At the Drive-In

The last movie I saw in the theaters was Garden State. I went with the girl I mentioned two or three posts ago, who's gorgeous but boring and wooden. She's like George Will, but replace politics and baseball with shopping at Banana Republic. I offered to buy her popcorn but she declined. Inside the theater, she ended up eating almost all my popcorn, and I'd gotten just a medium-sized bag. Bitch.

Garden State was a cute little film. It ranks well against the movies we've viewed the last few weeks on Movie Night. In fact, almost all the movies we've seen on Movie Night have sucked to an impressive degree. (None of the films we've previously seen has been a John K. pick. Instead, I've decided to let everyone else have dibs and I'd willingly suffer their choices like I was Job.)

The Cooler was especially bad because not only was it a cliche-riddled film about the redemptive powers of love or some fucking thing, but it featured William H. Macy's slack, naked body all over the place. None of us had signed on for this. A ghastly scene where the hot blond actress from Coyote Ugly cups William H. Macy's balls and solemnly intones that he has "a great cock" made us all recoil in horror. Alec Baldwin puts in a surprisingly serviceable performance, but it doesn't make up for all those shots of William H. Macy's pasty white thighs. Recommended for people who like noir-ish movies set in Vegas and hairless man-ass.

My God, I hated Starsky & Hutch. Yes, the disco dance-off was funny, as was the scene with Will Ferrell. I laughed like a retard when the black kid becomes airborne when Hutch's house explodes. But still, I think Owen Wilson has made enough shitty fucking movies that they grossly outweigh the work he's done with Wes Anderson. (Say what you will about Dignan, Grace, but he was no hack.) His only redeeming moment in the movie is when he straps on his guitar and croons David Soul's "Don't Give Up on Us," which is a powerfully beautiful song. Also, what's happened to Vince Vaughn? It's been less than ten years since Swingers came out, yet in that time he's seemingly aged 30 years. In the film, he looks like what you'd get if Lee Marvin mated with Gabe Kaplan.

It had been so long since I'd seen Fight Club that I'd forgotten virtually everything about it. I'd forgotten why Internet dorks would claim to be Jack's intestinal parasite in their Livejournals, or the significance of soap on the DVD cover. I'd forgotten how the film is sort of a homoerotic paean to Brad Pitt's rippling abs. And I'd forgotten that it ends with the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" playing over the soundtrack, which elevates the movie from an exercise in dudes' projecting their homosexual urges onto the Brad Pitt character -- they want to be him, as well as move in with him -- to an ultimately worthwhile film.

I expected Underworld to be cheesy good fun, like Blade II. It was neither cheesy nor fun. It was stupefyingly dull. For a movie about a war between vampires and werewolves, you actually see very few scenes of vampires locked in combat with werewolves. Also, evidently if you combine a vampire with a werewolf, you get Nightcrawler from the X-Men. So stupid, dude. And if you're like me and you've seen The Last Days of Disco, you probably still want to kick Kate Beckinsale in the box in the event you meet her.

Apparently Hero's been out on DVD for a while in Asia, so for those of you who've been contemplating seeing the movie in theaters (now under the Quentin Tarantino imprint, just to mislead viewers even more) take my advice: don't. The trailer makes the movie seem like something it isn't -- a boring piece of crap. It's a Chinese martial-arts Rashomon, which means the film depicts different versions of the same story. I fucking hate these kinds of movies. Also, just like Crouching Tiger, it features plenty of scenes of flying Chinamen. No one needs fight scenes with flying Chinamen.

There are various reasons not to see The Believer either, in which Ryan Gosling plays a neo-Nazi skinhead who's secretly a Jew. First, Ryan Gosling's head is alarmingly misshapen, and it really scared me. Second, Billy Zane is in it, and his liberal use of eyeliner has always really scared me. Third, none of it makes sense. No one's motivation is explained, including the titular character, which makes the film frustrating and unwatchable. The Cayton Bixby skit was more plausible.

I'd forgotten Predator, which I hadn't seen in years, features two American governors -- Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse "The Mind" Ventura -- and Carl Weathers, who in a fair and just world would be elected governor somewhere too. We were into the film only about thirty minutes when the girls started to fall asleep (it was around four in the morning), so regrettably we had to call it a night. There's a noteworthy scene that occurs right after a skirmish -- one of the soldiers points out to Jesse "The Mind" Ventura that he's bleeding, to which he gruffly replies, "I ain't got time to bleed." Outstanding. Notwithstanding I saw less than half of it, Predator's easily the best movie I've seen on Movie Night.

I think we're holding another Movie Night tomorrow night. I might have to step in this time and pick the movie myself. (I'm thinking Half Baked or The Exorcist.) Wens, you're all invited. Bring food.

Posted by john at September 2, 2004 03:36 AM