Movie #950: Caveman

Caveman is a 1981 comedy starring Ringo Starr, Shelley Long, Barbara Bach, Dennis Quaid, John Matusak, and Jack Gilford. 

Eons ago, one October, a tribe of caveman led by the massive brute Tonda (Matusak) searches the landscape for food, and that's pretty much their daily grind. Atouk (Starr) is kind of a schlub, perhaps a little smarter than your average caveman, but is fully taken with Tonda's mate, Lana (Bach). Atouk winds up expelled from the tribe and bumps into his buddy Lar (Quaid), and then Tala (Long) and her father(?) Gog (Gilford). The four of them hook up with another tribe, discover fire and cooking and so forth, but Atouk is still so stuck on Lana that he goes back for her and winds up saving her from drowning (whereupon he kidnaps her). Lar, in the processes, is washed into a nearby ice age.

Atouk is ready to settle down with Lana (who, being something of an opportunist, immediately snuggles up with him), but his friends convince him that leaving Lar to die is a bit of a dick move, so they go and find him and rescue him from the clutches of a yeti (Richard Moll). Meanwhile, Tala leads Tonda to Lana, and Tonda's tribe abducts all of the women present (bit of an error in judgement, there, Tala). Atouk and his people arm themselves with weapons (another new invention) and defeat Tonda! Atouk tosses Lana aside (literally) and takes Tala as his mate! Zug-zug!

I'd heard of this movie when I was younger; I remember someone telling me about it when I was a kid because I remember "zug-zug" as a term for sex. I'd never seen it, though, and thanks to my friend Toasty it's now a movie I own. It's...actually not terrible. Sure, there's a bit of problematic content (like, um, Atouk trying to drug and rape Lana early in the movie; it's played for laughs like "look how bumbling he is, can't even zug-zug an unconscious woman" but let's just say it doesn't really land by today's standards), but on the other hand, there's a gay couple in the new tribe they hook up with and...it's just a thing. Like, Ruck (Mark King) and Flok (Paco Morayta) are just two characters, they're affectionate and snuggle up with each other, but neither of them are caricatures of gay men. 

Much of the humor is broad and physical and stems from cavemen doing dumb shit - blundering into dangerous situations, running from stop-motion dinosaurs, and wondering if something they've found is "ull" (food). It's interesting watching this on the heels of Larry the Farting Fart Guy: Fart, because there are fart jokes in Caveman, but they...if not work, then at least don't fuck up the flow of the movie, and I think that's because the characters don't belabor the point the way Larry does. 

Anyway, this movie didn't exactly do well and it's regarded as kind of a crappy movie, and I think it's maybe a bit underrated. Ringo Starr isn't exactly setting the screen alight with charisma, but he works OK as a put-upon everyman. It's a simple story, there are a couple of legitimately funny moments, and I really enjoy the simple cave-language they put together for the movie (consisting of about 15 words, so not exactly Elvish). 

My Grade: C
Rewatch Value: Medium or medium-high, I think?

Next up: The Core, unless Toasty gives me something else before I have a chance to watch it

Movie #949: Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector is a gross-out "comedy" starring famed "actor" and "comedian" Larry "the Cable Guy" (real name Daniel Lawrence Whitney, because he should accept responsibility for what he's done). It stars him, Iris Bahr, Tony Hale, Bruce Bruce, Tom Wilson, Megyn Price, Joanna Cassidy, and (sigh) Joe Pantoliano. Jesus, Joe, if you needed the money, you could have come to me, we'd have worked something out.

OK, here we go. Larry (basically playing himself, or rather, doing his schtick) is a health inspector for...you know, I'm not sure we're ever told where this is set. A lot of the people have Southern accents, but there's a pretty big foodie community because there are multiple "five-star" restaurants. Well, anyway, wherever this hell-dimension is, Larry lives there and is a health inspector. He takes his job seriously, more or less, but he's gross, crude, and stupid, and we're supposed to think he's genuine and endearing. But he's so funny! He does funny things like continually call his partner Amy (Bahr) a man because she wears a suit and her hair slicked back! And call his neighbor (David Koechner) "retarded!" And rearrange letters on a restaurant sign to call his partner a "fag"! FUNNY FUNNY STUFF BLUE COLLAR HAW HAW GIT R DONE

Ahem. Anyway, there's a plot, sort of; a local cooking competition is coming up and someone is poisoning people at restaurants to whittle down the competition until only Micheli's remains, but it's not just the owner Lily (Cassidy) or her horrifying sister (I actually don't know because I don't remember the character's name and there is no way I'm putting the DVD back in to check), it's his coworker Jack (Hale), who was pretending to need a wheelchair for no adequately explained reason, who was the mastermind! 

(I note with some amusement that Jack's involvement in the scheme is not even mentioned in the wiki plot summary of the movie.)

This movie is in contention for the worst thing I've ever seen. Let that sink in. I mean, I hate Larry the Cable Guy's schtick anyway, because I hate ignorance and bigotry passed off as humor wrapped up in an "aw shucks ain't I funny and loveable and straight shooter" kind of bullshit, but this is all that plus a lot of fart and poop jokes, which I also hate. This movie has the obligatory "character sits on a toilet and loudly poops at us" scene (see also: Kingpin, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, plenty of other gross-out comedies), but honestly it's not like it was just that one scene we had to power through to get back to the action, because the whole movie is grating because the lead character is such a jackass. 

There is not one redeeming thing I can say about this movie. I wish I had a "Rewatch Value" lower than "If I Never See It Again I'm Fine With That" because I literally rather watch any other movie I've given that rating to than this. 

My Grade: F-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT - 1

Next Up: The Core (thank god, some good cinema)

Movie #947: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a really weird movie directed by Terry Gilliam (like he directs any other kind) and starring Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield, Heath Ledger, Troy Verne, and Tom Waits, with cameos from Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. It's Heath Ledger's last movie, and I knew nothing about it other than that when I watched it.

We open in modern-day London with a theater troupe that carries around its own makeshift stage in a horse-drawn carriage. I mention it's modern-day because I certainly didn't figure that out right away. Anyway, Anton (Garfield), dressed as Hermes, pops out and tries to entice people to roll up and check out the show while the titular Dr. Parnassus (Plummer) sits impassively and a little person (Verne) dressed as a...fly? Piece of poop? zips around and a Valentina (Cole) stands on stage...

The opening of this movie is very weird, is what I'm saying. 

And then a punch of drunk idiots roll up and start hurling bottles at the stage, things get out of hand, and one particular drunk idiot (Richard Riddell) charges up and passes through a curtain and wham, he's in a vast landscape that responds to his imagination. In the end, however, he's confronted with a choice: go to a pub and have a drink or being the arduous climb to...we're not sure. Enlightenment? Sobriety? Anyway he fucks it up, goes to the pub, and the pub explodes. We never see him again. Or maybe we do and I missed it, this movie is very visually and auditorily busy. 

Anyway, Dr. Parnassus is immortal and has been around a thousand years, but about 78 years ago he made a deal with the Devil (Waits) to become mortal so he could marry a woman (also Cole, I think). The terms of the deal were that any children born of that union belonged to the Devil after 16 years, and when his wife was about 60 she had Valentina. She is now a few days from her sweet 16, and wants desperately to get away.

And then the troupe finds a man named Tony (Ledger) hanging by his neck off a bridge and saves his life, and he joins the troupe and winds up being able to lure people in better than Anton can. But he winds up going into the Imaginarium on three separate occasions and finding his face has changed (to Depp, Law, and Farrell, respectively). 

There's a lot more twists and turns, and honestly trying to explain it is exhausting. In vibes, it reminds me a little of Pushing Daisies, except that narratively it's far harder to follow. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead comes to mind, too, just for the quasi-self aware nature of some of the characters (Verne's Percy has one of the best lines: Tony asks him where they are, and he responds "Geographically speaking, in the northern hemisphere. Socially, on the margins. And narrative, with some way to go." It's never addressed, but Percy seems to be immortal as well). The movie pulls the rug out a few times; it seems like they're setting Tony up to have a redemption arc, and then he betrays everyone at the last minute. It seems like they're setting up Valentina to follow her themes of wanting to escape, and then she fucks off to hell but gets freed and winds up marrying Anton. 

It's not that the movie is confusing, exactly; it makes a kind of sense if you pay attention. It's less a story than a meditation or a fever dream. If you're looking for a straightforward narrative or, god help you, you're one of these people that doesn't like movies with "talking" in them (a real thing a person eyes and a brain and a Masters degree actually said to me once), this is probably not going to do to much for you. As it is, it feels to me like it was conceived to be very different and then Heath Ledger died, and they had to finish the movie somehow so they added in the notion of his face changing in the Imaginarium. And that's fine, but I wish that had been explored a little more.

And as long as I'm complaining: Tony (Farrell) having sex with Valentina (who, remember, is newly 16 in the fiction) and Troy Verne in blackface with an afro wig aren't...great. Coulda done without either of those.

My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Kindergarten Cop

Movie #941: Gun

Gun is an action/drama starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, James Remar, Paul Calderon, Val Kilmer (wait what), and AnnaLynne McCord. 

Detroit is in the middle of an unemployment surge and a boom (lol) in illegal firearms. Rich (Jackson) is a street-level gun dealer, and we open on him and his crew gunning down a rival (Malik Barnhardt) at a club, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders, including one cocktail waitress (Jill Dugan) whom the camera seems to linger on. Hmmm, very significant!

Anyway, then Angel Hawkins (Kilmer) gets released from prison. Turns out he saved Rich from getting pinched, so Rich feels like he owes him and lets him into his crew. Of course, Angel is working for the Detroit PD (as represented by Rogers (Remar) and Jenkins (Calerdon)), because it turns out that cocktail waitress was Albert Einstein Angel's wife! (He'd been listening to his wife's outgoing phone message all through the movie, in a move I thought was cribbed from Captain America: Civil War, but actually this came first.)

So Rich gets shot and arrested, Angel gets shot and released to go be with his daughter (no idea who plays her, she's not credited on the wiki or the IMDB page), and the evil businessman in charge of all the guns ever (John Larroquette - the businessman, not the guns) pleads out to something minor. 

OK, so obviously this movie is terrible. Jackson is credited as the writer, but evidently he didn't write a word of it (I don't have a source on that, though). As I mentioned when I talked about All Things Fall Apart, he can't act for shit, but his portrayal of the snappy, fast-talking Rich works a little better - Jackson is better able to play an amoral gun dealer. Of course, having Kilmer helps, because although Kilmer's career was very much in decline here, he's still Val Kilmer and brings a little life to the movie. Likewise, James Remar is a workhorse and is competent enough.

None of that changes the fact that the dialog and story is pretty damn simplistic. Honestly it sounds like a 13-year-old gun bunny who may or may not have had black friends wrote the screenplay. I actually do think Jackson had some input into it, because as with All Things Fall Apart, we get a protracted sex scene with, like, lots of thrusting (as a side note, the woman in that scene, Gabriella (McCord), is probably the most interesting character in the movie - is she a politician? A gangster? An ATF agent? All we ever learn about her is that she's banging both Rich and the evil businessman, which unfortunately reduces her role to "sexy assistant", but up until then she had some potential). 

So to sum up: Kilmer's career was in a dark place. Remar and Calderon take the work they get. Danny Trejo cameos, and I'm not 100% sure why because it ain't like he was hurting. Jackson cannot act and is no great shakes as a screenwriter. The effects are bargain-basement, and you can tell they blew the budget on the final shootout with the car explosion because in much of the rest of the movie they couldn't even spring for squibs. But it's better than All Things Fall Apart because at least it's an action movie and that gives us something to watch, rather than the glurge. 

My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

Movie #936: CHIPS

CHIPS is an action comedy written, directed by, and starring Dax Shepherd, and also starring Michael Peña, Rosa Salazar, Vincent D'Onofrio, Jessica McNamee, Adam Brody, and Isaiah Whitlock, Jr. It's a reboot/remake/film adaptation of the 1977 TV show, which I never watched. 

FBI Agent Castillo (Peña) gets put undercover in the California Highway Patrol in order to uncover a ring of corrupt cops. He gets partnered with former motocross racer Jon Baker (Shepherd), because despite his age he's a rookie and the feds figure he'll be more compliant with Castillo - undercover as "Francis Poncherello". He's not; he's a probationary rookie because he sucks at literally everything except motorcycling and he's desperate to prove himself and get back in good with his wife Karen (Kristen Bell). So Ponch starts dragging him around as he investigates this group of cops, but discovers that Baker is actually kind of useful - not only is he a superb cyclist, but he's insightful and observant.

The plot follows a fairly standard buddy-cop formula; they hate each other, they like each other, they run afoul of the bad guy (D'Onofrio), they run afoul of stupid bosses (Brody as the FBI agent that Ponch has inadvertently shot a couple of times), competent bosses (Whitlock Jr. as Ponch's actual chief who fires him when things go absolutely tits up and a suspect (Justin Chatwin) gets decapitated), there's a big shootout, they win the day!

So...I actually kinda liked this movie. It reminded me in some ways of Hit and Run, another movie Shepherd wrote, inasmuch as the humor hits on some uncomfortable topics but mostly lands, the vehicle action is solid, and the characters are more fleshed out than they often are in this kind of movie. They have flaws and history to go along with their skills - Ponch is a very capable investigator, but he's also a sex addict. Baker is emotionally intelligent and smart, but he's addicted to painkillers, has a tendency to get sick in people's houses, and an absolutely terrible shot. Likewise, the presentation of those problems is played for laughs, but still comes off as sympathetic. Baker gets sick in a suspect's house, but the camera shows things like litter boxes, food, and so on that lets us kind of gets a more visceral sense of his discomfort. Peña plays Ponch's addiction as something he's kind of in denial about, but he kind of unravels around woman in yoga pants and he has to stop to jerk off several times a day. 

This is kind of what I mean about uncomfortable topics played for laughs - some of this stuff comes off as a little...much (though not to the extent that Hit and Run did), but for the most part I think it works because it's more about the situations these issues create rather than poking fun at the people involved. (And, I should note that Shepherd is himself a recovering addict, so he actually does know what he's talking about. No idea if he's hypersensitive about home smells, though.) 

The other thing of note is that while the CHiPS TV show was pretty sanitized, and proudly displayed a "this show is endorsed by the California Highway Patrol" before each episode, this movie is rated R and gleefully not so endorsed. The result is a movie that doesn't bear much resemblance to the show (as far as I know; I didn't watch it much), but is actually pretty funny. (My favorite line might be when Ponch and Baker discover that D'Onofrio's character Kurtz is the bad guy, and in describing him Baker says "He looks like he hates koala bears!")

So by no means a perfect movie, but definitely the best one Toasty's given me so far. 

My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Fantastic Four: First Steps

Movie #935: Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker

Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker is an action/comedy based on a YA series starring Alex Pettyfer, Mickey Rourke, Sophie Okonedo, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis, Alicia Silverstone, Damien Lewis, and Ewan MacGregor.

The titular Alex Rider (Pettyfer) is an English teenager who lives with his uncle Ian (MacGregor) and his housekeeper and friend, Jack (Silverstone). Ian is in exactly one scene, where he does a whole explodey James-Bond-esque escape from some Evil Bad Guys, but then gets shot in the face by the most Irish-looking Russian ever (Lewis). At his funeral, Alex learns that he was a spy and has the "aw my uncle was lying to me" pout, but then gets recruited by Mr. Blunt (Nighy), doing his best to convince us he just ate so many lemons, and Mrs. Jones (Okonedo), who I would say is wasted in this role but that's true of the whole cast. 

Turns out that Ian had been secretly training Alex to be a spy all his life, by teaching him...um, multiple languages and advanced martial arts (side note: the litany of shit Mr. Blunt gives him that's supposed to be relevant is hilarious. "You've been SCUBA diving, parasailing..."). Alex gets sent in spy on Darius Sayle (Rourke), a tech bro who couldn't be more obviously evil if he was literally eating a kitten in front of you and whose guyliner gets more intense every scene. His evil plan is to give away millions of VR headsets to British schoolchildren, but the headsets are infected with a virus! 

No, not a computer virus (Alex makes that mistake, too). A literal virus that will kill them. Because Sayle was bullied as a child by the guy who is now Prime Minister (Robbie Coltrane). 

Anyway, a lot of stupid action scenes ensue, including fight scenes that I thought would be good because Donnie Yen helped choreographed them, but they're all quick cuts and chopped to shit, and Red-Haired-Russian dude (the character's name is Gregorovich) drops in and blows Sayle away. There's very much "next time" moment between him and Alex, and he zooms away in a helicopter.

So, as is often the case with movies Toasty gives me, we need to discuss why exactly this movie is bad. (I've been noodling it.) There's the obvious stuff - weak script, lousy dialog, and that god-awful fight choreography - but what I think is most egregious is how hard this movie wants to be Harry Potter. That happened a lot in the early 2010s, but here in the mid-aughts, the YA franchise to beat was Harry Potter, so "established genre plus kid from normal life" was very much the vibe. 

It seems like what we're going for here is taking a Roger Moore-era James Bond vibe and trying to apply it to a modern British YA sensibility, but there's a couple of things wrong with that. For one thing, Bond murders a shit-ton of people and fucks a shit-tone more. The movies are never rated R, but the content is there, meaning that Alex can't be that kind of spy and you can't even imply that he is. Also, Bond movies at least had some relationship with the tradecraft part of being a spy, but this is basically a superhero movie more than anything else. 

But the tone, my god. Our opening scene has Alex' voice-over talking about how absent and kind of milquetoast his uncle is, as we're watching his uncle blow dudes up with missiles and then get shot in the face. The villain's plan isn't about world domination or fiscal control or repopulating the world like Bond's villains of the era, it's about literally murdering a generation of children because he was bullied. Our villain henchman include Mr. Grin (Serkis), a former circus performer and knife-thrower with a Joker-esque scar who just grunts and hisses, and Missi Pyle as Nadia Vole, a Russian (?) operative who reminds me a lot of Mila Jovovich's character in Zoolander. 

This was supposed to be the kickoff of a franchise, and you can practically hear the producers (and the screenwriter, who was also the one who wrote the novels this is based on) yelling "SEE, KIDS?! JUST LIKE HARRY POTTER, RIGHT? BUY ALL THE MERCH!" And like, the dude must have done something right, because there are a zillion novels and comics and there's another go at putting it on screen with a series that ran three seasons and was positively reviewed. So maybe there's something in the source material worth looking at, but lordy, you wouldn't know it by this.

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: Low 

Next up: CHiPS

Movie #930: All Things Fall Apart

All Things Fall Apart is a glurgey drama starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Mario Van Peebles (who also directed), Ray Liotta, Lynn Whitfield, Cedric Sanders, and...I'm actually not sure who plays the annoying-ass best friend because I never caught the character's name and I'm buggered if I'm going to pull out the DVD to check. 

Anyway, Deon (Jackson) is a college football player who's on the verge of going pro, and then discovers he has a tumor in his chest, goes into treatment, loses his scholarship, drops out of school, eventually rebounds and starts selling cars, and then discovers more cancer, and has a big party where everyone wears white to "go out on top." Is there more to the story than that? I mean, not really. 

50 Cent can't act, which means that in an action movie he'd probably be fine, or at least the movie would be somewhat entertaining (I got this movie from my sadistic friend Toasty in a two-pack with another 50 Cent movie called Gun, so we'll get to that soon enough). The movie feels like it wants to be a moving drama or, worse, a faith film, but it ends up being...I don't know, really. It's not just that the acting is bad (it is), it's that the movie just kind of stumbles along with Jackson getting skinnier and trying to look sick (but failing miserably because, again, can't act) until it just kind of ends and he goes running away from the party to demonstrate that he...hasn't given up?

There's an old Strong Bad cartoon where he talks about a one-legged puppy named Li'l Brudder, and Li'l Brudder always makes Homestar Runner cry because he has, in Homestar's words, "the heart of a champion." If you were to take that feeling of manipulative glurge and very clumsily make a movie out it, you'd get this. The most interesting thing about the movie is that Chinua Achebe stopped them from calling it Things Fall Apart (since that's the name of his novel), Jackson tried to pay him off, and Achebe told them to get fucked. It's not just a bad movie, it's boring, and although Jackson is the main character, the movie never quite gels around him, even as everyone either tries to use him as a meal ticket or thinks he walks on water (and he bangs like three different hot women in this movie, which you figure had to be Jackson's idea). 

Anyway, in conclusion, uggggghhh. 

My Grade: F-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Bride of Frankenstein

Movie #927: A.X.L.

A.X.L. is a sci-fi movie that wouldn't have been out of place in the 80s, starring Alex Neustaedter, Becky G, Thomas Jane, Alex MacNicoll, and Dominic Rains.

Miles (Neustaedter) and his dad Chuck (Jane) are trying to make a career of motorcross racing, but run afoul of the evil rich guy, Fontaine (Ted McGinley) and his eviler son Sam (MacNicoll). Miles beats Sam in a race, Sam pretends to befriend him, Miles starts falling for Sara (G), the daughter of the Fontaine's housekeeper (Patricia De Leon), Sam brings Miles out to the desert to do bike tricks and then sabotages his bike and leaves him there.

Wait, isn't this movie about a robot dog? Yep. 

Because the robot dog, the titular A.X.L. (Attack, eXploration, Logistics) is hiding out in a nearby junkyard after escaping from the lab where it was developed. Miles finds it, refuels it (it runs on gasoline, which seems inefficient), befriends it, and "pairs" with it because all you need to do that is press your thumb to a little key-fob thing. Meanwhile the "dog's" creator Andric (Rains) wavers between letting all this ride because it's good data and sending out hordes of little drones to get it back. 

Various misadventures ensue, and eventually AXL blows itself up to free Miles, but first it uploads all its files to "the cloud" and they wind up on the "dark web" so AXL is still out there somewhere, waiting for Miles to learn enough about robotics to rebuild this multi-million dollar, state of the art creature!

So, it's not a great movie. Like I said, it's not a million miles from the "kids find a supernatural friend" movies of the 80s (E.T., Mac n' Me, Monster Squad, Dinosaur Camp), but it feels much more 90s than that. The cast is...well, it's boring. I have no idea who Alex Neustaedter is, other than his name is really hard to remember. Becky G is fine, but she mostly wavers between Girlfriend and Hyper-competent Girl in Movie (we could shorten that to "Hermione", if you like). MacNicoll's Sam is actually the more interesting character, and there were clues early on that he wasn't really into racing and I thought we might be setting up a redemption arc, but no, he's just a bully, sets AXL on fire with a goddamn flamethrower and gets no character development at all.

The effects are OK, I guess, but they're mostly CGI and that feels lifeless at the best of times. It doesn't have the heart of a movie like Real Steel, and we don't really care about the leads enough to look past the silliness of creating a "war dog" that's robotic but still acts like a dog and can't handle a little napalm.

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: The Exorcist 

Movie #925: Daddy's Home

Daddy's Home is a cringe comedy starring Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini, Owen Vaccaro, Thomas Haden Church, Hannibal Buress, and Scarlett Estevez.

Brad (Ferrell) has always wanted to be a father, but winds up infertile (I say "winds up" because it's the first of many stupid gags; a dental hygienist accidentally aims an xray at his nuts). He marries Sara (Cardellini, far and away the best thing about this movie) and thereby becomes a stepdad to her kids, Dylan (Vaccaro) and Megan (Estevez). And although they kind of hate him at first, there's a lovely montage at the beginning of the movie where, as told through Megan's crayon drawings, Brad gradually becomes accepted into the family and patiently allows the kids to adjust. Hmm, I thought. Maybe this won't be so bad. 

And then Sara's ex, the kids' biological dad, Dusty (Wahlberg) shows up, and things go south real fast. I'm not talking about within the fiction of the movie - we know from the basic setup that the conflict of the movie is going to be Brad, a mild-mannered but kind man, against Dusty, a cool but probably irresponsible dude, and the kids kind of hang in the balance. That's fertile ground for a story. But fuck me. 

OK, so, Dusty isn't cool. He's fucking awful. He immediately gaslights both Brad and the kids, actively trying not only to get back into the kids' lives but turn both them and Sara against Brad. Sara, for the most part, sees through his bullshit, but does not back up Brad or put her foot down in ways that she clearly can (and, later in the film, does). And this isn't small stuff - Dusty invites himself to stay in the house, and then invites a stranger (Buress) to stay as well just kind of out of nowhere. He doesn't just try and ingratiate himself to the kids, he utterly disrupts their lives, brings home a dog he found in the gutter (like...wouldn't you think that might be dangerous? Especially if you see this fuckin' dog?), builds a full-on skate park in the backyard, and manipulates Brad and Sara into trying to get pregnant, figuring that since Brad can't, he can use that as a wedge between them (it backfires because Brad can still father children, but that's not the point).

For his part, Brad falls completely for every hook Dusty baits and eventually drives himself out of the house, whereupon Sara remembers that it's her house too and boots Dusty and Griff out. Dusty (trying to get back with Sara for reasons that are not totally clear to me, but we'll get to that) agrees to take on all the things that Brad does, and I thought, oh, good, we're going to see Dusty come to realize that Brad's time management, patience, and willingness to be present is what...oh, wait, nope, he can't even manage school drop-off without crumbling.

This all ends up more or less like you think it will; Dusty and Brad come to appreciate what the other brings to the table (more on that later), Dusty buys a house and makes it into a literal castle (wtf), and in one of the only funny bits of the movie, marries a woman (Alessandra Ambrosio) with a young daughter (Didi Costine) whose ex is John fucking Cena. 

Oof. OK. So, there's a lot wrong with this movie, but I think the main thing is that it doesn't live up to its premise. If what we're going for here is the basics: cool but absent bio-dad vs. loving but [something] stepdad, then that's a pretty good recipe for comedy. But first of all, Dusty is only cool by a 13-year-old boy's version of cool. He rides a motorcycle, he knows pro athletes, and he...maybe kills people for money? But he's not the "detached" kind of cool, he's enthusiastic about being a dad, kind of, but he only expresses that at Brad's (and by extension, Sara's) expense. 

Meanwhile, Brad doesn't have a specific flaw. His only real failing in the movie is that he wants so badly to be a good dad that he gets sucked into Dusty's shit, which if Dusty were an antagonist full stop, would be fine. But Dusty is treated as someone we're supposed to like, which means he needs to be a foil for Brad, and that's just not how he comes off.

It's annoying, because the premise of the movie is solid and the movie is well-cast, but it can't decide how over-the-top it wants to be and although it wants to have arcs for the main characters, it forgets to show how those arcs actually work. 

Oh, also, Brad's explanation to Dusty that most of being a dad is taking shit fucking boils my blood, because it just plays into crappy sitcom stereotypes of dads, and as a dad, I ain't here for it. Bleah.

My Grade: F
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT 

Next up: Evil Dead Rise 

Movie #915: Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels is a comedy starring Jack Black, Amanda Peet, Jason Segel, Chris O'Dowd, T.J. Miller, Emily Blunt, Billy Connolly, and Catherine Tate. It came out in the 90s...wait, what? It came out in 2010?! Well, it feels like it came out in the 90s. Anyway, the movie is (very) loose adaptation of Jonathan Swift's work, but we'll talk about that in a bit. 

So! Lemuel Gulliver (Black) is a schlubby but apparently content mail room clerk for a publishing house who's been crushing on his coworker Darcy (Peet) for years, but is too chicken to ask her out. His new hire (Miller) gets promoted past him in a single day and tells him that as long as he thinks small, he'll always be small. This is officially as subtle as this movie ever gets.

So in an attempt to impress Darcy, Gulliver plagiarizes a bunch of travel writing and gets sent on an assignment to Bermuda, falls asleep, falls into a whirlpool, and winds up in Lilliput, where everyone is only a few inches tall. He pees on the burning palace to save the king (which is in the book, but that's basically where the similarities end), and is promoted to protector and mascot. Gulliver claims that he's the hero of just about every movie ever made, Lilliput is remade in the image of New York, Gulliver claims to be the president of his land, blah blah blah.

But the former general of the Lillputian army, Edward (O'Dowd, just doin' his best) betrays the country and has the sworn enemy of Lilliput, Blefuscia, defeating him with a robot they built from a Guitar Hero manual. Anyway, Darcy herself has fallen into Lilliput, so she gets to be the motivation for Gulliver to rise up and fight the robot. Oh, and there's a brief diversion to Gulliver getting to the Island Where We Dare Not Go (Brobdingnag, but it's never identified as such) and getting to be a doll in a giant girl's dollhouse, but that's just there to be his Abyss moment in the Hero's Journey. He defeats Edward, stops the war between Lilliput and Brefuscia with an impromptu musical number ("War"), and then goes home with Darcy and actually does become a travel writer.

OK. So, this movie is really, really bad on a number of levels, and really mediocre on a number of others. I said before it feels very 90s. Jack Black is trying very hard to be 1994 Jim Carrey, just kind of acting goofy and making faces, but the problem is that Jim Carrey is a more gifted physical comedian and he generally had some kind of consistent (if annoying) character. What's Gulliver's deal? Is he lazy but generally happy? Is he ambitious but stupid? Is he good-hearted but naive? When he gives romance advice to the hapless, lovelorn Horatio (Segel) trying to woo Princess Mary (Blunt, who apparently missed out on playing Black Widow because of this movie, which is just criminal), he does OK at first, but then just has him quote "Kiss", but then tells him to act like an aloof jerk, which Gulliver knows doesn't work because he tried it with Darcy and it got him nowhere. 

Quite apart from Gulliver not really having much character (he has an arc, kind of, but again, it's just the Hero's Journey by the numbers), the Lilliputians have this quasi-Victorian England thing going on, but there's no statement or satire or even parody here. It's just an American screenwriter writing down "funny" shit that reminds him of England, and poor Billy Connolly and Catherine Tate trying to struggle through making it actually work. 

Jonathan Swift's novel was, of course, satire. Gulliver went through several different adventures with different fantastical civilizations, each one skewering something from Swift's experience. You could do a very smart update of Gulliver's Travels wherein a modern American visits Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the rest of it and sees parallels to his own life blown out of proportion, I think what happened here is that someone knew that in Gulliver's Travels, a guy goes to a place within tiny people and gets tied to the ground, learned that he also gets to piss to put out a fire, and put in a call to Jack Black's people without ever reading any part of it. 

My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT 

Next up: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus 

Movie #335: The Last Dragon

The Last Dragon is...well, it lives somewhere between chop-socky, blaxploitation, and concentrated 80s. It stars Taimak, Vanity, Julius J. Carry III, Chris Murney, Faith Prince, and Leo O'Brien.

We open with Leroy Green (Taimak), known to the residents of Chinatown as "Bruce Leroy" finishing his martial arts training and leaving his master (Thomas Ikeda) to find "the Glow," a mystical martial arts woogie power. Here's the thing: Leroy is black, lives in Harlem, and his family doesn't understand his obsession with meditation and martial arts, nor why he talks like a mentally challenged white dude.

But never mind that. The evil Sho'Nuff (Carry III), the self-styled Shogun of Harlem, who romps around with a gang wearing weird costumes, wants to fight Leroy to establish himself as the master. And, elsewhere, slimy producer Eddie Arkadian (Murney) wants to blackmail lovely Lisa Charles (Vanity) into broadcasting his girlfriend Angela's (Prince) tacky-ass video on her dance show.

Of course this all comes down to a fight between Sho'Nuff and Leroy, and...well, look, I can't possibly explain this.

OK, straight up, this movie is terrible. It's very watchable, of course, and it's funny as hell, in a "what the actual fuck" kind of way. But it's terrible. It's got too many characters, everything is way over the top, the music is god-awful (seriously, the best song in it is "Rhythm of the Night"), and there's a sea monster in a tank that violates the Chekov's Gun rule. Sho'Nuff is the most memorable thing in the movie, and the best moment is Angela walking out on Eddie.

The martial arts aren't terrible (Taimak is actually a martial artist), fight scenes are OK, and watch for cameo roles from young William H. Macy and Chazz Palminteri.

My grade: D
Rewatch value: Medium-high, I think

Next up: Last Man Standing