Marie-Antoinette

Marie-Antoinette travels from Vienna to become a dolphin in Versailles, but she finds that she is being shunned by most women of the court. She also turns a blind eye to the suffering of the French people, choosing to spend her time in her personal retreat wearing expensive dresses and eating fancy desserts all day long.

So she’s an ostracized ostentatious Austrian ostrich… that was funny, right? It took me like an hour to come up with it :-)

So how does she maintain such a superb figure with all this cake? Easy. She makes her waist look very thin by wearing dresses that make her butt look 5 feet wide. I guess that’s why French doors are so wide.

The movie doesn’t cover the one detail of her life that everyone knows about… you know… the “whoosh - chop” part. Now that would have made quite an ending to a relatively boring movie. Oh well, the result is still better than Sofia Coppola’s last work.

The Marine

Oh… my … God!

If you gave me an unlimited budget to make the most over-the-top parody of action movies, my result would have looked only half as ridiculous as the opening scene of this movie. This makes Rambo look like Hamlet.

John Triton, a veritable “Army of One”, disobeys a direct order by not waiting for further instructions and single-handedly killing all of al-qaeda in order to save the life of his fellow soldiers. The army had no choice but to discharge him, they can’t let soldiers make such morally ambiguous decisions on their own.

John is very distraught by this decision, as evidenced by is eloquence… “me be discharge? What me gonna do? Me no good at nuthin’ else… wait… me is good at sumthin else… but me gonna need me wife for that”. After a few weeks of using him as a boy toy, the wife figures she can also use her ape-husband to earn a paycheck. She gets him a job as a rent-a-cop, but he gets fired on the first day. If you’re watching the movie on DVD… first, are you regretting that rental yet?... second, this is the part that you want to fast-forward over. Just keep going until you see an explosion, that would be a gas station blowing up just after John’s wife gets kidnapped by the bad guys. Thereby fulfilling the other possible purpose for a woman in this kind of movie: the damsel in distress.

What follows is a random sequence of scenes where John out jumps fire balls, dodges bullets, punches bad guys or gets punched by them. The bad guys have no depth of character, or width, or height, they just exist for the purpose of making John look heroic. They even tried to have a comic-relief black guy, but every single joke falls flat on the ground. I swear I heard crickets.

The Grudge 2

Before the movie, the theater showed one of those “movie lingo” slide where they explained the meaning of “Shemping”. That’s when the director shoots a character from the back or from far away as a way of concealing the fact that the real actor was unavailable for the scene. This turned out to be prophetic since this movie did exactly that when their budget ran out and they couldn’t afford Sarah Michelle Gellar anymore (which is about 10 minutes in).

To make sure they don’t run into the same problem when making “The Grudge 3”, they decided to go with an ensemble cast of nobodies. Including a group foreign students in a Tokyo High School.

Why is it that when somebody explains Kanji, they always show the symbol for a tree and then say that if you put three of them together it makes the symbol for “forest”. As if this is supposed to show that pictographical alphabets are somehow superior to phonetic ones. I mean... that’s such a silly example. For that matter… what’s the symbol for “silly”? Does it look like a smiley? What about the word “example”? What symbol could possibly conjure up the concept of exemplification? What percentage of words are nouns of objects that can be recognizably drawn as tiny little characters?

Oh… right… movie… ermm… creepy corpses startle various people. That’s pretty much it. If you’ve seen “The Ring”, “The Ring 2” or the first “Grudge”, you’ve seen this movie.

The Prestige

At first, I was worried about spoiling the movie by giving out details about the plot. But then I realized that to explain anything about the plot, I would need about 20 pages and 5-6 screenings.

So I’ll just say this: Tesla made science fun.

Flags of our Fathers

The constant flash back / forward really gets in the way of the story telling. Not the best WW2 movie I’ve seen, but don’t tell Dirty Harry that I said that.

Flicka

Katie really loves living on The Ranch… she gets to ride horses and swim in the pond. She doesn’t seem to actually do any work, unless you count the 20 seconds she spends fixing a fence. But based on what I’ve learned about ranchers from various movies, they spend about 30% of their time fixing fences, so helping fix one fence post probably isn’t enough to be worth the trouble she’s causing.

That particular rancher spends the other 70% of his time raising “quarter horses”. Now I’m not a horse expert or anything, I’m from a more dairy farm-oriented area. But if horses are anything like cows, raising a quarter of a horse doesn’t seem all that practical. With only one leg, there’s no way they can stand on their own.

Less than a week after getting back from school for the summer, Katie finds a Mustang in the woods and even though she’s pretty good at horse riding, she lassoes like a girl. So daddy needs to save the day and stop the Mustang before it leads all the other one-legged horses over a cliff.

See, Mustangs are like the Arthur Fonzarellis of the horse world, they are wild rebels with an undeniable coolness. If there was a jukebox around, that Mustang would kick it to get it running. So when The Fonz jumps off a cliff, everybody follows (it’s when he jumps a shark, that everybody walks away).

The movie is chock full of Hallmark moments between the various family members, but no gay cowboys. Plenty of dinner plate-sized belt buckles though.

Employee of the Month

All right, not exactly the best comedy of the year, but I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I expected. And I’m not even that big a fan of Jessica Simpson.