Sonic the Hedgehog

Making a biopic about Ron Jeremy is a risky prospect. Depict his exploits vividly, and your ticket-buying audience dwindles to people who still pay for that sort of entertainment. Sanitize the life of one of the few male adult film stars that people have heard of and the theater staff has an even easier clean-up job. But hey, the Artist won lots of awards without a word of dialogue. So who's to say you can't save money on cameras and sets by having a Ron Jeremy biopic that is entirely audio. I've always been skeptical of hiring celebrities for voiceover work because, who cares what they look like when we don't see them. But reader, skeptical as I was, Joan Plowright can moan her ass off! There's always an assumption that Jews of note grew up in New York. Maybe there's not. But Ron Jeremy grew up in Maryland. And according to Sonic the Hedgehog, he was making $5,000 per week by the time he was 12, not by doing anything with his penis, but by rubbing things against his hairy back until they were so bristling with static electricity that he could short out the whole town just by throwing his teddy bear Yoinks at the nearest transformer. So they paid him not to do that. But one day, some anti-semitic classmates played a trick on him by telling him there was whipped cream inside of the nose on a pair of Groucho glasses. But it was glue. Any viewer/listener would then assume that's the provenance of Mr. Jeremy's trademark mustache. But no. The glue stuffed his nose so thoroughly that he had to dunk his head into scalding water just to melt the glue off. The doctor told him he may never grow facial hair. So he began masturbating. 10, 12, 15 times a day. He already had a hair back, but how he was like his own biosphere. I don't know what a biosphere is. But anyway, Christopher Meloni brings all the gravitas and pathos to this role that he brought for years to his beloved detective who never solved enough crimes to chase his demons away. He plays Ron Jeremy's good friend Delmont, and everytime he walks in on Ron Jeremy, protrayed astonishingly by Arsenio Hall, while he's trying to spank a mustache out of his face through his johnson, he is the model of discretion. There are many ladies in Ron Jeremy's life, some of whom tolerate his professional exploits, but at what cost? At what cost? Hillary Swank plays his 15th wife Mozie and she is a peach. And she doesn't mind the cavalcade of other partners in her man's life, but eventually she warns him to stop making puns with her name but he just can't help himself and so she has no choice but to follow through on her threat. Or where would she be? Where would she be? And that's when the story takes its obligatory biopic self-destructive turn. Ron Jeremy starts to direct his own movies. He decides to place his first one in a barber shop, but when he yells cut, a tragedy ensues that haunts him forever. But a little crippled child helps him find redemption and humility because the little crippled child has a shvantz that puts the Hedgehog's to shame. It's a feelprettygood story. One and a half stars.

Lee Daniel's The Butler

Does Lee Daniels himself have a butler? Because that right there is what I'd like to watch. I bet he's hot too! But this movie is about how highly accomplished white men who've never even seen the Green Mile take pity on a hulking, and sadly dignified, black man. Reconciling humility with dignity isn't easy, and the butler at the White House elevates it to an art and by doing so, saves every black person in America. Except for from racism. And themselves. This movie would have been so much better if the butler's militant son had married Caroline Kennedy, because then all racial problems in America would have vanished. Obviously. But none of this takes away from the most touching moment in the movie, which is of course when the butler goes on Oprah and he cries and she cries and the audience cries (because they get bribed out the wazoo by extravagant giveaways). I can't remember seeing that segment on the tv, but I'm sure there was talk about it. The butler serves several American presidents. Sometimes they're not reelected and they still call him in the middle of the night and he rises without complaint, grooms himself quickly and efficiently, gives himself a steely look in the bathroom mirror while holding the sink, realizes he doesn't have to hold the sink because he is a man of intense power derived from abiding faith in God and humanity and then he hops into the helicopter chopping and flashing in his front yard and rides off to Texas to help LBJ get his fucking cat out of a goddamn mesquite tree. And whereas his tearjerking interview with Oprah (where somehow they wind up in bed together ???!!!!!) is the most touching part of the movie, the best part are the celebrities who play Presidents- particularly Billy Crystal as Nixon. I mean, who knew?! Personally I thought David Cross was a little shot to play Reagan, but hey, that's just a credit to this movie's make-up artists with a lowercase a! This movie covers several years and administrations and is thereby epic in sleep, but I came away with a sense of hope that people can put up with all kinds of shit and sometimes they get scantly rewarded for it, and from a voyeuristic perspective, I'm just relieved I don't have to do that. So good job Lee Daniels! 3 Stars.

2012

In the English alphabet, the letter H precedes I. A is before B. And L prior to M. So, riffing off of the world's largest technology company at the time, Arthur C. Clarke named the villain in 2001: A Space Odyssey, H.A.L. As Captain David Bowman re-enacts the John Henry legend, pitting humanity's ability to innovate against the most recent pinnacle in human innovation, Clarke affirms faith in humanity, and gives his fable a happy ending in the form of Captain Bowman's victory over the diabolical HAL.
Bowman's victory has cosmic ramifications, which are expanded in Clarke's sequel 2010, in which Jupiter becomes a second sun. In 2012, JCN [pronounced Zhaitzk-elle-wing], a Tibetan monk with a secret fascination with astronomy, discovers a new ocean, right there in the Himalayas. This ocean, referred to in the film as the Guatama Depths, is first thought to be a miracle that will free Zetzelwink's people from their Chinese oppressors. But as the Tibetans rush to the hidden sea, something big splashes in the water. At first we don't know what- was it an avalanche? A Chinese warhead? A Yehti bellyflopping off of Everest [spoiler alert: sort of]?- but whatever the splash is, it buries the world in water.
Playing the modern day Noah is John Cusak. He's so likeable. But he's just not getting the roles in good films anymore. And 2012 is no exception. He has problems with his daughter. He has problems with his job. His Cialis keeps activating at inappropriate moments ("We're all gonna die!"=Shwing!?).
As audience members, we feel safe enough to prefer the spectacle of disaster over the safety of the poorly drawn characters, but you may find yourself noticing that these characters are provided with a surprising amount of background info, so why are they still poorly drawn? Well, for one thing, just because you know exactly what kind of house somebody has, and you are given glimpses into some wrenching emotional moments during yet another failed attempt to have a family meeting, you don't know who it was who hijacked said meeting by bursting into tears, only that it involved a letter from Switzerland. Such enigmatic moments don't cause you to worry about this family that can't meet successfully dying out beneath the Sea of Siddhartha.
Eventually, John Cusak meets up with Kvetchenweiner, who is airlifted from his dry point atop the Himalayas and brought to where a wooden basketball court has been skewered by the Chrysler building to act as a platform for New Yorkers who can't swim. I wasn't sure whether we were to infer that John Cusak couldn't swim either, or whether he just received the great Tibetan astronomer under false pretenses (and I mean, who can't wave his arms around and go "Help! I can't swim! Help! Help!"?); but at this point, all that matters is that disparate cultures are united by the need to live on land instead of under Lake Buddha.
I don't want to ruin the ending, but nor do I want to suggest that none of the characters discover they have gills either. The point is that heartfelt handshakes and the immediate agreement to drop any cultural barriers and work together to save all of humanity not perched on the basketball court impaled by the Chrysler Building are not nearly as cool as a big tidal wave. So I'm glad the Yethi busted that can-opener.
Nonetheless, this movie lacked one thing that every movie needs: hot babes with urges buried under an iron will to maintain ladylike behavior under the most dire of circumstances. Barring this, movies need sluts with self-esteem. But this movie had neither. Minus one star.

Two stars.

Couples Retreat

I have ambiguous feelings about this movie. It bears the message that even women who look fantastic in bikinis well into their 30s and 40s can have problems with their marriages, and that those problems don't stem from the sexual insecurities that afflict their lustful but aging and paunching husbands. So, while the subject of marital problems is a poignant one, exploring it in a tropical setting and foisting those problems onto girthing, balding men as well as the fantasies to whom they're married seems in poor taste. Because who is the audience for this movie? Men who can go dream about porking Kristn Davis, Malin Akermann and Kristen Bell because their schlubby hubbies are too old and stressed to deliver? Married couples who will recognize some of the domestic issues that plague the couples retreating from each other? People who laugh at everything Vince Vaughan gurbles? In the pitch meeting, I'm sure the answer was ALL OF THE ABOVE, BABY! But then what happens when married couples can't identify with the retreating couples' problems because they're too cartoonish? Or when the problems are so recognizable that they're more uncomfortable than funny? Or when you feel guilty for mistaking the big roly poly black dude included in the gang for that guy who goes around revoking various establishments' Miller High Life vending privileges?
There are 25 years between Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell's starmaking small screen turns as Derek on Silver Spoons and Veronica Mars. So maybe in the same pitch meeting that sold a mixed audience of the horny and the emo to the money guys, they decided to grab for the clever too by making a meta-statement by making this couple make their chief argument about who makes who watch what on the television? I mean, if you're gonna go there, why not make Jason Bateman a scientist who makes his own televisions? And then make the sky have a storm that makes them afraid that they'll be made to stay on the island until somebody makes a signal that gets a rescue or maybe even a nautical craft of some sort? Because that's the kinda situation that really puts a couple under stress!
Other smallscreen star Kristin Davis, finally away from those shoppy hags she ran with in New York, tries to imbue her character with a dignity that screws up the whole tone. Who directed this thing? I'll look it up later, but my guess is somebody who has done considerable work with Gore Verbinski. Blogging of directing, the urban myth that has sprung up about key plot points to Iron Man II being drizzled in the sand by Jon Favreau's pee is patently false. I honestly don't know who starts these rumors, but it really just looks like sandy splatter.
Evaluating each individual performance or even the level of chemistry achieved by each couple is a waste of your time, dear reader. They took hot girls married to stand-ins for Harvey Weinstein and put them somewhere hot and sunny and did terrible things to them. If you're jealous, you'll think it's funny. If you aren't, you won't. And if you don't think it's funny, and you don't plan on wearing a heavy raincoat to the theater, then you really have no reason to see this movie.
One and a half stars.

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

In this sequel to the classic Ratatouille, the red-headed human character has learned all he can from Remy the Rat and now it's time to strike out on his own. I'm surprised by the sophistication of the early plot twist that the filmmakers employed whereby the red-headed would be culinary-genius decides to study molecular gastronomy, the province of blackbelt chefs like Wylie Dufresne or Richard Blaze, but the movie wouldn't work without the whole experiment-gone-haywire trope.

So sure enough, after one too many bad plates of pasta and a running joke about that On Top of Spaghetti song that stales quickly for adults but sends children a'gigglin' every time somebody sneezes, the main dude goes into a lab to perfect his recipe. This being a children's film, the guy has neither genitals nor libido, but what he does have is friendship. Intimate male friendship. In another convention, the friend is slovenly and I suspect that the filmmakers preferred the best friend character to the main dude, but they had to keep the main dude heroic, so they leeched him of quirks and attributed all of the weirdness with which children's authors really identify to the more interesting character- best friend, who could technically be called the protagonist since it's his excitement about the spaghetti that knocks the gamma-leone ray over and it bounces off a mirror that was laying around on their coffee table and hits the sky just as thunderheads are gathering. Now I feel rather strongly that the filmmakers had a grand opportunity to make a Richard Pryor joke in this lab mishap scene, but I don't believe they took it.

In order for this movie to work, you have to be excited about the fact that food begins falling out of the sky. But neither I, nor anyone I know, ever needed such divine intercession to eat. More than a billion people do, of course, but does this film address them? Well, yes. In one of the poorer examples of taste in recent memory, we meet a character named Kookyboo. Kookyboo is an apprentice goatherder, but due to drought and famine, his family has no goats so he practices by herding tumbleweeds along the Serenghetti. I appreciate the film's attempts at dark humor, but the gag where a dog goes after the bone in Kookyboo's nose is not funny and all of the children who laughed at it need punishments, if not serious reeducation.

Anyway, Kookyboo's Uncle Wenstrom tries to take credit for the miracle that has befallen their village. He puts on this surprisingly terrifying witch doctor mask and dances around as if his rattle shaking and general Thoth-like behavior was what brought down the deluge of food, when of course it was the Ratatouille guy's invention ricocheting off a coffee table mirror after his slovenly friend gets too excited about how good the spaghetti is. Duh! Kookyboo doesn't exactly know this, but he's still suspicious of Uncle Wenstrom, and anyway, the goats have come back, but they're so fat from all of the sweet Italian sausage falling from the sky (and if you listen closely, you can hear one tribeswoman chant Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi! Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi!) that the goatherder's job is rendered obsolete. With thousands of years of tradition down the African bush version of the toilet, AKA the African bush, Kookyboo and Flakety Flak look for something else to do. As Kookyboo and Flakety Flak the world's leading herder of goats begin their search for a new purpose in life, the village gets hip to Uncle Wenstrom's jive and prepare a giant catapult for him.

Strangely, the film leaves this plot thread dangling until the very end and goes back to our main red-headed guy who is now friends with the President, which is pretty much exactly as it should be. And kudos to the filmmakers for creating a President who is A) Absolutely brilliant! and B) Incredibly fat! So Redhead and the Chunky POTUS realize that this accident is a boon to humanity and now they can worry about stuff other than starvation (and in this movie, President Candy really was concerned about this)- like making sure that at least 20 states elect gay governors, inventing an invention that turns Hot Wheels into real cars, and finding jobs for out of work defense contractors now that food-related wars are a thing of the past.

And here is where it all ties together! You see, Kookyboo gets falsely accused of one of those 419 scams because he actually is a Nigerian Prince. And because he wasn't trying to hide his real identity in the emails he was sending out on something that the filmmakers kinda blurred, but looked an awful lot like Nerve.com, his picture gets circulated and some real scam artists hack into Kookyboo's Hotmail account (looky.kooky.boo.ya@hotmail.com) and blame hundreds of their 419's on him until he becomes an internationally wanted criminal. But Redhead's sloppy roommate is watching the news report on his party-yacht and realizes that he had been Kookyboo's penpal when he was young, but he slacked off because it was back in the days of paper mail, and the postage was too expensive and Kookyboo's English was better than his, which made him ashamed. "KOOKYBOO!" the sloppy friend shouts, knocking his butler into the ocean.

Next thing we know, Kookyboo is herding regular sized goats on the Washington Mall and then we see the butler, still trying to get out of the water, and then SPLASH, Uncle Wenstrom lands right next to him. It was so funny!

Two stars.