Thighs Wide Shut

The Expendables
Not Nearly Over The Top Enuff
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

As expected, The Expendables has big ass beloved action stars of yesteryear involved in some big ass explosions, while expounding big assed corny dialog.  So why does all the big-assedness feel so small?  And why is Charisma Carpenter in this movie?  And why isn’t she nekkid?  Writer/director/actor Sylvester Stallone‘s heart and mind, and pals, are all in the right place here, but when all is daid and sone, The Expendables is a missed opportunity at exploding exploitation.  Perhaps in the hands of someone more ironic like Robert Rodriguez, this could worked out a lot better instead of being what it is, which is not much, but not totally nothing, so it’s sorta something… we guess

So who are The Expendables?  Do you really care?  They’re a multi-ethnic paramilitary group for hire that are hired to take down other multi-ethnic paramilitary groups and collect cash and a bunch of battle scares at the end of the job.  In this adventure, they’re hired by Bruce Willis(!!!!, but only in it for one scene, which he also shares with Schwarzenegger.  boy, do we miss him and his eeuauaughhhuauaahhing) to take down a Central American island dictator (David Zayas, another Dexter player Stallone has drafted, after he enlisted Julie Benz for Rambo), who’s really juss a puppet for a shady ex-CIAer played by Eric Roberts (who’s a better actor than her sister, duh!!) and his right hand henchman Steve Austin, and they are all evil or something and so they muss be taken down or else or something!  OK!  So our team springs into action.  And what a team! Jason Statham! Jet Li! Dolph Lundgren (who knew he was so awesome???  seriously!!!)! Randy Couture! Terry Crews! and Mickey Rourke, as a sorta Q character!

And guess what happens next???  Shoot!  Knife!  Boom!  Death!  Zzzzzz!!  Nothing special!! WE DON’T EVEN REMEMBER ANYMORE!?!?  Is it too late to request even MORE CORNY DIALOG????  And why no mention of the characters’ full names????  Czech these babies out: Lee Christmas, Ying Yang, Gunner Jensen, James Munroe, Toll Road, Tool and our personal fav, Hale Caesar!!!  Wish this movie was something we could hail.  Yes, we were moist happy to see these worthy actors put back into action, but we juss wish the action was more jacksony.  Speaking of, where was Apollo Creed?  Or Mr T? Or Chuck Norris of Van Damme? or CGI Andre The Giant?  HE ONLY DUCK PADDLES!!!

Planet Best: ah, the early 90s, where hath you gone?

Verdictgo:Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Expendables dulls bulls todat at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Dinner For Schmucks
Send It Back To The Kitchen For Some Re-Warming
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Putting today’s holy trinity of funny (IMO, or should that be In We Opinion?), Steve Carell, Jemaine Clement & Zach Galifianakis + adding in nice straight guy (playing mean!) Paul Rudd (and our sassy lassy Kristen Schaal!) in the same movie should equal NOTHING but comedy gold.  Anything less would be uncivilized! So why then does Jay Roach‘s Dinner For Schmucks feel like unoriginal pyrite material?  And why are we only served about 15-20 minutes of actual dinnertime and the rest is lukewarm appetizers of Murphy’s un-guffaw Law?  To be perfectly honestly, the 1998 Francis Veber film in which this is based on, Le dîner de cons, wasn’t even close to being humorous to begin with, and while writers David Guion and Michael Handelman elevate the material to at least a chuckle zone here and there, they can’t help but make the audience feel like the schmucks.  Ouch!

We don’t want you think that Schmucks is a bomb or a waste of time, cause it’s not (the mousterpiece dioramas by the The Chiodo Brothers are INCREDIBLE, and so is the beastly photo artwork by Clement’s character).  We know comedy is hard, but most comedies juss don’t try hard enuff… like this one!  Then again, this was well more enjoyable than Get Him To The Greek, Death At A Funeral (the remake), Hot Tub Time Machine and the Carell starring Date Night (do we even have to mention Cop Out?).  Knowing you alls, you’ll probably think the opposite is true, and let’s juss leave it at that you schumcks (we love you!!)

Final thought: Carell is leaving the comfy and well-written confines of The Office for the bumpy and poorly written ones of Hollywood flicks.  Look, he deserves all the money in the world, but he and we deserve better

A Lil Mo Than So-Szo: Stephanie Szostak plays Paul Rudd’s love interest in the movie, and a French maid in our wetty wet dreamzzzzzzzzzzz!

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Schmucks goes awe schucks this Friday at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Get Low
Six Feet Underdone
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Robert Duvall is an old man.  In Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low, with script by Chris Provenzano & C. Gaby Mitchell, he gets older, and crankier, and beardier and hermitierer and talks to animals at his cabin compound deep in the woods.  One day, after visiting the town, and realising that everyone thinks he’s a nutter and a million other things, from stories passed down and along, he decides it may be time to set the record straight before he perishes.  So he decides to have a funeral… WHILE HE’S ALIVE!!!!  SNAPPPPPages!!!!  Interesting idea!!!  So he hires local funeral parlorists Bill Murray (providing much needed, albeit mild comic relief) and Lucas Black (who always looks like a bewildered kid in any movie he’s been in) to take care of all the details.  And there are lots of details cause Duvall wants a big party and a raffle, with the winner taking all of his lands!  Damns!!  Sounds like we got ourselves a rootin-tootin hootenanny on our hands!  We do!  But we don’t!!

Duvall’s hiding something and we wait and wait for him to reveal this hidden secret, and although all of this hullabaloo is upsetting to old flame Sissy Spacek and old pal Bill Cobbs (not Bill Cosby), it’s most upsetting to us, the dear viewer, when we finally find out what it be and it be something not really worth the waiting around for.  Damns!  Oh well.  The picture is still a pretty one, dripping with sepia tones of home, and Duvall is grand as the licking his lips, mumblin bumpkin, and Bill Murray is Bill Murray, so we guess you could get down wit Get Low, but we just wished they aimed and got a lil higher

Tennesseein’ Is Tennebelievin’: this flick was actually based on the true story of Felix ‘Bush’ Breazeale, who threw himself a funeral party before he dieds!! here’s a pic of his gravestone and here’s a pic of him at the party!!!  Sometimes the truth is stranger and mo interesting than fiction!!!

[pic via TSLA]

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Low stays purty low in NY & LA only this Friday, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Countdown to Zero
or How I Learned Nothing New About
The Worrisome & Overloved Bomb
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

The United States has nuclear weapons.  Russia does too.  So do a bunch of other countries.  Some of them are scary countries that are even scarier cause they have nuclear weapons (guess which ones????).  The world would be a much better place if no one had nuclear weapons.  Is this news to you?  Probably not, but if it is news to you, then you’re probably in elementary school and if so, you probably shouldn’t be reading this site.  There’s basically 30 minutes of info rehashed 3 times over in Lucy Walker‘s attempt at an inconvenient, but obvious truth that goes by the name Countdown To Zero.  The only thing you’ll be counting down to is the minutes remaining until this redundant history lesson is over.  Snap!  Snap indeed.  Even with an impressive roll call of talking heads of state (Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Pervez Musharraf, Robert McNamara and Jimmy Carter), all being talked over by Gary Oldman, there’s just nuttin here that’s a bombshell.  Tick, tick, boo?

Doc-torate: do yerself a flavor and watch the franztatsic ’82 doc Atomic Cafe instead [for free on hulu!]

Verdictgo:  its heart is in the right place, even if its information is already in the place called your brain, so Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Zero wants you +1 this Friday in NY & DC only and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
#3 Puts The ‘Sag’ In ‘Saga’
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Where did we leave off in the land of flighty, but fun Twilight [reviews of Twilight 1 & New Moon]? Bella sweated Edward, but Edward took off to work on his hair, so she was stuck hanging out with Jacob and his abs and his shirtless friends, and they did stuff together, and everyone got blue balls. Then Edward returned and Bella totally wanted to jump his bones, and Jacob got angry and hungry like the werewolf. Then Bella and Eddie Muster went to Italy where Dakota Fanning and some red-eyed Vamps did some slo-mo throwdowns. A marraige proposal is proposed and all the ladies in the theater swooned and were over the moon

And where does #3, Eclipse, with no actual eclipses, go from there? Nowhere new or interesting. Same ole story as #2 (still NO SEX!), cept no trips under the Tuscan sun, and Edward sticks and dicks around, prolonging this whole love triangle that really isn’t a love triangle cause Bella totally wants to be a vampire for no other reason than trying to be as hot as Ashley Greene is. Good luck with that plain jane Kristen Stewart!!! OK, we lied, there is some new stuff, like snow! and 8 second backstories of the Cullen kids, like that of Jasper/Jackson Rathbone (our favorite character in the series), when he was Texan during the Civil War or something, and for 5 minutes he speaks with a Texas twang, and then abandons it when someone offers him Texas toast with garlic on it, and how he was seduced by Catalina Sandino Moreno, and who wouldn’t want that to happen, but she’s gone in 60 seconds, and if we were in her presence, we’d blow a load in 60 seconds

Oh, and there’s a mounting battle between vampires and other vampires, and the werewolves want to help out, cause they hate the new vamps more than the old ones. And why is their a battle mounting? Cause Bryce Dallas Howard stole Rachelle Lefevre‘s job and they all want Bella and must have her, which apparently everyone in the Twilight universe done does as well, which makes no sense, cause there’s nothing special about her, besides her dad’s awful mustache. OK, we get how Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner would want to protect her, but why would their respective clans also care so dangs much? Wouldn’t life in the land of Forks be much easier is she was killed? Or what if she moved to Florida to live with her mom (Sarah Clarke)? Seems like some fun in the sun could do her well. And maybe new stuff could actually happen, like vampires surfing or werewolves playing beach volleyball. As for the battle, the vamps prep the wolves on how to take down other vamps, and no tension mounts, cause an hour passes before any actual fighting begins and then the fighting is over in about 4 seconds and then Bella and Edward make kisses faces in a field of flowers, while Jacob pouts and works on his abs.  The end.  More like the end of fun in this now overly repetitive saggy saga!!!

Women will love this third edition (lust w/o the lust), and men will juss wish they were watching True Blood, and we/me juss wanna get as far away from vampires as possible, and Anna Kendrick too. Her acting here was juss as lame as it was in her Oscar-nominated turn in Up In The Air. Where’s the justice people, and moist importantly, where’s the ludicrous vampire baseball??!!!!

Twilight Up Our Lives: here be two vampiressesesessses who needed more screentime/shower scenes…

Kirsten Prout

&

Monique Ganderton

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Eclipse slips, blips, with no nips today at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…