Weekend Box Office: The Purge, The Internship, The Kings of Summer

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/ reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post about some of the movies from last week and THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed! This all follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!

Weekend Box Office: The Purge, The Internship, The Kings of Summer


By Debbie Schlussel



Another mediocre weekend of new movies at theaters this weekend–well-suited for an ever more mediocre nation. *** SPOILER ALERT *** – If you don’t want certain things given away for the very predictable, “The Purge,” only read the first two sentences of my review:


* “The Purge“: I absolutely hated this very obvious, predictable far-left “social commentary” denouncing rich White people (especially those who are still in married, nuclear families) and mocking American patriotism as something akin to supporting murder. Samantha Power–Obama’s America-hating UN Ambassador nominee–would LOVE this. The only good guy in this movie is a Black homeless veteran, who saves everyone, including the family that tortured him and was going to help him get murdered. And while the movie is entertaining, it’s mostly a racist (anti-White) exercise in torture porn, killing porn, and other brutal savagery. That’s how it gets its “thrills.” I saw almost every “twist” and plot point in this movie a million miles away–that the Black guy was gonna save the day, that the rich people are evil, self-absorbed Whites (they threw on one Black chick with the evil Whites at the end to make it seem balanced, but it wasn’t), that the daughter’s boyfriend was gonna try to kill the dad, etc.



The story: It’s the future–the year 2022, to be exact. Crime is near zero and unemployment is under 1% in America, where things are doing very well, economically. Ethan Hawke plays a wealthy, successful salesman of home security systems, which he’s sold to his entire gated neighborhood. His McMansion is the largest and nicest in the neighborhood. And it’s the night of “The Purge,” an annual 12-hour event, once a year, in which everyone is allowed to commit any crime, including murder, against anyone else, and they won’t be arrested for it. There are no police, firemen, hospitals, or EMT’s available from 7:00 p.m. on that night until 7:00 a.m., the next morning. It’s a “holiday” the “new founding fathers” of the “new America,” established so that everyone can take out their hate (“purging” it) from themselves by perpetrating violence against the homeless, weak, poor, and other “undesirables,” who cannot afford expensive home security systems, something apparently only rich White people have. Those rich White (married nuclear family) people all support this savage “Purge” holiday and put out lavender and white flowers on the night of the Purge to signal to purgers that this is a house that supports the purge and it should be left untouched.



Hawke is the father of a young son and a teen daughter and has a beautiful wife (Lena Headey). The whole neighborhood is jealous of their success. When the Purge begins, they are locked down in their McMansion, supporting the Purge, with Hawke and his wife lecturing the liberal kids about how good the Purge is for America and its economy. But no security system is really 100% failsafe, and you know at the beginning of the movie, there’s gonna be trouble. First, the daughter’s “older” boyfriend sneaked into the house before it was locked down. He tells the daughter that he is going to speak with her father and “resolve” things, but predictably, he has a gun and tries to kill the dad (Hawke).



Then, the son sees video from outside the house of a Black homeless man running from Purgers down the street. He begs for help, and the son shuts off the security system and lets him in. Then, the upper-class White Purgers who were trying to kill the Black man (who is wearing dog tags and a military-style green jacket, apparently to show us he’s a military vet) come to the house and threaten to kill Hawke and his family if he doesn’t release the Black man to them to be killed. So Hawke and his wife capture and torture the Black man into submission and prepare to throw him to the “wolves,” where they know he’ll be killed.



The rest of the movie is spent on the family trying to fight off the Purgers. And, again, they are ultimately saved by the Black guy they were going to send to his certain death at the Purgers’ hands.



Just horrible. And, like I said, anti-American, anti-White, anti-nuclear-family, racist class warfare propaganda.



FOUR MARXES PLUS FOUR OBAMAS

* “The Internship“: This is billed as a reunion of “The Wedding Crashers” lead actors Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. But it’s no “Wedding Crashers.” Not nearly as funny. Not even close. Instead, it’s a love letter to and about Google, and a somewhat annoying one at that. It’s also a lie–there are several scenes with interns training to man the Google “helpline,” for example, but one of the most frustrating things about Google is that it, in fact, refuses to have a “helpline,” because that would cost money. Instead, if you have a problem with any of your Google products (as I occasionally have–I use some Google products for my site), you are stuck searching the help section and participating in useless forums, where you’ll mostly never get help or find the answers you need. Hey, Google, thanks for untruth in advertising. I wish Google DID have a helpline.



I also found this movie to be very self-absorbed and–per usual with Hollywood liberals a/k/a hypocrites–it’s full of ethnic stereotypes against “smart-but-square” Indians, Asians, etc. No Muslim stereotypes, though, ‘cuz they’d NEVER do that.



The story: Vaughn and Wilson are very successful, very effective salesmen for a watch company. But their company went out of business, and they need to find new jobs. So they apply for internships at Google, which they get, despite the fact that they are not genius college students from Harvard and Stanford (which is pretty much the rest of the Google internship population). The interns are divided into teams to compete in various tasks (including the fake Google “helpline”), with the winning team members getting actual jobs at Google. At first, Vaughn and Wilson seem like idiots and out of their league. They are outgunned by the young geniuses, but, predictably, they soon start helping their team win. Oh, and did I mention that they do this by taking their team of interns (who are mostly underage) to a strip club to get drunk and receive and/or perform lap dances? Ick. That’s “team bonding” and the “socialization” of geeks, these days, sadly. A terrible message for the many kids who will end up seeing this movie, which–by the way–is NOT for kids. It’s rated PG-13, but should really have an R-rating.



Yes, there were funny lines and scenes in this movie, and I laughed. But not as much as I expected to. And not nearly as much as I did when watching “The Wedding Crashers.” This was just okay. But I’d be lying if I said it was not entertaining. It was, but it was also dumb and predictable, including the silly, improbable, and hardly believable “love story” between Wilson and a top Google exec.



HALF A REAGAN



* “The Kings of Summer“: In this coming of age movie, three teen boys who are fed up with their strict parents (who later become crazy and immature) run away from home and live in the woods in a house they’ve built from junk. While their parents are working with police to find them, they are “hunting” and “fishing” for their own food (a good deal of it bought by them from the nearby Boston Market just outside and across the street from the woods). They also learn about love and jealousy and test their friendship in the process. There are several VERY scary and creepy scenes involving a poisonous copperhead snake. And there is a gross bloody scene of a rabbit being killed and skinned. Plus the language is not for kids–it’s rated “R” for a reason (several of them).



This is one of those quirky, artsy movies I usually hate and I could have done without the melodrama. But there are funny lines and it’s entertaining. And, while one of the three boys is a very weird quasi-gay character (who is very funny), it’s mostly about boys becoming men (despite having parents who don’t necessarily foster that), which I liked.



ONE-AND-A-HALF REAGANS

Wknd Box Office: The Thing, Footloose, The Big Year, Toast, Sholem Aleichem, Weekend, My Afternoons w/ Margueritte

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/  reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post some of the movies from last week and  THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed!  This all  follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!

Wknd Box Office: The Thing, Footloose, The Big Year, Toast, Sholem Aleichem, Weekend, My Afternoons w/ Margueritte


By Debbie Schlussel



Lots of new movies this weekend, but only a couple that I really liked.



* “The Thing“: Although this is technically supposed to be a prequel to the 1982 version with the same name, it’s kind of like a remake with a very similar story and events. And I liked it. It’s not the greatest horror/sci-fi thriller I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t bad. It’s got suspense and alien creatures with a creepy, isolated frozen Antarctic setting, just like the original.



This one stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton and is the story of scientists who discover an alien spaceship and an alien frozen in ice, which they excavate and take to their outpost. Winstead, a graduate student, and her boss, a scientist, argue over whether or not they should take a sample of the creature, which they believe is dead. Soon, the creature comes alive and escapes, and strange things begin happening with the scientists as they fight for survival. Who is a genuine scientist, and who is merely a host to alien forces?





Entertaining, but not anything you haven’t seen before. But pretty good for a prequel in terms of explaining why they are shooting at the dog at the beginning of the 1982 version. But they never do explain in this one why these scientists go for excavating the frozen creature instead of trying to explore the spacecraft, which seems more interesting.



TWO REAGANS




* “Footloose“: This is absolutely awful and painfully stupid. Looking back, I’m really not sure why the original 1984 version of this was such a hit. It’s essentially the same dumb, anti-Christian, anti-middle America story, though.



A small Texas hicktown, Bomont, outlaws dancing in public because they feel it contributes to the corruption of minors and because a few years ago some kids died on the way back from a dance. The city is under the influence of an evil, out of touch, right-wing, conservative Christian preacher, Dennis Quaid, whose daughter is a slut, Julianne Hough. Soon, a big city boy from Boston–some unknown actor with the world’s worst stage name, Kenny Wormald–comes to this backward town and does his best to rebel and find a way to get the town to change its mind and allow dancing. And, in the process, he schools the stereotypically backward town folk on their hypocrisies and how to break dance and enjoy hip hop. Ugggh.



Hokey, preachy, and, yes, this is an attack by liberal Hollywood on the Red States population and their conservative values. Like a broken record, and a very scratchy, old one at that. The bad covers of cheesy ’80s songs from the original 1984 soundtrack don’t help. Yuck. Oh, and one other obvious thing: all the bad people in the town are White. The many Black characters are the good guys, who help make the dance happen, provide the space for it, and teach the “backward” White kids how to dance. How touching. Not. This movie was bad enough in the ’80s. It’s even worse now. Some things–many things–should never make a comeback.



FOUR MARXES





* “The Big Year“: This wasn’t a deep or great movie. But it was entertaining enough. I thought birdwatching was a pointless and pathetic activity. But this makes it somewhat enjoyable, while poking fun at it.



Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson compete against each other in a “big year.” It’s a calendar year, during which birdwatchers travel all over and compete to see who can see or hear the largest number of different types of birds. They take pictures of the most beautiful and rare birds, but it mostly goes by the honor system.



Black is a loser who works a menial job and, in his 30s, lives at home with his parents. He mooches off of them to do the big year. Martin is a wealthy CEO who wants to retire from his company, despite the urgings otherwise from his underlings. And Wilson is the champion “birder” from the year before who doesn’t want anyone to break his record of 722 birds. Meanwhile, his wife feels neglected and is trying to have children with him, while he’s off hunting birds.



As I noted, it’s not a particularly great movie, but it’s not bad. It’s a very light, superficial movie. But sometimes that’s why people go to the movies.



ONE REAGAN




* “Toast“: This movie was extremely weird, though mildly entertaining. Based on the true story of British chef Nigel Slater, it mostly takes place in 1960s Britain. Slater’s parents are very boring, stuffy, middle class British people who hate fresh produce and won’t eat anything that doesn’t come out of a can. His mother is a horrible cook, and Slater loves reading about cooking. He dreams of becoming a great chef and tries to get his parents to try new foods. He’s not close with his father, and his family situation changes drastically. Oh, and he’s gay, though that’s a very tiny part of the movie. It mostly focuses on his development of his cooking talents and his baking competitions with his stepmother (Helena Bonham Carter), with whom he competes for his father’s and attention. In addition to the weirdness, parts of this movie were very sad and depressing.



ONE-HALF MARX






* “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness“: I very much enjoyed this documentary on one of the greatest contemporary Jewish writers and storytellers, Sholem Aleichem (also spelled, Shalom Aleichem). But I’m not sure if non-Jews and those who are not interested in Judaica or Jewish history would find it of interest to them.



The film explores the life and times of Aleichem, the pen name of author Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, the Eastern European author whose work was the basis for the famous musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.” It talks of his life in the “enlightenment” age of Judaism in which Jews learned secular subjects and wrote stories, etc. beyond the Torah. He wrote his work in Yiddish, the German-Hebrew hybrid language, and the movie explores the golden age in Yiddish literature from around 1860-1950. Among the experts interviewed in the movie is the great Ruth Wisse, the politically conservative Harvard professor who is a fantastic columnist and writer about political topics.



What I found most interesting is the movie’s observations regarding Aleichem’s insights about how America affected Jewish life and Jewish survival. He felt that Jews were so comfortable in America and that there was so little anti-Semitism that the religion would die out here due to intermarriage and assimilation. And regarding that, he was prescient. I also found it interesting that his “Tevye the Milkman,” on which “Fiddler” is based, has a different ending. In it, one of Tevye’s daughters marries a gentile and leaves Judaism. He disowns her, but she returns to him after leaving her husband and discovering that she was wrong to abandon the beautiful Jewish religion. In “Fiddler,” written by assimilated American Jews, Tevye accepts his daughter’s leaving of the faith and still embraces her, telling her they will see each other in America.



This is a great, short, sweet set of insights into one of the great minds and writers of 18th and 19th century Jewish literature and the changing face of Jewish life in the West. If you are interested in either of those topics, as I am, you will like this movie. Odd fact: Saturday Night Live alum Rachel Dratch does the voice of one of the female figures in Aleichem’s life.



FOUR REAGAN




* “Weekend“: I think this movie was trying to be the gay version of “Before Sunrise,” but it doesn’t cut it. I found this movie to be long, slow, and boring, not to mention that I really didn’t need to see the multiple gay make-out and sex scenes. Ick.



A bearded gay British lifeguard meets another bearded British gay at a bar and they have sex. Then, they meet up again and have more and more sex. But the lifeguard finds out that his new paramour is leaving for a couple of years in America and he is sad. The end.



Not for me, nor for most of you.



FOUR MARXES







* “My Afternoons with Margueritte [La Tete en Friche]“: Gerard Depardieu plays a large, illiterate, simple 50-year-old man who is considered a loser and rejected by his slutty, gold-digging mother. He now lives in a trailer on the property of her house, where she still lives in her drunken life as an old woman. One day, Gerard meets a classy, elderly woman in the town park. She encourages him to learn to read and gives him a book and a dictionary. The movie is about his budding friendship with the woman and how he “falls in love” with her, a 95-year-old who cares about him.



I’ve seen movies like this a gazillion times before, with a tighter, much more interesting script. This was long, slow, and boring, and just not very original, even if it wasn’t that objectionable. It was obvious, predictable, and manipulative without much there, and it wasn’t for me. And I doubt you’d want to spend ten bucks and two hours on it, either. In French with English Subtitles.



ONE-HALF MARX

Wknd Box Office: Super 8, Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/  reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post some of the movies from last week and  THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed!  This all  follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!

Wknd Box Office: Super 8, Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris


By Debbie Schlussel



I did not see “Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer.” Here are my reviews of the new movies which I did see and which debut today at theaters:











* “Super 8“: I absolutely loved the first half of this movie (and the kid actors in this, which is why I’m giving it a good rating). It’s the second half–in which the U.S. Air Force are the evil bad guys who round up the population of a small town into a movie version of Gitmo–that was a mess and ridiculous. I’ve grown tired of alien thrillers that suddenly turn into “America’s military is evil, oppresses extraterrestrial aliens, and causes them to hate us and attack and kill us.” It was bad enough when they made this crap before 9/11. But when they made it afterward–as symbolism and allegory of how we are supposedly to blame for Islamic terrorists hating us–it got absurd. Come on, Hollywood, come up with a movie where it’s actually the aliens’ fault, not ours.



Several young boys in small town America are shooting a movie with a Super8 video camera. It’s 1979, and the lead character is one of those boys, Joe Lamb, played by Joel Courtney. His mother died, and his father–who is a deputy sheriff, wants him to give up his amateur movie hobby with his friends and go away to a summer camp for boys. One night, the boy and his friends sneak out to the train station to film their movie, when they see a horrific train crash after their teacher has driven onto the tracks, head-on into the train. It’s a spectacular scene, and probably the best use of special effects in the movie. The camera is still rolling, while the crash happens. They see their teacher, still alive in what remains of his truck, and he warns them to leave quickly and not to talk about what they saw.



Soon, airmen from the Air Force are on the scene, and the kids escape. The airmen are trying to find out who was at the train station and witnessed the crash. In the meantime, weird things are happening throughout the town. Dogs and people go missing. Buildings and cars are destroyed. Washing machines and other appliances are flying around in the air. And the Air Force sets fire to the land around the town, so it can evacuate the people and round them up onto a military base. Also in the meantime, Joe develops feelings for Alice (played by the beautiful and far more talented Fanning sister actress, Elle Fanning), the boys’ friend and fellow actress in their Super 8 movie.



I’ve already given away enough, so I can’t say more about the plot.



What I liked about this movie: the ’70s feel and the great acting by first-time actors who are just young kids, including the lead, Courtney, who was 14 at the time he filmed this. It was a more idyllic time, when kids were more innocent and didn’t act and dress like sluts and gangstas. The camaraderie of the young boys in the movie (and their female friend, the lovely Elle Fanning) is great and fun to watch. The kids are cute, and their interaction in this movie is reminiscent of the great boy buddy movies of the ’70s and ’80s, like “Stand By Me.” The late ’70s setting, morals, dialogue, costumes, and technology props made me feel like I was watching a movie made when I was a kid and with nearly the same morals and character.



What I didn’t like: this movie is aimed at kids and features kids in the lead roles, and yet the kids utter four-letter words. Was this really necessary in a movie kids are going to see in droves? No, it’s gratuitous. The movie would have been just as good without it, just as most of those kid movies from the ’70s and ’80s were. I also didn’t like the alien, which looks silly and unbelievable, kind of like the story.



And, per usual, the movie features your typical Hollywood race politics. To use Black cultural critic David Ehrenstein’s term, this movie features the “magic Black friend”–in the form of the kids’ righteous professor/teacher, Dr. Woodward, who warns them about the evil Air Force men (including the stark White evil commanding officer) and who resists the Air Force’s attempts to get him to talk about the whereabouts of the alien. He just so happens to be the only Black guy in town (until two Black guys are strategically juxtaposed as minions to the evil Air Force commander). The magic Black teacher is the one who tells the U.S. Air Force–in vain–that they should help the alien build his spaceship and leave. But, instead, we are evil and force the alien to stay and undergo experiments. Where’s PETA–People for the Ethical Treatment of Aliens–when you need ‘em?



Still, I so much enjoyed the first half of the movie, as well as these cute and charming kids that lead the story, I’m still giving it a positive rating. You will enjoy it, but for the silly ending, and it’s fine to take your kids to it, provided you promise to wash their mouths with soap if they copy the four-letter words in the dialogue. And you can do as my late father used to always do with me at these movies: tell your kids to ignore Hollywood’s anti-American, anti-military message, and tell them, in real life, it’s the aliens’–and the terrorists’–fault. We did nothing to deserve this, unlike what writer/director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg tell you.



TWO REAGANS



* “Tree of Life“: This is THE most pretentious movie I’ve ever seen. Also the most boring and absurd. I struggled to stay awake. How could 138 minutes seem like 138 days? So frickin’ loooooong. The best part was when the credits began rolling. Couldn’t wait for this waste of time, hodgepodge of nothingness, artsy fartsy BS to end.



There is very little dialogue in this movie, and it goes in and out from scenes of people saying things in partial mish-mosh scenes to scenes of what seem like shoplifted National Geographic films just slopped on in the middle at several points. The National Geographic Channel called, and they want their films of dinosaurs, rivers, planets, animals being born, sunflowers, and oceans back.



When a completely unrelated series of scenes of wildlife and nature were slapped in the middle of the movie along with computer generated dinosaurs, I laughed out loud. But I was the only one. Everyone else was eating up this crap as if the emperor with no clothing actually had something on. He didn’t. I passed a note to a fellow movie critic, on which I’d written “WTF?!” It’s kind of my view of this movie. Pretentious drivel starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn clumsily edited and sewn together with an unrelated wildlife film from a boring museum. Oh, and it’s anti-Christian.



The “story”–if you can call it that: a mother in the late ’50s or early ’60s learns that one of her sons has died and she cries, with her husband (Brad Pitt) warding off sympathetic neighbors. Then, we see a scene of another son, now grown and in contemporary times, walking around his fancy modern home, then walking around his fancy modern office building, and then sitting in the office–sulking in each setting. Then, we go back to Brad Pitt’s younger family walking around their house and going outside, playing the yard. Then scenes of planets, nature, sunflowers, computer-generated dinosaurs, then scenes of the grown Sean Penn in his business suit on a beach, walking like a zombie and seeing his young mother also walking. Oh, he also walks in his suit in a desert.



From the few disjointed, slapped-together scenes in which there is any dialogue, the story is that Brad Pitt is a mean, overbearing, abusive, religious Christian father (is there any other kind of religious Christian father in Hollywood’s eyes)? His young kids hate him and seek refuge with their naive, soft mother. The father is a repeated failure who loses his job and patents he invented but can’t get approved in patent court. Life is tough. One of their sons dies–presumably in Vietnam, but it doesn’t say–and one grows up to be a confused, messed up Sean Penn. The end, plus a lot of nature films mixed in.



A five-year-old on speed could have made a better movie (with apologies to five-year-olds and speed addicts). “Tree of Life?” More like, waste of life.



FOUR MARXES PLUS THREE SLEEPING PILLS PLUS THREE LADY GAGAS (for pretentious BS)



* “Midnight in Paris“: This is a Woody Allen movie. And, if he’d stayed away from the several lines of dialogue, gratuitously knocking conservatives, Republicans, and Tea Partiers, I would have no reservations about it. But he put those in for a reason. They were unnecessary and added nothing to the movie, other than to please the many liberals who flock to fund Woody Allen’s investment and pension fund by seeing his movies. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of this movie are very, very funny and entertaining . . . like when pretentious, left-wing, artsy-fartsy, intellectuals are mocked–though without identifying their ideology or political party.



Owen Wilson plays a Hollywood screenwriter who is on vacation in Paris with his materialistic wife, Rachel McAdams. They are tagging along with her gauche, materialistic parents who chose to take the vacation. Wilson is working on a book about a man who works in a nostalgia shop (think “Brady Bunch” lunchboxes), but he won’t show it to anyone. He longs for a life of art and writing, away from materialistic Hollywood. His wife doesn’t. They run into her married former college friend. He’s the pretentious artsy lefty. One night, at midnight, Wilson is sitting on a Paris street, when suddenly he is invited into an old fashioned car and transported to a bar in the early part of the 20th Century. He meets all the famous authors and artists of the time: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, etc.



The next day, back in contemporary times and the real world, Wilson realizes that he longs for another time, that he wished he lived in that era. But when he goes back, a woman with whom he’s fallen in love says that she longed to live in an earlier era. The issue is raised, regarding whether people who collect nostalgia or long to live in another time feel this way because they refuse to face their problems of the present time.



While Wilson is away every night back in the 1920s and ’30s, getting advice on his book, and dreaming of bedding the woman he’s fallen for there, his wife and her parents are getting suspicious that he’s cheating on her.



There was a lot of buzz about Carla Bruni, wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, having a role in this movie. But her role, as a tour guide, is paltry, and she still can’t act. Big whoop. Don’t believe the hype.



Can’t give away the whole movie because, without the pointed, brief, anti-conservative attacks, it was actually entertaining and elicits a few good laughs. It’s typical of the better Woody Allen stuff, but not his best.



ONE HALF REAGAN

Weekend Box Office: Hall Pass, Drive Angry 3D

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/  reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post some of the movies from last week and  THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed!  This all  follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!
 
Weekend Box Office: Hall Pass, Drive Angry 3D


By Debbie Schlussel



Utter, complete garbage at the movies, this weekend. Neither of the new releases is worth your $10 or two hours of life you’ll have wasted. Both movies are vulgar, vile, and disgusting, and you don’t need to be a prude to get that. This weekend, movie theaters across America are officially the nation of Dreck-istan.







* “Hall Pass“: Two words: Joy Behar. Anything that has her in it should be enough to keep you far, far away (even if she’s only in a few scenes). I liked this better the first time I saw it . . . when it was called, “Divorce American Style.” The premise of this movie could have been interesting, if it didn’t devolve into a disgusting, raunchy piece of utter garbage, with few jokes worth laughing at. Oh, and did I really need repeat close-up shots of two penises in my face on the screen? The point of the Squirrely, er . . . Farrelly Brothers in doing this is to let you know that Black men have large penises and White Irish men have tiny ones. Thanks for the tip, racists.







As usual, there’s a strong tie between purveying garbage and purveying liberalism. Director/writer Peter Farrelly gave tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party and the campaigns of Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Franken, Wesley Clark, the Clintons, many other liberal candidates, and the National Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees. Figures. Only liberals are allowed to make racist, sexist crap like this and be celebrated for it.



The “plot” of this celluloid cesspool: two middle-aged, married, geeky husbands (Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis) in suburban Providence repeatedly check out younger, sexier women and wish they could have sex with them. Their wives (Christina Applegate and Jenna Fischer) get fed up and, on the advice of psychiatrist Joy Behar, give their husbands a “hall pass,” a week off from marriage to do whatever they want and sleep with whomever they want. The theory is that these middle-aged geeks will not be able to get what they think they could have if they were not “shackled” to their wives and families. As always in sexist, anti-male Hollywood fare like this, men are portrayed as sex-obsessed dolts and morons. But the women are civilized geniuses.



Chock full of melodrama, crying, screaming, and other stuff I didn’t need or want at what is supposed to be an escapist movie, this piece of crap is literally filled with crap. The jokes include four men eating too many marijuana-laced brownies and one of them defecating in the sand trap on the golf course. To remove any doubt, the Farrelly Bros show you the guy’s naked butt squatting, and a pile of fecal material underneath him. Haha, funny. In another scene, a woman splatters fecal material all over a bathroom wall. Hilarious . . . if you’re an imbecile. And then there are the penis close-ups and topless women. When weak filmmakers rely on that–filth and dung–for laughs, do I really need to tell you that this is a truly sh—y movie? Fifteen years ago, this would have been rated NC-17, at the very least.



While there were a few cheap laughs, I mostly sat in stone cold silence as the many morons at the screening laughed like crazy. This is one of those increasing number of cases where snobbery and elitism are highly under-rated. “Hall Pass” is a combined national IQ and taste test for America. If you like it, you failed–you have no class. And even less intellect. And it confirms your membership in the very simple and easy to please masses. That’s why I predict it will be a blockbuster hit at the box office, this weekend.



There’s no accounting for good taste in America. It’s as rare as these crappy movies are common. Have fun in the sewer, America. Great nations never last under the weight of all this fecal material.



FOUR MARXES PLUS AN OBAMA PLUS A BIN LADEN





* “Drive Angry 3D“: Absolutely horrible and gratuitously violent to the max, not to mention extremely long and boring. Trailers for this movie present it as something like “Taken.” Don’t believe the hype. This movie is nothing like “Taken,” which was terrific (read my review). Instead, it’s nearly two hours of torture-porn and killing-porn, plus many gratuitous shots of naked women running around and having sex in semi-core porn scenes. And the “plot”–if you can call it that–is incredibly dumb. No surprise, as this movie was written by Todd Farmer, a Hollywood writer/actor who never grew up and is obviously in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Or, maybe, he’s just led an entire life of utter low-class pride in screenwriting complete trash like “Jason X,” “My Bloody Valentine,” “Halloween III,” and “Hellraiser.” He also co-stars and–shocker–puts himself in one of the sex scenes.



Nicolas Cage plays a father who has returned to earth from hell to find the cult leader who murdered his daughter and to reclaim his kidnapped granddaughter. All the while he is being pursued by a man with magical powers, called “The Accountant.” Cage drives across the southern East Coast together with a beautiful waitress (Amber Heard, who does a very lousy Southern accent). Together they have sex with and kill multiple people, with graphic dismemberment and body parts flying at you in 3D. Charming. It’s clear that Nicolas Cage did this movie to pay his giant IRS bill. Or maybe he really thinks it’s fun to play a bad-ass while serving up complete junk to America. And just like, “Hall Pass,” above, this movie would have been at least NC-17, not long ago.



Like I said, the movie is absolutely disgusting, vile, filthy, graphic, and just flat-out sleazy. While there are a few brief cool uses of 3D, that’s irrelevant to this utter and complete garbage. A complete bucket o’ feces. And that’s being generous.



FOUR MARXES PLUS A BIN LADEN