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House M.D. (2004)
House - proto-edgelord of the oughts.
The House character has got to be THE proto-edgelord. If it wasn't for this jerk doing the same old routine every week for almost a decade, perhaps we would not be having the culture wars we are today, or at least, the bad guys wouldn't be so smugly self-satisfied and petulant.
Everything about this show is annoying, it takes place in some kind of weird alternative universe where doctors are detectives who break into people's houses or mercilessly berate them into revealing what is ailing them. House is having some inane conversation with one of his cronies and something they say suddenly makes him run back to his 'team' to tell them what is wrong with the episode's patient. A few days ago I watched one where Wilson says something about 'being a boyscout', which causes House to launch into the aforementioned pause and diagnose routine. They never actually explain how the word 'boyscout' triggered House to figure out the diagnosis, it just happens and we're supposed to move on because we're more interested in the DRAMA of the whole thing. I am now typing this while watching a later-season episode where House explains what it's like to be House to a bunch of kids in a classroom, through some flashbacks with two other kids who are waiting to be scolded by the Principal along with House. The kids in the classroom are all well-versed movie critics, and the kids waiting for the Principal are miniature psychoanalysts. It feels like splinters being shoved under my fingernails.
And what's with the patients? Every second episode they're in full-blown hallucinating psychosis. Oh, the adrenalin boost caused by kidney sarcoidosis caused the hallucinations... oh the brain tumor must've caused the hallucinations... oh the LSD we accidentally injected caused the hallucinations... And why are there so many patients who don't want anyone to know who they are? How is Cuddy going to bill their insurance if they insist on being anonymous??
I remember when this show first came on, and I started watching it because I had a medical condition that took years to diagnose, and at that time it had not been diagnosed and I was pretty desperate so I was watching House to bone up on symptoms of weird diseases, hoping one would match my situation. That never happened, because what I didn't realize at the time is that the show doesn't really care about medical accuracy, it's all about House acting like a jerk and solving cases through an unmentioned psychic technique. His relationships with colleagues are annoying, Wilson is almost as boring as House, and Cuddy is very unlikable, at least until she starts dating House, then you feel as sorry for her as you do her gynecologist, who will have to deal with all the STDs House gives Cuddy. The House/Cuddy relationship is so gross, but we're supposed to find it so romantic because House is a prostitute-frequenting psycho who drives his car through Cuddy's front window when she jilts him, even though he's supposed to be a genius at decision making.
Every episode has plot holes, but my favorite one is when House bugs the room of another one of his anonymous patients, in order to somehow find out who he is, so House can obtain his medical records. But every time House tries to listen, his receiver emits a terrible squeal of feedback, which could only happen if the receiver and its speaker was in close proximity to the microphone bug. House realizes that all the 'channels' of his wireless bug system are in use, which doesn't seem right, so he walks into the patient's room and somehow immediately finds the patient's own microphone bug. No matter that these two bugs would only require two channels to not interfere. Anyway, when House finds the other bug, he realizes that the patient is a cop! The cop's bug is part of his undercover operation to gather incriminating evidence from his partner in crime. But then it turns out that the cop is going to die before the big drug bust from the case he's been working on. The bust is shown, as cops interrupt a major drug deal, which means that whatever the cop was recording with his bug was completely irrelevant!
Which brings me to wondering why they all call each other by their last names, which is one of the things that I found most annoying about That 70s Show. And both shows have an 'Eric Foreman', coincidence? Foreman, House, Hyde, Wilson, Kelso - these two awful shows could've merged and nobody would have noticed. Both shows feature characters constantly insulting each other and reacting with joy over each other's problems, except one is supposed to be funny. I'm talking about House of course. Does TVTropes say anything about a rule where characters that abuse each other have to call each other by their last names in order to be likable?
I actually saw a Hugh Laurie CD of music at the thrift store last week, who would buy such a thing? Who would finance such a thing? If there's anything worse than the show House, it's got to be House's music. And what are the chances that two guys from one of the best shows ever made, Black Adder, would wind up making their fortune with two of the worst shows ever conceived? (House and Mr. Bean - and I wonder who made more money, the guy who fakes an American accent to have a career on the less twee side of the pond, or the guy who shuts up entirely to have an international appeal). It's not the plot of these morose House episodes that make me depressed, it's the reality that this show lasted for so long, which means people liked watching it.
When Nature Calls (2021)
2021's version of the Rappin' Grannies.
A lot of people who have reviewed this show don't seem to understand the premise. It isn't funny but at least you should be able to figure out how it's supposed to be funny. The humor stems from Helen Mirren reading scripts in an upper-class british accent. The script consists of endless internet 'edgelord' jargon. In this way it is the modern equivalent of the 'Rappin' Grannies' from the 80s. They were a troupe of older women who rapped very badly but that was supposed to be hilarious because they were old. The same thing is going on here. The rappin' grannies weren't marketed to people into rap, or people who like grannies. It was marketed to the mainstream, just as this show is not marketed to edgelords or old british ladies. After all, edgelords don't watch tv, they watch the internet, and old people don't know how to use the internet, which is played up for laughs. This show is for people in their 40s and 50s, who can only understand half the jargon at best, but they find it oh so amusing when an old british lady actually says those things! Because they don't understand much of the jargon, the audience is fooled into thinking the script consists of jokes rather than a bad night on Who's Line Is It Anyway?
Big Meat Eater (1982)
Probably my favorite movie
This film has a lot going for it, but what I wanted to point out is the space-ship car, this movie predates both Back to the Future and Repo Man, and the space-ship car motif (yeah I know it's a time machine in BttF, but it does fly later on) in those films was surely inspired by this film. Repo Man even had a 'balonium'-type substance in the trunk of J Frank's car (later used in a briefcase in Pulp Fiction). I'm sure most filmmakers have seen this movie so I'm not surprised, but once again, like Class of 1984, we see a Canadian classic used as a blueprint for big hollywood productions.
Class of 1984 (1982)
Classic 80s punksploitation film that served as a template for so many more movies in the 80s & 90s
This film is like a kiddie-version of Death Wish films, but the most remarkable thing about this movie is the sheer amount of tropes it created that were re-hashed in dozens of films that came after it. From the scene where Stegman smashes his head into sinks, mirrors and a tiled wall in a bathroom then pretends the teacher, Norris, assaulted him, which was duplicated in an office setting in Fight Club, to the antagonist clinging to life at the end, pleading for his life while holding a rope, only to try to stab the protagonist when he reaches out to save him, giving the protagonist the moral approval to send the antagonist to his death, which has been re-hashed in so many movies, from Die Hard to Strange Days and many, many more. The sheer number of tropes that were subsequently re-used in subsequent movies is incredible. Of course, it did it's own pillaging of tropes too, such as the flagpole/PCP scene, straight out of a 70s Afterschool Special starring Helen Hunt.
For the most part the action in the film is somewhat realistic, except for when the teacher throws one of the gang members onto a table-saw back-first, killing him instantly even though the blade would have only made a gash a couple inches deep, and all the guy would've had to do is arch his back to avoid it. I know his arm was severed at that point but he still should have had a will to live. And the finale, where the antagonist, Stegman, goes from holding a rope and falling, to somehow wrapping the rope around his neck so that he gets hung. This would have been impossible for him to do on purpose while falling let alone having it occur by accident. The movie also fails to explain how the rope came down with him in the first place, since he was clinging to it and the teacher had no way of cutting it (and even if he had had a knife, which he didn't, the rope is like 3 inches thick). It seems to me I've seen an antagonist crash through a glass ceiling to his death after a rooftop fight before, but I can't place it. I will return periodically to update this entry as I continue to come across more movies with Class of 1984 tropes in them.
Probably the most amusing aspect of this film is the wardrobe and stylized characters, who definitely would have seemed menacing and out of place in a highschool in 1982, but by 1992 highschools were filled with people with dyed hair, studded leather accoutrements and punky haircuts. Even the safety-pin through the nose of the fat gang-member character would have seemed very exotic in '82 but nothing but a yawn by '92.
The only problem with this film is that it drags on too long, but that's generally the formula of 'thrillers'. The running gag throughout, that authorities' hands are perpetually tied because 'nobody saw it happen' was played up at the end with a printed message ensuring the audience that Perry King's teacher character got away with his murder spree for that very reason.
I'm giving this movie 8-stars, because it is watchable and so influential in all the tropes it created.
The World of Animals: Big Cats, Little Cats (1968)
One of the weirdest things I've ever seen
I really need to track down a copy of this production. I only caught the last ten minutes at about 4am on tv in the mid-1990s, but what I saw in that 10 minutes has made me pine for a copy since then. There were all these stray cats in an abandoned building and Lorne Greene is narrating an anthropomorphic tale of what each cat is supposedly experiencing, which is mostly a cat orgy in some kind of condemned building, then all the sudden a wrecking ball smashes through the wall and the cats go crazy.
Pirate's Passage (2015)
Two stars for the illustrating, otherwise it'd be zero.
This film is such a bizarre combination of dullness, pirate trivia and disturbing plot elements that I found myself compelled to watch it to the end in order to review it. At the beginning of the film some pirates in the early 1700s make their way to a small coastal town in Nova Scotia, Canada, in order to bury some treasure underneath a sea-side manor (ie large house). Eventually the title of the movie appears on the screen and we're catapulted into present-day Nova Scotia. Oh wait, no, it's not present day it's 1952. This kind of era-shopping allows the author (this is an adaption of a novel) to revel in all kinds of political incorrectness, such as harassing women with painfully tired misogynist tropes.
Anyway, so what happens is, an old guy who was on the pirate ship in 1717 at the beginning of the movie shows up in a much smaller boat in 1952, just after we see a kid, Jim, get bullied at school by another kid who likes to sick his dog on Jim (the dog's name, by the way, is Grendel, because everyone in this story is highly educated with classic literature, unlike, well just about everyone in the real Nova Scotia of 1952). Jim sees the boat struggling in a storm from his window at the big house on the rocks which is now a quaint Inn where Jim lives with his mother, and Jim incredulously proclaims to his mother that a pirate is at the helm, even though the sea is rough and he has no binoculars. The old guy ties his boat off with help from Jim and immediately after the old guy enters the Inn, 'Immigration', who must've been tracking the guy by radar since 1717, arrives to tell him to stay in the Inn and not go anywhere while some kind of immigration paper work gets sent to Halifax. Why they think he is a foreigner in the first place is not explored, even though it's far more likely he's some old cod-catching codger from another village up or down the coast. The immigration guy leaves without even asking the old guy for ID of any kind, but don't worry, he'll be back later with a partner.
Now, Jim just happens to be writing an essay on pirates for school, so it's a good thing this old man who seems to know everything about pirates showed up. He starts telling the kid various stuff about pirates, ultimately explaining that pirates are like modern day capitalists, who are bad. But pirates were good. Even though they're like bad capitalists. One such bad capitalist happens to live nearby and has designs on purchasing the Inn and developing it into a 'resort hotel'. Never mind that this is Nova Scotia in 1952 and nobody in their right mind would be investing in anything but a fish processing plant, and that this guy would be heralded a hero by the entire town for wanting to develop, he's a bad guy anyway because the old man noticed suspicious boat-traffic at his waterfront warehouse. Someone even tells Jim that the local bad guy has a fancy new car that is "the only one of it's kind in Canada". How anyone would know that is anyone's guess, but later Jim insists that he knows it's true when Jim's policeman uncle teams up with him to pull a weird stunt to entrap the bad capitalist guy. You see Jim's mother, who owns the Inn apparently owes the capitalist a considerable amount of money, because he lent her money to keep the Inn afloat. But he didn't do that because he's a nice guy, he did that so that he can eventually somehow "extort" Jim's mother into handing over ownership of the Inn. If his intention was not to help Jim's mother keep the Inn going, rather than giving her a loan, he could've just let the Inn fail and then buy it, at a distressed, lower rate, and take ownership much sooner than he would if he had to wait to buy out the mother's share by calling due the loan.
After lighting a fire with his breath and telling the Inn maiden that the devil helped him do it, the old guy takes Jim on an astral journey through the satanic fire (I'm not kidding!) to a pirate ship in 1720. They wander around on the ship, and Jim sees a rat and goes "eek" which a pirate almost hears, uh oh! During this aside, the old guy turns pop-philosopher by telling Jim such deep gems as: "Life is full of decisions, try to make good ones", and his favorite maxim, which he repeats frequently: "What is, is", which is apparently the 1700s version of everyone's favorite 21st century meaningless tautology: "It is what it is". He also explains that pirates had 'one of the first democracies', failing to credit any Greeks from thousands of years prior. It's clear by this point that the old guy is a major pirate apologist.
The old guy decides he needs to move a trunk off his boat so that customs won't see it, but Jim objects because that would be breaking the law since the immigration guy said not to take anything off the boat. The old guy says it's OK, those rules apply to smugglers, not him, even though hiding the trunk off the boat to keep customs from seeing it is the very definition of smuggling. Jim agrees only if the old guy shows him what is in the trunk. The old guy obliges and opens the trunk which has some scrolls in it one of which is shown to be a Shakespeare folio, so it makes sense that he would want to hide the trunk off the boat - he's smuggling antique literature that must be worth a fortune! Most prominently placed in the trunk is a very old book with the title "History of Pirates". While this story is fiction, that book actually exists. Except it's called 'A General History of the Pyrates'. I guess the author of this adaptation, as much of a pirate apologist as his protagonist, did not want to portray his pirate heroes as antiquated spellers since his modern audience would likely assume pirates just can't spell because they're illiterate but that wouldn't square with the ridiculously shoe-horned portrayal of pirates as being highly principled swashbuckling gents. The book was written by a Charles Johnson, which is thought in real-life to have been a pseudonym of a non-pirate writer in Britain. But as soon as Jim sees the book in the trunk he exclaims "You're the Captain Johnson!" The old man doesn't disagree, so from here on out I'll call him Johnson. For some reason Jim didn't say, "You're William Shakespeare!" when the Shakespeare folio was shown in the trunk before the pirate book.
So Johnson and Jim set out to bust the Capitalist, whom Johnson has decided has made his fortune by smuggling stuff into his waterfront warehouse. How are they going to do this? Well, by doing what pirates would do, which Johnson says is "attack him before he attacks us". The attack consists of Jim flattening one of the tires on the Capitalist's car so he can't escape when Jim's policeman uncle and the customs officials (who were previously immigration officials, I guess officials did a lot of double-duty in 1952 Nova Scotia) show up to bust him. After puncturing the tire, Jim sips from a straw in a disposable cup with a plastic lid, something I very much doubt would be in existence in a sleepy Nova Scotia town in 1952. If the Capitalist develops the area into a seaside resort, then sure, disposable cups all around. But before?? I don't think so. And so we come to the most laughable plot-hole of all, even though it almost seems like it could happen in 1952's Nova Scotia: The Capitalist is busted for smuggling, and the cop announces that because he is a smuggler that's proof he must be trying to 'extort' the Inn owners (by having the audacity to call his loan to them due), so he's going to prison for a long time.
YAY everyone is happy, oh except Jim who still has a bully and his dog to deal with. The bully appears and Jim, who apparently needed all the banal proclamations about life from Johnson in order to muster the courage to stick up for himself, refuses to back down. The bully asks Jim what he's going to do, and Jim delivers what is both the most hilarious and bizarrely disturbing line of the movie: "I'm going to kill your dog" The dog, Grendel, is of course the only innocent party in this sad mess of a story, but according to the twisted morality of this animated world, Jim is justified in threatening to kill the dog. And so far we've seen no indication that pirates were known for bluffing threats of violence.
The only good thing in this production is some of the background artwork and a few of the animation scenes. Most of the animation is bare-budget stuff but the background stills are actually quite detailed. I can't imagine what it would be like being an animator spending hours upon hours drawing for this awful story.
In any case, the moral of the story seems to be that smugglers and bankers are much worse than pirates. In one of their astral journeys to a pirate ship, Jim and Johnson look on sympathetically as a pirate captain laments, right before attacking a cargo ship, that he certainly hopes there won't be any bloodshed, all the pirates want is the cargo. What a bunch of swell guys those old pirates were, although they will probably have to shed blood to get their booty, they'd rather not, unlike the present-day smuggler capitalist who actually wants to develop the area into something more than rocky crag that smells of rotting fish 24/7, and who wouldn't have to worry about shedding any blood to do that.
UPDATE:
I want to stipulate that I am the furthest from a sympathizer of capitalism as may be possible, but this movie made me root for capitalism like no other has! In my review I originally accused it of using piracy to introduce socialism to pirate fans, but I now realize that is quite a reach. I think that the author was just an old capitalism-wary hippy with some strange ideas about real-estate contracts, who wanted to write the book to romanticize pirates as he reminisced over having read Treasure Island as a kid, an experience that must've had a great impact him at the time, when life was more carefree, before he had developed his rudimentary political views.
The Powers of Matthew Star (1982)
Only one star for Matthew Star!
The Powers of Matthew Star was hastily put together as ABC's answer to NBC's hit-series The Greatest American Hero. They tried to use the same basic formula; buddy crime-fighters, one of whom has super-powers. However, Matthew Star lacks the bumbling comedy of TGAH, not to mention the strong character performances of Katt and Culp, (as well as a young Michael Pere!) and vastly superior writing.
While Louis Gossett Jr. Is always reliable, and manages to be the only thing that makes this show at all watchable, even his acting heroics can't make up for every other dull and cheesy aspect of the show. The plots are very outlandish yet so simple they could be told in a half-hour format, which means they have to pad each episode with plenty of unnecessary side-trips and excursions (usually using Matthew's powers) before they get around to wrapping up the episode by catching the bad guys.
An even more fundamental issue with this show is that it's ostensibly all about Matthew's powers, according to the title, yet whenever Matthew uses his powers it's often to do something he could've done slightly less conveniently without them. As the series trudges along through its first and only season, the powers become more and more of a cheap deus ex machina to fill in various plot holes. By relying on the powers this way, the two leads don't get the opportunity to move the plot along in a way that is entertaining; for example a clever ruse combined with con-man techniques like on Rockford Files, to get into a building, would be far more entertaining than Matthew simply 'astraling' himself there. The powers end up dragging the show down; the one thing that was supposed to make the show interesting turns out to be a stinking albatross of bad special effects and an even worse script. The powers actually make the show more dull than it would be without them.
Say Anything... (1989)
Terrible, terrible stuff....
Like a bad car accident, every time this movie turns up on TV I am compelled to watch it and revel in its awfulness. I originally saw this one in a theater in 1989, and what I remember most from that experience was laughing hysterically at the dad sitting in his bathtub with his clothes on, sobbing about his credit cards getting cut up. I actually thought that was supposed to be a comedic moment until I realized I was the only one in the theater laughing and my friend who I went to the movie with was looking at me like I was deranged. But I couldn't help it, it was too damn funny!
Now lets cover some of the more obvious plot-holes and blunders... Wasn't it oh-so-satisfying to see these teens being so concerned about drunk-driving that they give all their car-keys to a 'keymaster' at the party, which they aren't allowed to get back until they've spent the entire night getting blotto, because as we all know at the crack of dawn everyone automatically sobers up. Yeah, wouldn't want anyone to drive home at 1am, after having a couple beers, better to confiscate their keys until 7am when they've had 15 more beers....
Now here's the biggest problem.. why, oh why, would a cool trenchcoat-mafia-type like Lloyd Dobbler have any interest in the stuck up puritan girl, and why does everyone else seem to think she's out of his league when in fact it's entirely the other way around? Lloyd is supposed to be the 'loser' because he 'doesnt know what he wants to do after highschool'? Here's an idea, Lloyd, why don't you spend your post-highschool life hanging out with people who don't have cardboard-cutout personalities, and haven't spent their entire highschool lives trying to please their dad and their teachers and every other adult in the world... you know, like Jeremy Piven and the 'Gas and Sip' crew, and thanking your lucky stars you never have to fraternize with any more status-quo worshipping WASPs like 'Diane Court' ever again?!
I still can't figure out what was with the Dad and his subplot of ripping off old people. Were we supposed to feel sorry for him, or be mad at him, or not give a crap one way or another? Because the latter is how it affected me.
In the end Dobbler actually accompanies Diane to England where you can be sure they will spend all of their time sipping tea and admiring fancy doylies, rather than catching a raucous footy match... As the audience we're supposed to be satisfied with that and happy for poor Lloyd who's coming directly out of highschool and aspiring for a life in which every drop of personality has been terminally squeezed out of him. Lloyd, you'd be better off selling something processed than running off to some bizarre Mary Poppinsesque fantasy with your chronically frigid girlfriend. Seriously, what kind of guy in his right mind would relentlessly stalk such a boring girl? And why would everyone else in the highschool, sporting the latest in new-wave and nascent grunge fashion, bow down to the supposed superiority of the illustrious valedictorian Diane Court? The movie establishes that through their highschool careers they hung around in different cliques, but can't seem to explain why that would be, since now that Lloyd is acting as middleman, Diane isn't just accepted in the cool crowd, she's revered, and considered to be TOO GOOD for the cool crowd! Maybe if Lloyd and Diane had smoked a joint and got silly with the Gas N Sip crew it would've been enough of a shoehorn for this to work, but as it is, it's just a mess.
The moral of this story seems to be that unless you're a glad-handing junior republican, you are a misfit and a loser who deserves to have low self-esteem, and your only hope for redemption entails a full-time commitment to wholly embracing your potential for sheer whiteness.
I liked Fast Times, although it has its share of problems, and I especially liked Wild Life, but it seems like with Say Anything, Crowe wants to compete with John Hughes by offering something 'meaningful'. He fails miserably in that, probably because the material he's trying to copy isn't any less contrived than this knock-off. When I read that Kirk Cameron was originally considered for the role of Lloyd Dobbler, the whole thing finally made sense to me. This movie was supposed to be a bland Christian allegory, but the lead was tragically miscast in John Cusack.
Strange Days (1995)
The worst movie I have ever seen
I don't review movies, but I decided I have to review this one, because it is absolutely the worst movie I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of movies. I worked at a video store for a few years, so for eight hours a day I was watching movies. I saw this one in the theater, with an advanced screening pass my then-girlfriend got us. She ended up liking the movie, and my detest for it probably didn't help our relationship which was on shaky ground and dissolved a month later. One of the main reasons I want to express my opinion of this movie here is due to the positive review that it has on All Movie Guide. I can hardly believe that whoever wrote that review saw the same cut that I did. Usually All Movie Guide doesn't have much trouble giving bad reviews to terrible movies, but in this case they dropped the ball. But anyway, back to Strange Days...
One of the things that bothered me early on in this movie was the fact that it was all a disappointment after the first 5 minutes. The first 5 minutes, with the extremely innovative first-person sequence with no cuts is an amazing adrenaline rush, so I was prepared to love this movie. I was even prepared to forgive it if it couldn't quite live up to its first 5 minutes, but it didn't just not live up to its potential, it turned out to be a complete turkey.
The plot is interesting, but unfortunately we've got Ralph Fiennes as a lead, doing his shoddy American accent. Accompanying him is a black woman limo driver who freaks out and nearly kills her 'friend', (Fiennes' character) because he puts his 'SQUID' unit on in the back of her car. This scene is probably there to make the viewer equate SQUID with heroin or crack, as if that silly comparison hadn't already been alluded to several times by that point. Her flip out over SQUID use is as comical as when Fiennes' character unknowingly begins viewing a 'blackjack' tape on his SQUID unit, which causes him to writhe in pain (but he continues watching), even though the apparatus supposedly works by giving you the feelings of the person who recorded/lived the event. Since the person who made it was obviously enjoying it, shouldn't the SQUID unit be subjecting Fiennes character to pleasurable feelings when he views the blackjack? But no, since this is Hollywood schlock, the audience is supposed to put a cognitive moral band-aid over this plot-hole and feel sympathetic for Fiennes for having to be put though the sordid experience of viewing the blackjack flick.
Now, even if a 'morally upright' naive citizen who views a blackjack clip gets feelings of disgust from viewing it, Fiennes character is supposed to be an ex-cop, an 'on the edge' sort, living in a dystopian future, who certainly should've seen plenty of gory violence close up on the job by now, and has no reason to be writhing around like you might expect a hapless Amish person to do if accidentally exposed to a blackjack clip via SQUID...
The only mildly interesting character in this movie is Fiennes' character's cyber-geek buddy who lives in a van. Unfortunately he dies right away, so he's unable to help save this movie at all.
Watching Juliette Lewis stumble through this mess while hanging off that weird hippie guy with the unbuttoned shirt to display his greasy shaved chest was disturbing and boring, as well.
Then the 'sub-plot' of the messianic rapper being gunned down by LAPD Rodney King-beater stereotypes amounted to a mini-farce of its own. The scene where the rapper is pulled over and the discussion with the cops who inevitably shoot him is so contrived and clichéd its cringe-worthy. I very much doubt any black people ever worked on this script. But one thing is for sure - whoever worked on this script and green-lighted it shouldn't be allowed near a film production ever again!
There are a million more things wrong with this movie, but fortunately I haven't seen it come on TV in a few years so it's not fresh in my mind. The 20-minute long millennium party scene at the end and the unbelievably clichéd false endings where the villain keeps coming after being shot a dozen times, falling down, dying, and somehow reviving himself to be killed again, caps off this inane excuse for sci-fi. I can't imagine this thing getting positive reviews from anybody but the most sheltered Christian Luddites, but it does. The makers of this film had a plot they could've done something interesting with, but instead they decided to tell a comical tale of cautionary morality and righteousness. This movie is in the same league as Battlefield Earth; as nonsensical and convoluted as Battlefield Earth is, is how simplistic and unoriginal Strange Days is, and both movies are equally unrewarding.
Are We There Yet? (2005)
cheap bastards
I decided to comment on this movie because I happen to live on a block in which several movies have been filmed, including this one. Usually when a movie is filmed on our block, the production company gives us some $$ for the MAJOR inconvenience (they surround our house with trailers and generators and porta-toilets and use them 24 hours a day for about 5 days straight). But the producers of Are We There Yet? Were the cheapest, AND the most obnoxious. They continually lied about the amount of various inconvenient things they were going to do around our house (claiming the generators would be parked at the other end of the block). Jason Vs. Freddy filmed on the same block a year earlier and they gave us $800. Are We There Yet gave us four movie passes. And the Freddy vs. Jason people were WAY nicer and never lied. And the fact that Are We There Yet was the 2nd biggest grossing movie for Columbia for 2005 is unbelievable, considering how cheap they were. At the time I figured the movie would bomb, so no wonder they were being cheap bastards. But in reality it probably grossed twice as much as Freddy vs. Jason. I mean we had to put up with 'cop chases' being filmed with sirens blaring, over and over again, in the middle of the night, while all day that stupid Lincoln Navigator with the bling-bling rims raced up and down the normally quiet side-street...
By the way, one reason why the production lasted three days longer than it was supposed to is because Ice Cube couldn't be bothered to show up on set till about 2pm each day. You don't wanna know how badly I wanted to put a cap in his ass for invading my 'hood with his obnoxious production then having the nerve to throw a few movie passes at us.
Columbia, you are NOT welcome in this neighborhood again, and neither is Vanilla Ice or whatever that has been loser calls himself...