Watching "The Duh Vinci Code". As bad as I remembered it.

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is One Missed Call, the American Remake.

Full disclosure, the only Japanese Horror films I can remember watching are Ringu, Kwaidan, and Audition, but I'm pretty sure the latter two aren't actually proper J-Horror as the term is commonly known. This may be a detriment because a good portion of the criticism on TVTropes' page talks about how it lifts scenes directly from the original and still manages to fuck it up.

I haven't seen the original (it's not available in the library, but this shitty remake is), and I get the impression that the second scene in the film could be a good example, because that Japanese-style house suggests this might have been lifted directly from the original, but the utter incoherence of it suggests quite a bit was lost in translation:






What the fuck is convincing her to look at the water, especially as she's trying to fetch her cat, who's clearly on the other side of the huge pond she has in her home for some reason? Why can't we see anything until that random arm comes out of the water and drags her in? And what does it want with her cat? What's with the long shot of the phone scrolling through her address book? What connection did this have with the child who got rescued from the burning hospital that this scene directly faded into? It's been forever since I've seen The Ring, but, IIRC, at least they knew to have scenes that the audience could understand. Maybe let the audience in on what's actually happening, like the opening scene of Get Out. It doesn't have to set up the central gimmick (this time of a killer voice message on her cell phone), but it should at least make some sense.

Eventually, they do set up the gimmick, and it's mildly explained. It involves cursed voicemail messages that foretell the time of death, and the people affected by it start seeing startling things that aren't all that scary (some creepy looking people who look like they're wearing Spirit Halloween costumes in broad daylight), or might be scary if they weren't so clearly CGI (like a centipede crawling inside the skin of someone's hand.) Despite the fact that the passage of time is a crucial part of the plot, a ticking clock to the time when each person is going to die, as foretold by those voice messages, the pacing is horrible. At least The Ring, for all its flaws, gave a sense of time. This doesn't. All of a sudden, it's Friday one week, and then it's Monday, then it's Friday of the next week.

There is not a single decent performance, which is shocking  when one considers that it includes some legitimately talented actors, like Jason Beghe, Ray Wise, and Ariel Winter. Seriously, Ray Wise plays a guy who works for an exorcism TV show (who somehow heard about the killer phone calls; this may have been explained, but, honestly, I don't give a shit.) Ray Wise also played Leland Palmer, Laura Palmer's father from Twin Peaks, who was possessed by the spirit BOB and, under his influence, kills Laura, and sets off the plot. I would love to be able to make wisecracks about the parallels between the two, but I'm given so reason to give a shit about it that I just can't. Hell, in one scene, he tries to exorcise a cell phone on national televison, and the religious figures around him start coming to life, and even that's just so boring that I can't even smile at it. Or even my own little autistic version of a reflexive smile, anyway.





Even when the movie inserts abusive parents into the mix (and it turns out it's the ghost of an abused child doing the phone killing), it just does nothing, and that's usually a good way of getting me to at least feel something. Seriously, Margaret Cho's on-and-off attempt at a Southern accent feels like she's putting more effort into her performance than the rest of the cast combined. Christ, the new Black Mirror trailers just dropped and watching this killer technology movie just makes me dread having to deal with those. Sure, I've seen the trailers for all three episodes, and at least they feel like they're giving a shit from the minute's worth of each episode we've seen, but thinking about them with this horseshit on my mind is just going to make everything worse. I'm still going to do an Anglotopia article about them, but it'll be a lot less joyful than my previous attempts have been.

Also, is the killer ringtone "No Dogs Allowed?" From that one Peanuts movie?

(May 22, 2019 at 3:52 pm)Thena323 Wrote:

(May 22, 2019 at 1:02 pm)Brian37 Wrote: I don't know why I stuck through it.

Because bikini booty?

Actually no.  I will admit to lots of other movies in the past for that reason, but this time, no.

One of the male actors is now "Dano" on the new Hawaii Five 0. , Being a fan of the 70s series, that is the main reason I stuck through it.
 

If you want to accuse me of watching a T and A movie for nostalgia reasons, "Porky's 15" or "Bachelor Party Part 20" would be a better argument.

(May 23, 2019 at 1:31 am)Brian37 Wrote:

(May 22, 2019 at 3:52 pm)Thena323 Wrote: Because bikini booty?

Actually no.  I will admit to lots of other movies in the past for that reason, but this time, no.

One of the male actors is now "Dano" on the new Hawaii Five 0. , Being a fan of the 70s series, that is the main reason I stuck through it.
 

If you want to accuse me of watching a T and A movie for nostalgia reasons, "Porky's 15" or "Bachelor Party Part 20" would be a better argument.

Lol....I was just asking, you know.


I've seen scenes on TV, but I don't think I've ever watched Porky's in it's entirety. 
Bachelor Party maybe, once. Can't remember.

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Catwoman. I've had two films in a row be the worst film I've ever seen. Well, I think I owed it to myself to see something that I knew had at least a few redeeming qualities. Those redeeming qualities? In Roger Ebert's words, ""There are three good things in Catwoman: Halle Berry's face, Halle Berry's body, and Halle Berry's costume. Those are first-rate." Well, he's wrong about the last one, but at least the first two are more than I got with The Babe Ruth Story or One Missed Call.

Well, there's two major, deep-seated, problems with this film: the first is Catwoman herself. She's given a radically different identity; instead of being Selina Kyle, she's Patience Phillips. And she's got actual cat-related superpowers in this film (Hell, in one scene, she rubs her face in catnip), and damn near the only thing taken from previous media is that she managed to get revived by magical cats like is implied to be the case in Batman Returns, but even in that case, you could argue that it's not exactly what it looks like. In this case, there's no ambiguity.



Seriously, comics fans (who would seem to be the major demographic for this movie, especially in 2004) will almost certainly be pissed off at how badly you dropped the ball and threw out everything that had been written about her in the past 64 years.

The other major problem is their decision to compensate for alienating comics fans by marketing it towards women. Now, this is not a problem in and of itself; it can certainly be a good gateway for an entire demographic to get into comics. However, they dropped the ball so fucking bad. They push for a girl power agenda (foreshadowed early on, particularly after her boss' wife compliments her work after her boss dismisses it). But they ruin it by changing the costume around to cater to the male gaze. I mean, sure, the traditional catsuit does that already, but at least that left something to the imagination. And Tim Burton wasn't constantly showing us shots of Michelle Pfeiffer's tits and ass. See this scene:



Meanwhile, this is what Halle Berry is given: 

That shit has to be really impractical to fight in, and it barely counts as a catsuit, even if Lois Griffin says it is. Also, as a foot fetishist speaking ex cathedra, open toed boots are pointless (Well, at least we get a few decent shots of Halle's Berry's feet in this film.) And, back to the film, what's the big adversary Catwoman is fighting in this film? An evil cosmetics company. Yeah, that's a major letdown for anyone who's actually seen a superhero film before. I don't care if The Joker did that in the original Batman film; that was just one part in a larger plot with many different aims. And even the Smylex was actually pretty ingenious in its execution, since it involved several different parts that needed to be done in a specific order (which could potentially lead to some plausible deniability if anyone gets caught), and at least The Joker's endgame made sense: kill people and leave a big, creepy, smile on their faces. Why the fuck does the company in this film want to go through with selling a makeup like Beau-line, which will lead to people's faces disintegrating? What is the endgame here? And for bonus shallow feminism points: apparently, Catwomen have been around for millennia, but Patience's mentor hasn't had any success in promoting her idea, and it's all because of "male academia" (and given the boon in gender studies since the 1970s, that excuse can only go so far) and not because the idea is fucking insane. Also, if you like mediocre mid-2000s chick flicks, see how many tropes from them show up. Not all of them, of course, (I can't find a scene where she's complaining about her weight, and with all the proverbial ink I've spilled about that costume, there's no fashion montage scene), but there will be a lot of them. Overall, not anywhere near as bad as the Feminism Fail in The Emoji Movie, but it may be hard to drop the ball that bad. Thank Jah Wonder Woman proved you could pull it off.

Other miscellaneous crap I've noticed.

• They lay the cat motif onto the film way too damn thick. It includes a scene of Patience rubbing a ball of catnip in her face and it just gets worse from there.
  
• The obvious CGI, especially in the resurrection scene, is obvious.
  
• The writing is crap, as you might have guessed. But the first line, the opening monologue, really lets you know right off the bat what kind of shit you're in for:
  

  Quote:It all started on the day that I died. If there had been an obituary, it would have described the unremarkable life of an unremarkable woman, survived by no one. But there was no obituary, because the day that I died was also the day I started to live. But that comes later. This was my life

• A white Russian, hold the vodka, hold the Kahlua. I seriously always wanted to know if that worked in a real bar.
  
• Also, the whole subplot with the handwriting analysis makes no sense. Unless Patience was supposed to be a barista, since they're the ones who usually write on coffee cups.
  
• In the initial ledge scene, something strange I noticed: when she's hanging on the AC unit, she's barefoot, and she stays that way once she comes into the apartment. 30 seconds later, she's running out her apartment wearing shoes despite not having any opportunity to put shoes on.
  

And you know what, on that note, I'm going to leave you with a little present: a good parts version of Catwoman, although I may have cut the phone conversation down and added the catnip scene. Cause that shit's funny. Fucking three video limit.




That's it for now. I'm 69 minutes into the film (HAR DEE HAR), and dinner's just about ready. There may be more stupid shit in the last 35 minutes that bears mentioning, like there was with Hillary's America. Or there may not be.

Anger Management

I resisted watching this for the longest time, for the simple reason that I hate Adam Sandler.  He's awful, in every sense of the word.  But rejecting the film unseen caused me some pain, because my hatred for Sandler is the inverse of my reverence for Jack Nicholson, who might just be the best actor of his generation (not the least because, when he smiles, he looks like Satan having his best.day.ever.).

If I had the skills, I would edit Sandler out of the entire film and replace him with someone with actual talent - Steve Carrell or Ryan Reynolds, maybe.  Or a hat rack.

Very funny film, but none of the funny bits come from Sandler.  Nicholson, John Turturro, Luis Guzman and an underused Woody Harrelson take care of the funny.

5.5 out of 10 (the .5 is because of an extended scene of Heather Graham in her underwear).  Would have been 9 out of 10, but, you know, Sandler.

Boru

(May 27, 2019 at 6:06 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Anger Management

I resisted watching this for the longest time, for the simple reason that I hate Adam Sandler.  He's awful, in every sense of the word.  But rejecting the film unseen caused me some pain, because my hatred for Sandler is the inverse of my reverence for Jack Nicholson, who might just be the best actor of his generation (not the least because, when he smiles, he looks like Satan having his best.day.ever.).

If I had the skills, I would edit Sandler out of the entire film and replace him with someone with actual talent - Steve Carrell or Ryan Reynolds, maybe.  Or a hat rack.

Very funny film, but none of the funny bits come from Sandler.  Nicholson, John Turturro, Luis Guzman and an underused Woody Harrelson take care of the funny.

5.5 out of 10 (the .5 is because of an extended scene of Heather Graham in her underwear).  Would have been 9 out of 10, but, you know, Sandler.

Boru

I simply won't watch a film with Adam Sandler in it.

I know it won't be funny.

Same goes with a number of actors/actresses.

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Doogal.

This one will require some explanation: Once upon a time, there was a French puppet animation series called Le Manège enchanté. It ended up getting picked up by the BBC for a dub. However, they considered it too difficult to translate properly, so they just made their own scripts that kinda sorta followed what was happening on screen. It wound up being a huge hit, big enough that people blew a gasket when Auntie Beeb decided to mess around with the time slot. It was huge, but not enough to get any meaningful American release. As a result, I'm not familiar with it. In 2005, however, the Weinstein Company somehow managed to pick it up for American distribution. However, in the spirit of Harvey Weinstein's habit of simultaneously bringing interesting stories to the world and completely butchering them in the name of profit, he made a new dub for the film (despite the fact that a perfectly decent dub with the likes of Tom Baker, Jim Broadbent, Joanna Lumley, and Robbie Wiliams already existed.) He only retained two voice actors from the original dub, Ian McKellen and Kylie Minogue, and even the latter had to re-record her lines in an American accent. So, how did the new dub fare?

• The script is full of random pop culture references that add nothing. If you thought the reference humour in Shrek was distracting, just watch any given minute of the movie. I'll just give a list of properties referenced in ONE scene later in the post.
  
• When the script isn't just referencing much better movies, it's just banal shit that most decent writers would cut. Apparently, this script was written by Butch Hartman, but he claims that anywhere between 80-97% of what he wrote ended up getting rewritten by other writers, who kept clashing to the point where it all ends up as a massive clusterfuck.
  
• Judi Dench plays a narrator that just narrates the obvious. Kind of like what I think the original version would have been like, but more banal.
  
• Kevin Smith voices a random moose who was silent in the previous dubs, just saying stupid shit and farting.
  
• The actors who already did get a voice end up getting poorly matched, like Doogal getting voiced by the kid from Elf (whose acting is horrible enough that, when he says 'Look at Me' it took several takes for me to be sure he didn't say 'Fuck It') , Ermintrude the operatic cow being voiced by Whoopi Goldberg (whose voice and new dialogue is clearly better suited to soul than opera, but she still does songs from Carmen), and Jon Stewart having a really non-threatening voice for the villain (especially when his rival is voiced by Ian "Gandalf" McKellen).
  
• Dougal, whose name was spelled properly in the original, was given the phonetic spelling in the movie.
  

Also, in the making of featurette that I somehow managed to see before the feature film, Jon Stewart said: "Harvey Weinstein called and said 'Do this film' and I fear him, as most do, and I said 'Yes. Please don't hurt me.'" Yes, that was in official promotional material that made it on the DVD. That speaks volumes about the final product.

And properties referenced during the skeleton fight (a single 90-second scene):

• The Shining
  
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  
• Pirates of the Caribbean
  
• The Whassup? Commercial from Anheuser-Busch.
  
• Bone Thugs n Harmony
  
• Dawn of the Dead
  
• The Matrix
  
• John Woo
  
• Wu-Tang Clan
  
• Possibly Homestar Runner if the "Hey, I'm Steve" line is actually a reference to Eh! Steve
  
• "Can't Touch This"
  
• Karate Kid
  

Don't believe me?



The rest of the film is only slightly less reference overdosed. Seriously, I think this may be the new contender for the Megatron Award for Bad Comedy when I cover this round of films for the Deep Hurting Project.

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Dinesh D'Souza's Death of a Nation, one of only five films to reach a 1 on Metacritic. And of the three that are actually in the Skokie Library, this is the last one I've actually covered (Biodome and United Passion are the other two.) 

Like my previous entry into the world of Dinesh D'Souza, I've decided to divide this into separate lists, debunkings, and miscellaneous bullshit. I'm going to see if I can remove all the overlap with Hilary's America (and there's a lot of them):

Bullshit:

• D'Souza is talking about when he was a child in India and how he was fascinated by how countries got destroyed, and included the USSR in his list of destroyed nations he looked up as a kid... even though it was dissolved when he was THIRTY. He could be adding the Soviet Union retroactively, of course, but the phrasing is kind of ambiguous. Still, it took five minutes for D'Souza to do something totally stupid.
  
• There is some tactical overlap between brownshirts and Antifa. That's kind of the nature of militant political groups. Doesn't necessarily mean that Antifa are the real fascists. It's honestly kind of depressing to see D'Souza railroading Robert Paxton into his own bullshit agenda and you can see him taking a nuanced view of the situation and trying to convey it through some clearly loaded questions. 
  
• Yes, there were actually some leftists who sympathised with fascism (at least in the 1930s.) It really helped that, at that point, Mussolini, and to a lesser extent Hitler, actually had some control over the narratives. And his talking about how Mussolini's fascists claimed FDR was one of theirs really reminds me of this.
  
• You know what, the whole Nazis and Communists had a lot in common canard is so annoying I'll just leave you with this:
  
  
  This should cover it all. D'Souza is largely accurate when he's talking about the basic facts of the Nazi regime (even if he does mispronounce "Beobachter") but is hopelessly idiotic when he goes anywhere near analysis.
• Notably, he talks about the destruction of the Native Americans like it's just a Democratic thing. It really wasn't. To be fair, the Republicans were only around to see about 32 of the last years of the conflict, but they weren't all that ready to stop the madness.
  
• Anti-homosexuality is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to evidence that Hitler's point of view was antithetical to progressive values, like the fact that he was willing to destroy anything that threatened their hegemony. Also, he talks about how willing Hitler was to tolerate the gay people in the SA like a minute after he talks about the Night of the Long Knives.
  
  
  
• Also, being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean someone's not going to attack other Christian denominations he doesn't like. 
  
• Technically, as much as we might have liked, theories of racial superiority weren't totally discredited by the unveiling of Dachau and Auschwitz. Further scientific research that did a whole lot to make sure that we knew eugenics didn't work that way. And, of course, the rabble didn't give a shit. 
  
• What do you know, he points out that, during the founding of America, the founders' view of slavery was a lot more nuanced than we tend to give them credit for. Still flawed, but they still seemed to not buy into the idea that it was a positive good the way successors like John Calhoun did. That said, they didn't really do much to stop it unless enough people made a stink of it. We know this because France actually did abolish slavery around the time of the founding of America, with Robespierre, he of the Reign of Terror, even saying of attempts to defend slavery in the colonies: “perish the colonies rather than our principles;”
  
• Apparently, the Democratic support for immigration is a Tammany-style scheme and not just a natural result of the Republicans treating them as an existential threat. 
  
• Also, D'Souza treats the Democratic support for segregation (and the Klan) in very similar terms to Howard Zinn's description of the post-slavery systems that kept the black man down. Horseshoe theory in action? 
  
• For all his talk about trying to look at the secret meanings behind the things Democratic politicians say, he's really shit at trying to decode the racism in the Southern Strategy. Or even reading the election results; he points out that George Wallace took most of the South (read: five states), but in three of those, Nixon still got more votes than Humphrey. And in 1972, he got everything but Massachusetts and Washington DC.
  
• Also telling how he cherry-picks the response to the left to see how far they go. Something tells me he won't do anything about the Unite the Right rally, that Trump took four times to condemn. And sure enough, when he covers Charlottesville, he talks about Jason Kessler's past as a Democrat and his concerns about bankers. And somehow, despite his indignant response to being exposed as a past left-winger, that means he's still left-wing.
  
• He spends several minutes interviewing Richard Spencer, and it's a massive clusterfuck and it fails to explain any point, just that D'Souza takes the sort of racial lip service that the right has used since Reagan seriously (as does Trump, to a much lesser extent). And Spencer doesn't. And that's pretty much the main difference.
  
• So, Sophie Scholl is good for speaking out against Hitler. Hey, Dinesh, what's your stance on racists dogpiling on journalists who talk out against Trump?
  

Miscellaneous bits of stupidity:

• D'Souza goes into the story of how Trump became  president, and somehow managed to completely lose sight of not only the more jackasstic shit he said in the intervening 17 months, but also the other dozen or so candidates.
  
• Sadly, the docudrama bullshit that covered Hilary's America is a lot less, and there's not much to make fun of. Just some barely competent and largely silent (or German-language) re-enactments of history.
  
• Like Hilary's America, the film just kind of stops for some patriotic song, but this time, it does so about 25 minutes before it's supposed to end instead of just 15. This time, it's just Dinesh and his wife covering a song by Celtic Woman. And the film just goes back to talking about Sophie Scholl. 
  
• For all the hype about this film, and the fact that he's on the cover with his face merged into Nixon, and the fact that some reviewers believe he made this film as a condition of his pardon by Trump, he actually says very little about Trump. He does bugger-all to explain just what Trump will do to make America great again. Granted, he's painted himself into a corner by apparently taking a hard line against racism (but not enough to keep from retweeting messages with lines like #gasthejews or #bringbackslavery), and he's trying to lionise a Republican who, when racism is removed from his policy, has bugger-all in the way of coherent ideology.
  
• What the fuck is Angela Primm even doing when she's singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic?"
  
  She's making a lot of weird faces, and what's weirder is it looks like, a lot of the time, she's doing something normal with the right side of her face, but she's doing all these wild shapes with the left side of her mouth.
  

The third iteration of the Deep Hurting Awards coming soon...