Men of the Yamato (2005) 男たちの大和

This is about the WW2 Pacific theatre. As most people already know, the Imperial Navy lost badly to the American combined fleet and had their prized flagship sunk late in the war. This is basically Pearl Harbor in reverse.

From a strictly American viewpoint, this was ridiculous. Most of the movie is spent talking about ritual suicide and all these fucking weird things the Japanese culture is known for. Far too much screen time is spent watching people yell stuff like "YOIIIII" or screaming "goodbye world" off the side of the ship.

What about the good points? People persisting with anti-Japanese sentiment will find this movie appealing simply because a bunch of Japs die in droves. It's similar to watching the second half of Titanic, but with a ship chock full of screaming Japanese men. You get to see people die in every conceivable way. The naval combat action, and the whole point of this movie, was merely satisfactory.

The great thing about watching the fighting from the opposing side is that you get to see them lose. Losing a war is many times more gruesome than winning and is therefore many times more interesting to watch. Many people, especially Chinese nationals, derive enjoyment from watching Japs die because of lingering bitterness over unresolved war atrocities. For these, most of the culpability falls to the Japanese Army. The Japanese Navy was much less oppressive. Nonetheless, both the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy are usually held equally responsible. For this undue blame, I think those guys deserve a break.

Story Rating: 0%
Action Rating: 75%

Poisoned by the Red Tide

I got sick eating at a seafood restaurant on Pier 39.

For those not in the know, Pier 39 is a tourist concentration camp on the Northeast corner of San Francisco where your welcoming attitude to foreigners goes to die. It gets trampled under the boots of a million camera-clicking French, Filipino and Japanese people who want nothing more than to get in your way.

It's because of places like this that all the small-towners who visit big cities like New York, Paris and SF leave with the impression that cities are packed shoulder to shoulder with seething masses of loud and quite possibly homosexual people. In reality, the problem is the out-of-towners themselves who feed the tourist trap with their money and turn it into an inescapable hell-hole of tacky businesses and shady restaurants.

The restaurant I went to was called Fisherman's Grotto, a nice-looking if huge restaurant packed behind a fake fish market and next to some falling-apart docks. It may be because I ordered 2 pints of beer within the first 10 minutes of my stay, but the food didn't seem bad. The only thing memorable about it was the price, which was enormous and unwarrented. Such is the way of Pier 39.

The first symptom I had was a night-long bout of physics-defying gassiness. My intestines, sensing the parasitic corruption, attempted to convert all the solids of my meal into gaseous form so that I might release them harmlessly into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the poisons were able to re-enter my system through my nose and lungs and allowed them to infect my brain more easily.

I was unable to sleep until 4 AM despite going to bed at about 11 PM. My nervous system jacked itself up to keep me from slipping into a fatal coma so I could do nothing but writhe around and vent deadly vapors while feeling my intestines deflate and re-inflate.

This morning I woke up with the feeling that my brain was lifting off from the inside of my skull to parts unknown. I felt ambivalent towards everything, including my vision blurring and my ears ringing at random intervals.

After my bowel decided to jettison everything in a last-ditch attempt to keep me alive, I decided to go jogging to sweat out the remaining toxins. While I was running I had the interesting sensation that I couldn't feel anything but my face. I had to clap my hands together to prove they still existed.

All in all, totally worth it. A little Red Tide is nothing to be afraid of when you're hungry for bottom-feeders. Next time I'm trying the crab.

Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott Ruined By Stupid People

I love boycotts. When done right, they can cause companies a ton of grief, generate controversy, and divide a community until one side becomes analogous to Hitler. In this case, supporters of buying L4D2 are the Hitlers because their blind support of Valve is the same as hard core fascism. Unfortunately, the boycott failed miserably due to the two shitbags who led the boycott, going by the names Walking_Target and the other guy. I don't know the other guy's name because it doesn't really matter: both are scumbags who wasted a perfectly good boycott opportunity.

So a few months ago these 2 dipshits created the L4D2 Boycott Steam Community Web Group Forum Twitter Page and got something like a million members championing the cause of not buying L4D2. This was a great time. Just going to the L4D steam forums the first 3 pages would be filled with whines about L4D2, complaints about the lack of support for L4D, and general FUCK U VALVE!!!!!! threads. I wanted to join in the bitch fest, but I didn't want to receive another 4 point(s) infraction from Rotten Dude:

So I just sat back, relaxed, and watched Valve's consumer support wither away from under them, as the boycott anger and strength grew with each passing week. Now you can guess where this was headed. In September, this message was posted on the boycott group page, along with this picture with the lead designer of L4D2 which seriously was the sole inspiration for this post:

Boomer!

Steam flew the two scum sucking boycott leaders to the Valve HQ for a private tour where they could preview L4D2 and directly discuss the game and their concerns with the L4D2 staff. That's where they took this picture with the fattest, ugliest boomer I've ever seen. They probably did stupid shit all day like treat everyone with respect, ask a bunch of insightful questions, etc. etc.

If you didn't want to read that entire post, I'll summarize the important parts for you:

"Over the last week or so, we've been hinting at something big. A few days ago, a potential technical difficulty forced us to say that this announcement might be postponed – which we took even more heat for."

Translation: Valve hit us with a non-disclosure agreement which we lapped up like dogs because we wanted to sell out and go to Valve HQ

"Facta Non Verba is a Latin phrase meaning quite literally “Deeds, not Words”, or “Actions speak louder than words”. This is ironic in more way than one."

Translation: This is ironic, because quite literally, I'm a pompous asshole.

"Valve took the course of Facta Non Verba in dealing with myself and Agent of Chaos. Rather than trying to explain everything via email, they invited us out to their offices in Bellevue, Washington. That alone speaks of a developer that really does care about its fanbase. So, after making arrangements and booking the time off of our jobs, we flew down for a day to take a quick tour and talk with the guys at Valve."

Translation: We creamed our pants when the fat bastards at Valve actually spoke to us. The Valve accountants decided that the boycott was going to make them lose their bonus money, so they told the HR department to order the Developers to entertain us for a day. We told our bosses to suck it because we hit the big time. Just kidding, we don't have jobs.

"We can't get into details, but we can definitely say that support for L4D is NOT being dropped by Valve and that they are actively pursuing bug fixes for Left 4 Dead. We're going to continue to talk to Valve and ask questions as needed, however if the frantic pace which we had seen people working at is any indication, we're not going to be left in the dust. The staff seemed to honestly love the original 4 Survivors and many said that “we're not done with them yet”."

Translation: The catered lunch was really good and I actually got to shake the fat developer's sweaty hand.

"As for L4D2, things seemed balanced and 'tight' and did not feel like a rushed job. While we were visiting their offices we personally witnessed what can only be called a small army of artists, coders, mappers hard at work, which explains the rapid transformations in artwork that we've all seen."

Translation: Despite the graphics of L4D2 being identical to L4D, I actually got to shake the fat artist's sweaty hand.

"We're not giving up just yet though, we will both be here up until our individual concerns are addressed and sticking with you folks."

Translation: We gave up.

"We'll be doing write ups about this tomorrow, Thrusday and Friday as well as answering questions. We will not be around that much tonight as we both have to fly back early tomorrow morning"

Translation: We will be justifying our selling out to the outraged millions of group members Thursday and Friday.

"As a collective we have done more than achieve a few goals, we have paved the way for Developer-Community relations in the future. No matter what the press or other gamers say, we have made an indelible mark upon the future of this industry. You should all be proud, we certainly are."

Translation: We've proved that all it takes to end a boycott is for the corporations to shell out a few hundred bucks to cater to two impressionable asswipes in order to avoid millions of dollars in lost revenue. Gamers have a say in what happens unless one of the boycott leaders gets to hold the golden crowbar.

Ever since the boycott effectively ended with Valve glad-handing the boycott leaders, sales of L4D2 skyrocketed. This is despite the game being priced at $50, full price for a brand new game, NOT an expansion. But wait, Valve wasn't done with those two talking heads just yet:

"We understand some of you have a problem with its price tag. Personally, I’m quite surprised with the discount on pre-orders; A 4 Pack bundle brings it down to only $33.75 for each person. I see many people took advantage of this including "boycotters", but to be honest that’s a fair price. In other words, that’s what expansions cost. You can’t blame them for making this decision."

Yes, a 4 pack bundle will only cost $33.75 each. What a great fucking deal, except that you need to buy 4 of them and you need to convince 4 friends to actually sit down all at the same exact time and play this game. And who would want to play with these two guys anyway? How do I know they won't shoot me in the back because the zombie leader gave them a tour of the zombie HQ and catered a free brain lunch for them?

"I'm sorry, but the zombies are really nice people and they are working hard on this!"

What a disappointment. I should follow more promising boycotts like Minute Maid. FUCK YOU MINUTE MAID.

The Sniper (2009) 神鎗手

lol this movie has been posted everywhere. This is the first time I've watched an HK movie without subtitles, so I probably missed some of the subtext, but I get the picture. It starts with a bunch of guys on a Chinese SWAT team that are competing to become the best sniper. They would say stuff like "chinese china bunch of chinese TOP SHOOTER! more chinese" and I would smirk. It's not long before friendly competition turns into enraged rivalry during real police action and soonafter they turn their sniper rifles on each other. It's so dramatic!
This is also the returning debut of Edison Chen after fleeing HK in disgrace due to the untimely leak of his homemade porn. He looks good. Acting still sucks though. Thing is, when I see him on the screen I just can't stop thinking about the photos of his sexual tryst ahahaha they got him good. Stuffed bear in the background watching them bahaha!

Rating: 40%

Blade 2 (2002)

Fuck yeah Blade. Let's say you were in the mood for some violence. Lots of chops, shots, and bloodletting fire. You don't care where or why it happens, simply that it does and that it happens instantly. Hands down, Wesley Snipes is your man. Blade was an "okay" movie for it's day, at the time directly competing with the not yet completed Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Matrix sequels. Those two movie series prevented Blade from being more popular than it was, making the Blade series a forgotten favorite.

When you go back and watch old movies, sometimes you get surprised by what you find in the cast. Here, I found a young Donnie Yen as a vampiric blademaster. His character is a mute (implied, as he had no lines) and has a shortlived and unsatisfying role. Basically, even though Donnie Yen was a better choreographer than the rest of the cast, he ended up with a smaller role. The first (and last) move he pulls out is the HK classic "no shadow kick". What the hell? The director must have looked at his demo reel and said, "yeah just do that move and gtfo". Ten minutes later he is vampire food.


To date, Donnie has never had another scene with fucking eyeliner.
It also struck me on how dumb the story is. Full of holes and mostly a distraction, the plot of Blade 2 was very weak. For example, the prevailing bad guy shoots Blade into a swimming pool of blood and then expects him to be dead. Common, everyone knows that if Blade receives blood, he gets fully healed. How can the bad guy be that stupid? So forget the story, just watch the action and move on.

Rating: 60%

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

It's hard to turn a kid's book containing about a paragraph worth of simple sentences in it into a feature-length film. Which is why it's necessary to take each of the simple, dialogue-less monsters from the storybook, give them interesting and meaningful names like Douglass and Judith, turn them into complex characters with psychological issues and wait for your Oscar.

What surprises me is that apparently the original author of the book is totally O.K. with this. Well, actually I'm more surprised that he's still alive. So now he gets to see his creation warped into a very non-kid friendly movie directed by a guy who normally directs music videos. And he's O.K. with it. So I guess I am too!

So what do the kids who go to see this movie learn? Here's a smattering of things I remember...um, teachers are dicks for telling kids the sun is going to eventually explode, single moms are crappy parents who raise kids that are nuts and like to dress up like foxes and hallucinate about monsters, it's not very nice to destroy your friends' houses, and interpersonal relationships are fundamentally flawed and will always fail on multiple levels if given time...and if you're a monster.

Demolition Man (1993)

When looking for movies online you often get a dichotomy of very old and very new. Following the release of a new movie, people post them everywhere, despite the movie industry's vigilant attempts to remove them. Older movies, while uploaded much less often by their niche fangroups, do not get targeted by piracy police, causing them to build up over time on the internet.

Such is the case with many early Sylvester Stallone movies. This one starts in a super fucked up city (caption says "Los Angeles, 1996") that's rife with mega-crime. Shit is on fire and all these people are getting killed, so Stallone steps in to administer justice. Just 20 minutes into the plot, and Stallone is convicted of manslaughter for failing to save the hostages and gets sentenced to 70 years in a cryogenic prison. His mass murdering nemesis (Wesley Snipes) gets the same sentence. Upon their release, they wake up to a crime-free society where everyone is a huge wuss. The cops are too nerfed to stop Wesley Snipes so they bring in tuff guy Stallone.

Basically, this started as a Rambo movie and quickly turned into Judge Dredd. The people all talk like school children and Stallone is the only remotely normal person. Every time he says "FUCK", a buzzer in the background goes off and says "John Spartan you have been fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute", but he just keeps talking like nothing happened. Then he follows Wesley Snipes into the museum of guns where all the plasma rifles are loaded, and they fight in the Hall of Violence while making funny insults at each other. Yeah. Stallone's voice is funny too.

Rating: 75%

Turbo the Movie (2009)

http://www.turbothemovie.com/
A friend of mine that likes really stupid videos sent me this. You can watch this piece of shit at that link if you want. I actually suggest you just skip through it to see if you can piece together the story from little evenly distributed 2 second snippets because it's better that way. Let me tell you, this production is an embarrassment. Name any evaluational metric for a movie, be it acting skill, special effects quality, or story writing, and you will find that Turbo (the movie) fails at them all.

One of the recent trends I've noticed on the internet is a niche of Asian style made-for-asians-by-asian-american movies. I watched a few of these and they've all been fairly lousy. For some reason, Asian people just don't know how to produce movies (unless you're from Hong Kong which pretty much guarantees that you're a brilliant filmmaker). Asian Americans in California frequently complain about having to work harder than everyone else. Well I say that when it comes to movies, they're not working nearly hard enough. The fact that an asian kid beats a white kid at sports in your story doesn't make it a good movie.

Rating: 10%

Shinjuku Incident (2009)

After I saw the trailer for this I was fixed on it. Could this really be a movie with Jackie Chan that wasn't retarded? Could this actually be a movie about Chinese-Japanese relations that didn't involve rage filled arguments about contemporary history? Yes it had all of those things and more. I guess when Jackie Chan doesn't get a shitty writer his acting can really shine. He plays a poor Chinese peasant that immigrates illegally to Japan in the 90s. The Chinese are to Japan as Mexicans are to California. Impoverished, loud, and a public nuisance, they're constantly begging for work or being harried by police.

Japanese society fosters high levels of racism to the Chinese. Both local gangs and police officials give them lots of trouble so they must band together to form their own gangs to help them survive and compete in their new environment. Above all, Jackie wants to do things honestly. His virtuosity takes him very far among the big players in Tokyo. He brings his fellow Chinese the security and prosperity they crave but upsets the established order of Yakuza and Taiwanese gangs. This is where Jackie's acting is at it's best. His character is simplistic but not stubborn, impressive but not exaggerated.

Jackie Chan is normally such a carefree guy that it's very disturbing to see him take part in this much brutality.
Rating: 100%

Five Fingers (2006)

Laurence Fishburne plays the part of a Muslim terrorist who captures some Dutch guy in Morocco in order to extract information from him. Throughout the "interrogation" Fishburne plays chess and mind games and systematically cuts off Dutch guy's fingers one by one until he gives up the information. What information exactly? Well the entire movie really boils down to one scene:

(Fishburne is in some abandoned warehouse with Dutch guy chained to a chair)

Laurence Fishburne: You know, if more Westerners played Chess, we wouldn't have many so problems between our cultures. Do you want to play a game of Chess?

Dutch Guy: No.

Laurence Fishburne: I really like jazz music.

Dutch Guy: What?

Laurence Fishburne: Enough! (Fishburne snaps his fingers and an assistant brings out a paper cutter)

Dutch Guy: OH GOD NO!

Laurence Fishburne: Tell me what I need to know.

Dutch Guy: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT NO PLEASE NO!

Laurence Fishburne: Last chance.

Dutch Guy: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?

(Fishburne cuts Dutch Guy's finger off)

Multiply this scene 5 times and you get this shitty movie. So what is this information that Fishburne wants so badly that he is willing to spend hours playing chess and discussing musical preference with some random Dutch guy? Well the audience never knows until the very end. At least, I assume it's revealed at the end because regrettably I couldn't finish watching this movie due to extreme boredom. I expect there was some big secret that tied everything together, but seriously this movie was just Laurence Fishburne speaking really slowly talking about random shit while the Dutch Guy chained to his chair pleads for mercy. The only good part about this movie was that Transporter Chief O'Brien was shot to death in the first 10 minutes.


Also, there was some subplot involving Dutch Guy's Moroccan girlfriend which involved a bunch of flashbacks. Whatever.

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

Okay to begin with, there's too much character development in this movie. I can't believe that I'm saying that, given the already lackluster storyline, but nobody is going to remember that shit for a movie like this. They try to stuff the plane with a diverse character set to spice up the story, but honestly speaking, that isn't what the audience wants. I say kill them all. Blah blah blah. GET TO THE SNAKES ALREADY!
In the next phase, Sam Jackson fights snakes + angry mob. By this time, he's already produced several meme worthy lines in an attempt to get the passengers to shutup. Then he says, "Give these people air!" and that's where the memory file in my neural net processor ends.

There are 2 buff chinese men that do some kind of kung fu or stunt shit in this movie. This is out of a total of 2 chinese men. That's a proportion of 100%.
Rating: 50%

The Medallion (2003)

I remember a time, perhaps in the 90's when Jackie Chan was revered as a brilliant stuntman with titles like Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop under his belt. But now his movies are -what?- slapstick comedy mystical fictions with Jackie Chan making panicky noises the whole time.

Out of his ensemble of his half-assed joke movies, this is one ranks relatively low. He teams up with this aloof Scottish detective that is scared of everything like he has some kind of horrible mental disorder. He would turn corners or open doors, see something unexpected, and scream "whoaaaaaa!!" like 50 or so times in the movie. The Englishman also has an asian supermodel wife. That's weird because at the same time Jackie is flirting with this other caucasian supermodel who is the coworker of the Scottish guy. So he, uh, switched wives or, I'm not sure they know, what?

Anyway in the end the Chinese dragons do some magical shit and Jackie Chan becomes immortal. So, that's cool. The movie ends with Jackie running 100 miles an hour and going "yay!".

Rating: 20%

The Weather Man (2005)

Another great Nicholas Cage movie. I can't even believe that I used to think he was a bad actor because I keep watching his movies and he nails the role every time. I must have mistaken him for a bad actor because of his unenthusiastic face and boring voice, and most of all his embarrassing acting in The Wicker Man. At face value, Nick Cage is unremarkable. Yet, if you roll with his style a bit, his simplistic and unassuming personality seems very appropriate. His narrations here are brilliant. The combination of his disparaging face and his flat voice delivers a succinct but illuminating message.

This movie is highly underrated. Nick Cage's depressing appearance goes well with the fact that his acting career at the time was sucking.
Rating: 80%

Four Brothers (2005)

I didn't really like this. I can tell its a quality movie because Mark Wahlberg is in it, but I've been watching some really good movies lately and this one's a relatively low point in my viewing sequence. One of hollywood's favorite mantras is, "Even bad men love their mothers." So that's where this starts, with the four brothers returning to Detroit to avenge their moms's untimely death.

Hey come to think of it, this was ridiculously similar to the plot of GTA: San Andreas. They might even have the same storyboard.

Both stories start with a dead mother, (what could be more dramatic than that) and pick up with the search for mom's killer. So the movie is just a bunch of hoodies + Wahlberg going around hustling various neighborhood characters. Man are there really people on earth that are this hardcore? The brothers are the toughest of the tough guys.

Mark Wahlberg's urban gangster walk in this movie is retarded. His arms are swinging around like crazy and he bobbs up and down like he's on a merry-go-round. No one in real life would ever have that kind of gait.
Rating: 30%

Lord of War (2005)

I was looking for a light hearted movie, and Nicholas Cage would surely provide it. Going in, I believed that Lord of War was going to be a brusque, shoot the bad guys movie with a shitty plot and a shittier display of acting . Instead, I got an incredibly deep tale of woe about the creed of weapons dealing. Nick Cage's sullen voice narrated the movie, supplying quick justifications behind his character's complex moral decisions.

He starts as a nobody. One day he rationalizes that restaurants will always exist because people will always need to eat. Therefore, weapons dealers will always exist because people will always need to fight each other. "Besides, the margins are better", says Cage. Shrewd reasoning if you ask me. Margins and Need. Ask anyone why they choose their profession and it will be one of those, either good margins or great need.

So Cage goes out into the world and makes his name by selling weapons to one side of a conflict, then the other. Every war in recent history becomes a lucrative business opportunity. His big break came with the dissolution of the USSR, giving him ample armament to flood the market with Soviet military surplus.

So basically, we get a profound explanation for the causes of all modern armed conflict. This movie says that all those blood diamonds and child soldiers are simply byproducts of the war economy surplus. We were in fact responsible for fueling the violence with weapons that we manufactured, packed up, and sold.

Great acting by Nicholas Cage again. Why have his more recent movie sucked so much?
Rating:90%

Lucky # Slevin (2006)

Welcome to the world of crisp, cool crime stories where innocent little Josh Hartnett has to deal with a bunch of brunt gangsters that want money from him. You have to listen to all of them talk their heads off, even if they're not directly related to the plot. You will have to watch the portrayal of a Jewish mafia, which is borderline anti-semitic. You will watch Morgan Freeman be a gangster too, as head of a mob with his matter-of-factly facial expressions. Less words and more staring at your constipated face, is the name of the game.
The girl next door is Lucy Liu, who (is tiny in stature and) spends the movie fawning over Josh Hartnett. She just can't get enough of this guy. Is she really that small? It didn't seem that way in Charlie's Angels.
Anyway in the end, the good guy kills the bad guy, so happily ever after right? Naw, pretty much every character in this movie was a fucker. The bad guy loses, the good guy wins, and I lose for watching this faggoty movie.

Rating: 40%

Babel (2006)

When I first discovered Apple Trailers, I watched a segment for this and was intrigued. I wondered how this one movie could weave together some tribals in Afghanistan, a blond couple on vacation, Mexico, and some Japanese people. Well they did it. They're lives are all related in some weird way, and the tribals are in Morroco, not in the Afghans. Could Babel be about globalization? Language barriers? The story has more to do with Babelfish than the Tower of Babel. In fact, language barriers hardly come into play in the story, and most of the plot is moved along by the unintended aspects of human individual ambition. Cool movie, but I don't see a moral. Oh, and Brad Pitts in it. He's cool.

Rating: 60%

Wall Street (1989)

So I guess this is what the financial market was like in the 80's. Man, look at those shitty computers, and are those ledgers? How did they manage to do all this market trading stuff on a green screen? The dress code looks the same. The snide, slightly restrained douchebaggery is also the same. But my god, look at all that paper! Nobody uses paper anymore, in fact, I think all that stock market data is computer generated. So now I'm wondering why brokers are so busy these days, when the computers are doing all the work for them. Can you imagine calling your broker to ask for a price check? HAHAHA nobody would ever do that.
Oh, I almost forgot. This is basically Boiler Room but with Micheal Douglas instead of Ben Affleck. The similarity is remarkable but this is the original.

Style is too old.
Rating: 40%

Honor Among Charities

Every time I see a TV advert for the cause of a charity I vomit internally. How counterproductive is that? They're spending donated money on advertisements in hopes of netting even more donated money. It seems predatory, even fraudulent in my eyes.

The modern charity has its roots in religious tithing. The devout would give a portion of their income (usually around 20%) to the church, which would in turn, give it to the poor and needy and whoever. But before doing just that, the clergy would take a portion of that money for themselves, using the funds to build an even more grandiose church with more buttresses and stained glass, thus attracting more to their flock. The power of the churches grew and grew, eventually leading to centuries of religious war and other bullshit.

Following the decline of the religious powers, nation states often took over the role running charities. Unfortunately, this system worked poorly as well, mostly due to the dampening effects of corruption and excessive bureaucracy that shunted the donated money to other places, such as war funds, royal coffers, and back to those damn churches.

As the world approached modernity, people increasingly distrustful of big government would take on the role of charitymaker themselves, founding philanthropist organizations that would serve as the agents of action for giving to the poor and needy. That's where we are now. But starting last year, everything changed.

The current economic recession not only pulled back on consumer spending, but also cut private donations. In effect, the cash flow to these houses of charity dried up. And that is why almost every day, I have to hear from charities begging for money. I am tired of hearing people pandering for chump change and constantly shouting "GIVE" in my face. For me, this recession has exposed great flaws in the modern charitable organization. Charities suck and they're annoying. Starting this year, they've also become desperate, in addition to being an annoyance to me.

When a person says "I donated $1000 to charity", that is incorrect. He is actually saying, "I donated about ($1000 * 0.65) to charity and I unknowingly gave ($1000 * 0.35) to some strangers that don't even need the cash but took it anyway."

Rather than constantly asking people to blindly give them chunks of money, they should be required to use a more honest approach. Charitable organizations should have a 0% expense ratio requirement. Instead of stealing cash from their own donation bins, they should charge an expense fee for donating money to their cause. For example, if you donate $1000 towards the Sudan, $1000 of your dollars would be spent on procuring food staples for the Sundanese. A separate fee would be charged by the organization to take your money. Similarly, if you donate $1000 to researching cures for disease, $1000 should be spent on medical research, and not 50% into funding research and 50% into a stupid candlelit relay race at a track and field.

Imagine what this would do for the world of philanthropy. Donations would be properly segregated into charitable money and wasted money. Charities would have to openly reveal how much of your donation they bite off when they charge you the expense fee, incentivizing them to keep internal waste to a minimum. Shitty charities would die off, leaving only legitimate charity organizations behind. Television adverts would stop. Door to door clipboard artists would cease to exist. There would be no guy dressed in a Santa suit ringing a bell for your coins.

And that's how the system should be working. Personal donations aren't some cash cow. A donation is money given in goodwill to a total stranger on the promise that it will be used for a beneficial cause. The middleman needs to be kept honest to stay a middleman.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Wow this is a really awesome western. I usually don't go for these types of movies, simply because I find the dusty dry scenery to be unappealing, but when I saw Russell Crowe and Christian Bale on the cover, I knew this had substance. Every time someone dies, expect it to be good. Each death is profound. Every corpse has meaning, and that's how it's supposed to be. People have to die for a reason. When I watch a western, I don't want to see a horde of retarded outlaws play shoot-em-up with a bunch of stupid sheriffs like some kind of outback holocaust. I want to see a bad guy fighting with an ordinary person that's incredibly determined. Show me accomplished and philosophical characters that share the same common sense but choose different sides. Top it off with good acting and you're done.

Amazing line: "Tommy was weak. TOMMY was stupid. Tommy. Is. Dead."
Rating: 100%

Paycheck (2003)

After so many years of hearing about this from other people and shrugging, I finally got this fucking movie and actually watched it. Meh. Modern action movie with high tech gear and a man/woman celebrity pair, period. That's all you're gonna get from this movie and you will remember nothing more profound than that. Ben Affleck is this secret agent that does backwards engineering for rival corporations and then gets his memory erased after the job is done. Following one of the routine mind wipes, weird things start happening that unravel an action packed mystery. Cool premise.

Where this movie falls below par is in the characterization of the bad guys, which were often excessively stupid or had motives that just didn't make sense. It annoys me to see characters doing unreasonably stupid shit. The story depends on the human quality of the antagonist, and when the bad guy is stupid, the story becomes stupid. The result: the plot fails. Ben Affleck swinging a wooden staff around also annoyed me. Why did they put that in there? Nobody wants to see Affleck doing kung fu. I've seen people on the street do much better.

Rating: 50%

The Lost City (2005)

The aforementioned "lost city" is Havana, where we get to see old democratic Cuba get swept over by communism. My god, the sacrifices that must be made to enact societal changes are brutal. The once noble families divided by these conflicting pluralistic and socialist ideologies face disappointment beyond measure. A lifetime of regret and shame awaits them once they escape to the States.

As the movie depicts it, Havana was good thing in the world that got destroyed, the symbol for which is an innocent city nightclub that gets ended by the Fidel Castro society. Because the American east coast has a large Cuban diaspora, hollywood movies like this often turn into tacky anti-communist art forms. But I didn't find that to a particular problem here. Instead, what I found to be more of a problem was that there was too much irrelevant conversation that bored the shit outta me. Show me more guerilla warfare!

Rating: 40%

Solaris (2002)

This sucked. I couldn't get my hands on Event Horizon so I took on this George Clooney movie instead. That's too bad because everything was terrible. The plot is in the same realm as The Traveler (2005) and is basically a bunch of buzzy lights with a guy tripping out multidimensionally. Throw in an ephemeral looking mysterious woman that may or may not exist to complete the picture. The script is absolutely unbelievable. George Clooney would walk into a room and just start asking questions one after another, his face unchanging like his mind was some sort of blank slate. The conversations sounded more like some kind of recorded recital than an actual dialog. Nobody in the history of mankind would ever talk remotely like that. George Clooney you fucking suck I'm glad you got sucked into a black hole.

Rating: 30%

One Hour Photo (2002)

It's pretty weird to see Robin Williams as a dried up old man on the cover of a movie. That's what got me into this one, resulting in the first psycho thriller movie that I've even come close to appreciating. So as it turns out, back when they were using chemically developed film, the technicians would be required to look through the photos to make sure there weren't any slides of child porn or pictures of people getting murdered. But this guy, turns this into a crazy obsession and the sickness spills over into real life and you know the rest. Real nice guy too. Well meaning, really pleasant neighborhood guy.

I would hope to see more of Robbie Williams in future movies, but that seems unlikely, so I won't.
Rating: 60%

The Bucket List (2007)

This title sounded really gay so I refused to watch it until now, when my boredom has reached new highs that compelled me. We have 2 famous and incredibly seasoned actors here that spend the movie hanging out and having friendly jibes at each other. Does that sound like a good watch to you? Hells no, that sounds faggoty and boring.

The better part of Bucket List is spent with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in a duo dialog. A duolog. Or something. With these 2 guys working together, the acting doesn't fail. While admitted in the same hospital room, they decide to do a "bucket list", or a list of stuff you want to do before you kick the bucket. So knowing that their time is limited, they go on an adventure to complete those things and cross off the items when they've done it.

Here's an example of a bucket list that I am happy to share with you from my own list of things I'd like to do before I'm dead.

The Bucket List
Make a difference in a total stranger's life.
Laugh until my midsection hurts too much to laugh any more.
Return this shitty movie to the library.
Kill a woolly mammoth with my bare hands.
Kill 5 men.
Kill 10 men.
20 men, and I wear this emblem.
Get Buzzy Aldrin to admit that the moon landing was fake.
Reconquer Jerusalem.
Learn necromancy so that I can resurrect Hitler and give him another chance at Art School.
Learn to use psionic weapons.

Jack Nicholson has lost some of his fire. He's old and decrepit and looks mildly like a down syndrome kid.
Rating: 50%

Summer Movie Showdown: Transformers 2 (2009) Versus The Proposal (2009)

I want to make it clear that I was against seeing either of these films, but due to the enormous power women have over my nuts (and because I wasn't paying) I saw both in the span of a week. I decided that rather than take each one on single-handedly I would compare and contrast the various strengths and weaknesses of these two wildly different films against one another.

Here are the contestants:


Movie 1: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
Director: Michael fucking Bay
Genre: Completely overwrought sci-fi action-comedy
Star Actors: Shia "crack addict" Lebouf, Megan "miscast porn star" Foxxx, Optimus Prime
Budget: A million billion Spielberg dollars



Movie 2: The Proposal
Director: Some chick
Genre: Romantic comedy
Star Actors: Sandra "career rebound" Bullock, Ryan "punch me" Reynolds
Budget: Enough to keep Betty White alive though filming

First Catagory: Plot.

The plot in Transformers 2 begins with the annoying kid from Transformers going to college and making the brilliant decision to leave his transforming robot car in his mom's garage because he needs his space. Then he makes the second brilliant decision to leave his perfect 10 of a girlfriend behind where she builds custom choppers or some unbelievable shit. He has a shard of something in his pocket that brings his toaster to life which promptly tries to kill him. Then a bunch of evil robots start blowing things up in order to ressurrect Megatron from the bottom of the ocean. Then Shia starts seeing things and Megatron tries to steal his brain, then decides to kill Optimus prime, then decides to drop a bunch of robots from space to blow up some stuff and declare war on all humans before trying to blow up the sun. Then an Egyptian transformer who was hiding on another planet starts blowing more stuff up and the good guys try to ressurrect Optimus Prime to defeat him and set the movie up for a sequel.

In the Proposal a Canadian senior editor and her assistant at a New York publishing house decide to commit marriage fraud in order to further their careers. In the process the Canadian chick has to meet her assistant's family in Alaska and endure their crazy antics while trying to avoid an investigator from the INS. She then freaks out because she doesn't want to hurt his family's feelings and tries to call it off, but then it's too late because they're already in love.

Winner: The Proposal, due to the fact that it actually had a plot.

Second Category: Acting.

The acting in Transformers 2 is abysmal. Shia Lebouf is an ex-Disney kid who grew up with drug addict parents who let him basically do anything he wanted, so now he's a total shit who has no idea how to act. Megan Fox just looks and acts like she's in a porno the entire time. In fact, she probably would have made a great porn star. She can't act for shit but she's basically a piece of meat for 13-year old boys to lust over anyway. Everyone else is a complete failure except the voice actors for Optimus Prime and Megatron.

Sandra Bullock continues to be Sandra Bullock in every movie she's ever been in. She starts out serious and professional but degenerates into this goofy wacky lunatic who can't no anything by herself and therefore becomes irresistible to the male lead. Too bad she's totally unconvincing as a Canadian, which is a major plot point. As for the male lead, Ryan Reynolds continues to be Ryan Reynolds in every single movie he's ever been in. Luckily we have Betty White to round things out.

Winner: The Proposal, for having actual actors who have been in actual movies before.


Category 3: Entertainment Value.

Transformers 2 is entertaining in the way that injecting heroin into your nutsack is entertaining. It's so totally over the top and full of explosions and dying robots and battles and insanity that I don't think it's possible to be bored. But it's the kind of "not being bored" that you'd get if someone threw you out of a plane at 10,000 feet. You're entertained, but it's not enjoyable.

The Proposal is pretty mundane and basic, but its comedy segments might actually engage your sense of humor instead of forcing you to watch two dogs fuck like Transformers does. It's mild humor that might make you laugh, but it's the whitest humor you can imagine.

Winner: Transformers 2, for making sure for 3 hours that you will not be able to look away from the screen.

Category 4: Casual Racism.

Transformers 2 is the most racist movie I have ever seen. It portrays blacks as idiots, Jews as ineffectual losers and Arabs as cannon fodder and paranoid traitors. Two robots in the movie were most certainly referred to in the script as "the nigger-bot twins" who speak ebonics and profess the fact that they can't read. One even has a gold toof.

The Proposal makes fun of a single Mexican guy who is a waiter, a stripper, a store owner and a priest at different points in the film. He is fat and unattractive but at least he works hard.

Winner: Transformers 2 is racist as hell.

Category 5: Sex Appeal.

Sandra Bullock is getting old. But even though she's got crinkles around her eyes and the ravages of time are slowly getting the upper hand, she still looks good naked and runs around in slinky nightclothes for a good portion of the film. And the loud gay guy who was sitting behind me in the theatre kept saying she had "great legs" to his boyfriend, so that settles it.

Megan Fox is the most corporate-approved hot chick in film today. They basically found the hottest piece of ass they could find, viral marketed her as such until the name Megan Fox became synonymous with "hot chick." Unfortunately, she has no soul and when you look into her eyes there is absolutely no life behind them. That is not sexy.

Also there is a hot chick who tries to rape Shia and who turns out to be a Terminator. That was kind of hot.

Winner: Tie

Category 6: Reviewer's Slant.

Transformers 2 hurt my fucking brain and my fucking intelligence. The movie tried to insult me the entire way through by telling me I had no sense of what was quality film-making, that plot didn't matter, that I was a reptillian-brained idiot who just wanted to watch things blow up and moms eating pot brownies and guys getting tazed in the nuts. It is a movie made by Michael Bay, who is some kind of genius who managed to boil action movies down to their core values and amp them up to unbelievable levels. At no point in the movie are you not being stimulated. It is just too much for any person to handle. I did not enjoy it very much.

The Proposal was a very laid-back, very safe movie that wasn't unpleasant to watch. It didn't have anything that blew my mind, wasn't daring and knew what it was: a chick flick. There's goofy comedy spaced evenly throughout a basic plot which was based around marriage fraud, something I've not seen before. The visuals are nice and every character in the movie is white except for one Mexican. One of the characters is Betty White.

Winner: The Proposal, which does not feature Nigger-bots, or try to melt my brain or insult me.


Overall Winner

The Proposal



Transformers 2 is not a movie. It is an American disaster. It's a symbol of why the world hates us. It is brainwashing. Your brain is being tricked into believing it is being entertained, but it is in actuality being over-stimulated in a way that approaches torture.

The Proposal is a chick flick, but the acting and plot is decent and you actually might even care about what happens to the characters by the end. And the ending alludes to the fact that Ryan Reynolds will probably get thrown in jail while Sandra Bullock gets sent back to Canada. So even if you don't like the characters you're not forced to watch them live happily ever after. In Transformers it is obvious that the main characters will never, ever be gotten rid of until the actors themselves OD in real life. Which in Shia's case is hopefully very, very soon.

Men vs Wild (2009) Will Ferrell and Bear Grylls

If you went up to my face and told me that Bear Grylls was going out into the wilderness with Will Ferrell, I would say you're full of shit. That's not even remotely possible. Yet, it has come to this.

They start off on some frozen mountain where Ferrell starts the trip with lots of complaining. Bear Grylls has done this dozens of times so this episode is just a routine for him. As the journey progresses, Ferrell's jokes are noticeably less flamboyant and more fatigued, more angry at his inferiority in this environment, which I think might be a part of his comic persona. Overall, this duo interp has been a chance for Bear Grylls to expand his acting repertoir and maybe defend his survivalist reputation. Wait, what the fuck is Will Ferrell doing here again?

Next on Man vs Wild: Bear Grylls with Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in the African Savanna.
Rating: is Awesome.

Peaceful Warrior (2006)

There's something about this movie that doesn't jive with me. At first, it seemed to be a movie about an athlete coping with a crippling loss, but then it threw in some pseudo philosophical shit, and after one of the main characters got the name "Socrates" it became incredibly gay. I don't even give a shit about gymnastics. What is that, some circus tradition? It just didn't seem right.

So I immediately looked this up on the wiki and found that the author is a former gymnast that peddles a line of inspirational self-help books. So basically, this is a sales pitch disguised as a family movie. The author's message, of course, is nothing more than a small excerpt of traditional Bhuddism about attachment and mental concentration.

As it turns out, this guy also teaches Aikido, which I consider to be a cult practice. Aikijutsu is one of those styles of fighting designed to empower old people and middle aged women with the delusion that they can draw "infinite power" from their aging bodies. Then to cover their asses, they advocate total pacifism, so in this movie the main characters get robbed, but rather than resist the muggers, they happily hand over their watches. Then they have the nerve to call that inner strength. What? I mean, that might look good on paper, but it doesn't make any sense. These people have gotta stop.

Dan Millman should kill himself.
Rating: 30%

The Machinist (2004)

This movie is by far best known for the pictures of emaciated Christian Bale like the one pictured above. His character is a blue collar factory worker with a body that resembles a dehydrated prune. The majority of the movie is spent in bewilderment and irritation in his quest to make sense of these recurrent hallucinations he keeps seeing. Finally, shriveled Christian Bale unlocks a pivotal memory that makes everything crystallize into clarity. But now it's too late. A crazy person cannot return to ordinary life after spending so much time as a crazy person, so the movie just ends.

"Psychological thriller" is perhaps my least favorite genre of movie. It cannot be watched more than once, it is nonsense during the movie, and the story is irrelevant after the movie ends.
Rating: 40%