The Last Airbender

2010 soul-sapping experience

Rating: 5/20 (Abbey: 13/20)

Plot: A little kid with a blue glowing arrow tattoo on his bald head is the chosen one or something and as the titular last airbender, has to journey to far-away lands to learn how to bend water and fire and dirt. Fire-bending people are trying to get in his way.

Abbey's a fan of the television cartoon series that this is based on. I kept having to ask her questions about what the hell was going on in this piece of supernatural crap, but honestly, I didn't really care all that much and was just trying to stay awake. This was probably the most bored that I'll be with a movie all year. The characters were flat, and they might as well have been played by statues. That's about how much personality they all had. And I just didn't get this bending thing. The characters made these little kung-fu moves, and through the magic of special effects, crap moved around. I got that, but the fight scenes didn't make any sense to me. I kept trying to apply logic, paper-rock-scissors type rules, to the whole thing, but what element beats what? It seems like water would beat fire. What beats air? At least closing my eyes and trying to figure that all out kept me from having to see this movie. It looked synthetic, synthetic and ugly. And like Drive Angry, the criminals responsible for this have tried their best to take advantage of that fad with swooshing water and flying fire. No type of glasses will help this look any better though. The biggest issues here are with the storytelling though. This fantasy-adventure tale is told by a person who has no idea how to pace a movie or write dialogue. And who might that person be? M. Night Shmaltzydong, of course! And he tells this story so humorlessly. I've seen bits and pieces of the cartoon, and there's some humor in that. This thing is sickeningly stiff, as if somebody wanted this epic tale of bending crap to be super-serious and decided to suck out anything that could potentially cause the audience to have fun. And the best news? There are at least two more installments required to finish this story. I won't watch those with 3-D glasses either. In fact, I'd rather have somebody poke my eyes out than watch any more of this shit.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #5: Drive Angry

2011 3D mayhem!

Rating: 6/20

Plot: John Milton (oh, geez) is angry as he drives in search of some devil worshippers who killed his daughter and are about to sacrifice his granddaughter. Oh, and he escaped from Hell. That might be a spoiler. Sorry about that. Milton meets a waitress, kills her fiance with an air conditioner, and takes her along on the trip. Meanwhile, a mysterious man known as The Accountant pursues Milton while he pursues the devil worshippers. Cue "Yakety Sax"!

There's a muffin reference in this one.

This movie assaulted me--throwing slow-motion bullets, coins, flying cars, baseball bats, severed fingers, pieces of glass, blood, and whatever else its makers could find into my living room. Because you see, just having all hell breaking lose is fine, but it's really nothing compared to having all hell break lose in 3D! I mean, did I enjoy watching William Fichtner of Prison Break walking toward me? Sure, but when I imagine what I missed by not seeing him walk toward me in 3D, it makes me. . .well, angry. And then it makes me want to drive. Angry. By the way, should I penalize this movie for having a grammar error in the title? It should be Drive Angrily. This is the type of movie that doesn't care about that though, the type that if you tried to correct its grammar would get all in your grill and say, "What are you? A fucking English teacher or something?" It's also the type of movie that would probably pick fights with other movies. "You think you're bad ass or something, Real Steel? Watch me throw a car over the side of this bridge! Woooooooooo!" I swear to God that I'm not making this up, but Drive Angry actually threw a punch at me while I was watching. Luckily, I had just bent down to grab an ink pen that I had dropped, and the punch didn't connect. It would have hurt, too, because Drive Angry's fist was all on fire and made of iron. My whole face would have probably exploded! Just the soundtrack of this movie could probably kick your ass. "Raise a Little Hell," a classic played during an opening scene where Nicolas Cage's character shoots a guy's hand off (right into your lap thanks to 3D technology) while things explode and "Fuck the Pain Away," another aggressive song that's played minutes before a scene where a guy punches a naked woman. I need to buy the soundtrack because it would be perfect for times when I need to drive angrily. Or as William Fichtner describes Nicolas Cage: "Angry with attitude." Fichtner's easily the best thing about this movie, by the way. His character doesn't make a lot of sense, but he's kind of cool, and Fichtner understands that he's playing a comic character. The guy who plays the leader of the Satan worshippers (Billy Burke, apparently taking a break from those teenage vampire movies) is really awful. He's got an unidentifiable accent and looks like he's auditioning for a David Copperfield biopic or something. And our hero, Nicolas Cage? Well, this isn't his best performance, and I'm surprised his skull wasn't on fire in this movie. For the most part, he looks exactly like he does on the poster up there--angry. I did like his aggressive-kiss-coffee-drink move though, and there's a great scene in a hotel room where he simultaneously smokes a cigar, drinks whiskey from the bottle, has sexual intercourse, and kills a bunch of Satan worshippers who are attacking him with garden utensils. In case I wasn't clear--that's all happening at the same time. I imagine it's pretty close to Nicolas Cage's honeymoon actually.

My favorite Cage line: "It's still in there. The bullet. I can feel it."

Back to the 3D thing. The ways the makers of Drive Angry try to take advantage of the technology is laughable. The CGI in this movie is some of the worst I have ever seen, and I wonder if it wouldn't look as bad in a theater with the 3D glasses. It wouldn't have come close to saving this movie though. But the next time I have an opportunity to see a Nicolas Cage movie in 3D, I'm watching it with aviator goggles.

Avatar

2009 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Dylan: 12/20)

Plot: Gargamel and his crew of marines have found their way on Pandora, a planet that needed its name changed during the Avatar script's rewrite. They want to use their clunky robots and and hibernation tubes to harvest some fairy juice from the rhizoids of Pandora's foliage. Unfortunately, the blue bipeds, scantily-clad hippies, who inhabit the planet use that same fairy juice to get high, an activity that takes up the majority of their time. The Navajo of Pandora ain't giving up their fairy juice easily! Gargamel develops a plan involving the most expensive Halloween costumes in the history of the holiday, and a few marines, including one nondescript guy who is only on the mission because his twin brother died, dress up as Navajo in order to befriend the real Navajo and abscond with the fairy juice. "Shove it all down the front of your pants if you have to," Gargamel ordered. "Me and Chuck'll still smoke it!" When it seems that the Navajo has no interest in cooperation, the marines decide they're going to have to take over forcefully and even, if push comes to shove, knock down their giant tree and, just to show them who's boss, piss all over their fiberoptic weeping willow. But the Navajo, as feisty as Ewoks, have a few tricks up their blue sleeves, including holding a three-day music festival with Country Joe and the Fish, Sha Na Na, and Joan Baez. Brown acid is taken, hair is plugged into freaky-looking horse tails, and the Navajo reach a higher level of consciousness, unfortunately making us all a little bit dumber in the process. How's about an explosion? How's about one in 3D?

I enjoyed watching this for a couple reasons: 1) Dylan and I, along with a couple of our robot friends, found it fairly easy to make fun of with the predictable plot, the hamfisted political message, and especially the inane dialogue, and making fun of things is how my family feels better about themselves. 2) It was pretty. It's the type of movie that distracts me with thoughts about how much it costs to make something this big and sparkly and how many pairs of leather pants that would have bought me when I was a fourth grader. Because when I was a fourth grader, I wanted to be a movie like Avatar. I wanted be clad in leather pants and a Michael Jackson jacket and just be able to walk into my classroom, saunter up to the gal I happened to like that week, and point with both hands in an exaggerated way at my crotch. Maybe thrust a bit, possibly spin depending on my mood. The gal, I'd imagine, would have been understandably impressed, with or without the 3D glasses. And then I could have pointed in that cool way I always wanted to point (like a finger gun, thumb waggling) but couldn't because I didn't have the leather pants to do it. Would I have any substance? Possibly not, but that's not what fourth graders cared about anyway. Avatar is a movie that brazenly waggles its thumb in the air, thrusting its leathery hips willy-nilly, splashing hos with bucketfuls of colors that probably don't even really exist. It all looks pretty good, expensively good. My tiny screen (Dylan and I watched this on an Ipod touch that we propped up against a Sparky Anderson statue that we got at Great American Ballpark recently, by the way) was soaked in all these gorgeous colors, and I was impressed with the creativity that went into designing these lush surrealistic landscapes. Pandora's a lovely place to visit. I wasn't as impressed with the interaction between its characters/wildlife and the setting. Things in Pandora looked too shiny and plastic. But it's a quibble because I enjoyed nearly everything on the screen that wasn't terrible blue-screen acting or laughable dialogue. I thought the robot things that mimicked the movements of their drivers were really goofy. I'd like to have one though, just because I think it would be funny for people to see me and a robot in which I'm riding simultaneously point at their crotches with two hands. Unfortunately for the King of the World, cardboard cutout characters added to a story that feels derivative adds up to a pretty boring eight hours of movie if you take away all those pretty visuals. Which I'm sure is close to what all my love interests in fourth grade would have thought about me, too. "Yeah, he's got a pair of leather pants and can do a pretty mean centipede on the cardboard during recess, but I really can't stand the guy. And why's he point at his crotch so much?" To me, there's very little difference between this movie and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, a movie I watched while wearing a welder's mask.

Jackass 3

2010 high art

Rating: 13/20

Plot: More comic mischief from the Jackasses. This time, they utilize 3-D technology so that it looks like the fecal matter is coming right into your living room! Huzzah!

Well, I felt like showering after watching this one, so that's something. I didn't watch this in 3-D, of course, but I can see where that would have been kind of fun. The colorful and gimmicky opening scene has the boys being pelted with paintball pellets, kicked in the face, and abused with little booby traps that might have been borrowed from Wily E. Coyote's attic. And they're wearing funny costumes. And some times it all happens in this slow motion. Now I don't possess a high-def television, but the images in this were impressively crisp anyway, fantastic news if you want to see every detail of a fat guy wearing some transparent plastic suit designed to make him ooze sweat. Or vomit. Or poop. Or urine. Or hair glued to somebody's palms right after it's been yanked from some other guy's chest. You get the idea. This is definitely not the movie I'd pick to watch with my grandmother if, following some miracle, she was resurrected and really wanted to watch a movie with me. Unless she picked it, of course. I'm not going to deny the dead the right to select a movie for movie night. There's something nice about seeing the jackasses willing to do all this gross or dangerous or gross and dangerous stuff despite their advancing ages. You get the sense that some are doing these things reluctantly though. And the stunts in Jackass 3(D) aren't as consistently hilarious as the ones in part two, the Empire Strikes Back of Jackass movies. I think they peaked (Wait a second. There's no way peaked is the right word here.) with number two. But I had more than a few chuckles, and as with the other stuff, I'm glad I watched it. I laughed most heartily at a scene involving a score or more of little people, one of their set-up/written gags. I'm a grade school kid in a thirty-seven year old's body though, so I, of course, enjoyed the slapstick as well. After all, if you can't appreciate video footage of a guy getting hit in the balls, you're just not a real American. There are people who could argue that the world would be a better place without these movies. I'm not sure I could successfully argue with those people actually, but I'm happy the movies do exist. Long live the Jackasses!