Movie Review: Shutter Island

"Shutter Island" isn't a bad movie -- it looks pretty, and it's refreshing to watch every character chain smoke -- but it is offensively mediocre. If you get that much talent into one film, it should elevate the material, right? Like, if Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese decided to work on a teenage sex comedy, it should be a REALLY GOOD teenage sex comedy. As the women's field hockey team does jumping jacks in the shower, it should make you both laugh and truly appreciate the quiet and disturbingly human desperation of the sociopathic loner watching from his hiding place inside a locker.

The genre here is psychological mystery: DiCaprio investigates a disappearance of a criminally insane inmate at an island asylum, which also supposedly holds the psycho who killed his wife and kids. And he thinks the guys running the place are experimenting on the inmates. The problem is, the psychology isn't that gripping and the mystery isn't that mysterious. About 40 minutes in you get the vibe that something is seriously amiss -- the action never leaves DiCaprio, so you only get his perspective, and that perspective is increasingly weird. So either there's something massively sinister at foot, or DiCaprio is bonkers. It's not too tough to figure out the answer about halfway through, and then you keep hoping for another twist that's not coming. By the end, the "actual" explanation is so logically implausible that nothing in the plot is entirely satisfying.

If the lead was John Cusack and the production values were suckier, it would be perfectly acceptable entertainment. But that's not the case, so the real mystery is why DiCaprio and Scorsese would be pumped to work on this. It's not bad, but the screenplay is on par with something you might have thought up over lunch in a college dining hall. Expectations are not met. Go for the rental.

P.S. -- the previews for "Shutter Island" were awesome, and they suggested that there was a horror / action element. This is completely not the case.

Sausage Party!

A few weeks ago my lovely girlfriend decided to organize a girls only brunch -- a chance for her to spend time with friends of the same hormonal imbalances. It was a smashing success, not only from a socializing standpoint, but also because it made me and several other guys extremely jealous.

And so this Sunday, I hosted my first ever sausage party, in which guys gather to ... uh, eat sausages for brunch. Look, it sounded hilarious on paper. As if guys sitting around eating four kinds of sausage isn't manly enough, we also had an excellent and manly screening of ...

Movie Review: Black Dynamite

Every red-blooded American male worth his salt goes through a blaxploitation phase, because the movies combine male wish fulfillment, great music, nudity and karate/guns. "Black Dynamite" is not exactly a spoof of blaxploitation, but a careful re-creation, right down to the awful camera work and acting. Then once they establish that they can do a perfect imitation, they let it go off the rails and get progressively stupider.

It's awesome. You should probably see it. Easily the best Michael Jai White film that I've ever seen.

Tags: movies

Hot Curler

Who doesn't enjoy the Winter Olympics? Every four years, we get to see this glorious assemblage of amazing athletes who play fabulous sports that no one cares about 3.96 years at time, because we live somewhere warm, are too poor to play them or don't feel like getting up at 2:30 a.m. five days a week to have our semi-lucid and mentally abusive parents drive us to the rink for some ice time before school. As a layman, I love that tingly feeling when a hot-dog aerial skier loses a medal after a lifetime of training because her legs were two centimeters askew as she did 43 backflips and 17 twists in midair. That's what sports are all about.

But even if you don't LOVE the Winter Olympics, I think we can all agree that the breakout star is Madeleine Dupont of the Danish women's curling team. She first came to my attention in a bar last Thursday. The sound was off on that corner TV, but women's curling has a mysterious allure: women sweeping, happily. So right away, you have a sport clearly designed by men to get women intrigued about housework. But it gets better, because the Danish team decided to compete IN SKIRTS. At this point, we're pretty close to "French Maid" costume, so what guy wouldn't take notice?

Then it gets EVEN MORE BETTERER, because Madeleine Dupont is sort of hot. CNBC knows this, because every time she threw a stone (or whatever the terminology is), they gave you shots of her face that were so tight you could count her pores. I can totally imagine her with a headset microphone and a halter top, and I'm pretty sure they can design an auto-tuner that takes away a Danish accent. All of her songs could about curling, but really, they would be metaphors for heartbreak. I'm thinking we call the album "Swept Away" and get it on iTunes within the next two weeks. Either that or we bang out a new James Bond movie where she's the ward of some sinister guy with a curling fetish on the side, and then Bond seduces her. She can kill someone with a curling stone in the final scene. It can even be a tricky shot, around a corner or something.

So now we have an attractive Nordic woman who sometimes competes in a skirt, surrounded by other women who are doing housework on ice. That's almost USA-Canada hockey levels of excitement. And here comes the cherry on top: Canadians made her cry. They were so loud and abusive that she totally lost it! So she's a VULNERABLE skirt-wearing, housework-loving potential Nordic pop star/Bond girl. The Danish team isn't even that good, so what's holding her back?

Madeleine Dupont, the world is your oyster. Crack it.

Tags: sports

Heavy Stuff

It's taken me a few months to accept it, but I think my body has downshifted. And also, the transmission fell out. And three of the four tires are flat and the AM radio reception sucks.

Basically, I cannot easily lose weight anymore. During the 2008 holiday season, I put on about 5 pounds. Par for the course. I blazed through 2009 with my usual level of physical ferocity -- fighting street gangs twice a month, bench-pressing the prostitutes in my stable three times a week, jazzercising -- but for whatever reason my weight held at 195. No big deal, I figured: all my leather pants still fit, and it's probably just extra muscle weight.

During the 2009 holiday season, I put on 5 more pounds. I am still hovering around 200 two months later. I'd fight more street gangs if I could, but I can only make the streets so clean. I still feel and look pretty good, but if we project this out, by New Year's Day 2040 I'll be pushing 350 pounds. I know the complete collapse of the global economy in 2019 will prevent me from retiring in my 60s, but I'm not sure I want to roll into my cybernetic golden years on a wheelchair with caterpillar treads.

My metabolism now sucks. I tried to keep it fresh by not moving very much between the ages of 15 and 25. But apparently these things have a shelf life, and so now when I eat a one-pound bag of pretzels at 2 a.m., I'm going to pay the horrible price.

I've been reviewing my options, and they aren't pretty. I could start heavy weight training, but I'm really concerned that it will cut all the hours I have budgeted for the programming of the Game Show Network. Also, say you get really buff, and then you decide to go on a three-week bender in Sao Paulo to celebrate your 35th birthday All that muscle turns to fat! It's like carrying around a loaded gun with the safety off. No dice.

I could start eating right, but you know what costs a lot more than beer? Fruits and vegetables. It would be fiscally abhorrent of me to eat apples in these troubling times when I could get valuable nutrients from affordable, American-made beer.

So I think I'm stuck with fad diets. I need something to get me down 10 pounds by my wedding, six months from now. Any suggestions? Do they involve honey sandwiches? If they do, I'm all ears.

Tags: exercise

Trivia Recap: 2/24

Snow delayed the fun by two weeks, but that enthusiasm just builds up behind the trivia dam. By Feb. 24 the trivia town was ready for some trivia flooding. (Metaphor over.) We had a packed house -- not an empty chair in sight -- with 14 teams total. "Speaking of ..." featured 10 general knowledge questions. "Zine-o-File" challenged teams to pick the real magazine titles out of a list filled with fakes. "Broken Resolutions" was a double challenge: given a heavily pixelated image, you had to identify what famous painting was shown AND know its formal title. "Short Stuff" honored the shortest month with questions about short things. And a special 4-point bonus question had a presidential bent:

Multiply the number of presidents named James by the number who died in office. Deduct that from the number of states Reagan carried in 1984. Add on the number of presidents who served exactly one full term. Whatever the total, tell me the president who corresponds to that number (i.e., 44 equals Obama). Answer below the pictures, if you want it.

"Hurry Up! Curling Starts at 9 p.m." overcame their obvious distraction to get 30 points out of 41. Plus they were the only team to nail down the bonus, for 34 points and the win. Squizzle and ToyoDUDS both ended up with 32, and a dance-off couldn't settle things -- both teams put in so much effort that they tied for second. Here they are:

And your answer ... 6 times 8 equals 48, subtracted from 49 equals 1, plus 12 equals 13. Your answer ... Millard Fillmore! Easy, right?

Tags: trivia

Movie Review: Animated Shorts

In search of something different, I checked out the Oscar-nominated animated shorts, packed together into one screening along with a few bonus films. The five contenders below (massive spoilers for all of them):

French Roast. A rich guy can't afford to pay for his coffee after losing his wallet, so he sits at the table hoping things will magically get better. Instead, they get worse. Not quite deep or funny enough to fill the 8-minute run time, and the animation isn't exactly eye-popping. Presentable, but it tops out at "cute."

A Matter of Loaf and Death. Wallace and Gromit are funny in a British way, which means you won't really laugh all that much, but you will smile every now and then. And also Wallace has bad teeth. At 30 minutes this is twice is long as any of the other shorts, but it holds up -- the story is that Wallace (a baker in this episode) ends up dating a serial killer obsessed with bakers. Good, light-hearted fun! It's nothing too different from the other Wallace and Gromit films, but it is clever and consistently amusing. They color to the edges of the page with all the sets, and since it's stop motion it looks substantially different from the competition.

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty. This one struck me as an old-school "Saturday Night Live" sketch that just happened to be animated. A grandmother tells her pretty granddaughter a bedtime story: a beautiful princess is born, and while all the hot young fairies are invited to the christening, the old gassy fairy (i.e., grandmom) is left off the list. She crashes the party and curses everyone, so that if they ever fall asleep, they will die. Then she says good night. Morbid and good for a chuckle, but what's the point? It didn't need to be animated at all.

The Lady and the Reaper. An old widow takes a look at a photo of her dead husband, lays down for bed, and dies in her sleep. The Grim Reaper comes to collect her, and she's almost in heaven when she is suddenly yanked back by a surgeon who looks like Johnny Bravo. The Reaper gets frustrated, so he kills her again; the doctor revives her again. Then there's a Bugs Bunny-esque chase sequence, as the doctor and his nurses square off with Death, carrying the old lady like a football. Death gets frustrated and gives up, but the old lady, on learning of her revival, punches the doctor in the face, then ELECTROCUTES HERSELF. This was very confusing. There were some good sight gags here, and again it was a morbid chuckle. It might have had a point about end-of-life issues, but that doesn't quite gel with the slapstick. Bizarre. Very, very bizarre.

Logorama. This was the most frustrating of the bunch. The concept is great: it's a city (Los Angeles) in which every building and person is a corporate logo. The first few minutes (it runs for 16) you're just impressed with how clever it is, and how ubiquitous these images are in our life. And then ... nothing. There's a police chase, where Michelin man cops hunt down an evil Ronald McDonald, a lot of people get hurt in the crossfire, and then there's an earthquake. It's kind of funny, but the concept never pays dividends -- the story doesn't really seem to relate to the theme. In this case, it HAS to -- the theme is just too intriguing. Logos are symbols, so you need something symbolic to say. If there was a point here, I missed it, which is an absolute shame.

If I have to pick a winner ... beats the hell out of me. With a better story I'd give it to Logorama, hands down. But as far as combining vision with execution, the best one was Wallace and Gromit.

Honestly, my favorite short in the whole program was just an honorable mention. Pixar's "Partly Cloudy" played before "Up" in the theaters, and like most Pixar products it's close to perfect: inventive visuals, sweet sentiment and excellent humor. I guess no one wants to let Pixar big-foot these awards, though. Sigh.

Tags: movies