TIMtheTOON

Cracked recently ran a scathing litany of 5 Terrible Life Lessons Hollywood Loves to Teach You. It is just painful to read because I can make no solid argument against what Cracked is saying; in particular what they have to say about the irony of casting corporations as villains:

Each and every one of these films are made by a corporation every bit as huge and unfeeling as the ones being portrayed in the movies (and the Walt Disney corporation could crush all of them like a grape). There’s almost something condescending about the way enormous companies are willing to cast themselves as the villains, knowing we’ll give them more of our money to watch it.

Speaking of Disney, in the movie WALL-E the earth has been ruined by the excesses of humanity, fueled by a greedy, uncaring, ubiquitous corporation with the cute name of Buy ‘N Large. But here is the thing I don’t get: if Buy ‘N Large is the corporation that made everything, then they’re the same ones that created WALL-E, the robot who saved humanity, and they also made EVA, a robot tasked with finding plant life, a sign welcoming people back to earth — www.buynlarge.com even says they make robots. So wouldn’t this mean the big, bad corporation that caused this mess is also the one with a plan to solve it? Surely someone within Buy ‘N Large was looking out for people after all.

Sadly, I don’t think this was the message the movie intended.

Trojan’s new ad campaign is entreating men to “evolve” by using their product.

How, um, do Trojan’s customers evolve when using a condom to prevent sexual reproduction effectively takes them out of the reproductive gene pool? If anyone, it’s the unwashed masses too dumb or impatient to use a condom that are taking part in any actual evolution — for better or worse. Maybe the people at Trojan don’t understand how evolution actually works?

If you really wanted to encourage condom use, why not use an obnoxious caricature of a pregnant teenager instead? That would at least save us one cute independent film with a teen as the smartest one in the room, so sassy and like, “pfft, whatever” while adults are left as a string of bumbling, one-dimensional straw men.

Now that would be a sign of evolution.

Grindhouse, of course.

That’s probably not such a good name for a movie though, since no budget, crappy effects and wooden acting are not the best points to sell a movie on.

In the new film celebrating a genre that really didn’t need that much celebratin’, directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino team up for a cinematic masterpiece not seen since their earlier success with Four Rooms.

Director Robert Rodriguez got his start making movies for $7000 and has grown quite a bit as a director who now spends millions of dollars making a movie that merely looks like it cost $7000. Meanwhile, indie auteur Tarantino continues to draw his inspiration from other movies of the genre, which puts him creatively on par with the directors of Epic Movie and Airplane! — except his bag of tricks draws from movies you’ve never heard of.

Will this new movie be as gruesome and nauseating as Rodriguez’s earlier kidsploitation flik The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl? Only time will tell.

In Cars, Owen Wilson plays the voice of a talking car who….

Talking car? Let me start over.

In Cars, the zombified carcass of Walt Disney (ahem, Walt Disney Pictures) grasps at the coattails of the animation powerhouse Pixar and its latest offering. And this time, it looks like a cartoon version of Oliver Stone’s U-Turn, except with J-Lo replaced by a Porsche, though hopefully without so much junk in the trunk. If you like automotive puns like that — God help you — then Cars is the movie for you! If you like a night of mixed feelings, check out Cars in a double-feature with Who Killed The Electric Car? and see what happens to all those adorable cars you fell in love with over the last hour and a half. Or try Cars with An Inconvenient Truth to see how our nation’s dependence on plucky animated race cars is destroying our environment.

Speaking of movies where the cars have all the personality, there’s The Fast & the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift. In it, Average White Guy and Average Black Guy meet Japanese people and are like, “Hey, Japan is a crazy place where everything is different!” I got the drift that this movie is made up nearly entirely of car races and car chases, so if the filmmakers aren’t going to pretend there’s anything more to Tokyo Drift than this, neither am I.

Switching gears (ugh), The Lake House stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as a couple trapped aboard a speeding bus as a couple who share the same house by the lake, albeit two years apart. If only they had tried this in The Break-Up, I could’ve saved 90 excruciating minutes. The Shyamalan-esque twist is that while one lives in the eponymous lake house in 2006 and the other lived there in 2004, they still seem to be able to write letters to each other, which I think classifies this as sci-fi. Or if Sandra Bullock is supposed to be the attractive female lead, then fantasy. I don’t want to jump to conclusions with this touching fantasy romance with its elves and unicorns and magical time traveling postcards, but do you think it’s possible that… one of them was dead the whole time?!

Click. That’s me turning off the latest Adam Sandler movie.

I’ve tried looking up information on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford but I still have no clue what this movie is about, and the title sure isn’t any help. The closest I could find is a motorcycle mechanic by the name of Jesse James, so uh, I guess this movie is about bikers?

So this wraps up my round of movie reviews; I’ve left the critique of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 to the guy dressed like Jack Sparrow up on Hollywood & Highland — I figure he’s more of an expert on the subject, so ask him what he thinks if you see him on your way into Beard Papa’s.

I’ve gotta get back to programming in a second, but first…

Let me save you some time and distill the 5-book series that encompasses The Chronicles of Narnia down to its two essential facts: Turkish Delight is a sticky dessert and the titular lion is a metaphor for Christ …for some reason. These would appear to be the only things going for this movie apart from a very long and silly title. But the real question for The Chronicles of Narnia is will it be a bigger success than last year’s The Chronicles of Riddick?

Rumors about a fourth installment to Peter Jackson’s incredibly popular Lord of the Rings trilogy reveal it to be a separate movie entirely. At last, stop-motion and claymation technology have reached a level of sophistication that Peter Jackson can finally make an enduring version of King Kong. The real advantage for Jackson is that computer graphics allow for a greater degree of lip sync and character animation that until now have limited the performance of the film’s pivotal star, Adrian Brody.

I’m a little worried about whether the popular Broadway musical The Producers could actually work as a feature film, but I’m glad that at least one popular Broadway musical has finally shown enough crossover appeal (thanks to the public’s enduring fascination with both Uma Thurman and the Nazis) to make it to the big screen. I can’t wait until 2008 for the inevitable musical based on the movie based on the musical based on the movie.

Brokeback Mountain, which looks like a cowboy fantasy taken out of Gus Van Sant’s secret diary, is the sort of movie that usually enjoys a limited release at the Tomkat Theater in West Hollywood. Starring the Casanova Heath Ledger and Jarhead Jake Gylyllennhaaaaall (sp?), this steamy cowboy romance simmers with an erotic ambience not seen since Unforgiven.

Finally there’s the Jim Carry comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, which is not to be confused with the Tomkat double-feature Fun with Dick and Dick.