My Favorite Entries of 2012

Favorite Entries

I felt that it would be fun to go back and highlight my personal favorite entries of 2012. I thought most were pretty good, some not so much, but a few I found myself exceptionally proud of. In no particular order, here they are!

Snow White & The Huntsman
I really liked how concise I was in getting to the root of why this film bugged me. I felt my analysis of why Snow White as a character does nothing worth calling her a savior figure, let alone the title character was well done, and I always enjoy whenever I can really deconstruct a film from an intellectual standpoint. And to be honest I can't recall hearing anyone else bringing a lot of these points up.

Overall I think this is objectively my best written "review" of the year as it were, and I had fun writing it. It's just a lot more fun to talk about the inner workings of the plot and character motivations than simply trashing Kristen Stewart over and over again. Although that is therapeutic, I'm not going to lie.

Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies
This was a pretty solid entry by itself, as it had a reasonable review of the film which focused more on how well it accomplished what it set out to do rather than saying "It was a cheap knockoff so it sucked" like most people would. But the big thing that made this entry memorable was the fact that Bill Oberst Jr. himself, the actor who played Lincoln in the film, left a very nice comment on it and even linked it on his Twitter, which got me a good number of views. Not too long after that David Harland Rousseau, the 2nd AD also left a comment in which he even gave a little behind-the-scenes info that was really cool to hear. This blew my damn mind.

I can't tell you have exciting it was to have the star of the movie you just wrote about in your tiny, insignificant blog not only read it, but was so nice as to leave a comment on it. I'm still stunned when I think about it. Bill Oberst Jr. is a class act, not only from that but also from interviews I've listened to. He's not only a very good actor, but he seems like a really cool dude, and I can only assume that he stumbles across my blog every once in a while, since he left another very nice comment on "Lincoln." I can't tell you how big of a smile that puts on my face. That's freaking awesome. I can't wait to see Bill show up on my TV screen again.

The Room
I love how dramatic I made the lead in to this one. It was so over-the-top and epic over something that is just this silly movie that manages to be so pathetic that it's hilarious. That's all it is. It's just an exceptionally bad movie. But I led into that like it was a summoning of Yog-Sothoth or something. It's also one of my funnier entries, I think. It cracked me up anyway, and I had a lot of fun with the pictures. Any time I can use the "You are tearing me apart, Lisa!" picture twice is a good time. And even I must admit that was a pretty good "Silence of The Lambs" reference in there.

Hugo
One of my favorite things that I've done in any entry this year was to take the dozen most significant characters in this film and one by one explain what, if anything, they had to do with the plot. All but three of them were shown to be absolutely unnecessary to the story. I defy anyone to explain to me why this film deserved 5 Oscars. I mean, besides the fact that now they're terrified not to give Scorsese every one they can possibly give him since they feel bad that he went so long without them. Enjoy your pity Oscars, Martin. You sure earned it.

American Warships
I love running gags, and the "How Many Carl Weathers References Can I Make" game I thought was a stroke of near genius. I love Carl, and it was so much fun (and surprisingly easy) to make joke after joke about other movies he's been in. But then again, I can fit a "Predator" line into any conversation given enough time. It's a talent. But I was also very pleased with the "Arrested Development" joke I got in there. This was a fun entry. Good times.

ATM
This was a great example of what happens when I'm unleashed on a crap movie. Tearing this one apart was actually somewhat difficult and annoying to do, not because it was a good movie but because "ATM" had made me so mad so often that I didn't even know what to say half the time besides I HATE THIS MOVIE, and I was resistant to even think back on it to remember what had happened. I think I made it into a pretty entertaining read, though.

Man On A Ledge
Like "ATM," this is a good example of what goes through my mind when watching a movie. Read all those rambling questions that I had for it at the end. That's just a small percentage of what goes on inside this stupid, nitpicky brain of mine all the time. I can't help it. And yes, it does ruin many a film you could label as "brainless entertainment" for me, unless it stars Bruce Campbell or something. And yes, it can be annoying but I actually find it fun to tear apart garbage like "Man On A Ledge." And hey, I thought the entry was pretty funny, too. Terrible film, however.

Lockout
Another fun entry I cracked myself up with fairly consistently. My favorite part is the section where I dissect the prisoner escape scene step by step to show why everything about it and the film is absolutely ludicrous. Also, the phrase "Odin's Mighty Butthole" is glorious. That's all me. That's a Pat Jackson original. I'm quite proud.

You know, I just thought of something. Why do they call it "Lockout?" What does that even mean in context to the film?

Poltergeist
Just a really good entry throwing down a pretty solid case as to the problems I have with a film considered by most to be a stone-cold classic. Also, I fit in a fantastic "Predator" reference, and the most obscure nod to MST3K ever. Seriously, I don't know how anyone could catch the MST3K joke. (And it's not the picture I have down below, either.)

Kung Pow! Enter The Fist
This was one of the easiest entries to write, and I love when that happens. "Kung Pow!" Is one of my favorite comedies, and writing a love letter to it was so natural I barely had to think about it. This one puts a smile on my face. I also love the whole introduction where I'm writing like I am completely ashamed for loving it, and my credibility is going to shoot completely to hell, but I just can't bring myself to lie. A good bit of writing, I thought.

Dressing Women In Armor
The first in what I'm hoping to turn into a series of rants about various things that I find worth talking about in film. This one was unsurprisingly inspired by "Snow White & The Huntsman." I took a long time with writing this one, as I felt I needed to be very careful with the language I chose out of fear of being misinterpreted, and I think it paid off because I think it's a well reasoned point. I've got a few more ideas for rants on the back-burner already, and I hope to turn it into a semi-regular thing.

Favorite Captions

One of my favorite aspects of writing this blog are the picture captions. I initially got the idea from Cracked.com and Spoony's written reviews, and I think it really does a lot for the flow of the entry and the humor I try to inject. Sometimes it works better than others, and sometimes I crack myself the hell up. Again in no particular order, these are my favorite picture caption jokes of 2012!

Abduction - Poor George Lazenby

Relationships in spy movies ALWAYS end well.

Possibly the most obscure reference I made this year. What? You don't remember the end of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service?"

Anonymous - Nicolas Cage does Shakespeare

"To be or NOT THE BEES! AAAAAAHHHH!!!"

I am SO proud of this one, you guys. I can't believe I've never heard anyone else make this joke because it's freaking golden.

Session 9 - CSI: Danvers

"Looks like I'm fighting...the institution."

This is a twofer, since the real punchline is the YEEEEAH! at the bottom. I do love a good "CSI: Miami" stinger. By the way, that is the actual hospital the movie was filmed at. And yes, I'd watch the hell out of "CSI: Danvers."

Immortals - Stephen Doriff's war face

If you stuck a ferret in a bag of garbage and swung it over your head for 20 minutes, then opened up the bag, this is what you would see looking out at you.

Of all the captions that I've cracked myself up with, this is hands down my favorite. I giggle like an idiot every damn time.

The Adventures of Tin Tin - Taking one for the team

"Please, Captain. I know your liver is the size of a boogie board and the consistency of a used grease rag, but for the good of the plot and sake of the world, we need you to shotgun that last sixer of Pabst..."

The runner-up for making myself laugh. I love how it quickly turns from heroic to the lowest of brows. The look of terror on his face is also great. I also just love the phrase "sixer of Pabst." Classy.

Casablanca - Bogey smokes with science

"You know, Paul, I'm actually smoking 3 cigarettes right now. I've discovered Quantum Smoking."

I have no idea if I used the term "quantum" in anything close to an applicable way here, but it's still funny. I'm just imagining Bogey using science to smoke every cigarette in the world at once.

Poltergeist - Kevin Bacon's tour de force

Kevin Bacon IS JoBeth Williams as Sally Field in "Sybil 2: The Reckoning"

This is a reference to my undying love for "Mystery Science Theater 3000." And she does look like Kevin Bacon in drag.

Lockout - Guy likes apples

"Uh...something witty...um...how do ya like THEM apples...supplements...damn it, CUT! Gimme a minute...damn it...apples...come on, Guy, THINK!"

Ever wonder what would happen if a smarmy, annoying, overly sarcastic action hero ever stumbled over one of his endless one-liners? I do. This is probably what would happen to me if I tried it.

ATM - Ice fishin' wid' da guys

"Jerry, I don't see nothin'!"

"No, jus' kip lookin' dare. Does'r'sum noice crappies right in dare."

"Oh yah, Jerry, now I sees 'em. Oh yah, dem's good eatin's."

You see, the joke is that it looks like a photo of a Yooper sticking his head in an ice fishing hole to look for fish while his buddy, Jerry, points them out to him. But it's really a photo of a guy about to bash another person's head in with a tire iron. That's just good comedy.

Black Death - Sean Bean holds the record

He is the only man to have been shot in the face by Batman through a book of Yeats poetry. So far.

It's true, you know.

Dredd - Possibly the nerdiest reference I've ever made

"I'm Queen Cersei! I'M QUEEN CERSEI!!!!!"

I merged "Game of Thrones," "Dredd," and the original series of "Star Trek." I win at nerd. The scary part is that were Cersei to actually split into two people like in the episode "The Enemy Within" where that happens to Kirk, Ma-Ma would be a pretty accurate portrayal of her evil side.

Skyfall - Adele is bad at pronouncing things

 Pro-tip for Adele: It's pronounced "Sky Fall." Not "Sky Fwallrrr"

Figuring out how to phonetically convey the irritating way that Adele pronounces certain words was quite difficult, but I think I did pretty good. I really can't stand her, though. Seriously, anybody else doing the song and it would have been awesome.

Dr. No - The doctor is needed in ICU

"Paging Dr. Crotchpound...you have an outside call on line 3. Dr. Crotchpound...line 3."

Thinking up horrendously over-the-top sexual metaphors for Bond girl names is actually pretty difficult. I settled on "Dr. Crotchpound" after "Dr. Quicklube" seemed too subtle.


So there you go. My favorite things in my blog of 2012. May 2013 be even more productive and hopefully funnier! I'll try my best! On the menu for this year will be more rants, more bad jokes, possibly a new series I'm thinking about where I stick up for movies everyone hates but I love, and more trilogies including the entire Bond filmography. And of course, as many movies as I can get my hands on. It's going to be a good year! EXCELSIOR!

Kung Pow!: Enter The Fist (2002)

I have a bit of a problem today. I am experiencing a moment of "half-puke." Allow me to elaborate.

A moment of "half-puke" refers to one of those moments of pure, unfiltered horror and terror that everyone gets at the precise instant after they realize that there is no good way out of a situation. 

Perhaps you see the flashing cop lights in your rear-view mirror, and you look down to realize your speedometer had been slowly creeping up to 15 over without your knowledge. Maybe you come into your room to find your parents are waiting for you, and next to them is the stack of Gallery, Playboy, and Juggs you had cunningly hidden under your mattress. Maybe the teacher starts handing out an exam you had completely forgotten about, and it's only then that it hits you that you hadn't even read the last 5 chapters of the damn book, and you're not sure that you can "wing it" with Charles Dickens.

Your heart starts beating faster as adrenaline rockets through your veins, your stomach starts its basic seamanship test as it begins to tie various forms of knots, your eyes try to pop out of your skull, and a cold sweat starts seeping out from your skull as your body gets so hot you could become your own pressure cooker. And then some little tiny person in the back of your throat drops an anvil down your esophagus, which lands in your gut with a mighty thud and just SITS THERE.

That's what I'm going through right at this moment, because I know that after this, there is no going back. Nobody is going to listen to what I have to say when it comes to movies ever again. My credibility is henceforth decimated. But, there's nothing for it, so it's time to bite the bullet and just come out and say it -

I love "Kung Pow!: Enter The Fist."

You can't step to gopher-chucks.

This movie...this movie is amazing. It is something that on one hand is hands down the dumbest thing I've ever seen, but at the same time contains sequences that are so breathtakingly brilliant that it really should rival the universally accepted greatest comedies of all time. "It should" is the key phrase in that previous sentence, because it doesn't, but it should.

The concept is rather brilliant: Take an old kung fu movie (in this case a film called "Tiger and Crane Fist") and reedit it with different, funny voiceovers, and digitally swap out the main character with director/writer/star Steve Oedekerk in order to create a whole new narrative, and make it a comedy. It's actually very "Mystery Science Theater 3000" in many ways, almost what you would get if the riffing could actually change the film. And as a die hard "Misty," this kind of thing is right up my ally.

But man is it stupid. I mean dumb. Really dumb. I'm taking "Idiocracy" dumb here. Although to be honest, I think "Idiocracy" isn't as dumb as "Kung Pow!," mostly because with "Idiocracy," you can't really call it dumb humor when that was kind of the whole point. "Idiocracy" was approaching dumb humor from an intelligent, satirical level. "Kung Pow!" is just a strange kind of surrealist dumb. And perhaps that's the best way to go into "Kung Pow!" if you've never seen it: Don't expect anything to make any sense whatsoever.

If "Idiocracy" is a Salvidor Dali painting, "Kung Pow!" is an Andy Warhol.

The parts that are funny in this movie are sidesplitting. I don't know how anyone could watch the "stomach plug" scene, with the narration just going on and on about it, and not get a laugh. And if you remember my entry a while ago about "Casa de mi Padre" where I talked about jokes that go on for really long being really hit or miss depending on how over-the-top it goes, "Kung Pow!" contains a scene which could be a textbook example on how to do that kind of extended joke well.

If you've never thought that 4 men beating the everloving crap out of a guy with sticks could be funny, good lord are you in for a treat. I cried laughing the first time I saw this.

But for me, there is really only one thing that makes "Kung Pow!" stand out, and that's the characters. Every single one of these characters is quite frankly amazing, even if some of them just approach levels of "wrong" that defy explanation (Master Tang, I'm looking at you). The main character, Chosen One, played by Oedekerk, has some fantastic moments including imploring people to reconsider, and making vows while adding to the dictionary.

"Killing is wrong. And bad. There should be a new, stronger word for killing. Like badwrong, or badong. Yes, killing is badong. From this moment, I will stand for the opposite of killing: gnodab."

But like most comedies, the main character is not the most memorable one. The supporting cast in this film, or at least, the performances created by Oedekerk, are incredibly fun. I absolutely adore the inconceivably inept Wimp-Lo, a "fighter" who has been trained wrong as a joke by his master. Ling, the Chosen One's love interest, is potentially one of the strangest character in modern movie history, and is probably the second most quotable character in the film, despite the fact that the quoting of any of her lines usually ends up breaking down into someone screaming "WEEOO WEEOO WEEOO."

But the absolute best character is Master Pain, who you shall all refer to as "Betty." Betty is hands down the best part of the film, as he has the best lines, and really hammers home more than anyone else the completely absurd nature of the movie. Again, it's not that I can really explain it, and I don't know why him saying crap like "Mmm...sleepy time" and "A tiny net is a death sentence. It's a net and it's tiny!" is so ungodly funny, but it probably has to do with the voice Oedekerk gives him.This voice falls somewhere between Snidely Whiplash and Burgess Meredith's version of The Penguin as performed by Steve Urkel. And that laugh...mother of god...that laugh...it's amazing.

Betty's stand-up routine could use a bit of work, however.

There are also some admittedly very clever jokes spread throughout that lampoon various cliches of the kung-fu genre or action movies in general. In particular is a very funny sequence near the end that addresses the fact that "Just because I did this *glagh...uggh...::lays head down::* doesn't mean a person is dead," which is technically true. The final payoff to that scene is fantastic by the way.

Now, here's the part where I have to be brutally honest and come down a bit hard on a movie I really like. I said earlier that it should be counted among the funniest movies ever. Well, the reason that key word "should" is in there is that when "Kung Pow!" is funny, it's tear inducing, but when it's not, it's really, really bad. And I'm talking unfunny kind of bad.

The reason it isn't funny all the time is because "Kung Pow!" is a movie whose worst quality is that it tries too hard. The worst parts of this include any time they try and cram a pop culture reference into the movie, which is almost always comedic death. Those parts almost always come off as nearly unwatchable. There are two primary examples of this, both of which use CGI so poorly that you wonder if that was part of the joke. Granted, it would be a part that failed, but still.

The first part is the CGI baby fight. Yes, you read that correctly. Remember the Dancing Baby commercials? Yeah, they made a fight scene using roughly that same level of technology. And yes, it is every bit as stupid as that sounds. The worst part about that is the fact that it's essentially the first thing in the movie, or at least the first gag. It's such a shame that a movie that is so good starts off so poorly, although it has a really funny joke at the very end of that sequence.

But the absolute nadir of the film is, unfortunately, plastered all over the box art, and was a big part of the marketing campaign. It's that stupid cow fight. By Moradin's Hammer, is that terrible. And I'm not sure what made them put it in there. Was it because they could? Was it because there was a "Fighting Cow" program installed in the software they got to do the special effects? Or was it just so they could reference "The Matrix" and do some bad "bullet time?" You know, because THAT hadn't gotten old in the 3 years since that movie had come out.

As weird as it is to say, this movie is better than this...

That just boggles my mind. And the crazy thing is that I remember seeing the trailers for this movie. All you saw was the damn cow. I don't know who they got to do the marketing for this movie, but they needed to be fired. That should be fairly evident considering that I freaking love "Kung Pow!," but when I saw the trailers, if you were to have asked me if I was interested, I'd have put my own eyes out with garden shears before going to see it. And they wonder why it bombed.

Then again, I have no idea how you market a movie like "Kung Pow!"

"WEEEEOO WEEEEOO WEEEEOO" on repeat for 2 and a half minutes, THAT'S how! #brilliant

There are two main things to keep in mind about "Kung Pow!" if you've never seen it before, and perhaps this will help your viewing experience:

1) Understand how dumb it is beforehand, because seriously, you kind of need to brace yourself for it.

2) Watch it with friends. Preferably friends who have seen it already, and are fans. It really does help the experience. Plus, this is one of those films I can't see watching alone. "Kung Pow!" has become something of me and some of my best friends' signature movie, and there's just something special about watching it with good people and laughing your butts off at the dumbest things you've ever seen.

"What do you get when you cross an owl with a bungee chord? MY ASS! Nnnyaaaaa ha ha ha!!! ENOUGH!!!"

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Kung Pow!: Enter The Fist" is the definition of acquired taste. I'm not sure how much someone will like it on the first go, but it's a film that gets funnier the more you watch it, much like "Idiocracy" or "The Big Lebowski." And above all, you need to be ready for some really absurdest humor. Personally, it's one of my favorite comedies. Highly Recommended.