Alexander, staring Colin Farrell, and Troy, staring Brad Pit, both came out the same summer. That summer, the critics called one of them a pretty good war movie that took license with history and the other one a historically accurate, long, boring, sex-charged waste of time. The other night, renting from the DVD kiosk at the grocery store, I struggled to remember which was which. In the end, “He chose… poorly.”*

I need to preface this with some history. In ancient Greece, sex was … uninhibited. There were whole temples in which one could “pay tribute” to a particular god by having sex with a temple prostitute. Was Alexander the Great gay? No, but only because “gay” wasn’t really invented yet. He was just Greek. (Maybe that would make a better euphemism for our modern culture’s sexual switch hitters.)

If you’ve read my blog at all, you’ve probably figured out, I’m not a big fan of mixing your pipe fittings**. Still I think it’s worth mentioning that Oliver Stone surprised me with how he handled Alexander batting from both sides of the plate. Alexander’s “lover” spends the whole movie making fawning glances and syrupy comments about his feelings and, as Roger Ebert put it, “…the rest of the time, they hug a lot.” Meanwhile, on Alexander’s wedding night (with the only female love interest in the movie), Stone offers a scene befitting those channels you have to pay to watch. Again, I’ll go with Ebert’s description: “[It] ends with them engaged in the kind of unbridled passion where you hope nobody gets hurt.”

In between scenes of weird sexual tension, there was, apparently, a war moving going on. There were a couple of big battle scenes that are frankly confusing. I knew there was supposed to be some masterful battlefield tactics going on, but I never figured out what. Heavy use of blowing dirt and shaking cameras eliminated the need to actually do anything clever on the screen. Instead we see a lot of Farrell yelling and a fair amount of millisecond blood squirt clips.

The rest of the movie (and believe me, there’s a *lot* of the rest of the movie) was filled with gruelingly long speeches and philosophical arguments. Imagine a two hour long debate over whether the toilet paper should roll frontwards or backwards, but with more yelling.

Just about every element of the movie bothered me. It seemed that Oliver Stone tried to use the make up department to help the viewer know who was who. For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that Persian men wear thick eye liner *all the time* including during battle. Likewise, if you are a Greek soldier, you must have at least two gruesome scars on your face.

Accents in American films always bug me, but this one was just silly. The Greeks had either the standard Hollywood bad British accent or a thick Scottish/Irish accent. (Seriously, one of the guys from Braveheart is in this movie and sounds the same.) Then, Angelina Jolie’s character sounds kind of Turkish or maybe Middle Eastern. Seriously, I don’t think anyone in history ever had an accent like that.

Sorry to get all long winded on a review of a movie I didn’t like. There was just so much to not like about it. In the end, I want my two dollars back.

* Movie reference! Can you be the first to comment with it’s source and the character who spoke it?

** NOT a movie reference, but rather a sexual metaphor using pluming terms. Please DON’t be the first to comment on what you think it means.

I hold very strongly to the opinion that “Entertainment News” is the biggest oxymoron in America. I detest tabloid society and deplore the people whose money keeps it afloat. If it were not for the vacuous multitudes who fawn over Hollywood stars and drool of every morsel of paparazzi gossip, the entire industry would fade into the septic tank of history where it belongs.

That being said, I’d like to post my first comment on Britney Spears. This weekend, in the span of 48 hours, she checked in to and out of rehab, shaved her head and got two tattoos. (Not that there’s anything wrong with tattoos.) This sounds very much like something that you’d hear about a rebellious sixteen-year-old who’d had another fight with her mom. This sounds very much like something I’d have to deal with in my youth group. But this is not a pubescent tantrum we’re talking about. This is an adult mother of two.

The first time I ever heard the name Britney Spears, it was swirling in the controversy of a jail-bate teenager doing a sexually charged music video when she professed to be a virgin and was touted as a role model for good girls everywhere. It would not have been hard, if I had even the slightest shred of interest at the time, to predict the path this young girl would take.

From Mouseketeer to sex symbol to making out with Madonna to pregnant white-trash to Paris Hilton crotch shot to drug hazed head shaving. It’s all par for the course. It’s terrible to say, but I would be surprised if she survives past 30 and if she does, she will end up one of the many curiosities in the freak show of American pop culture has-beens. There’s a long and illustrious history for people in this gutter of society with names like Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Anna Nicole Smith. From that list of names you can see that there are two possible outcomes. Early death at the hands of fast living or years of sequestered insanity. Britney’s chances of ending up in one of those two situations is near 100%. 2 to 1 says it’s the former rather than the latter.

Call me a cynic, but I pray for the day when America stops idolizing entertainers. It is the root of all that stinks about our society. Something is terribly wrong in a culture where hundreds of people spend weeks outside a courthouse to show their undying support for a millionaire recluse who spends his days riding roller coasters with a monkey and someone else’s kids and has paid the mortgages of countless plastic surgeons in his futile attempts to become something other than what he is. It’s this same people who wring their hands and wag their heads over a distraught woman acting out in rebellion befitting someone half her age.

I tell you we need to treat these people the same way you treat a wayward four-year-old screaming for attention. If you ignore them, eventually, they’ll stop being so stupid. Thus ends my last ever post on Britney Spears.

YouTube strikes again. Other than the Rubber Ducky song, my favorite classic Sesame Street sketch was this one in which Ernie must explain why Bert should wear a pot on his head.

Clicky clicky!

As I said in my previous movie review, comic-book-based movies expose the chink in my geek facade. Constantine, like Hellboy, made me wish I had more comic-book exposure in my youth. Although, to be fair, you’d probably get a black eye if you stood in a comic book shop and referred to this as a “comic book”. There’s nothing comic about “Hellblazer”, the graphic novel on which Constantine is based. It’s a graphic novel, see, and that’s what you call comic books that are written for people who want to feel grown up even though they are still reading comic books. Graphic novels are graphic and are not for kids. (See also: Sin City.)

As with most movies in this genre, Constantine has raised the ire of Hellblazer fans. The reviews on imdb are scathing. But if you’ve never heard of Hellblazer, then you have no idea what kind of a man John Constantine is supposed to be and thus no reason to hate Keanu Reeves for not being it. (It’s pretty easy to hate Keanu Reeves for not being a real actor, but that’s neither here nor there. He hasn’t played a believable character since Bill and Ted.)

Constantine is dark. Very dark. Bleak. It’s as far from a feel-good movie as you can get. Yet, it’s still a great movie. There’s enough mystery to keep you thinking. The special effects are off the chart. And the theme of the movie is truly thought provoking.

That’s not to say it’s without faults. The writing and plot could have been better and… well… then there’s Keanu. The rest of the cast does a good job, making his performance that much more flat.

The thing that sold me the most on this movie was the theme. Being a Christian, it’s good to be reminded that demons and angels are real and they are here, all around us, fighting a war… THE war …and that just because we can’t see them, doesn’t make us any less involved. We are the battle ground upon which the war if fought. If you’re looking for sound doctrine and Biblical correctness, you’ll have to look somewhere other than Hollywood, but if you already know the doctrine (and can excuse a movie for not getting it quite right), I strongly recommend this movie to get you back into the warrior’s frame of mind.

Constantine was good enough that I was able to see past what was wrong with it and enjoy the story. And the story was good enough to remind me that my faith is not just a badge or a label. It’s what I am. And besides all that, it made me actually want to read the graphic novel, which in itself is worth four grins.

I have come to realize that, as much as I love being a geek, I’m not a very good one. I’m consistently two years behind the latest geek hardware. I’ve never actually read any graphic novels or fantasy fiction (outside of Tolkien). I never actually played Dungeons & Dragons. Thus I am at a disadvantage when I join ranks with geeks of more pure lineage. This becomes especially apparent around comic-book-based movies.

I’ve heard lots of chatter about how, even though all three X-Men movies were extremely entertaining, they offended many comic book purists. I loved Hellboy, but I wasn’t even sure it was based on a comic until I watched the DVD extras.

With that said, I would guess that fans of the F4 comic books would hate this movie. It contains much more Hollywood cliche that I expected. While I admit, I’ve never even seen a real F4 comic book, I can’t imagine that any main-stream comic would be as campy. The script spends a lot of time (and by “a lot”, I mean 3/4 of the movie) trying to flesh out the characters. A better writer could have fully developed the characters in five minutes. Instead, we get fifty.

Other parts of the script left me honestly puzzled. In any comic book flick, one must be willing to step a bit outside of reality, but Fantastic 4 goes a step beyond and asks you to step outside of common sense. Example: To get past a police blockade, Sue (the invisible girl) has to take off her clothes and sneak by. This sets up a predictable gag, but after the gag is had, we find the whole team inside the police blockade. Umm… Exactly how did her being invisible (and naked) get the other guys in? There too many similar plot holes to list here, but you get the idea.

The effects were top-notch. Unfortunately, 90% of the effects shots were in the trailer, so rather than thinking, “Ooh! That was cool,” I thought, “Oh, I remember that from the commercials.”

In the end, F4 felt more like a poorly done sci-fi movie, than a well done comic book movie. Maybe it’s because the bar has been set so high in this genre, but that doesn’t change the fact that this movie came up a little short. I didn’t hate it, but if I’d paid $8 to see it, I might have. I give it two grins.

Since I haven’t been blogging regularly since about August, I’ve seen a lot of movies that have not been properly reviewed. I probably won’t have the time to do so, or, by the time I do have a chance, I will not remember enough about them to give honest reviews. So here’s a movie review brief.
The Ladykillers – Tom Hanks leads a small band of criminals in a bank heist by conning an old woman who lives near the bank. Weird, quirky, darker than you’d think. Hanks does a pretty good job of playing a slimy bad guy. 2 grins

Being John Malkovich – John Cusack plays a frustrated puppeteer who gets a dull clerical job in an office with four-foot high ceilings. He finds a mysterious opening behind a file cabinet that leads into actor John Malkovich’s brain. It’s even weirder than it sounds. Still, I like weird, so I enjoyed this one. 2 grins

Seven Years in Tibet – Brad Pit plays a self-absorbed Austrian mountaineer, caught in the Himilayas at the outbreak of World War II. He escapes a British prison camp and stumbles into a forbidden Tibetan city, the home of the Dalai Lama. The story is well written and well acted. If you can stomach a heavy dose of Hollywood pacifism, it’s a good movie. P.S. Brad Pit can’t do accents. 3 grins

The Sixth Sense – M. Night Shyamalan’s creep show about a boy who sees dead people. I’d seen the last half of this show on cable, so knowing the surprise ending made the first half more interesting. Otherwise, it’d be a really slow, boring movie. 2 grins

Bewitched – Very clever story is not a remake of the TV series. Instead it’s a movie about the making of a remake of the TV series. Nicole Kidman is brilliant as Isabel, cast to play Samantha and Will Ferrell is equally brilliant as the Hollywood narcissist Jack, cast to play Darrin. Great, fun movie. 4 grins

Brothers Grimm – A good, scary, well acted fairy tale. Two brothers who make a living as Elizabethan era ghost busters slash con men find themselves caught up in a real live ghost story with a real live wicked witch. 3 grins

Hotel Rwanda – I watched this one on my computer while working in the wee hours, pausing it to write code, and watching it during builds. Don Cheadle plays a prim and proper manager of a five star hotel in Rwanda during the Tutsi/Hutu “ethnic clensing”. Cheadle plays the character brilliantly as he struggles to cling to normalcy but ends up housing refugees in his high-dollar hotel and bribing the authorities to keep the refugees alive. The fact that this is a true story makes it even more fascinating to watch. 3 grins

My long time readers know that I was a huge Doctor Demento fan. In fact, while I was a member of a Christian drama troop in college, I adapted several songs and sketches from the Dr. D show for the stage. Here is one of our most popular sketches, reanimated using flash. (I played the part of the weird green guy.)

Clicky clicky!

I so miss the days when I had so much free time that I got bored. As I sit in my office, waiting for the project to compile (at 10PM), I fill the gap by watching short videos on the internet.

This guy reminds me of the kind of stuff I used to do when I was about 14, with my parent’s video camera. Of course, back then you couldn’t hook up your camera to your iMac and splice it down to the individual frame. Instead, I had a creative collection of wires and adapters, two VCRs and a tape deck. My stuff sucked. This guy’s stuff rocks.

Keep in mind he does no special effects. He’s just rearranging the frames of video. Really very cool. (Makes me want a video camera, an iMac … oh yeah … and about a week with nothing better to do.)

Lasse Gjertsen:
Hyperactive
Amateur

Oh… Compile’s done. *sigh*

More Ernie goodness. I remember actually trying this on Lake Meredith. No matter how loud, it never worked. All it did was irritate my brother.

Clicky clicky.

One of my fondest memories growing up was watching Sesame Street. And of all the weird and wild critters that lived on that avenue, my favorite was Ernie. I still have my Ernie cookie jar (Seriously!) and can sing “Rubber Ducky” with the best of ’em.

Good ol’ YouTube brings us another Ernie Classic: Banana in My Ear.