My Very Half Assed Best of 2008 (Movies and Music)

It has been forever since I have posted here, and for that I appologize. I swear 2009 will bring more new material, but for now, here is my list of the best and worst of the past year.

Best Music of 2008

10. Beck - "Modern Guilt"

The point where Beck's melancholy meets perfectly with his pop sensibilities in no small part to Danger Mouse's stellar production.

Stand out tracks: "Orphans", "Chemtrails", "Walls", "Soul of a Man"

Beck (feat. Cat Power) – “Orphans

9. Thrice - "The Alchemy Index Volumes III & IV

Modern Prog-Country-Emo-Whathaveyou done right by a band that continues to evolve by leaps and bounds.

Stand out tracks: "Broken Lungs", "Moving Mountains", "Come All You Weary"

Thrice – Broken Lungs

8. Gaslight Anthem – “The ’59 Sound”

An almost too good meshing of Springsteen and The Pogues. While at some points the album is almost too earnest for its own good, it still rocks just as hard as anything else out this year. Also, despite my ardent hatred for Dickie Barret, I can even forgive his cameo here. This was the album The Killers always wanted to secretly make but are too full of themselves to do so.

Stand out tracks: “Great Expectations”, “Old White Lincoln”, “Meet Me By the River’s Edge”

Gaslight Anthem – “Old White Lincoln”

7. Los Campesinos - "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed"

The better of two stellar albums from a band I admittedly tried hard not to like at first.

Stand out tracks: "Ways to Make it Through the Wall", "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed", "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing", "Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1"

Los Campesinos – “You’ll Need Those Fingers for Crossing”

6. Fall Out Boy - "Folie a Deux"

If you hate them, far be it from me to try and convert you, but this is the best mainstream release of any genre this year, and is often at its best at when the songs are weirdest.

Stand out Tracks: "What a Catch, Donnie", "Disloyal Order of Water Buffalos", "w.a.m.s.", "West Coast Smoker"

Fall Out Boy (feat. Pharell) – “w.a.m.s”

5. Fucked Up - "The Chemistry of Common Life"

This isn't just good hardcore. This is good music in general. Brutal and beautiful all at the same time.

Stand out tracks: "Son the Father", "Royal Swan", "Twice Born", "Black Albino Bones", "Crooked Head"

Fucked Up - “Royal Swan”

4. Girl Talk - "Feed the Animals"

This is all around the best achievement this year by a single artist. The ultimate party in a box is also one of the most cohesive and well thought out albums of the year. Also, the best hip-hop album in a weak year for the genre (sorry Jeezy, I just can’t put you on this list).

Stand out tracks: Well, it's just like on really big track if you think about it...

Girl Talk – “Shut the Club Down”

3. Sigur Ros - Med Sud I Eyrum Spilum Endalaust

Sometimes accessibility can be a good thing. While not their best, these guys have finally created an album even the most casual listeners can get into easily.

Stand out tracks: "Gobbledigook", "Inni mer syngur vitleysingur", "Straumnes", "All Alright"

Sigur Ros – “All Alright”

2. MGMT - Oracular Spectactular

Much like Los Campesinos (and to a much lesser extent Vampire Weekend) I tried so hard to hate these guys, but I have a deep appreciation for bands that like to blur the lines between what a joke and what is sincere. These guys are clearly in on it. By turns fun and touching, this could be the one album on this list that stands the test of time better than the rest.

Stand out tracks: "Weekend Wars", "Kids", "The Youth", "The Handshake", "Pieces of What"

MGMT – “Weekend Wars”

1. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Overly sensitive indie acoustic loving assholes (like myself) find themselves a new Iron & Wine with this absolutely gorgeous collection of songs. It might only be 9 songs long, but they are all the perfect soundtrack to a lonely night of nothing in particular.

Stand Out tracks: "Re: Stacks", "Skinny Love", "Blindsided", "Team", "Lump Sum", "For Emma"

Bon Iver – “Re: Stacks”

Worst Music of 2008

10. Jamie Foxx - "Intuition"/ Terrance Howard - "Sanctuary" (tie)

Fuck, where do I begin when a lot of this list repeats itself. I can’t even figure out which of these two clusterfucks to begin with. I guess we can start with the ever so slightly better Terrance Howard album. This man has come a long way from “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”, but he has gone in the wrong direction completely and started to think he can now play the troubled troubadour role. With a lead single as ri-god-damn-diculous as the title track, i could not take him seriously as an artist. I thought I was listening to Tenacious D’s Wonderboy. As for “Shine Through It”, well, just listen to it. Check that falsetto he tries... numerous times:

Terrance Howard – “Shine Through It”

So naturally Terrance Howard feels the need to dis Jamie Foxx and his music (on CNN of all places). Jamie comes back and does a pretty spot on imitation of Terrance that nearly made me piss my pants laughing. Unfortunately, Jamie’s album also made me piss my pants laughing at his fake ass neo-soul freak shit that sounds like he just dusted off some shit he found in the trash of Boyz II Men. In the YouTube comments for “Slow” someone had the balls to say that people are “losing their V-Cards to this song”. Fuck, the world is doomed.

Jamie Foxx – “Slow”

9. Weezer - "Red Album"

I don’t think it needs to be said anymore that letting Rivers Cuomo turn song writing duties over to his band mates was a terrible idea, but this album is simply abysmal. It’s only saving grace is the astoundingly flippant lead single that makes you wonder if this whole thing wasn’t a joke to begin with. River’s also redeemed himself with the vastly better solo collection “Alone II”.

8. Oasis - "Dig Out Your Soul"

Are these guys dead yet? Between bouts of getting tackled on stage and baiting Jay-Z, the Gallagher brothers found time to release yet another dreary bombastic album that shows no progression whatsoever from “the greatest band on Earth”. Of course, I have never been a huge fan of Oasis. Now I am just plain sick of hearing about them at all.

7. The Killers - "Day & Age"

The title of the first track, “Losing Touch”, seems quite prophetic. This is a band that seems chronically out of their comfort zone on every album, but it is none more apparent than on this bizarre effort. I don’t think I was more bored listening to another album this year. I didn’t even care to figure out what the hell was exactly wrong with it. I just didn’t care.

6. Metallica - "Death Magnetic"

People need to stop saying “At least it doesn’t sound like ‘St. Anger” as if it were a good thing. It’s like the difference between having a safe dropped on your head from 20 stories up and getting run over by a freight train with steamroller wheels. Everything about this “return to form” is wrong from start to finish. Even the cover looks like a fucked up Wooly Willy.

5. Beyonce - "I am ... Sasha Fierce"

It is a bad sign if you are trying to create a concept album and the singer sounds completely disinterested in everything. If Beyonce wanted to create an altar ego, she should have sat on it longer. From lyrics to production (which is surprisingly sparse for such an occasion) this entire thing feels half baked and lazy.

4. Plain White T's - "Big Bad World"

I can see why Delilah left you. You were outshone by label mate Miley Cyrus. This is what you get when you mix the sound of Radio Disney, a bad Joy Division cover band, and the sound of a check cashing over one another.

3. Scarlett Johanson - "Anywhere I Lay My Head"

Scarlett’s bid to become as overexposed as possible came up short with an album of covers that should never have been allowed to crawl out of the bowels of Hades. There have been threats of yet another album. I say the world starts a fund to make sure that never happens.

2. Pussycat Dolls – “Doll Domination”

Oh, just go fuck yourselves. You guys get number two by default because...

1. Nickleback - "Dark Horse"

...these assholes put out an album. But getting back to both number two and number one, combined both albums manage to bring misogyny to dizzying new levels. Nickleback wins simply because “S.E.X.” (spelled that way for God knows what fucking reason) is quite possibly the most loathsome song of the decade.

Best Films of 2008

10. Cloverfield – Despite the inevitable backlash over the past year, this January release manages to hang on to it’s spot on the list mostly on technical achievement alone. It is fun, suspenseful, and not disappointing in the slightest.

9. American Teen- There is a fine line between fiction and reality. For all the claims against this little seen documentary that large parts of it had to be staged (and large chunks of the film definitely suggest that), the film remains an interesting case study if you look at it from the perspective of what happens when you introduce cameras in front of a group of otherwise normal kids. Definitely a movie where you have to suspend your own personal prejudice towards the material.

8. Snow Angels – Before he helmed “Pineapple Express”, auteur David Gordon Green directed this indie downer of a drama. Movies this bleak and this rewarding were hard to come by this year.

7. JCVD – Quite possibly the best foreign film of the year, also one of the most unexpectedly endearing portraits of a larger than life man struggling to just be human in an inhumane world.

6. Son of Rambow – Since I didn’t see “Slumdog Millionaire” yet, this is the requisite feel good crowd pleaser of the bunch. This tale of two kids trying to stage their own version of Rambo is a testament to the magic that even the most mediocre of movies holds.

5. Role Models – By turns equally crude and unexpectedly touching, David Wain’s comedy doesn’t expect laughs to come easy. Every emotion this film creates is earned by an able cast and a tight script.

4. Wall – E – It is hard to get people in this day and age to care about a main character that doesn’t even speak so much as he squeaks and grunts, but Pixar has created undoubtedly their best movie to date and redeemed themselves for “Cars”.

3. The Dark Knight-So many people attack this movie now during its (perhaps unavoidable) backlash by saying that it isn’t what a superhero movie should be. I secretly envision these people going home and watching “The Phantom” every night before jerking off into a sock. It stays true to the source material in tone (if not too much in story) and manages to work as something better than a super hero movie. It is the best crime saga in years.

2. Tropic Thunder – I didn’t expect this from Ben Stiller. Or anyone in the cast for that matter. Still has created the most vitrollic representation of Hollywood in quite some time. Even the gags that don’t work seem to be part of the whole point, and the performances are across the board awesome.

1. I doubt I have seen it yet. Seeing as my budget was pretty tight both over the summer and now, there is a list of films that I sadly have yet to see. I am very lax to call any of these films the best of the year and I ultimately feel guilty naming “Tropic Thunder” as the across the board champion. If I see one of the films on the list to take the title, I will be sure to update this, but for now, I am at a loss.

Worst Films of 2008

10. Jumper – A petulant Hayden Christiansen jumps around moping and bitching while Samuel L. Jackson continues his rapid descent to Shatnerville.

9. Fool's Gold- Easily the most overly plotted movie of the year. I actually saw this piece of shit twice. Don’t ask me why. Both times were voluntary. I am so ashamed.

8. Untraceable – It’s like “The Net” and “Feardotcom” had an unholy demon of a child. Co-starring Colin Hanks!

7. 21-The most implausible blockbuster of the year full of scenery chewing and listless direction to reel any of this in.

6. Chapter 27-Jared Leto gets fat for the sake of getting fat and no one gave a shit. I hope you enjoy the gout you got trying to play Mark David Chapman. Your inept stab in the dark to try for respectability just got you blown off the screen by your co-star Lindsay Lohan, who was actually the only decent thing about this piece of shit.

5. Speed Racer-I couldn’t finish watching this movie. It was pretty terrible based on the half that I did see. I felt drunk, high, and about to die the entire time. It is only number 5 on this list because a movie with this much crazy shit going on has to count for something.

4. Smart People-This is the indiest movie to ever indie itself to indietown. Everyone in this movie is such a cliché and so utterly loathsome that you don’t give a shit about what happens to them from the opening frame. Never before has such a talented cast gone down with their material so hard.

3. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor-Both a guilty pleasure and undeniably horrible at the same time. I could write a book about just how risible this movie is. It is only number 3 because I actually plan on showing it to people as a double bill with “Troll 2” to illustrate just how cathartic a shitty movie can be for the soul.

2. Twilight-It’s the fluorescents. I’m sure of it. It’s science.

1. The Love Guru – Easily the most unfunny movie of this or any year since Carrot Top shat out “Chairman of the Board”.

New (Hidden) Clues

You are supposed to sip it, not chug it.

I need to party with you more often.

I knew what you wanted the entire night.

I wasn't drinking to forget, but there was no amount of alcohol that could make this night go away.

I hope your career is nice.

Fucking vampires.

Test Patterns

Due to both technical and personal issues, hip-hop week and all blogs for this week have been postponed until next week. Check back then for all the excitement!

Because You Want to Book Club #16: "The Glass Castle"

I like to think I know a thing or two about living through an impecunious childhood, but Jeanette Walls has effectively taught me that I don’t know as much about storytelling as I think I do. Her memoir, “The Glass Castle”, is a book of style and grace in the face of sometimes overwhelming and unforeseen setbacks. To say I admire her achievements would be an understatement. “The Glass Castle” is the most powerful memoir I have read in years.

Jeanette and her older sister and younger brother have had a rootless childhoods. Their mother was an old school hippy who didn’t believe in rules, discipline, or even really caring about or for her children in the slightest and was often cold and cruel towards them. Their father was a brilliant, but mentally damaged self-taught man with delusions of finding gold and building a glass castle for his family to live it. He also had a hair trigger temper and battled the bottle at every turn. Their father couldn’t keep a job longer than a few months and their mother refused to do anything other than work on her art projects at home. As such, they constantly moved to avoid paying overdue rent or to avoid creditors. The book starts the family out in the desert mining towns of the Southwest where they moved at such an alarming rate that making friends turned out to be impossible. From there they moved to West Virginia where things grew far worse and the were poorer than ever before. But as things got worse, the resiliency of the children grew, as did the bond between them. It wasn’t that their parents didn’t love them, because Jeanette is quick to point out that they did; they were just emotionally stunted human beings. One by one the kids all left for New York City and their parents followed despite being completely homeless. Jeanette had created such a life for herself away from her family that she was mortally embarrassed upon seeing her mother digging through dumpsters.

I have never had siblings and I was never homeless as a child surrounded by family, but in terms of what it is like to be poor, homeless, alone, and ashamed of what your family has done to you, I can relate entirely. No other memoir has ever come close to the power of “The Glass Castle”. The story unfolds in a series of brief vignettes that come together as a spectacular whole. Walls writes in a clear and matter of fact tone. Things happened the way they did and Walls never questions them for a second or wonders how she could have changed it or what would have happened otherwise. The facts are there in front of her and that is more than enough. Walls has written the quintessential book of dysfunctional family dynamics and no one since Judith Guest’s fictional “Ordinary People” has ever come close.

Grade: A+. A must read.

Appetite for Destruction #3: Mash-up Meatballs

This is an amalgamation of four different recipes for sweet and sour meatballs. Why is it is combination of four recipes, you ask? Because every single time I try to make sweet and sour meatballs there is always at least four or five ingredients in any given recipe that I just don’t have and at least one of them is almost so headscratchingly obscure or unusual unless you happen to be a gourmand or are independently wealthy. Meatballs are a no brainer of a meal. At their basest you need ground meat, breadcrumbs, and an egg. That is it. The good news is that this recipe is kind of a “choose your own adventure”. There is no wrong way to do it, but you can keep experimenting until you find what flavours work best for you. It can even be made vegetarian, if you want. Anything goes! This won’t be a normal recipe set up either. It will take you through the different ingredient choices before going into the directions.

First you need some sort of meat. 1 ½ lbs. of ground hamburger, lamb, turkey, or fake veggie meat. You can even use a combination of any of those. Avoid ground chicken because it is the most useless ground meat known to mankind.

Second, choose some veggies. Carrots, onions, celery, peppers. Choose at least two of each and chop them into bite size pieces.

Third, choose a type of broth. Chicken or Vegetable work best. Beef broth is OK, but it will throw off the “sweet and sour” part of the dish and add a strong flavour that some people might like, but is too salty for my liking and I think makes everything taste like beef jerky. You will need roughly six cups of broth; 5 for now and 1 or possibly more for later.

Fourth, you need to choose a fruit to add sweetness. Your best bets are oranges, pineapples, apricots, or peaches. If you go the fresh route, prepare the fruit accordingly in a food processor or just mash it up as best you can. If you want a much easier and just as tasty way, buy some jam or marmalade, NOT jelly. Either way, you need about ¼ cup of whatever you decide to use. Dried fruit definitely does not work for this.

Fifth, and this is easy, choose any spices you want that taste good to you. You can’t screw it up, per say, but just use what you think you can handle.

Now that this is all sorted out, you need either a large pot that can go safely on both a range top and in the oven or a casserole dish that can safely do the same, but those are quite expensive and hard to come by. If you only have a pot with plastic handles, make sure you have a casserole dish for the oven to transfer everything into at some point. You also need a large bowl to make the meatballs in.

With all of that out of the way, here are the only ingredients that can not be substituted:

-2 Cups of tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes (one cup for the meatballs and one cup for the sauce)

-1 egg, beaten well (If going vegetarian, use ¼ cup plain soy milk, but you may need more since meatballs require a binding agent and the low fat content of fake meat can be hard to work with sometimes.)

-1 Cup of bread crumbs, finely crushed croutons, or rock hard stale bread that has been broken up and finely crushed

-Something to serve the meatballs on. Rice or couscous works best. Pasta, not so much. This can be prepared at any time according to the box directions, but instead of using water, substitute whatever broth you used for added flavour.

Directions

-In your pot, prepare the sauce first. Bring to a boil the broth and vegetables. Add some salt and pepper to taste. Once boiling, cover, reduce heat, and allow to simmer while you prepare the meatballs.
-Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
-In a bowl combine meat, egg, bread crumbs, one cup tomato sauce, and any spices you want. Mix it all together by hand until well combined and form meatballs about two inches in diameter.
-Carefully place meatballs in the broth and bring it back to a boil. Once boiling again, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 15 minutes.
-When the 15 minutes are up, stir in your fruit and the remaining cup of tomato sauce. Stir until the sauce seems to have blended into the broth.
-Either transfer the broth and meatballs to a casserole dish or place the pot uncovered into the oven for 35 minutes. If you can’t fit everything in your casserole dish or it will surely boil over, carefully ladle some of the broth out and save it since it makes a great base for soup.
-When done, serve over rice or couscous.

Three New Polls in Honour of Hip-Hop Week

In honour of my special hip-hop theme next week, I offer you three reader’s choice polls. Hip-hop seems to be a polarising subject. People seem to love it, hate it, hate to love it, or love to hate it. Sadly, at times I fall into all those categories, which is why I am leaving it up to you, the reader, to decide the next subjects for the time capsule movie blog, the next career I look at, and a special encore for my Diddiology series.

First, as many of you know, I ran the last time capsule blog poll for the past two weeks and stated that the top two vote getters would be covered. I also said there would be a run-off if there was a tie. First place, with a decisive victory, was Snoop Dogg’s 2001 horror film “Bones”. There was a three way tie for second place, but since I have not been able to procure a usable copy of “Rappin’” it will now be up to the readers to decide if the final film will be “Judgment Night” or “Tales from the Hood”. You have until next Thursday to place your vote. Here are the trailers once again to refresh your memory:

Judgment Night

Tales from the Hood

The next career I will focus on (akin to my study of Ben Stiller) will focus on rapper-actors and look at both the music they made as well as the films they have starred in. Since Will Smith and Ice-T will have pieces written about them already, here are your four choices. Voting in this poll will go on until Wednesday.

Busta Rhymes- He hasn’t been in very many (good) movies and his recording output varies in quality to an almost alarming degree, but even at his worst Busta handles himself well and usually comes out on top no matter what the case. Even in terrible movies or in guest spots on terrible albums, Busta is usually the M.V.P. His career retrospective will run from his early days as a member of the Leaders of the New School to his current works on Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records.

DMX- This man is bat shit crazy and kind of an asshole. OK, so he is a major asshole, but it hasn’t stopped him from putting out a couple of decent hard-as-hell albums, some astoundingly cheesy/embarrassingly entertaining movies, and one god awful book. His analysis will not only include pop-culture references, but a look at the man himself in his days starting out as Dark Man X up to his long gestating (and possibly unlistenable) album in the works with Dr. Dre at the helm.

Ice Cube- Out of all the choices this week, Cube probably has the most prolific career. He started off as part of NWA, then moved on to a successful solo career, became a music video director, then an actor, then a writer, a producer, and a feature film director. The man has pretty much done it all and never cared about anyone’s feathers being ruffled in the process. From the birth of NWA and the tumult that followed to his recent successes and failures on the silver screen, Cube has a résumé to be reckoned with both inside the hip-hop community and out.

Tupac Shakur- You will find no conspiracy theories if I cover Tupac’s career because they are all pretty ludicrous. This will strictly be a look at a man who had a huge heart, but was also quite paradoxical. Tupac was undoubtedly one of the best young rappers and best young actors at the time of his death. His early days before he went hardcore will be discussed as well as the wealth of turgid posthumous releases that for the most part Tupac never wanted released to begin with. There will also be a discussion about the documentary “Tupac: Resurrection” and personal reflections from a man who lived and breathed everything Tupac.

Finally, I had no idea going in exactly what I had started when I began dissecting the videos of Sean Combs. Diddiology was far and away the most popular series I have debuted in the blog thus far. My take on the rock remix of “All About the Benjamins” is the only blog I have written with hundreds of hits, with the other Diddy entries not far behind. They have been the majority of the blogs I have received emails about. It is with that in mind that I have decided to do an encore as a way of extending my thanks to you for all the support. Now it is up to the readers to decide which of these seven songs (all viewable online and briefly described here) will close out the show for good. There can be only one and there will not be another one after this. This poll only runs until Monday, so be sure to vote early on this one.

“I’ll Be Missing You” (Featuring Faith Evans and 112)- I will be honest and up front about this song. I just don’t want to cover it. Yes, it is a bad song. Yes, it is now more recognisable than the Police song it samples. Yes, the video is pretty bad. I have been avoiding it because it has been stomped on enough and it is the only time when I haven’t actually doubted Puffy’s sincerity. But, a lot of the emails I receive ask me when I am going to cover this song, so if the people will it I have to suck it up and play it like a band sick of playing their greatest hit.

“P.E. 2000”- I largely avoided Diddy’s 1999 album “Forever” because even the three singles were pretty forgettable. This odd choice for a first single samples Public Enemy and included Flava Flav in the video alongside wind chimes, house music, an extended dance sequence, and sets so stock for a Diddy video that it looks like he reused half of them.

“Satisfy You” (Featuring R. Kelly)- What could be more unsettling than anything featuring R. Kelly? The fact that all the sexual innuendo in this NSFW video comes from the vocally stunted Diddy. Kelly doesn’t even do much. The beat is also lifted from a song only four years older than this and was originally about smoking a shit load of weed.

“Best Friend”- Diddy made an entire gospel album and then shelved the whole thing without ever saying why. This song (featuring Mario Winans) found its way onto the “Victory” album as the only survivor.

“I Need a Girl (Parts 1 and 2)” (Part 1 featuring Usher and Loon and Part 2 Featuring Mario Winans, Ginuwine, and Loon)- Let’s all take some relationship advice from Diddy with this two part song with two very different tones and videos. Part one is the more soulful and sad on about losing what you love and part two is the angry part about moving on. Neither is very good except for Usher’s contributions.

“Come to Me” (Featuring Nicole Scherzinger)- I know one of the other gripes some readers had was that I never touched on Diddy’s newest album “Press Play” and after having revisited the three choices that appear on this list, I wish I had. This video seems more of a showcase for the former Pussycat Doll because Diddy looks fucking ridiculous; dancing with both a toothpick and a hideous grill in his mouth wit one of the worst verses in recorded history.

“Last Night” (Featuring Keyshia Cole)- Diddy actually tries singing (!!!) over a new wave Casio beat I could have made when I was six. Worst of all, Cole does him absolutely no favours.

“Tell Me” (Featuring Christina Aguilera)- Diddy ruins a killer beat and a perfectly awesome Christina Aguilera song simply by showing up and opening his mouth. His rhymes here hearken back to “Come With Me” only sped up. Through it all, however, Aguilera wipes the floor with him (or the wind tunnels as it were).

Movie Time Capsule Blog #14: "North"

Sometimes the dregs of Sunday afternoon television give you an opportunity that is just too juicy to pass up. The hours between noon and four are usually reserved for sporting events or at least fishing shows. If a network doesn’t have that, they will often pad out their schedule with infomercials and sitcom reruns. Sometimes, ever so rarely, these stations will dig into their vaults and pull out the most petrified turd to their shelves and release it on an unsuspecting public because they were just flat out of things to show.

I didn’t even know what the movie I was about to watch was going to be. The satellite program guide simply said “movie” and gave no information whatsoever. I had missed the first five minutes of the movie, but when it was back from commercial break I knew within five seconds what it was. I had seen this evil before and stared into its cold black heart. I slowly got up off the couch and put the remote down; backing away from the television and couch as if there were a large, rabid animal in front of me. Without looking behind me I calmly told Marilyn I was going to go watch television in her room.

“Why are you going to watch it in my room? I mean, you can, but you can watch it down here. I’m not paying attention to it at all.”

“Because even if you aren’t paying attention to it, I don’t want to subject you to this. No one should have to be subjected to this.”

“So why the heck are you going to watch it?”

“It’s my thing.” I kicked the notebook off the edge of the table and into my hands as if it were a shotgun, grabbed it and cocked the pen in my hand, ready as ever for a movie I have wanted to write about but haven’t had a second chance to view until now. “It’s what I do.”

I dashed up the stairs to looks of puzzlement and confusion. As I ascended the stairs and made my way to the master bedroom, a famous quote filled my ears with a combination of dread and adrenaline:

“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

I turned the television on and a chill once again ran down my spine as if the spectre of death itself was right there in the room with me. There are a reason embarrassments like this aren’t put out on DVD, I told myself. I leaned back and readied myself for a movie I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I didn’t care for it much then, but I didn’t think it was as bad as Roger Ebert said it was. I haven’t had the chance to watch it since I read the review and after having seen his review on his show. No video stores ever seemed to carry it; not even the one I worked at in the late 90s. It was never released on DVD and I had never once seen it played on television. I can never find it online and it was never popular enough with anyone to spark bidding wars on eBay. I could only find three clips of it through exhaustive online searching: the trailer, which I lost the link to, but you can find at videodetective.com or through a Google search, a brief musical number that someone deranged enough liked enough to upload, and the infamous television version of the infamous review. Here it was in front of me. The unidentified movie was Rob Reiner’s “North,” a 1994 movie so terrible it seemingly inspired rage blackouts in anyone over the age of 18.

Anyone who fawns over the filmography of Rob Reiner is a moron and you should immediately run in the opposite direction if they ever start talking about him while using the phrases “genius” or “auteur” to describe him. The man has only made 14 movies in his career, and while some of them are really great movies (“Stand By Me”, “The American President”, “The Princess Bride”, “This is Spinal Tap”, and “A Few Good Men”), many more are either vastly overrated (“When Harry Met Sally”, “Misery”, “Ghosts of Mississippi”, and I will include “The Bucket List” here because a ton of people saw it, inexplicably like it in a “Patch Adams” sort of way that I can’t fucking stand) or completely unwatchable (“The Story of Us”, “Alex and Emma”, “Rumor Has It”, and today’s subject). His best movies weren’t even good because he was the one directing them. The directing in all these movies is rudimentary and serves only to move an amazing story with an amazing cast along at an adequate pace. “North” was seemingly the beginning of the end for the former actor turned director, but on paper it certainly didn’t look like it at the time. “North” has a cast that could rival most epics made in Hollywood’s golden age, and everyone involved can thank Reiner for making a movie so toxic Columbia Pictures (and probably Reiner’s own company Castle Rock Entertainment) have seemingly quarantined it for so long. Today, security has seemingly been breached.

“North”, also the name of the main character, was Elijah Wood’s first role as a lead and I can see why someone would take it other than for the money. North is a great kid who excels at everything he attempts. He gets straight As. He is a star on the baseball diamond. He can even act and sing. Any parent on the face of the planet would be thrilled to have a son like North, right?

Wrong, North’s parents are too self-absorbed to realise what a wonderful son they have. North’s mother, played by Julia Louis Dreyfuss, is a cartographer too interested in travelling the world to care about anything else. His father, played by Jason Alexander, is pants inspector number six and spends all his time complaining about his job and how he was passed over for a promotion. They never listen to their son and hardly ever acknowledge his existence.

North’s malaise begins to spill over into every aspect of his day to day life. He forgets the simplest lines in school plays and starts walking numerous batters in a row. One day, he just walks out of a baseball game and goes to his own “secret spot”; the one place that everyone has where they know they can be alone. North’s just happens to be a large leather recliner in a mall department store. He goes there because he knows that while other parents love him and everything he does; by sitting in this chair he knows he looks no different than any other kid waiting for his parents to finish their shopping.

While in his chair, the Easter bunny sits down next to him and tells him when the world is going to end. No wait, that was a metaphysical movie that I hate infinitely more than this movie. It is just a man in an Easter bunny suit, played by Bruce Willis, who sits next to North to eat a carrot (ha-ha) and ask North what was eating him up. The Easter Bunny tells North that out of everything in life you can’t pick who your parents are and that it isn’t like a baseball team where you can declare yourself a free agent. Up until this moment, roughly fifteen minutes or so in, “North” is still not a bad movie, but any good will you might have up until this point will just lure you into a false sense of confidence.

North decides to emancipate himself from his parents and find new ones that will actually appreciate him for the prised child he knows he is. He is aided in his quest by a lawyer he literally meets while chasing ambulances, played by Jon Lovitz, and the editor of his school’s newsletter, a weasly looking kid with slicked back hair named Winchell (ha-ha) and played by a thoroughly annoying Matthew McCurley.

When North’s parents find out he is leaving them, they become paralysed and can’t defend themselves at their own custody hearing. The judge, played by an Al Pacino channelling Alan Arkin in the worst performance he has ever given, has no choice but to award the case to North, but adds the stipulation that North must be in the arms of his new parents (literally) by noon on Labour Day or he will be remanded to an orphanage.

Thus begins North’s whirlwind adventure across the world, but mainly staying in Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii because Reiner and writer Alan Zweibel (a former “Saturday Night Live” head writer and author of the novel “North” was based on. The novel is also long since out of print and wasn’t very good either) think these are the funniest places in the union to stereotype. It is at this point that “North” ceases to be cute and panders to some of the most outright ignorant, lazy, and in some cases outright racist stereotypes ever committed to film. I have talked to some people who say “North” is as bad as “Song of the South”, but since I haven’t seen Disney’s infamous film, I can’t agree or disagree with that statement.

The first family North visits with are a pair of Texan something-or-others played by Dan Aykroyd, in the worst performance of his career and that says a lot since he has starred in some shitty movies, including one where he had a penis for a nose, and Reba McEntire, in the worst performance of her career. Apparently, the love everything big because they are from Texas! You know how those Texans love everything big! You know how they love to shout! You know how they all live on ranches and are so gosh darn excited about everything it all sounds like they have an exclamation point after every statement they make! Yee-hah! North leaves them because they are trying to fatten him up and make him look like their son who had been trampled to death by a pack of longhorns. They tell this to North over the course of a musical number that has backup dancers ready and at the waiting. North talks to a ranch hand, played by Bruce Willis doling out more sage advice, and he decides to leave for his next destination.

Back home, Winchell and Lovitz are scheming of how to frame this new revolution that North has started. North has set a dangerous precedent and children everywhere are using it as leverage against their parents. There is all of a sudden talk about lowering the voting age to seven and having Lovitz run for president. I don’t know how the hell Winchell does it, but he makes enough money to buy a swanky new office in a Manhattan high rise even though being the leader of a revolution partnered with a piss poor attorney doesn’t earn you any money, but whatever, it will all make sense at the end which I am going to spoil mercilessly when I get there.

The second family North visits is in Hawaii, where everything is made of grass and straw and everyone hula dances. Not even Adam Sandler’s “50 First Dates” portrayed Hawaii in such a stereotypical light. North is the guest of the Ho’s, the governor of Hawaii and his wife who is apparently “the only barren land” in the whole state. How witty is that? Everyone on the island is asinine and has stereotypical names; they are all topless perfectly tanned males, female dancers, or fire twirlers. Mr. Ho even tells North he will live longer because of the difference in time zones. North actually like the Ho’s and wants to stay until he finds out he is just a ploy to bring tourists to Hawaii, which apparently has no self esteem and is still pissed about Hands Across America not reaching that far. That is not me being flippant. That is exactly the reason why Mr. Ho puts North’s bare ass on a billboard like he is the Coppertone girl while getting his shorts pulled down by an octopus. Elijah Wood seems like he is going to crack up in this scene because every other word he has to say in his exasperation is “crack.” Bruce Willis turns up as a beachcomber, delivers some sage advice, and North leaves.

The third family... I need a minute on this one. It is now hours after I have seen the movie, but I am about to get into how hateful and wrongheaded this movie truly is. I will try not to let my anger get in the way of this one, but I make no guarantees.

The third family are Eskimos. When North’s plane lands in Juneau, it skids all the way to Anchorage because apparently Alaska is made entirely of ice. Right. North arrives in town on a dogsled and is led into a commune of igloos that look and act exactly like the huts on “The Flintstones” right down to even having garage door openers. Kathy Bates, in not so much a bad performance but one where she wisely blends into the background, greets her prospective son with hot chocolate and “their state dish” and Eskimo Pie. Every piece of clothing has caribou, polar bears, and penguins on it (even though there are no penguins in Alaska, but as I said, it will all make sense at the end). Alaskan Christmas is the best because his dad tells him it lasts for three months because of the amount of sunlight they get. As if the puns weren’t bad enough, it just gets worse.

Apparently these people fish in their living room while whistling the theme to “The Andy Griffith Show”, and it is now that I realise that this movie is filled with nothing but references to old television shows. Every scene has included some theme of some sort from “Bonanza” to “Hawaii Five-O”. Anyway, they stop fishing when North’s prospective father realises it is time to kill Grandpa. Apparently, it is an Eskimo custom to send old people out on ice flows when they reach a certain age just so they can drift out to sea and die “with grace and dignity”. The most ironic part of this was that I saw this movie on the Aboriginal People’s Television Network, who of all the stations out there should have known better.

When was this movie made? 1929? There is no excuse for such a joke in such poor taste handled so stupidly that not even a single shred of it is funny in any way. The grandfather is played by Abe Vigoda, who really is just biding his time until he dies in real life since everyone seems to think he is dead already, and he is set out carelessly on an ice flow with nothing but a stool (some people have recliners and T.V. sets on theirs) and they shove him out to sea without giving a shit and never question it again. No one grieves for a second because the script tells them not to. It is all a fucking joke. North decides to leave Alaska not because it is unsettling but because time has moved by so quickly that Labour Day is one week away (the walk to the ocean took seven weeks and North was too stupid to notice, apparently) and he still has other families to visit. Bruce Willis shows up as the driver of a sled piloted by caribou delivers some sage advice, and North is off again.

The next few families are only briefly glimpsed because the movie seems to have blown all its inspiration and well thought out hatred on the three previous families. There is the Amish family where the parents are played by the same people who played the parents in “Witness” who constantly use “thy”, “thine”, and “art” and have an endless field of kids with only two names: Ezekiel and Art. North makes a joke about needing a butter churner and books it out of there. North walks out on being a Chinese emperor because he doesn’t want a haircut. North goes to Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) where everyone is naked and he thinks he won’t get any work done from staring at his surrogate mother’s naked chest. In Paris, his parents smoke and wear berets while laughing at Jerry Lewis movies that are on every single channel. This is a movie that if it gets out could start wars. I sure as shit hoped no one watched it other than me today.

North’s parents are still frozen in shock and are purchased by Ben Stein (no stranger to hate filled mediocrity these days) and placed in the Smithsonian as exhibits. Just wanted to throw that out there so you don’t forget amongst all the ruckus that North has actual parents. The emotional blackmail by children against their parents continues and North’s face is now on Mount Rushmore.

The last family on North’s trip is a white bread suburban family from Upstate New York. They are normal in every way and the movie doesn’t once make a joke about them. The father is John Ritter, a doctor so gosh darn nice that he still makes house calls. The stay at home mother is played by Faith Ford. They have two kids, one boy and a girl played by Scarlett Johansen in her film debut. They even have a shaggy but loveable dog. Everything seems perfect, but North feels that something is still missing.

In a bid to get their son back, North’s parents cozy up to Winchell upon waking up and cut a video for North to watch in which they tell him how much they love him and want a second chance. In typical journalist fashion, Winchell asks leading questions and edits the video to make it seem like his parents aren’t really even upset about him missing. When North watches the video in his new, idyllic home, he doesn’t decide to stay despite the fact that these parents seem to be the nicest people alive. Instead, North runs off to New York City to simply disappear and never be heard from again. This is an idea that is completely stupid for so many reasons that I think you can figure out on your own, but apparently no one bothered to tell Zweibel, Reiner, or the cast.

Winchell is furious upon hearing that his plans to get North a new family are falling through. If North were to go back to his loving family, all that Winchell had worked so hard to attain (?) would be lost. Winchell decides that the best way to combat North’s unknowing insubordinance is to have either the parents who hate him or the kids who don’t want him to return home to kill him and make him a martyr. At what point did anyone involved in the making of this film think that any of this was entertaining? How the hell did anyone think this was uplifting family fare? It doesn’t help that in the villain category, Lovitz simply doesn’t give a shit and seems to be reading his lines as if he were doing an animated show and he might even think he is invisible. As for McCurley as Winchell, he might not be able to act as well as the rest of the cast, but he is effective. I cringed every time I saw him on screen and wanted someone to desperately punch him in the face, remind him that he is twelve and put a stop to not just the revolution, but this whole God forsaken movie.

After being chased through Central Park in the middle of the night while getting shot at, North meets up with a “deep throat” like character named Adam who worked as the camera man for the doctored video shoot. Adam is the only black person outside of The Congo in the entire movie unless you count his father who admonishes him to floss in the middle of a montage. Adam gives North the unedited footage because North was always nice to him and always treated him well. This could have been a scene that actually works, but Reiner stages it as an Abbott and Costello routine and ends the scene with pointless sentimentality because we have no clue just who the fuck Adam is to begin with. The first thing North does when he gets the tape instead of immediately running again is to stop and buy a hot dog. Needless to say, it is only a matter of time before he starts getting shot at again.

North keeps running before jumping in the back of a delivery truck (because they totally drive around New York City in the middle of the night with the doors open) while getting shot at. North drops his hat and it is covered in some red goo that Wichell’s inept goon-for-hire thinks is blood. For all the villains know, North has been shot in the head. In reality, it is borscht. Since an average child that would be taken to this movie has no clue what borscht is, we are treated to a long monologue delivered by Winchell that spells out what it is in painful detail.

The delivery truck pulls up to some sort of convention being held by A.S.A.P., the Association of Smoke Alarm People, and who should be providing the dreadful stand up routine for this crowd, but Bruce Willis. By this point, you might be thinking Willis is some sort of guardian angel character, and even by this point you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but as I said before, when we get to the end it will all make sense. Willis conveniently has a VCR in his dressing room and lets North view it because he totally needs to see if his new gadget works and then when Willis gives North a ride to the airport to go home, he doesn’t even take it with him. Willis delivers some sage advice about not going to Miami in August because your balls will stick to your thighs and leaves.

The staff at the airport refuse to let North on the plane because all of the newspapers have front page stories saying that North is dead and they just can’t take the chance that he is not a zombie. Conveniently, a bunch of kids he went to school with just happen to be at JFK airport and they all notice they the flight he wants to get on goes back home to his real parents. Instead of getting on the flight that they should be boarding and be content that North will never make it home in time, they chase him through the terminal and try to kill him. North escapes in a FedEx truck driven by... oh what’s the fucking point anymore. Willis delivers some product placement for FedEx, tells North to get in a box, and when North arrives at his parent’s house (two hours later than the package should have arrived) the driver has changed. It used to be so simple to ship small children overnight back then.

Winchell is waiting for North when he gets home and tells him that his parents are at his secret spot in the mall. North only has ten minutes to get over there. The only satisfying point of this half of the movie comes when you think Wood is going to beat the shit out of McCurley, but it never happens. At least they allow North to slightly curse like a normal human being probably would.

Meanwhile, back the furniture store, North’s parents wait anxiously and Arkin is back with an obnoxious countdown clock that every such scene should have. North just barely makes it there with seconds to spare. After all, the ridiculous stipulation states that North has to be in the arms of both parents at noon and neither of them could go and try to meet him half way there. Just as North runs through the store in slow motion, jumping through the air to the loving arms of his family, we see the same incompetent goon lying in wait with a gun; the gun goes off and...

North wakes up in his favourite chair in the store. It was all a dream! None of this ever happened. He fell asleep in the mall after the baseball game he walked out on.

If the movie itself is dreadful, unfunny, and structurally unsound, the ending shows just what an enormous piece of shit this movie really was. The ending is oddly enough what many of this film’s defenders (yeah, there are a few here and there on the internet) cite as defence of the rest of the movie. While I do give the movie some credit for giving us some clues that the movie was heading in this direction (Willis always popping up everywhere, the music and character names from television shows, its utter incoherence), the ending makes this an even more hateful movie. By making it all a dream, all you have done is show that North is a racist sociopath. North, this supposedly perfect kid who is smarter than almost anyone on Earth, dreamed up all these broad stereotypes because that is really what he thinks is true about the rest of the world. Also, the laziest thing you can do to any story (other than adding narration, which this movie also has and is provided by, you guessed it, Bruce Willis) is to end it by saying it was all a dream. It shows either that you had no plot to begin with, had nothing to say, or that you went in without knowing how it was going to end and you let the story get too far away from you to pull it back. Willis gives North a ride home delivers one last piece of sage advice, and leaves. North’s parents greet him at the door and finally show some sort of concern and emotion.

Clearly, this movie didn’t kill anyone’s career with its toxicity. People would have to have seen it to really kill their careers, but its $40 million budget (none of which ever appears on screen) it led Castle Rock Entertainment to temporarily declare bankruptcy before being bought by New Line Cinema. Wood has moved on quite nicely and never looked back and Willis has always had major failures just roll right off his back as if he is coated in Teflon. Willis is pretty remarkable like that. Zweibel occasionally pops up every now and then to write a script for something. The person who seemed to fare the worst was Reiner and while his career is still going strong (“The Bucket List” was his most successful film since before “North” was made), it has never fully recovered.

One has to really wonder what Reiner and Zweibel though the audience for this movie was and how the hell they thought they were pleasing anyone with this movie. It is far too dark and stereotypical to take any child to see it (even I saw it alone in a theatre with four other people) and no adult could possibly take anything on screen seriously because anyone who has up to a grade nine education would know that this movie is complete bullshit. The jokes are lazy and groan inducing. Both times I saw this movie I didn't laugh a single time. In closing, and if you didn’t want to read this entire review, here is the Siskel and Ebert clip where they discuss their hatred for this movie. Both of them said it was the worst movie of 1994, and Ebert still maintains it is one of the worst films he has ever seen in his life. It has clips from the movie, so if you need to see what I am talking about, feel free.

Verdict: Best Left Forgotten

Because You Want to Book Club #15: "Mom, Have You Seen My Leather Pants?"

Growing up in the shadow of the Sunset Strip during the hair metal (or glam metal, if you prefer) craze must have been quite an experience. Television writer Craig Williams tries his best to document his not so meteoric rise to minimal success with his high school metal band Onyxxx (the extra xs added because the rap group threatened legal action and then an all female metal band from Texas insisted they had the rights to use two xs), but for all the humorous anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book, it ultimately falls flat on its face.

“Pants” tells the story of four friends Craig (guitar and backing vocals), Tyler (vocals), Sonny (bass and keyboards), and Kyle (drums) who worshiped the ground that bands like Motley Crue and Guns N Roses walked upon and dreamed of following in their footsteps. They weren’t tremendously talented, but they had something a lot of people liked. They had an amazing sense of style, and quite often near the end of the glam metal heyday, that was enough to get by.

Onyxxx (formerly known as Devolution, both names chosen by Craig randomly out of books) played all the big houses on the Strip by the end of their short career together. They were simply too young and inexperienced in the end to keep on adequately rocking in the free world, and this book tell their ups and downs; from signing breasts and sneaking into strip clubs to line up changes, in-fighting, and botched shows all while trying to complete their class work.

The story at the heart of “Pants” is a good one and parts of the book play like great scenes from a movie, but when reading a book about it, you expect to learn more about the people involved. Craig might not remember much about what happened now, but he really doesn’t make any attempts to fill in the gaps with details. The book rushes along at almost too fast of a pace. Granted, this isn’t a plot heavy book, but in the end I didn’t feel much richer for the experience. What Williams has included in the book is good, but it hints at something much better just below the surface. Maybe a bit more background into the scene at the time which was absolutely fascinating but only gets cursory references here and there would add something to the mixture. This is a book that is, like a good album, devoid of any filler, but as such it also feels very forced. It would probably make a better movie than a book.

Grade: C-

Movie Time Capsule Blog #13: "Mac and Me"

“Mac and Me” is a movie that almost doesn’t belong in the movie time capsule blog since its infamy is boundless. Many writers more talented than I have taken shots at this movie over the years from “The Onion” to the writers of “Robot Chicken” to “Slate” and even Keith Buckley, the former English teacher and lead singer for Every Time I Die. If you have heard of it, my take on it probably won’t be much different. It is a terrible movie with little if anything to redeem its existence.

For a moment, let’s briefly talk about the movie “Mac and Me” so shamelessly borrows from. “E.T.” was a surprise blockbuster for three different reasons. The first is that it really isn’t standard Hollywood fare. The idea of a kid befriending an alien is so simple in itself that it’s hard to believe no one really thought of it before 1982. The fact that “E.T.” was ultimately a high drama with complex family dynamics driving the story ultimately makes it a tough sell for the average family crowd.

The second surprise of “E.T.” was its remarkable longevity. “E.T.” became the highest grossing film of all time (until “Jurassic Park” came out) because it was still showing in theatres three years after it was first released. The video wasn’t even made available until the late 1980s, allowing Universal to keep it in theatres for a long time with the occasional re-release and special screening. It wasn’t always the number one movie in the country, but it consistently made money week after week and seemingly never went away during the 80s.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “E.T.” was how infinitely marketable it turned out to be. If Spielberg and company made the movie a blockbuster of great substance, wit, and heart, the Universal Studios marketing and licensing team made the film iconic. E.T. might have been pretty ugly (and I certainly thought so as a child; shunning the life size stuffed alien I had as a baby. I even ripped one of his eyes out because he was freaking me out.), but he was everywhere including sleepwear, fast food, the candy aisle, and as star of what was arguably one of the worst video games in recorded history. “E.T.” was a cash cow not seen since the original “Star Wars”.

Studios from Disney (with “Flight of the Navigator”) to the lowliest of indie studios (Trimark’s abysmal low-budget “Star Kid”) tried to recreate the “E.T.” formula with middling to dismal success. Audiences for once didn’t care to see the same movie again because not only did Spielberg get it right the first time, but people no longer wanted the marketing thrust in their faces as blatantly as it was with “E.T.” After that and “Star Wars” people started to get burnt out, and as bad as things are now, a quick look over at YouTube will show you that it was far, far worse back then. None of this, however, stopped producer R.J. Louis from creating one of the most indolent cash-in attempts ever committed to celluloid. It almost makes “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie” look subtle and nuanced by comparison. You would have thought that he would have learned his lesson not only after the waning marketing power of a successful franchise, but also from a much maligned movie released a year prior to “Mac and Me” that proved co-branding a motion picture and a product just doesn’t work: the much maligned “Million Dollar Mystery”.

“Million Dollar Mystery” was another egocentric cash grab from Dino DeLaurentis, a man who thought his ludicrous remake of “King Kong” and the unnecessary sequel “King Kong Lives” were the greatest movies ever made. “Mystery” was a movie that took a familiar template, in this case the reproduced to death plot of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, and tried to pass it off as fresh and original with the help of a corporately aided gimmick. Upon the release of “Million Dollar Mystery”, which features Glad Trash Bags shill and former “Happy Days” star Tom Bosley and a cast of “colourful” characters searching for four million dollars hidden somewhere in the United States in Glad brand trash bags, patrons were given lobby cards with DeLaurentis’ face plastered all over them giving them one hint as to where to find the last remaining million that isn’t found by the actors by the end of the film. The movie doesn’t give you any more clues; for those you have to buy Glad products. To this day the million has not been found leading many to believe that the whole thing was a scam, but others to keep searching for the money despite the contest being over since January of 1988.

The fact that this not-so-high profile failure almost killed DeLaurentis’ already fledgling career (he also produced former time capsule entries “Maximum Overdrive” and “Trick or Treat”) did not dissuade R.J. Louis from doing something similar in tone and cynicism. Louis, a former advertising executive who used to be in charge of McDonalds’ corporate accounts, created a spurious grafting of E.T.’s plot onto what was nothing more than an hour and a half commercial. Louis was instrumental in forming the Mac and Me Joint Venture Corporation: McDonalds and fellow megacorporation Coca-Cola teaming together for what they must have seen as a license to print money. The only problem was that Louis and company didn’t bother to focus on making anything that could even be considered a movie under the loosest of terms. “Mac and Me” is the motion picture equivalent of those Bugs Bunny and Tasmanian Devil dressed as Kriss Kross T-Shirts or decals of Calvin pissing on the corporate logo of a car manufacturer. It is a perversion so blatant and tasteless that had McDonalds and Coke been successful lawsuits would have and should still be filed. Oh, the wondrous loopholes of copyright law.

The plot of “Mac and Me” is almost the exact same as “E.T.” with only the dialog and plot showing just enough variations to avoid Spielberg’s outrage. A single mother named Janet (played by T.V veteran Christine Ebersole who looks like she could care less if she kept this job or not) is moving with her two sons to Los Angeles. Michael is the older, annoying tween who fluctuates wildly between being an ass and being the nicest guy you’ll ever meet and Eric, the younger brother who is confined to a wheelchair. Eric is played by Jade Callegory, a young man who has been in a wheelchair almost his entire life thanks to the debilitating effects of spina bifida. Jade is now a successful portrait artist and photographer who still fields questions about “Mac and Me” to this day, but he neglects to mention his brief foray into acting anywhere on his website.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the desert a group of scientists have captured a family of aliens (mother, father, sister, and little boy) who have found their way to Earth from a far off planet that looks like the same desert they were found in where the survived by sucking a Coke-like liquid out of the ground with their faces. The family of aliens escapes the probing clutches of science by making all matter of electronic equipment go screwy and ‘splodey. The family hides out in the desert but Mac (the little one, not the big one, whose name means mysterious alien creature) gets away from them and makes his way to the big city.

Back in L.A. (if I had to die I couldn’t choose a better location), Eric has befriended his hippy like next door neighbour Debbie and her very un-hippy like sister Courtney, who not only works as McDonalds, but proudly wears the uniform in every single one of her scenes no matter how inappropriate it may be.

One day while playing in a backyard far too palatial for a single mother with two kids working at Sears (home of the McKids clothing line, y’all!) to afford, Eric loses control of his wheelchair and begins careening down a rocky hillside and off a cliff in one of the worst stunts ever committed to film. The dummy Macauly Culkin threw off an overpass in “The Good Son” looks way more convincing than the one used here and Culkin’s was made to look fake to begin with.

Naturally Mac, who followed the family home by secretly hitching a ride on the family’s van, is there to save Eric because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. I am amazed that I am this far into the blog and I haven’t mentioned how ugly the aliens look in this movie. They look like random shapes shoved into latex sacks and made to act like puppets.

In order to meet/trap Mac properly, Eric and Debbie leave a trail of Skittles and open cans of Coke to lure him close enough to suck him into a vacuum cleaner. We all know why they would use the Coke by now, but why the Skittles? There is no concrete proof that I can find on-line or in print, but it is a well known fact that M&M-Mars turned down Spielberg’s request to use M&M’s in “E.T.” and he went with Reese’s Pieces from Hershey’s instead. Mars, who make Skittles, probably saw the error of their ways and was now just glad to get anything. It should also be known that Coke backed out of product placement in “E.T.” as well and Pepsi was brought in.

Somehow in this movie’s magical 1980s universe, vacuums could suck up anything. I know from trying to suck my Hot Wheels off the floor when I was six that they just don’t work that way. Mac falls for the trap and we are treated to a scene even more ridiculous than the wheelchair scene in which the kids try to contain Mac in the bag that I wish I could show you but I don’t have it and can’t find it online. When the kids finally subdue Mac, Eric’s brother suggests they let Mac out by somehow throwing the vacuum in reverse and having it spit him out. When your movie rips off “Spaceballs” in the logic department, you are hopelessly fucked. Mac nearly dies from these shenanigans, but lo and behold Coke can bring the little guy back to life. Even though Coke is something like 90% water, Mac shuns it when it is offered. I could only wonder how he would have reacted to Cherry Coke or Sprite.

From this point in the movie on, Mac and Me” just becomes a race to see who will get to Mac first. The government sends faceless and nameless agents to try and get him back or kill him; their intentions are never all that clear. When Eric wants to go to a friend’s birthday party at (surprise, surprise) McDonalds, he figures he can’t leave Mac alone so for a seamless (meaning, completely fucking implausible) disguise Eric somehow finds a bear suit and tries to pawn Mac off to everyone as a toy. Actually, every scene in the movie just builds and builds on how ridiculous it is right up until the end, so it is worse than the wheelchair scene and the vacuum scene; worse than both of them combined. It is a scene that insults its audience so badly, you can see director and former Disney hack Stewart Raffill (who would follow this up with “Mannequin 2: On the Move”) and co-writer Steve Feke (who had a hand in version of “When a Stranger Calls” ever made) in the background with handfuls of cash, waving them around. This scene raises so many pointed questions. How come I have never once seen a dance contest break out at my local McDonalds? Who the fuck wears full football uniforms to dance contests at a McDonalds? Why the fuck is Mac dancing in a bear costume on the order counter and no one seems to give a shit or even look slightly annoyed? Did the makers of “The Wicker Man” remake take notes from this scene on how to successfully disguise Nicolas Cage? These and many questions will sadly remain unanswered even after you watch this clip as many times as I sadly have.

After narrowly escaping from the evil agents and a Sears, Mac and Eric manage to track down Mac’ family at a rural supermarket where the aliens are trying to shoplift Coke. A security guard tries to stop them by opening fire with a gun so large that no supermarket security guard would ever be allowed to carry. Pretty soon the entire cast except for Ronald McDonald arrive on the scene. The agents open fire and the entire supermarket explodes. That’s right. It bursts into a cataclysmic fireball with Eric and the aliens inside just from firing bullets at the building itself.

The aliens are not harmed in the attack, but Eric has died. He hasn’t been shot or burnt to a crisp; he’s just dead. The aliens being him back to life, but can’t give him the use of his fucking legs back and all of a sudden and without explanation the government grants the aliens a full pardon. At the film’s end, the entire alien family is sworn in as United States citizens and I’m not even entirely sure they wanted to be in the first place since all they can do is whistle and grunt. In the final shot of the movie the aliens drive (!) off into the Los Angeles mid-to-late afternoon with a cheesy looking lavender and orange though bubble coming from Mac’s head with the threat “We’ll be back!” Twenty years later, the sequel has not arrived. I guess they are just waiting on the right script.

“Mac and Me” is a vacuous black hole of ineptitude even without the product placement. None of it makes sense as a movie and it is the most annoying commercial I have ever seen that wasn’t for Axe Body Spray. It wasn’t even really bad enough to win the Golden Razzie award for worst picture in 1988. That distinction went to Tom Cruise’s god awful blockbuster “Cocktail,” but director Raffill won worst director and McDonald won worst new star. I guess parents simply drew the line at any more movies that didn’t try to hide the fact that they were just feature length commercials. After a decade of sub-par animated features based on toy lines parents couldn’t take it anymore. “Mac and Me” died a silent and painful death at the box office and most people involved in its making, including its distributor Orion pictures, rarely worked again after the mid-90s. For better of worse, the feel good Hollywood economics of the Regan era were over by this point.

“E.T.” was finally released on home video three moths after “Mac and Me” disappeared from theatres. Pepsi and Hershey’s had their tie-ins all set for one more round with a movie where the products told only an integral part of the story. They never drove the story or forced character motivation. Coca-Cola and McDonalds were left with hideous rubber suits and a movie only held in esteem by less discerning 80s nostalgia lovers and Conan O’Brien who plays the wheelchair scene every time Paul Rudd shows up on his show. Coca-Cola and McDonalds are far from poor and together they had more than enough money at their disposal to at least create a decent looking “E.T.” rip off, but they clearly seemed more intent on simply getting their product out there on the screen to even care about what was going on around it. These companies weren’t going bankrupt. They were never in any danger. So why does this movie reek of desperation? Why does it even exist? As a result of this movie’s failure, R.J. Louis never worked a day in advertising again. And neither did Mac.

Verdict: Best Left Forgotten

Because You Want to Book Club #14: "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History"

"Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History" was a book I had my eye on for quite some time, but always skipped over because I was already walking out of the library with large stacks of books and movies. A few weeks after I had noticed it, I finally picked it up. It hadn't moved from its spot atop the wall of the library's most recent social science acquisitions.

It wasn't until I got home that I realised it had been written by an author I am actually quite familiar with. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich had written a book called "A Midwife's Tale" that was required reading for my Advanced Placement Grade 12 U.S. History course. I even attended a lecture she gave at Clark University (despite being a professor at Harvard) shortly after "Tale" was turned into a PBS documentary. My American History teacher for three years of high school, the late and dearly missed Robert Cormier who is of no relation to the late and dearly missed novelist, lauded Ulrich's book as the single greatest written account of colonial history ever recorded. She might as well have been praised by Caesar since Cormier was one of the presidents of the American Antiquarian Society. I even remember that out of the 15 books that I read for the course that it was the least boring one of the bunch and I actually quite enjoyed it.

Ulrich is a historian and a feminist dedicated to the preservation of a woman's role in history. The title of the book stems from a phrase she coined and unwittingly made famous (to her own amusement, happiness, and, at times, chagrin) in an obscure journal article she wrote in the late 1970s (after she had already won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1976) deriding the fact that the role of the "average" woman is never talked about in the history books no matter how worthy their accomplishments. The women that often appear in history books were "rebellious", had some sort of thirst for blood and power, or in some cases were just seen as shrill or mad.

"Well-Behaved Women" delineates feminist history through three main starting points: Christine de Pizan, often regarded at the earliest feminist writer, abolishionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Virginia Woolf, specifically while writing "A Room of One's Own". From these three subjects, Ulrich makes connections between numerous aspects of worldwide feminist history and the works that inspired them and the ones they ultimately inspired much in the same way Ulrich's quote found its way onto T-Shirts and coffee mugs around the world.

Ulrich, in the two books of hers that I have read, has an amazing talent for balancing the academic and the entertaining. While Ulrich has clearly done intensive research (the last hundred pages are footnotes and citations), the book is never obtuse or unapproachable and her connections throughout recorded history read like an epic of the highest quality.

This is a rare book that I could safely recommend to anyone and everyone. It is relatively short and easier to read than you might expect from a largely academic text, but it flows with the grace and force that sometimes the greatest novels have a hard time achieving. This is an important book and a must read for all social science students.

Grade: A+