Just saw the Simpsons movie and it was a big bowl of awesome covered in awesome sauce with extra awesome on the side. Go see it.
Spoilery nitpickiness follows:
I guess the writers were so elated at the thought of not having to follow the rules and regulations the FCC imposes on the televised version of the Simpsons, they felt the need to break a rule or two, just because they could. Unfortunately, the naughtiness they come up with seems forced and unnatural and tacked on and unnecessary. It just doesn't fit, aside from Homer flipping a lynch mob the double-barreled bird. Marge utters a mild profanity under extreme stress.
After an extended (and utterly brilliant and utterly Simpsons) sequence in which Bart skateboards in the nude, with various objects shielding our tender eyes from having to view his animated junk, we actually do see the Simpson Family Jewels. Yeah, it was amusing, because the animators played with our expectations, but come on- Bart is a ten year old, after all. I didn't need to see that.
Minor quibbles, really. The movie really adds something to the Simpson world- it isn't just an 86 minute long TV episode. Marge and Homer's relationship evolve, as does Bart's relationship with Homer.
Worth the wait.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Simpsons Movie Review (extended).
Friday, June 22, 2007
Movie Review: Big Nothing
I just saw Big Nothing. I picked it up because it stars Simon Pegg, and the back of the dvd looked interesting.
Quick Review: it sucks enormously. If you are on a plane and this is the movie that they are showing, walk out.
Spoilers follow in super secret highlight-o-vision.
Natasha McElhone was completely unbelievable as a small town detective in Oregon. Everyone dies in this super violent crapfest, except it doesn't happen fast enough. I thought it was a comedy, but there are no jokes and very few ridiculous moments, although one character is murdered with one of those enormous lollipops, so that was cool. I thought David Schwimmer doesn't do a half bad job of the former professor with an unbelievable disease and poorly written dialogue.
I want my money back.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Like taking a six year old to watch Dawn of the Dead.
Caught Knocked Up Saturday night.
Yes, that's right. I took my pregnant wife to watch a movie about pregnancy, including an incredibly graphic birth scene.
Not the most intelligent idea I've ever had. I don't think my right thumb will function in quite the same way ever again.
Very funny, btw. I highly recommend it to all you unpregnant persons out there. be advised, though: this thing earns its R rating, what with the aforementioned birth scene and the filthy, filthy (but very funny!) dialogue.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Music duel: Jewish klezmer vs Gipsy music - Train de vie
From a wonderful, hilarious, heartbreaking movie.
I suggest you watch it. And I suggest you reserve your judgment till the end.Sunday, May 06, 2007
Movie Review: Dirty Dancing
At the Local Video Store TM, Mrs. Chainik picked up a copy of Dirty Dancing, which she claims never to have seen despite being a straight female growing up in the Western Hemisphere during the last quarter of the Twentieth Century. So we rented it and took it home.
As I popped the DVD in, Mrs Chainik said "do you mind if we watch this without the commentary"? Mrs Chainik is not an MST3K fan, you see, and actually expects me to shut the hell up when we watch movies. I agreed, because that is the kind of considerate husband I am. The kind that will lie to his wife in order to not get beat up before the popcorn is gone.
Now on to the review: the movie is awful. The acting is wooden, the plot is predictable, and the dialogue is silly. Mrs Chainik agrees, adding that the dancing is technically very good (she
was a dancer in high school). At the end of the movie, I exclaimed "Baby is now a self-actualized woman through the magic of the Dance, yay!" at which point Mrs Chainik threatened me with bodily harm. I give it a five out of ten (watch it if it's late Saturday night and nothing much else is on) and Mrs Chainik gives it a six out of ten (if its on cable on a rainy Sunday afternoon you can watch it).
I wanted to show Mrs Chainik that even though neither Jennifer Gray nor Patrick Swayze know how to act, it doesn't matter if the material is good enough, but the Local Video Store TM did not have Red Dawn. I question their patriotism. We got Ferris Bueller's Day Off instead, which, while not being a cinematic masterpiece like Red Dawn, at least features the destruction of a classic Ferrari and has the added bonus of not having Patrick Swayze in it.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
New To You: Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Here is my review of Fahrenheit 911, written before I started blogging, and posted on my old blog. If you haven’t read it, its new to you.
Chainik Hocker reviews Fahrenheit 911
Note: I first wrote this review in early July, about three days after the movie came out, and was hoping to sell it to somebody somewhere. Nobody bought it or was even willing to publish it for free. So I saved it on my hard drive and forgot about it. I just dug it up now. Here it is.
I must start this review with a caveat. Not only am I a Republican- an Orthodox Jewish Republican- an Orthodox Jewish Republican who has lost friends and relatives to Arab terror in New York and Israel- but I am also a huge Michael Moore fan.
I first discovered Roger and Me on cable when I was sixteen, and have since read all his books and seen all his movies. The man is both a genius and funny as hell. However, he has moved from his populist, mildly socialist Roger and Me (force GM to keep jobs in Flint!) to the more extremist Downsize This! (nationalize GM!) to the crackpot lefty Dude, Where’s My Country? (capitalizt GM exploits the proletariat!). Which brings us to Fahrenheit 911.
I was extremely reluctant to contribute my $8.50 to Moore’s coffers. However, I remembered all his criticisms of capitalism and realized that he probably wouldn’t want me to go to a theater (owned by Lowe’s), having purchased my ticket online (with my computer from Dell and an operating system from Microsoft), purchase a soda (Coca Cola Corporation) having traveled in my Ford automobile (powered by gas from Exxon). This one trip to see a movie would put money in the pockets of a lot of big powerful corporations. So instead I walked around the corner from my apartment and bought a pirated DVD for five bucks.
The movie is a well crafted, deliberately paced, beautifully written piece of crap. The plot, as far as I could tell, went as follows. First Al Gore is elected President of the United States. Then George Bush’s cousin, working for Fox News, tells everybody that Dubya won after all. All the African Americans in the country have their votes discounted. The US Senate doesn’t care.
Dubya is a lazy guy who spends much of the summer of 2001 on vacation. It is implied that Gore wouldn’t have taken a vacation (although he would have needed a tune-up and an oil change after 5,000 miles).
Then Osama Bin Laden crashes four planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It turns out that Dubya’s father, Bush the Elder, knows Saudi Arabians from Saudi Arabia. He has even done business with Saudi Arabians and has visited Saudi Arabia. Also, Dubya may have known a guy who knew Osama’s father. Both the Bushes know the Saudi Arabian ambassador, who is from Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is very rich and it owns precisely 7% of the United States. Saudi Arabia gave Dubya 150 billion dollars. You get paid about 400 thousand dollars a year to be President. 150 billion dollars is more money than 400 thousand.
After the WTC incident, Dubya got real mad. So mad that he invaded Afghanistan, an innocent country that had never done anything wrong to us. They were run by some real evil guys named ‘Taliban’ with funny beards and bad teeth who didn’t respect women’s rights. Also, Dubya was real good friends with the Taliban. We have proof in the form of a trip that a Taliban representative took a trip to Texas in 1997 and met with the Governor, who was Bush. Donald Rumsfeld bombed the heck out of Afghanistan, but most of the Taliban got away. He did manage to kill a whole bunch of innocent civilians, though. Then Bush decided to invade Iraq, just for the hell of it. More innocent civilians were killed. Also some American soldiers. Many American soldiers are from poor neighborhoods.
The military actually has people who go around to poor neighborhoods and encourages people to join. There is an interview with a mutinous Marine (whose first name, not that it matters, is Mohammed) who announces his intentions to go AWOL rather than return to Iraq.
Some rather gruesome shots of dead and dieing Arabs are shown. We follow an unidentified Army unit on Xmas eve arresting an Iraqi for reasons we are never told. The man’s relatives are, not surprisingly, annoyed at this. Cut to an interview of the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq. Cut to an Iraqi kid screaming and bleeding from a head wound. Cut to American mother sobbing in front of the White House. Cut to American soldiers under attack. Some of the men have been hit. There is much shouting, running back and forth, camera jiggling, bleeding, gunshots. Cut to Iraqi with arm mostly off and bleeding all over the place. Cut to explosions, confusion, yelling, the President playing golf. The army has been brought to its knees. Fade to black.
In his terrifyingly bland, Midwestern, nose-first voice, Moore narrates our national descent into hell. Iraq is Vietnam with sand and camels. He plays six-degrees-of-separation between Bush and Osama, so convincingly that we want to leave the theater and burn George at the stake for being the twenty first hijacker. The battle scenes leave us astonished there are any Marines left alive. The powerful scene with the grieving mother causes many an eye to tear up and many a stomach to turn. The shots of bleeding and broken Iraqis looked like someone stuffed their sister’s dolls in a blender, poured in some dirt and a lot of tomato juice, and pushed puree with the cover off, and splashed the result all over the street, with extra yelling and running around. This is bullshit. This is sickening. There is no excuse for this kind of barbarism.
Burn down the White House. Hang all Republicans from light poles. Then the credits roll and you come to your senses.
Something was bothering me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. This is why, when one views a documentary on current American politics, one does so in the company of a Canadian or other some such foreigner- to provide a sense of perspective. The Canadian I was watching the film with came up with the biggest problem of the film, which proves my point. “What was the deal” he said “where they had the Senators with the kids who weren’t in the army?”
See, Mr. Moore pointed out that many legislators in this country, including those who approved the war in Iraq, don’t have children in the military. He pulled a classic Moore stunt by going around to Congressmen with military-age sons and handing out recruiting literature. The results are, predictably funny… but there’s something wrong with this picture.
What?
During Vietnam, we had the draft. If called to serve, you damn well went into the army, whether you wanted to or not (in theory). However, now the Charlie Chaplin of the Iraq-as-Nam metaphor slips on the banana peel of logic. We have an all volunteer force nowadays. And nobody, mutinous Marine notwithstanding, is in the military involuntarily. Yes, it is possible that some joined for the benefits and not because they expected to have to actually fight. However, they did sign up of their own free will.
This is, at most, a minor quibble. However I believe it is indicative of Mr. Moore’s attempt to reclaim sixties style political activism, even if it means twisting an Iraq until it fits into a Nam-shaped hole. For most liberals today (although I hear they’re calling themselves “progressives” now, and I for one thing it’s great that they finally have the guts to show there true colors by calling themselves what Communists used to call them- although the Communists were being sarcastic and the lefties seem not to be kidding), the sixties never ended. So thrilled are they by finally being able to have everybody chant the same thing at the demonstrations that they did forty years ago, (namely, “Stop the War!!!”) they will gladly protest any damn thing. Bush? He’s a Republican, isn’t he? Booo!!! Stem cell research? The Right is against it? Yay stem cell research!!! War? Booo war!!!
This kind of knee-jerk politics has replaced careful thought and deliberate decision, followed by a knee jerk reaction. Well, my knees don’t work all that well, and I can’t jerk them. I can sit down and think about stuff, and I can remember that we did not start this damn war. We did not start this war, but we will damn well finish it. We don’t have a choice. And I don't give a crap about Michael Moore any longer.
