85% Less Child Murder, 2/3rds the Mormon Fascism Calories.

Every plot element that was removed from the theatrical adaptation of Ender's Game improved the final product, and it was still a dumpster fire of clumsy dialogue, uninspired science fiction tropes, bad costumes, child psychopaths, and disturbing ethical  rationalizations.

There's multiple reasons that for quite a long time this novel was considered unfilmable, and they can be broken down into two categories: Effects and Plot.

The diatribe will begin with effects and physical delivery of the film, being the least objectionable and poisonous aspects derived from the epic Mormon creation from the demonhorn-tipped quill of Orson Scott Card.

Battle School in Space, which is what the location is literally actually referred to, is the main setting for our adventure. If you're at all familiar with the source material, which i unfortunately hope you would be if you're bothering to read this hot mess of rambling poorly grammartized musings, then you know about Battle School in Space. The end result of the International Space Station if the solar system was invaded by a group of insectoid aliens, and the governments of Earth allied themselves to create a United Nations that you can be elected President to by posting persuading essays in internet comment sections.

A sprawling rotating station with a big sphere in the middle where the teachers can torture the shit out of their child students, the sheer technical hurdle of depicting it without looking like an episode of the big bang theory kept the movie from being greenlit for multiple decades. And everyone still looked awkward floating around the arena, since humans look like flailing dummies in simulated low gravity, it's just in our nature.

Set design was... passable, until the act when our intrepid hero Andrew "Bender" Wiggin was sent to a captured Bugger planet to do more war stuff that wound up turning into genocide. I don't know what it is, but from Stargate SG-1 to any movie with insectioid aliens... Starship Troopers for example, they just can't properly recreate an environment an insectoid alien would live in. The floors are always flat, the doorways are always human sized. It shouldn't rustle my Jimmies but it does.

Costumes: i didn't expect to see any Adidas underwear logos but... here we are. Apparently the official clothing supplier to the International Fleet Fleet is one of Nike's competitors, and their logo hasn't changed in about 150 years.

Plot:

So it's generally agreed upon that Orson Scott Card is a pretty terrible person. At least, it's agreed upon if you're NOT a bad person with bad opinions and ideas and should not be ground up into food for the less fortunate/fertilizer/Torgo's Executive powder.

What bothers me, always has and always will, is the argument that you need to try to look past Card's obscenely regressive backwards harmful opinions and judge the work on its own merits, like the two are mutually exclusive.

They are not.

When someone who has continually expressed bad opinions, (let's just go with Hitler since it's the easiest/most unfair example), creates something, like a book, you cannot separate the person from the creation. It's like God. Or if like you had friends who told you they were really getting into the Mein Kampf series and that you should check it out.

That feeling is partially because stuff written by a bad person is always going to be tinged with their personal philosophy, and partially because Ender's Game frankly isn't that good. The series isn't.

Is it readable? In general, yes, aside from the weird Chinese stuff in the third book, but is it deserving of the #1 spot on the list of greatest science-fiction novels of all time?
Fuck no.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

This is a paper that puts forward pretty much my exact argument only much more eloquently and with less profanity, so it's worth a read.

What makes Ender's Game so dangerous is that it's read by people while they're children and they identify with the main character. He's small, bullied, but in the end he's better than everyone else and is a winner even if everyone doesn't realize it, since you're special. You, the reader. You and Ender are friends from the start.

Then you go back to it as an adult, and nostalgia clouds the child murder, the rationalizing of violence as both a first and last resort, and the idea that 6-15 year olds are the future of the military industrial complex.

 

But that's all about the book. We're talking about the movie adaptation OF the book, where most attention is paid to the detail of what has been included, and what has been excised. Like Jurassic Park, and how it took 3 movies to get to the pteranodons.

Remember all those interludes from Battle School in Space where Bender's siblings, where sociopath asshole Peter and empathetic pussy Valentine basically become the first internet superstars by arguing about how Earth needs to go to war in the comments sections of blogs?
Yeah that's gone. Thank god.

Instead what we have is a pretty much uninterrupted Education of Bender Wiggin at the Space School of Hard Knocks, since as we learn early on in the film the I.F. fleet (heretofore referred to as the International Fleet Fleet) is only 26 days and some-odd hours away from the Bugger home planet. So there's a time limit, and Harrison Ford, playing a tired and angry Colonel Graff, needs to grumble his motley band of rejects and losers and murderers to victory ASAP. However...

There's never any real set of stakes in Bender's Game. The movie decides that it's 50 years after the first invasion of the homosexuals where they were defeated by Ben Kingsley flying an F-22 jet into the mothership and killing it EXACTLY like Randy Quaid in Independence Day. Almost shot for shot. So apparently the greatest tactical mind before Bender lifted his ideas directly from an excellent Roland Emmerich movie. Don't mess with Earth/welcome to it. Bender MUST complete his college education before his balls drop, and the timeframe is meaningless

Asa Butter field, aside from having a terrible name, is a... bad child actor. Most are. Eventually he'll be good looking and deep voiced and buff and girls will want to rub up against him so much he'll look like a glazed doughnut but right now he's just awkward. Hiring a british actor for an american role isn't necessarily risky, but when their accent breaks through the dialogue while you're there since they have to scream a lot, it's not necessarily the best time. And as for the rest of the cast, I have both faint and damning praise. I leaned over to Nick about halfway through the movie to whisper "I find it interesting that every woman in this movie is a huge pussy".

Bender's mom: coward.

Viola Davis: military psychologist, and coward.

Abigail Breslin/Bender's weird incestual romance sister: reinforces Bender's pre-emptive self-defense murder philosophy, also a coward though she herself is kinda a psychopath.

Petra Arkanian: only girl with speaking lines in Battle School in Space, nice to Bender on the outset thereby revealing her cowardice.

BUT I will say that i appreciated the movie having non-whites and/or men in roles that contributed to the plot. Bean and the Muslim kid (who i was amazed was allowed to have speaking lines) are both nonwhites, the one sergeant dude that teaches recruits and tells Bender he'll never salute him is Xaro Xoan Daxos from Game of Thrones.

I love when actors are not the race or gender that books make them out to be. Ursula K.LeGuin, a much better SF author than Card, goes out of her goddamn way to tell her readers that her characters are people of color, because in the cold dark dystopian universe of the future, we're all gonna look olive/mahogany skinned and sexy as hell.

[BIOLOGY ASIDE NOTE] My favorite authors don't cater to an audience. They embrace the diversity we encounter in our daily lives. Our species wouldn't exist if it wasn't for our shockingly varied phenotype and adaptive ability, and my favorite authors ranging from Richard K. Morgan to Kameron Hurley pick characters with a heritage that can be proudly referred to as multicultural. Even if they're white. 'Purity' is an illusion, I myself am a mop bucket of all your garbage genetic strains of Europe, I wish that I had something more exotic in me than a half Turkish grandfather. When I see alarmist news articles about how in 75 years america will resemble Brazil more than any other country i say bring on the slammin' booties.[END BIODIVERSITY DIATRIBE]

Aside from removing the nudity and child sexuality and violence, Bender's Game at its core is just a shit ass predictable script. Nick, who has never read the series, asked me "the simulations are real, right? And Bender is totally gay, isn't he?" about 45 minutes into its 112 minute running time.

It's a complete mess of a flim, and is an example of trying to service everyone while pleasing no one. Fans of the novel will be disappointed by the (bad) plotlines that were removed, and kids and/or adults who have no idea what the Bender's Game universe is will be disappointed since they don't know what the fuck a Hegemon is since only asshole computers like me will understand the dialogue and be able to think "oh they took out the slippery sexy shower showdown thank god" and come away happy but angry.

Speaking of showers, dear punished reader, let's talk about that showdown and the implications of it for a very long time. For starters, if you remember Bonzo, he was a tall buff 14 year old Spaniard with a violent temper and more psychopathic tendencies than most GTA characters.

In the film? There's a joke, that i really don't appreciate. And it's about Napoleon. Napoleon was taller than me, he was probably 5'9'', since the French foot (and cock) was bigger than the English equivalent. But a lot of actually short guys, from Jimi Hendrix to Elijah Wood have had both functioning dicks and left a mark upon society in an indelible way.
Bonzo, when he's introduced, goes up to Asa Butterfield's nipples. Halee Steinfeld is taller than him, and about 5' 9''.

Bonzo is less than 5' 6", probably closer to 5' 0".

So the moral I took away from this movie is that if you're short, you're subhuman, haha, take that you short pussy, kill yourself since you wont amount to anything and save the earth by killing other children by kicking them so hard in the face you drive their nose bone into their brain (twice!!).

Fuck you, you piece of shit casting director.

Bender manages to send two boys to the hospital, one on Earth school and Bonzo in Battle School in Space, ignoring the fact that he is so brutal in "destroying his enemies" than he  in reality killed them. And therein lies the failing of the movie. Honestly, the movie would fail either way, since killer or not Bender is an irredeemable opening act to a cavalcade of military officers who find humanity's best hopes in the very few children born without a genetic sense of right and wrong. It just... sucks

*http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-enders-game-and-thor-the-dark-world/ closing music plays*

I liked it more when it was called [Insert intellectual property here]

R.I.P.D. is one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life.

How is it so bad, dear indexing machine that contributes the most of my pageviews? Oh let me count the ways.

On the whole (and hole, the eyehole), the premise for the entire fucking movie is Men In Black, Ghostbusters, The Sandman, True Grit, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that Simpsons episode about The Flying/Fighting Hellfish; lifted nearly in its entirety and plopped into a 3D setting in Boston of all the goddamn settings, with Jeff Bridges' accent crammed in there since the human body is nightmarishly elastic and can accommodate massive trauma before succumbing to the damage. It's almost incredible, the lack of thought that went into creating R.I.P.D., even the title reeks of cutesy ersatz-supernatural science fiction masquerading as creativity.

The movie is a spectacular failure at every level, the only new thing it contributes to civilization is finding a way to be even worse than Jonah Hex, the previous "most objectionable comic book movie and/or possibly movie i have ever seen" title holder for several years running. What is it about stories where the main guy is dead the whole time and has remaining unfinished business that wind up being unfilmable? The comic of this must be fun, Jonah Hex must be fun, the far superior progenitors to the abortions must also, by the Socratic Method, be fun. But when crammed into the soulless (lol) ZOG-controlled corporate machine that is mainstream Hollywood, we get a Ryan Reynolds movie that once more stirs up the confused feelings i have about the man.

For the most part, I hate Ryan Reynolds. It might not be entirely his fault, but the man cultivates his image, of a snarky sarcastic too-cool-4-skool canadian asshole who'd fuck your girlfriend behind your back and lie to you about while trying to climb over your gearshift to unbuckle your pants, and you wind up getting chlamydia. BUT (there's always a juicy butt), he also has a skill, an infuriatingly charming and enjoyable skill, that when used appropriately can wind up creating a hell of a piece. Buried, for one. Goddamn that movie is the tops. Safe House (carried 99% by the presence of Denzel but I'll jerk off over that American Treasure another day). His supporting role in Adventureland. Waiting..., even Blade 3. When he succeeds, in whatever way, he hits big.

But the failures completely overshadow every single thing that might be positive or good or prove there's any light in the world, and Green Lantern almost singlehandedly proves that. But now it has a best friend, a roommate in hell. and it is R.I.P.D.

I'm not going too far into the plot (or obvious lack thereof), but when a film starts centered around a gold heist orchestrated by a pair of dirty cops, you get interested. Then the rest of the movie happens, and you get angry at the people in the rows in front of you who are laughing at this.... this THING. When Jeff Bridges shows up, dusting off his Rooster Cogburn accent from the superb reimagining of True Grit, something breaks, and the damage is done.

"Deados" are what out heroes call the antagonists. Souls of the deceased who do not ascend to the judgement of St. Peter, but instead remain on Earth and decay and mutate until they resemble shittily lazily animated antagonists from Left 4 Dead 2. "PILLS HERE" i desperately wanted someone to shout, so I could dull the pain of this cinematic monstrosity. And then Kevin Bacon, in his usual 'Kevin Bacon as the antagonist' style commences, to make you wish you were watching Hollow Man.

Nothing about R.I.P.D. is good, You can't even enjoy looking at it, or laughing at it in the most ironic of senses. If you want to get angry at a comic book movie where the main character is basically a zombie, go watch Jonah Hex. It's a half hour shorter than this pile, and is also lacking in any horrible usages of "Let's Get It On" literally EVERY TIME the avatar of Jeff Bridges' ghost is onscreen and every single man who looks at her immediately gets a raging hard erection and goes into 'papa horney, Michael' mode.

The Delicious Dessert of the Real

Like all nerds, I love franchise opportunities. The more of something, the usual better. Half a thousand Star Trek Episodes, 200+ of Stargate, the Law & Order universe, infinitely many written words that range from Isaac Asimov to Richard Morgan to Kameron Hurley, and then... the hated trilogy.

I have every hope Pacific Rim turns into a series. After Hellboy 3, of course. And then there are the THREE Indiana Jones films, the Original and canonical Star Wars films, The Nolan Batman trilogy especially Dark Knight Rises which is awesome to seduce someone to since Tom Hardy's Bane voice equals lubricant, and finally The Matrix and select parts of its following ventures.

I love The Matrix. So much. Partly because it's sci-fi and it's required, partly because the first film's message affects me so closely, and partly because a huge area of me wants to be something that i'm not, and that if i believed and tried hard enough i could change things for the better.

I live in a world of limbo. Halfway between life and death. A dreamworld, if you will. And it's all because of biology. I am a scientist. I have to become one, and nothing will ever stop me from it, CSU system not accepting applications be damned.

It's because of that mindset that I realize that for all purposes of Darwinian natural selection I should not be alive. Ten years ago, a thousand years ago, I should have succumbed to a wasting disease. A natural and randomly occurring disease, that serves to control the properties of natural selection, a deoxy-ribonucleic acid based computer code aimed at preventing the virus from over expanding outside its containment limit.

But here I am, because of the end results of the thousand year long experiment with the science of medicine and its subfield of oncology, and you're reading this sentence. Which is why I'm dedicating my precious free time to writing about a movie franchise that inspired countless loners to start wearing black leather trenchcoats and pretend they knew kung-fu.

There's only so much I can say about this that hasn't already been said, from the philosophy to the visual style (i fukkin love green), to the implications of artificial intelligence, to the morality of having a huge orgy while a war is going on and you're fighting against the extinction of your entire species , but I'll try to bring something original to this conversation. Which I will start off with a quote. Highly unoriginal, I know.

"Morpheus: I won't lie to you, Neo. Every single man or woman who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an Agent, has died. But where they have failed, you will succeed. 
Neo: Why? 
Morpheus: I've seen an Agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.
 Neo: What are you trying to tell me, that I can dodge bullets? 
Morpheus: No Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to." ~ http://thematrixtruth.remoteviewinglight.com/html/transcript-of-the-matrix-5.html

Every time I hear Larence Fishburne deliver that quote about Agents, I get the chills. There is something so powerful, so finite about his performance, if i was a voing man i'd have nominated Larry for a best supporting oscar right then and there.

Morpheus is so steadfastly sure in his beliefs that when they are invariably proved correct on the rooftop fight in that faceless L.A. rescue scene that it almost makes me a religious man.

I wish I could believe. Truly I do. If there was anything else that I could place my trust in in this universe aside from the inevitable forces of entropy and decay, I would. I don't like crying, but at the end of the day when you face it, the End of All Things is all that is left to me.
The Matrix is a parable of God, I know that for a fact. The original film is a commentary on the differences between logic and belief, a blending of science fiction, fantasy, western, thriller, drama, comedy, action, romance, foreign, every fucking genre you could imagine that it's the BEST Hollywood could ever churn out. This is the best we will ever get on the subject of philosophy. And it's not that bad. Reloaded and Revolutions are increasingly flawed realizations of the same premise, while Animatrix for all of its flaws is around the same level as its source material in quality.
I cannot and will not ever recommend the Matrix enough. The Wachowski siblings (one of whom apparently and applaudingly underwent gender reassignment therapy and I helped contribute to through the purchase of a ticket) stumbled upon one of the greatest philosophical contributions to decaying western society that we have ever known. There is so much that is RIGHT with The Matrix that I cannot criticize it, for all objections fall flat, especially since we truly do live in a dream world. Our very species cut off from the harsh reality of day.

In the end, would I choose the red pill or the blue pill? I may never really know. I hope against hope to make the right choice, the best choice, and it is my strongest wish that you do, too.

H To The Izzo, This Movie Was a Scourge On the Estate of F. Scott Fizgeraldizzo

I've been terrible at keeping this updated, I'm so, so sorry. I blame The Woman.

So. The Great Gatsby. In 3D. (which i actually saw in 2D but fuck you and come fight me if you think 3D in any way improves the narrative structure of a film).

By Baz Lurchman.

Where... where the fuck do I start? The director? The editors? The casting director? The actors? The visual effects? The bizarre decision to make a 3D adaptation of what might possibly be the Great American Novel? Or is it all of the above?

Yes.

I went to see this with Acacia on a date night to prove I can still plan things, and the classless boors who sat in the back row and dropped a 40 oz malt liquor bottle and sent glass skittering everywhere halfway though did not detract from the flim. That was the level of my unenjoyment.

In any other hands, this might have been a good movie. Seriously. Gatsby is an incredibly relevant piece of literature (unfortunately), that details the depressing emptiness to decadence, mindless self-indulgence, alcoholism, materialism, reckless hedonism, manifest destiny capitalism, and so many other -ism's I can't and won't go into describing them all. The disturbing parallels between roaring 20's era Jazz Age financial industry excess and pretty much every boom and bust cycle for the past century are SO GODDAMN PRESCIENT THAT YOU'D THINK THE CLOWNS IN CONGRESS WOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. BUT THEY DON'T. WHAT A BUNCH OF CLOWNS.

But is any of that evident in this particular movie? Only superficially. Which is the exact wrong way to depict the catastrophic precursor culture to the great depression. But that's entirely the fault of Bahz Lurchmann.

To start off, the first 45 minutes of this movie made me angry. Not because of any plot that happened on the screen, but the absolutely confounding  editing process.

Now, I know WHY they did this to me, but my real question is also why? From the start of the picture (that actually stars Tobey Macguire and not Leonardo di Caprio like the previews would lead you to believe), 3D effects more gratuitous than the final cumshot to an hourlong culioneros skin flick featuring Nekane are rampant.

I need to watch this again, to count the amount of cuts there are during a conversation, or a long silence. My estimate is closer to every three seconds. Its so FUCKING fast, and frenetic, i just know that the movie aims to stay moving in order to keep its audience's attention. Which is insulting on an entirely other level.

In order to more properly justify the expense of releasing the movie in 3D, they camera motion had to be constant. Unending. The set design and backgrounds of a 1923 period piece don't grab your eye on their own, unless you are an aspergian faglord who loves intricate easily missed setpieces (me). Every time the camera slowly pans across an actor as they sit motionless in a chair reciting dialogue, the background moves, too. Which make the 3D effects pop, and allows people to go home and feed themselves after selling their souls and working for a corporate machine in creating this affront to the name of cinema.

It just... sucks. I'm tired of always being shown things and not told anything. We don't need this kind of indulgence if there's no superstructure. I'm all for lavish, beautiful and creative visual effects, but if you can't back it up with something that justifies its expense then you might as well blow your brains out on the wall and leave something much more 3D than anything i've ever seen onscreen.

Plot: surprisingly passable, even though it kind of reinforces the fact that Gatsby is a shitty movie but a great book. It just doesn't have the 1st, 2nd, 3rd act structure that movies need.

And then we come to this. The music.

I am completely and utterly stupid when it comes to music. I love weird shit. I will listen to the entire discography of the Beastie Boys (rip M.C.A. you were one of the best humans), hipster on to Run DMC, jam the fuck out to the Black Keys, get my estrogen on with Adele, Ellie Goulding, Kate Nash, get drunk as shit and listen to 105.1 K-Mozart, and pretty much sit through whatever you have playing. I LIKE music. One of my favorite things to do is search youtube for Taylor Swift music videos and laugh at them, and unironically enjoy N*Sync or Britney concerts.

I'm weird.

But this... this THING, executive produced by Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter is just weird and off-putting and poorly planned. Contemporary and modern musical pieces go back to back, dragging you back and forth between the bleeding THEN and the dead NOW. Boardwalk Empire, a similar era period-piece, stays rooted entirely in the past. All the music is from the 1910-20's, much like Deadwood, which adds to the enjoyment.

Gatsby? Well...

Look, I like Jay-Z. For all the faults that that might entail, you racist. But his music has no place here. The Jazz Age rendition of the Beyonce song later in the movie is entirely fitting, but PLAYING "H To The Izzo" WHILE THE CAMERA PANS OVER A CAR FULL OF PARTYING JAZZ AGE BLACK PEOPLE IS STUPID, PROBABLY RACIALLY INSENSITIVE SOMEHOW, AND JUST... FUCK. I got mad, Acacia got mad, for entirely different reasons that wound up overlapping and allowed us to make out in the car later.

The modern pieces wind up petering out about an hour into the film and it gives itself entirely over to Gershwin and his cadre of similarly sounding influences and generic movie score. Which is great, but it should have been like that from the beginning.

Overall... this is a masturbatory flick spawned from the loins of a shitty director, costume designers, interior decorators and people who are obsessed with Art Deco for the form over the function, the style over the substance.

I'm sorry, white people, but you blew it. there's too much here to ignore, and that you completely overlooked. Class struggle, racial inequalities, the impact of World War on the psyche of the returning veteran, the role of women in 20's society that at the same time (like now) that valued them purely for their sex appeal but at the same time judged them for being TOO goddamn sexy, the deja vu effect of teh Matrix when it changes something... EVERYTHING.

Baz Lurhmann is not the person to have given this to. I don't have a list of names on hand to suggest different directors, but Lurhmann is so obsessed with the superficial, what looks and feels good, i'm amazed that Aussie fuck hasn't checked into a rehab clinic for MDMA abuse.

THINK FOR GOD'S SAKE. Let your brain live. Read the book, read any book, watch Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, anything. I beg you. Please. there's nothing wrong with fun, but the fun had on this was son wrong it makes me wish i was born a hundred years earlier so i could beg Lenin to take an aspirin every day after dinner so he didn't die of a stroke and lead to the worst outcome of socialism that could possibly be imagined.

Two fuck's out of five, only because I love Art Deco so much and will use this moment to plug the novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", which is accessible to both die-hard comic fans and normies alike.

Fear Is the Mind Killer

"A month after the release of The Last Airbender, Will Smith contacted M. Night Shyamalan on August 6 to wish him "Happy Birthday" and to persuade him to direct his movie with his son Jaden Smith as the star.^[6]"

^{Will Smith is dumb as shit.} 

What is it that allows someone to succeed in cinema?

Acting talent? A creative mind capable of exposing the audience to a fantastical wonderland that makes us laugh AND think? Really good blowjob skills?

After today I'm pretty sure it's luck. Knowing your way around a pole is all and good, but it's pure luck.

How else do we explain After Earth, the newest tag-team adventure brought to us from acclaimed writer Will Smith and revolutionary director M. Knight Shymamalam?

After Earth is a hodgepodge of themes, storylines, and accents. Straight from the mind of a 14 year old screenwriter, we open on the clunky expositional narration delivered by Jaden Smith, or as he shall henceforth be known: Kitai Raige, son of Space Ranger General Cipher Raige:

Our prodigal son lays out the state of the universe for us, in which 1,000 years ago humans pollute earth too much and must evacuate. The Space Ranger Corps save humanity by taking them to a new planet called "Nova Prime" which is then promptly overrun by aliens who deploy Hork-Bajir style shock troops soldiers.
These aren't your granddad's tinfoil suit alien spaceman blitzkrieg soldiers, though, oh lawdy no. These are some weird 6 limbed eyeless bugdog monster whose secret weapons is that they smell fear pheromones.

This is where I end this review since it's so fucking stupid that i'm not going to talk about fanfiction anymore. I'm just going to detail my complaints.
1: The actors. Jayden Jaymes cannot act. He just can't. He's in that awkward teenager stage where he's still developing his adult face, and he's ugly as hell right now. Couple that with no innate charisma and a father who is a literal brazillionaire and you have a recipe for disaster.
Will Smith criminally underused himself. Aside from the weirdass Baltimore area accent he was trying to portray as a future accent (which i picked up from my many hours of The Wire viewing), if the movie centered around  him it might have been passable. Except it wasn't. Couple that with the fact that you don't know how his last name is pronounced and it just winds up making you angry. Will Smith says his last name sounding like "rage", the emotion. Which is FUCKING STUPID. But every other ancillary character pronounces it as "raiche" like the alternate non-movie pronunciation of Ra's al-Ghul, which i find much more preferable.
2: Everything else. The general plot of the movie was stupid, shitty garbage that is worse to film than my Relict series that involves an old man, a black guy, a big titted blonde lady, a princess and an excomminucated alien fighting to stop the apocalypse that for some reason that involved mechanical spiders.

2a: The eagle. You have to see the movie to believe this subplot. I can't even describe it, but it's dumb as FUCK. I just.... I can't put it into text. Ask me about it in person.

So It Has Come to This. I warned you, I warned all of you.

Here in the hive, we have very discerning tastes. And by discerning I mean we grab literally anything that moves, drain its lifeforce out, and move on. Like ID4 aliens, or Kaiju. However, beggars can also be choosers, and this week I chose what was easily the most frustratingly bad movie I've watched in a long time, 2012's The Paperboy.

I should have known better. All of us should have the fateful day we opened that Netflix envelope. Sprung from the mind of Lee Daniels, the man responsible for bringing us Monster's Ball and the celluloid crime that is Shadowboxer, The Paperboy is something that has to be experienced to be fully appreciated.

First things first, let's get to the reason I compared today's entry to those other two movies. if you've ever seen Monster's Ball you know that it should not be confused with Charlize Theron's Monster, or the incredible indie sci-fi thriller Monsters whose director is now helming the Godzilla reboot. No, MB is responsible to one of the grossest sex scenes distributed by mainstream Hollywood. If you ever hear a woman tell you "make me feel good" and you immediately lose your turgid boner then you remember That Scene and can obviously sympathize with me.
Shadowboxer is the previous entry by Daniels, a bizarre unsexy psychosexual "thriller" about an incestual relationship between assassins Cuba Gooding Jr. and Helen Mirren.
The man loves male buttcheeks, what can i say.

Which brings us to The Paperboy. Do you like rough sex? Rough sex with an accused murderer freed from prison on a technicality? Rough sex with a murderer who is drenched in buckets of sweat, likes to wrap his hands around your throat, bite off your panyhose, and happens to be John Cusack?
Well then I've got good news for you!

Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey serve as two small bright points in the film. Two brothers, the older of whom is a journalist from 1963 Miami while the younger one delivers newspapers. Idealistic McConaughey is shooting to win a Pulitzer Prize by exposing the faults of the justice system, and sets his sights on freeing a man who was likely falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. The man in question is Cusack, whose existence was brought to McConaughey's attention by a sexpot Nicole Kidman, who writes convicts letters and gets off on them telling her how much they want to fuck her.

Ready for things to get weird? Well, not so much as weird since it already was, but much, much worse. Efron falls in love with Kidman's character, who works with the brothers and McConaughey's black Englishman assistant on freeing Cusack. She thinks it's cute, pretty much leading him around for the entirety of the movie by the dick. "Tee hee hee, I write letters to criminals and will fuck anything else that moves including McConaughey's assistant but I don't want to ruin our friendship."

Which all culminates in Kidman peeing on Zac Efron's face after he staggers out of the ocean, covered in jellyfish stings.

After an initial jailhouse meeting where Cusack and Kidman's characters, not allowed to touch each other, talk each other off and stain Cusack's prison-issue trousers with semen, everyone starts to sour on Cusack. Circumstantial evidence put him behind bars, but it's increasingly obvious that he is indeed a scummy character, a racist, might a murderer, probable rapist, etc. But all that is too late! With the Pulitzer in sight, McConaughey goes out drunk one night, cruising (oh yeah it turns out he's a homosexual), and winds up being tortured nearly to death, saved only by the timely arrival of Efron and Kidman after she finally decided to give Efron a pity fuck.
McConaughey's assistant decides to run the story while he's in the hospital anyway, plot holes and faulty research aside, and Cusack is made a free man.

Only.... he winds up being a bad person. He whisks "poor" Nicole off to a shack out in the everglades to live with the other inbred racist hill people to have lots of degenerate aberrant sex while making an income hunting alligators. Kidman, learning that courting psychopaths was possibly a poor idea, writes to Efron to come save her.
Our intrepid white knight and his older brother, who was rendered a cyclops during the gay-bashing, rush off to rescue the fair maiden, but alas Cusack beat her to death about five minuted before they arrive. A fight ensues, and WHOOPS McConaughey gets his throat slit with a machete.

And then the movie.. just ends. Efron runs off into the wilderness, collects the bodies of his brother and Kidman, and then there's a closing narration.

I wanted to like this, at first. The setting of civil rights era Florida is fascinating (there's an interesting five minutes after an enraged Efon unthinkingly calls McConaughey's assistant a nigger and the resulting fallout, but that's basically the only good scene), and Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey bring pretty much the only enjoyable acting to the table, but overall the movie falls flat.
I gave this thing a 3 on Netflix. 1 star since that's the lowest you can rate it, then a star each for Efron and McConaughey.

Don't watch it, just... dont.

Preview pre-show for the postess with the most-est

Dear internet tracking robots who compose most of the web traffic here,

This week will be the start of our very first theme week down here at the Old Fashioned Nuts & Gum Bloggin' Shack. We're starting off big, with a post-mortem of John Cusack's acting career. I'm not going to go over everything on that gargantuan list, just the entertaining ones like the performance of his saggy asscheeks in The Paperboy. Enjoy! :D

Arbitrage: Everything About Capitalism is Evil

"What the fuck is an Applebee's?" Richard Gere's billionaire investment banker CEO character asks halfway though the movie, to the man he was bribing to cover up the fact that Gere was involved in a motor vehicle accident that resulted in the death of his mistress.

Arbitrage is a film that came out five years after the collapse of the financial industry, and global capitalism was again revealed to be something reminiscent of an Akkadian blood god cult that demanded the sacrifice of the innocent in order to stave off the destruction of the world.

Well guess what, the Akkadians collapsed when they ran out of things to conquer, and the world went chugging along just fine, until the 18th century.

Gere plays a character who runs a high risk-high reward hedge fund that promises returns on investment of more than 15 percent. In the midst of negoatiating a $500 million merger with a bank, he happens to pull a Chappaquidick while with his mistress, and his daughter (who happens to be the Chief Investment Officer (nepotism)) uncovers Gere's recent 'cooking of the books' AKA fraud.

Tim Roth plays a detective out to nail Gere to the wall while possessing one of the most hilarious New York accents I have ever heard.

A tight 1 hr 45 mins, Arbitrage was really good. A provocative amoral tale of business and family loyalty, if you need something to discuss around one of your gay little socialist pow-wows i totally recommend it. Secondary characters include Susan Sarandon, the asshole teacher from Malcolm in the Middle, and that black guy i really like whose name I can't remember. He was in an episode of Criminal Intent, playing a cool professor.

Entry the First: Just as awkward as a devirginization

Let's start off with something easy/doesn't suck: Adventure Time.

I haven't watched every episode, but i think now that i'm more than 20+ 11 min episodes deep I can comment on the beyond fascinating creation that Pendleton Ward & Company have created.

What we have here is an amazing product. Written by people slightly over my age group, FOR people slightly over my age group + their shitty little kids. It's designed for parents to get blazed and plop down next to their kid and laugh their asses off at. Each show has a specific conflict, solution, and moral of the story, and it is executed masterfully. It's a darkly comedic show set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear war blasted hellscape. The monsters previously relegated to man's innermost psyche have become real, and the last defenders of civilization are those few adventurers of the Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic Good alignment that bother to protect the rest of us. A show that spingboarded off a Ver. 1.0 Monster Maual, hand illustrated by the late great Gary Gygax

I had a conversation with Jake the other day (Jake the Brother, not the Dog), and he pointed out that the show is one of the bright spots in the vast desolate wasteland that is modern Americana culture.

It's a show written BY the kids who grew up watching the Simpsons, who very wisely never went to try to write for The Simpsons, but that is a post all in itself.

The voice acting is probably the main selling point of the show, carried by the charisma of a 14 year-old boy and John DiMaggio. Finn and Jake are one of the prime examples of a healthy best-friendship; in the vein of couples like Han & Chewie, J.D. & Turk, Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Before I descend into a world of colossally misspent anger and regret I might as well start off with something that makes me happy, that makes me laugh. We live in a time of darkness and despair, but if we cannot bring ourselves to find at least one thing funny then They have won. No matter what is left, you MUST find something that makes you happy. You take what is offered, and sometimes that is enough.

Episode XXVI: The Return of the (fuc)King

Here it is. What all the sorority girls have been clamoring for.

What you will find contained in this little capsule are the views of myself and what I've plagiarized from others. Writings that will dazzle the mind and frighten the soul. And so, over the next few decades, we will be taking a journey across space and time. We shall explore myriad potential realities, some that may inspire us to reach humanity's greatest heights and others that will drive us into the deepest chasms of sadness and cruelty.

Possibly we will learn to understand the responsibility we have to deal more kindly with one another and preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known, or maybe I'll just be drunk and analyze Deep Space 9 episodes through a Marxist perspective.