Reviews

If you are like most normal Americans, you probably find invasive dental procedures, such as a root canal, to be profoundly unpleasant. If, however, you are the type who, given the choice, would actually pay for the pleasure of sitting through a root canal, I believe I have a movie I can recommend to you.

I can't help but feel like the fact that this movie was made in my hometown in suburban North Carolina obligates me to say glowing things about it. Sadly, that is something I cannot do. I found it to be a perfectly horrible movie with absolutely no likable characters or sympathetic situations.

In a nutshell, "Junebug" is about a self-important and completely uninteresting art dealer who takes a trip to the south, where she proceeds to Not Have a Very Good Time. That's pretty much it.

"This is no fun" is really the underlying theme of the movie. And it is equally true both for the characters in the movie and the audience. The overall tone of the movie is bleak, alternating between long, unenviable, boring stretches, interspersed with periodic bursts of highly unlikeable people behaving in highly unlikeable ways. (Not the good, interesting kind of unlikeable, such murderous or creepy, but a thoroughly unengaging sort of unlikeable, such as contempt and downright crankiness). Fifteen minutes into "Junebug", buoyed between overwhelming boredom and moderate discomfort (you know how you feel sitting through an ungodly, two-hour long mandatory sales meeting while combating diarrhea? Or getting motion sickness in the back seat of your parents' car during a long drive to grandma's house? That kind of feeling.), I began to enumerate ways of spending my time that might be less fun than sitting through this god-awful burden of a movie. And it was during this blessed distraction that I began to notice that "Junebug" has far more in common with a root canal than with an enjoyable cinematic experience.

Your more pretentious viewers might describe this movie as "honest" (invariably adding the words "beautiful" and, of course, "indie" to their description, as though the latter unquestionably justifies use of the former). A root canal is also a startlingly honest experience, during which one can scarcely fail to comprehend the enormity of "a piece of my body has begun to rot and decay, the throbbing, abscessed nerve endings of which must now be extracted with a drill". The fact that it is honest, however, does not make it good. While dripping with its indie-film brand of faux-honesty, Junebug is just as nauseatingly unpleasant. As for whether "Junebug" is in fact, honest, I can only say that if I felt my life was accurately reflected in that miserable heap of suffering-artist, indie-film garbage, I would have committed suicide sometime in my teens, a decade and a half ago.

Also like a root canal, this movie is really only bearable if experienced under heavy anesthetics.

As for the performances of the cast, I suppose they are all just fine, though, again, there is little that is praiseworthy to be said about the ability to convincingly portray Uninteresting, Comptemptible, Dislikable, and Generally Unpleasant.

A far cry from "beautiful" or "moving," this load of utter crap is not even able to achieve "interesting". If you are bored on a Saturday afternoon, I would suggest that you spend it lying on the couch in your dank apartment, watching the flies attempt to mate for 106 minutes... or even just boring holes into your more sensitive tissues. Ultimately you will feel just as satisfied with the use of your time as you would have if you had watched this movie, though you will have made a much more sound financial decision.

To be blunt, I could have made this movie. The only thing directors Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza had that I don't is access to famous comedians. Other than that, the movie has little direction. It looks like it was filmed with a camcorder, it is very choppy, it digresses a lot, and it is filled with people I've never heard of and whose opinions mean very little to me.

This isn't to say it's not funny. There are some truly wonderful bits in it. Unfortunately they are scattered throughout a long and often tedious journey of filler material and analysis. Much of this is provided by star comedians, such as George Carlin, Paul Reiser, Robin Williams, etc. But a lot of it is from below-the-line showbiz insiders, such as Hollywood columnists, talent agents, editors, etc, who are not introduced until the closing credits.

There are some truly hysterical tellings of the joke, particularly George Carlin, Glbert Gottfried, Kevin Pollack, Drew Carey, Robin Williams, and Sarah Silverman, delivering with her trademark cute-little-girl voice. Billy the Mime's pantomime performance of the joke is high on the list of funniest things I've ever seen. And there is even some interesting analysis about the nature of comedy. Paul Reiser and Larry Miller offer some valuable ideas.

Largely, though, the movie is filled with comedy clichés, such as "Comedy is all about timing." "This joke is all in the delivery." "Comedy is about how far you can push the envelope." And so-forth. The majority of the movie is people repetitively restating these well-known facts, with annoying interruptions by some of today's more annoying comedians, such as Pat Cooper and David Brenner, who think that comedy is nothing more than having a Brooklyn accent, a loud voice, an angry tone, and using the c-word as much as possible. The most abominable of these is the ventriloquism act calling himself "Otto and George" whose material is exactly what I just described, only performed with such poor ventriloquism that it's embarrassing to watch.

Overall it's choppy, redundant, tedious, and fortunately, hilarious.

It's a movie worth seeing, even worth owning if you have more than a passing interest in comedy, but if you're expecting miracles, prepare for a disappointment.

I didn't know what to expect when I saw this show. Comedy Central has a way of releasing shows that look promising, and then disappointing me with them.

But the Colbert Report is very funny, slightly ridiculous, and definitely worth the time.

It's a parody of shows like the O'Reilley Factor. It has a host (Daily Show veteran Stephen Colbert)whose persona is very self-important and self-centered. His name is on everything, all over the set, and his desk is shaped like a giant C. (C stands for Colbert, he reminds us).

The show consists primarily of Stephen Colbert, in his Daily Show persona, sitting at a desk and giving his opinions on things. It's all done in the spirit of satire, parodying popular journalism and the tendency of people who have no expertise to get a lot of camera time, despite the fact that their opinions are basically worthless.

All in all, the show is very funny, and very edgy. I think Stephen Colbert is a good investment for Comedy Central.

"Hulk" was, without a doubt, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It was missing some very basic elements, which I will recount for you now.

The first thing I notice was the conspicuous absence of a plot. This movie was deathly slow. By the time anything happens, you're so tired of waiting for something to happen that the payoff simply isn't worth it. What happens is this: a guy (Eric Bana as Bruce Banner) becomes the Hulk, and they military doesn't like it, so they fight him. Also, Banner's father (Nick Nolte) shows up for some reason and is revealed to be some sort of weird, crazy guy who is also a doctor, apparently, who also fights him, although we're never entirely sure why (we'll get to him in a minute).

The directing was terrible. Yes, terrible. I've heard criticisms that I just didn't understand the film, but frankly, what's to understand? The director was trying to make a movie that watches like a comic book, which is a mind-numbingly stupid idea. He utilizes split-screen shots to try to emulate comic book panels, overlooking the fact that comic-book panels are a limitation when trying to present action to an audience-- a limitation that thankfully the medium of movies can circumvent. Not this one though. The director, apparently completely unaware that he was doing a movie based on a comic book, tried to be artistic.

The characters were all terrible. I don't blame the actors; the cast was in fact pretty incredible. But the characters were terribly written. No sympathy, no empathy, and no development. Bruce Banner was apparently some sort of personality amputee, although it may be by some birth defect that he was simply born without one. Trying to care about this character was a chore in itself, and detracted from what little there was to enjoy about this movie altogether. Again, I can't blame Bana for this, it was a badly-written character, but I have to say, acting like nothing doesn't really count as acting. Nor is it in any way entertaining to watch. The love-interest, Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) is extremely lukewarm. She's the ingénue, who loves-him-because-she-knows-what's-right, despite the fact that Bruce Banner has all the lovable personality traits of a toilet plunger, but with a tendency to rip the heads off puppies because he gets cut off in traffic. The chemistry between them is bland at best, and quite frankly, someone who looks like Jennifer Connelly could do much better.

By far the worst character was Bruce's estranged father (Nolte) who shows up out of nowhere and rambles incessantly in an irritatingly mumbled voice like some sort of hobo with a Ph.D. . This sort of thing goes on for tedious minutes on end before one stops wondering "What in the hell is he talking about?" and begins wondering "when is this scene going to end?". Father (for that's his name) also develops an unlikely super-power, which he describes, in typical form, as the ability to "partake with the essences of things," which essentially means he can become stuff. (Admittedly, the visuals here were actually pretty cool. Not cool enough to make up for having to hear him describe it in prolonged bouts of Ivy-League gibberish, though). In the end, Nolte and his son fight for some reason (I think because he's a weird, crazy nut-ball, and Bruce is just a guy who fights people), Nolte partakes with the essence of some lightning and strikes Bruce, and presumably the whole thing is over, except that, for no reason whatsoever, Banner emerges several months later in the amazon, telling some South American drug lords "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry," at which point I actually found myself in throes of agony in the movie theater thinking "Dear God, he survived, they're setting up a sequel."

In short, a man who turns into a giant green monster and tears buildings in half when he gets mad should be quite exciting enough to hold my attention for an hour and a half. If you can make tedium out of that, you might want to reconsider what line of work you belong in.