Getting Bent After The Last Airbender

Two years ago it just so happened that Hokahey of Little Worlds made his annual Washington, DC-area visit on the debut weekend of The Happening. Hardy fans of M. Night Shyamalan, particularly Unbreakable and The Village (we're in the minority on the latter, we know), Hokahey and I were left reeling from encountering a movie that was two times worse than what we figured would be Shyamalan’s rock bottom, Lady In The Water. The atrociousness of The Happening led to our transcribed post-movie discussion. And a few days later, I paid a mocking tribute to the film with a parody ad.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, this year Hokahey’s visit coincided with the national debut of The Last Airbender. A proper review should come along later this week, I hope, if I can juggle projects successfully. In the meantime, here’s some more mocking tribute, entirely shot and edited on the morning and afternoon of July 4, starring Hokahey.

(As always, allow the video to buffer before playing. Watch the video in a larger player on Vimeo, here.)

Big Payne, Big Gain

More substantial posting later this week. But first, props to Mark Wahlberg, who was a double winner this weekend. Against all odds (or so I thought), his Max Payne was tops at the box office this weekend (take that, Oliver Stone). And even more surprising, Wahlberg showed he has a sense of humor.

Just last week, he ripped both Saturday Night Live as a whole and Andy Samberg’s impersonation of him in the skit “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals.” This week? Well, see for yourself …

What’s the Other Word for Donkey?

For the first time in years, NBC’s Saturday Night Live has become must-see entertainment again – its first 5 minutes, at least – thanks entirely to a winking, media-dissing governor from Alaska. But Tina Fey’s dead-on Sarah Palin isn’t the only impersonation worth noting. On the October 4 show, Andy Samberg provided a surprisingly accurate (if goofy) impression of Mark Wahlberg. At least, I think so.

Wahlberg? Not so much. In a recent Q&A with the New York Post, Wahlberg made it clear that the offbeat sketch titled “Mark Wahlberg Talks To Animals” didn’t give him good vibrations.

“It wasn't like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, that's for sure,” Wahlberg says. “And Saturday Night Live hasn't been funny for a long time. They've asked me to do the show a ton of times. I used to watch it when Eddie Murphy was there and Joe Piscopo and Bill Murray. I don't even know who's on the show now.”

That’s quite a putdown from a guy trying to generate excitement for Max Payne, which apparently isn’t being screened for critics (never a good sign). Oh, and what was that movie Wahlberg was in over the summer? The Happening? I wonder if I can remember how that went …

Anyway, you be the judge. Watch the SNL clip. If you need a Wahlberg refresher, the trailer for The Happening is provided, too. And after that, there’s a brief clip in which Wahlberg reveals that he apparently hasn’t seen a scary movie since The Exorcist.

Enjoy! Wahlberg is right that Samberg’s impression doesn’t match Fey’s. But it’s pretty darn good. And the dialogue is as smart as anything M Night Shyamalan has written in a while. Seriously.

Say It Ain’t So

A movie I won’t be seeing this weekend: Righteous Kill. I can’t bring myself to purchase a ticket for something with such a lame title, first of all. More so, I of course can’t stand to watch Al Pacino and especially Robert De Niro as they soil their legacies. I mean, really, what are these guys thinking? And, assuming they’re not, what are their agents thinking?

Pacino has been a bit of a clown for a while now. As for De Niro, I’ve heard people say he officially sold out when he appeared in the 2000 bomb that was The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle. I didn’t see the movie, but I have to disagree. Rocky & Bullwinkle was a film for kids in which De Niro played a colorful and (for many) iconic character: Fearless Leader. It didn’t work, fine, but the cartoon was beloved, so it wasn’t crazy to think that it might have. Besides: Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta don’t come around every year, and an actor’s gotta work, right?

The bigger offense is when you enter a genre for which you are known, and play the kind of tough guy character with which you are familiar, and do so opposite an actor to whom you have been compared throughout your career who is working on equally familiar turf. Under those circumstances, the product can’t just be good. It has to be fantastic, or else you disappoint your fans and taint your legacy (or what’s left of it) in the process.

Who knows, maybe Righteous Kill is terrific, but it’s painful just to watch its trailers. And De Niro and Pacino aren’t helping the film or themselves by making appearances like this on The Late Show. (Watch this Top 10 at your own risk, and marvel at Pacino, who reads the cue cards like English is a foreign language. So sad.)



What makes the Righteous Kill situation worse is that De Niro and Pacino did it right with Heat. Until then, as you most certainly know, the actors had never played opposite one another on screen. Michael Mann used that real-world anticipation to increase the fictional suspense. It was both thrilling and cathartic.



But this? This is pathetic.

"The Best Movie I Saw at 5:15 pm on June 13!"

How does a studio market a movie pulling a 19 percent favorability rating at RottenTomatoes and a score of 35 (out of 100) on Metacritic? Not very well, it turns out. Just a week after M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening bombed in its opening, the film is now being promoted in newspapers with this ad featuring a standard sampling of ‘rave’ pull-out quotes from critics. When flattering quotes are hard to come by, the promotional raves often wind up being from unfamiliar personalities at unfamiliar radio stations … and Larry King. This time though the quotes are from Roger Ebert, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Ebert’s inclusion is hardly a surprise. He likes about everything these days, and he reviewed The Happening with a growing-familiar caveat that he’ll probably be “in the minority in praising it” (translation: it sucks, but I enjoyed it anyway). Arnold I have no read on. And then there’s Whipp. His grand quote calls The Happening “genuinely enjoyable.” That’s it. That’s the quote that Fox hopes will put asses in the seats. Ouch.

Apparently this means Fox’s marketing team couldn’t convince John McCain to watch The Happening so they could coerce him into calling it “Better than my experience with the North Vietnamese!” Shyamalan’s wife must have been unavailable, too. But I’m most amazed that they didn’t find someone to call this “Shyamalan’s best film since Lady In The Water.” Because it is. It so is!

(Click to enlarge rejected ad at the top of this post.)

Reason No. 919 Why I Love The Onion

What would life be like without The Onion? Oh, wait, I know the answer to that. It would be just as absurd as it is now, only not intentionally so.

When you’re done enjoying the above clip, I highly recommend this print piece from a month back. It has nothing whatsoever to do with movies – I mean, other than the fact that the author guest-starred in my favorite Bill Murray movie – but it makes me laugh.

As for the latest Iron Man trailer – the real trailer – it’s a groaner for me. Part of the problem is that I’m not a comic book fanboy, so Iron Man is just yet another dude in a funny outfit saving the world. (And Robert Downey Jr. as an ass-kicker? Really?)

The part that annoys me though comes at the end of the preview, when the crimson C-3PO fires a rocket at a tank and then does the turn-around-and-walk-away-because-I’m-too-cool-to-watch-or-flinch-at-the-explosion bit. Is it just me, or has that become totally lame? I’d go so far as to say that move has jumped the shark, but nothing is as lame as arguing about when or if things have jumped the shark. So let’s just stick to debating lameness, okay?

(Oh, and here’s the original trailer – the one examined by The Onion – in case you care.)

Sucky By Any Name (Especially So By This One)

Got myself back to the theater tonight by squeezing in a showing of Stop-Loss, which I’ll review later in the week. I was planning on arriving at the theater just before the opening credits. Instead, I got there in time for the full slate of previews. Damn promptness! If I could manage to be a little more nonchalant I would have saved myself the agony of watching the trailer for an upcoming film starring your favorite Oscar winner and mine: Nicolas Cage.

I needn’t say it here, but the movie failed to entice me. Fucking brutal were words that came to mind, and that was just the experience of enduring the trailer. Cage, wearing a long hairstyle that only accentuates the massiveness of his forehead, apparently plays a gunman for hire who gets pissed off over a shady business deal and goes on a rampage in some Asian country or another. Truth is, I did my best to keep from paying attention. Cage’s goofy hairstyle sure helped.

Still, I was attentive enough to catch the title of the film at trailer’s end: Bangkok Dangerous. Seriously! I’ve done a little Googling and it seems that this is an American knockoff of a 2001 Thai film, so I’m guessing the title is a literal translation. Too bad, because it sounds like a bad porn name, more specifically like an action hero played by Dirk Diggler. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s the character Will Ferrell would play if allowed to take his Ron Burgundy/Ricky Bobby/Jackie Moon act to the world of adult film: “Hello, I’m Bangkok Dangerous.”

But here’s the thing: it turns out that the movie’s title and the casting of Cage in yet another a leading role are not the most curious decisions related to this project. No, what’s downright preposterous is this: the 2001 film upon which the movie is based might not be very good. Over at Metacritic the original Bangkok Dangerous pulled a score of 45 (out of 100). That would put it behind movies like Beowulf (59) and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (48). But, hey, the new film has Nicolas Cage in an unforgivable hairdo! How could it fail?

So I offer this post as a public service announcement, but also to ask: What are some of your favorite awful movie titles? The invention of those computerized ticket kiosks has created a less embarrassing alternative, but has there ever been a movie you skipped at the theater simply because you were too proud to say its title out loud at the ticket booth?