Category: Movies

The Margie YHGTBKM Movie Review Scale

andertoons2 Comments

In recent movie reviews I’ve mentioned my wife’s opinions as a sort of bonus. Occasionally during a film she’ll be moved to comment and recently I’ve begun counting how many times she says “You have got to be kidding me!”, or something like it, as another measure of a movie.

Well, her stats have proven so popular that I’m actually adding a new feature to my movie reviews: The Margie “You Have Got To Be Kidding Me!” Movie Review Scale! (Or YHGTBKM for short.)

From now on, for every three outbursts, I’ll add a graphic of my lovely wife rolling her eyes:

YHGTBKM!

For example: Catwoman received eleven outbursts from my better half, so you’d see three and two-thirds Margie heads.

YHGTBKM!YHGTBKM!YHGTBKM!YHGTBKM!

Now before you get all excited, she’s not going to be able to watch every movie with me, but I’ll be sure to save the obvious stinkers for couples viewing.

I hope you enjoy the new feature!

(BTW, I’ve also added a shortcut to all reviews featuring YHGTBKM under the “Categories” heading. And, although they don’t contain any Margie heads, I’ve also added Catwoman and Elektra to the YHGTBKM category since they got the ball rolling.)

Cat Fight!

andertoons

Hobbes Club

There’s an interesting and entertaining article at Metaphilm.com in which Galvin P. Chow explains that Ed Norton’s Fight Club character “is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.”

Picture this: a hyper, self-absorbed child initially concocts an imaginary friend as the ideal playmate, to whom more realistic qualities soon become attributed. This phantasm becomes a completely separate personality, with his own likes, dislikes, and temperament—and the imaginer and the imagined clash and argue constantly, though remaining fast friends. This pattern continues to the point where the child begins to perceive what was originally mere fantasy to be reality.

Just as Calvin has an imaginary jungle-animal friend named Hobbes, whom everyone else believes to be nothing but a stuffed toy, “Jack” in Fight Club has an imaginary cool-guy friend named Tyler, whom no one but Jack can see.

In both cases, the entity that began as the ideal companion soon took on a more realistic, three-dimensional quality. In other words, they became real. This is evident in that both Hobbes and Tyler also began to function as scapegoats for their creators. For instance, consider that Calvin often blames broken lamps and other assorted household mischief on Hobbes, and that Jack is inclined to believe that Fight Club and other various anti-society mischief is brought about by Tyler, not himself. Calvin claims Hobbes pounces on him every day after school; Jack believes Tyler beats him up next to 40 kilotons of nitroglycerin in a parking garage—the list goes on and on. The relationships between the two sets of friends are the exact same. Is this mere coincidence?

The whole thing is a hoot, and oddly fascinating, but I think this excerpt from the “Marla Singer—Avatar of Susie Derkins?” section is my favorite:

Somewhere between the end of high school and beginning of college, uptight, grade-obsessed Susie Derkins lost her way. The pressure to get good grades, the pressure to succeed, simply became too much for her, and she snapped.

Free from the protective bonds of her parents’ guidance and the bland safety of her suburban home, Susie loses her moral bearings entirely and sinks into a dark, seamy, grim world of sex, drugs, and eccentric Albert-Einstein-like hair.

Check it out if you got a few minutes…

Elektra – Review

andertoons2 Comments

Elektra

I was actually kind of hoping Elektra would be bad, but it was worse than bad, it was boring.

As I sat down I remarked to my wife “wish me luck” and wait for this to be another Catwoman. But after about a half hour I found myself wondering if it was too late for a Mountain Dew.

Elektra, who seems to have lost her last name since Daredevil, returns from the dead and works as a Frederick’s of Hollywood clad assassin until she’s hired to kill Mark Miller and his thieving yet supposedly likable daughter.

Of course she’s conflicted after meeting each of them for roughly ten combined minutes and forming some sort of deep instantaneous bond, and ends up protecting them instead from the murderous Hand organization.

Blah blah blah ninjas blah blah fighting blah blah blah mystical warriors blah blah green smoke blah blah blah meaningless flashback blah blah blah blah blah…

The few good parts mostly revolve around Jennifer Garner in a skimpy red corset, a weird lesbian death kiss from a character named Typhoid, and the poorly named Tattoo villain (I couldn’t help yelling “The plane! The plane!” at the TV) whose inky coverings come alive and leave his body.

(For those of you looking to check this out for the corset factor alone, don’t waste your time. There’s a little bit at the beginning, but it’s lit rather darkly, and then you don’t see it again until an hour and eleven minutes in.)

When compared to other recent Marvel movies, this is somewhere between The Punisher and Hulk. You don’t have Travolta dragging it down, but there’s no giant green guy either.

Darn it, I was really really looking forward to writing this review. I’d gone looking for pictures of both Garner and Berry and started creating little charts to compare Elektra and Catwoman. I’d begun working on a great graphic involving the two of them duking it out too. This was going to be fun! But sadly, Elektra is so uninteresting it isn’t even worthy of mockery.

So, unbelievable as it sounds, I still like Catwoman better. Sure, Berry’s performance is laughable, but at least it was so bad it was watchable.

(BTW, for those of you who remember the Catwoman review, on the Margie “You’ve got to be kidding me!” scale, this rated only seven outbursts in 96 minutes.)

Sin City – Review

andertoons5 Comments

It was a gray day. The theater was mostly empty except for a few desperate loners like me anxiously looking for our noir fix. And after twenty minutes of whoring itself out, the screen got down to business.

starts like a zebra with a sunburn; black and white and gloriously red all over. The opening scene that sold Miller calls to me, begging me to love it. I caress it with my eyes as I settle in with my soda.

For the next 126 minutes Sin City spills its guts. The story’s got more twists and turns than a pretzel having a bad night’s sleep, and I love it.

Cops with good hearts and bad tickers, leggy dames that’d just as soon kill you as love you, and a yellow bastard with more than one weapon in his stinking dirty trousers. The whole enchilada in beautiful black and white.

If I could kiss a movie I would have planted a hard wet one right on Sin City, but when it was done I just walked out into a hard rain, alone. Like I said, it was a gray day.