::A Geek in Korea::

Yo Dawg. Spoilers.

My favorite movie of the year so far has been Inception. I had to sneak out after work and see a late night showing because I was so excited to see it. I came back home and raved about it to my wife for an hour. I told her I really wanted to watch it with her, but we’d have to figure out how to get a babysitter to make it happen. If I couldn’t see it again, I wanted her to see it before it disappeared from the theater. Now that our daughter spends a few hours at a child care service in our apartment block, there is a short window of time where we aren’t walking around cleaning up and chasing her from one disaster to the next.

My wife said she wanted to go out and see a movie. Inception was still playing, and I told her I’d be glad to go see it again. We got up extra early and got Glow ready for the day care center. We didn’t even have time for an actual breakfast before we departed the apartment. We dropped off Glow and ran to the theater. The seating policy at the movie theater is that you can’t buy tickets with less than 10 minutes to go before the movie started. We jumped in a cab to travel the four blocks we needed to traverse in the five minutes we had before the deadline and luckily caught the elevator right as it arrived. We got there just in time.

Breakfast was some nasty orange drink and some caramel popcorn. I watched the movie again for clues, and I think I felt satisfied in one of the more optimistic interpretations of the film. For people that came to an opposite conclusion, I’d like to have a long sit down conversation while playing the DVD and drinking beer to see their point of view. There is a lot of symbolism and poignant lines that I know either interpretation of the film will ignore to support their opinion.

The story was easier to follow this time, and I still was amazed by the special effects. The film projector was slightly out of focus, which gave me a headache. The score, which I failed to mention last time, makes the film feel so much more epic. The characterizations of the majority of the heist members is still flawed, but I think that could be explained away with some of the symbolism of what those characters might actually be about. I don’t know…I still really enjoyed the film, and it’s the first movie I’ve seen twice in the theater in a really long time.

Yo Dawg.

I saw Inception last night. I was excited to see the film, and it lived up to my expectations. I’m glad I went in spoiler free. I had no knowledge of what the film was really about until the premise got explained in the first ten to twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the movie was working through the consequences of that idea, and it was really well executed.

The movie was deeply layered, and had lots of interconnected parts that could all be interpreted in multitude of satisfying ways. People that don’t want to think about the implications of some of the dialog can get something out of the tale as an off the wall heist movie. Someone that wants to dig deeper and discuss some of the themes of the scenes also has plenty to speculate on. The ending was satisfyingly open to interpretation, and there could be dozens of different ways to explain what went on.

The “heist” part of the movie was neat. It kept you guessing the entire time as to what was really happening, and what would happen next. It’s a film that defies the expectations of what a heist movie should be. The special effects were great and weird. I am really at a loss as to how some of it might have been done. It is a film that could stand up to multiple viewings, and I still think there would be more to discover every time you watched it. I was totally blown away by it, and I would recommend it for anyone that wanted to see an interesting and different sort of film. I freaking loved it.

Sitting around watching old movies used to be one of my hobbies. Watching terrible movies and heckling them online with friends is how I came to get my online moniker “Torgodevil” from the dearly beloved Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now whenever I watch one of those classic movies I remember loving in my childhood, all I can picture is how I wish the guys from MST3k were watching it and commenting on how bad it is too. Rifftrax has ruined me for passive entertainment. I mean, I could come up with funny stuff to say, but that’s their job.

Case in point, “The Karate Kid“. This was a formative movie in my childhood. I was in elementary school when “The Karate Kid” this was at the height of it’s popularity. There are things I remember vividly from the movie:

• There is a scene where the kid, Daniel, gets his ass kicked by thugs wearing skeleton costumes. It always terrified me that gangs of skeleton bullies were roaming the high schools of America.
• There were some training montages, like “Wax on, Wax off.” and when he caught a fly with chopsticks.
• A guy yells, “Put him in a body bag!”. That guy looked exactly like one of my cousins, which freaked me out.
• There was also that weird thing where Mr. Miagi, the Japanese guy claps his hands together and starts rubbing them in some room during the karate tournament.
• Daniel was fine, despite being “put in a body bag” and kicked that bully in the gut to score a winning point in some tournament.

That’s like four scenes. The movie is 2 hours, 6 minutes long, including the credits. I must have forgotten a lot in the past twenty years. Watching it again, there are a few awkward subplots about his mother moving out to get a new job, Daniel’s insecurity moving to a new city, and being poor. All of which forces Daniel to lie all the time. He also happens to take severe beatings whenever he approaches Elizabeth Shue, who likes him for some unfathomable reason. There are long stretches with nothing happening, and no one being kicked in the face at all! I forgot that happened. I know I had access to a fast forward button, but there is a lot of “not Karate” in “The Karate Kid”. Where are the Rifftrack guys to make fun of this?

Maybe with some luck they will tackle this movie. There is a remake of The Karate Kid, which will undoubtedly be horrible. Perhaps that will prompt them to go back and mock the original version, like when there was a rifftrax for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They occasionally do requested 1980’s classics, like Red Dawn too, so there is always a chance that The Karate Kid might get riffed on sometime in the future too. My imagination has grown lazy, and I want funny people to make fun of things that are bad for me. Is that so wrong?

Watch it back to back

Or Doubled.

More from Mst3k Haiku on Tumblr

Some friends of mine bought tickets to the 3D version of Pocahontas, who Dances with Wolves in Ferngully and is also the Last Samurai Avatar that was showing at a theater in town. They made the reservations a few days in advance, guaranteeing a good ticket for us. I’m too lazy to get to a theater to see a movie about blue cat people, but if someone else does the work I was willing to go see it with them. That being said, I’m glad I went. That movie in particular was only really worth seeing projected in 3D in a theater. It was beautiful, well made, and stylistically cool, despite starring giant furries. If I was a kid today, this is the movie that would make me a fanboy for science fiction.

The story was a well done take on something you’ve seen half a dozen times. How they packaged the story, the scenery of the world was presented in a novel manner thanks to the special effects and 3d. You weren’t there for the story, but the spectacle of it all. The bomb dropping left and right in the battles were heavy handed metaphors, but they blew up and looked so pretty! I had a hard time remembering that some it CGI some of the time, which is  rare. In 20 years time, when all movies look like this and are in 3D, people will laugh at how bad this movie is, but this is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and that’s worth seeing in the theater.

I felt that the most interesting part of the entire premise was the technology they absolutely skipped right past. There was a vat grown creature linked to another that could somehow connect via a giant body coffin, allowing one wheelchair bound marine to become a capable furry cat guy. That was the entire premise of it being called “Avatar”. They don’t explain why this is possible, but the entire story builds off the idea that people infiltrate another society by wearing their bodies, learn their culture, then exploit their sympathies to gain their resources. Sometimes I feel that I am training people to do exactly that as a teacher. Not only that, but the entire planet had a symbiotic relationship, and creatures could control each other by linking minds. That was a fascinating concept.

The whole “got to get the resources that happen to be in a inconvenient place” aspect was only there to create the conflict. Any society with the level of technology the humans displayed would have been able to extract the resources without disrupting or alerting the alien culture to their presence. I have to give credit to having the balls to call a plot device “unobtainium”. Why didn’t they just call it “MacGuffinaium” instead.

The idea of wearing someone else, being able to replace your body with another, the idea of leaving yourself and acting remotely? All of that has been done, and better, by Dollhouse. While I was coming home on the subway, I watched the third to last episode of that stellar program (Title: Getting Closer). Avatar was gorgeous, with lots of spectacle, but the only thing that floored me, or made me say, “OH MY GOD!” in public today was the mind blowing twists on Dollhouse this episode. It doesn’t take 3D or blue cats to make me happy. All it takes is a well written and executed story with a good twist or two.

Holy shit, Dollhouse is being cancelled. There are only two episodes left, but it’s going out on top! I haven’t seen a show that has warped my mind as much as this one has for a long time. The twists in Dollhouse make Battlestar Galactica’s lame ending all that more infuriating. BSG had a stronger, longer run, but absolutely fell apart at the end. The poor ending made me think the less of the entire show for all the broken promises. You can’t have “…and they have a plan” in the credits for 4 seasons and not pay it off! The more you learn about “The Plan”, the more you want to punch all the Cylons in the face for being idiots. The mythology of BSG gets lessened the more you find out about the motivations of the characters. Up until the end of the show, this wasn’t true.

Dollhouse might have taken a few episodes to find its legs, but damn it kicks like a mule. Joss Whedon blew me away this past episode. Damn I’m going to miss it when it is gone, but at least it will go out telling a good story.

Part 1

This is a comedic, through, and well made video review of the atrocious Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Watch the other six parts too. Even this 70 minute review isn’t enough to purge my hatred of that movie. George Lucas might have had some laughs on The Daily Show saying, “It is a work of fiction. Like it or dislike it. It doesn’t matter,” which is true, but his movie is still shitty.

Welcome to the insanity of “The Room”. I heard about this movie MONTHS ago from the guys at Stop Podcasting Yourself. First in October , then again later in December, they discussed this legendary bad movie in passing. I had no idea what I was missing by not following up on this tip. I wish I had seen this terribad movie earlier. The Room is a new cult film that’s legend is spreading virally through the Internet. It’s terrible, but strangely entertaining. It’s the Manos: The Hands of Fate for the Internet age.

IFC says of Tommy Wiseau, who financed, wrote, directed, produced, and starred in of The Room in their primer: “When Wiseau speaks in “The Room,” he sounds like Borat trying to do an impression of Christopher Walken playing a mental patient.”

It’s true! Tommy Wiseau’s accent is as inscrutable as it is indecipherable. If it was a better actor doing a character, you’d laugh at how absurd it sounds. Watching Tommy Wiseau, his creepy laugh, his weird greetings, his terrible acting, you know he is giving it everything he’s got, which makes it all the more tragic and enjoyable to see when it comes crashing down into a total cinematic disaster.

You simply become mesmerized by everything being so bad, but so hilariously good at the same time.  The movie is never actually good, but it’s never bad enough to make you look away. It’s poorly made in every possible way, but you know it’s made with a naive passion that makes it watchable despite its flaws.

While I heard about this movie months ago, I only took the dive to finally watch it after the Rifftrax guys did their take on it. They grew obsessed with this B-movie disaster and decided to do their commentary despite the nudity and frequent *awful* sex love scenes. This is a change of pace for Rifftrax, as they have been doing bad big budget movies for so long, watching them tackle a B-movie cult classic seems like a new beginning.

I chuckled quite a few times, but the movie is already laugh out loud bad already. I kept greeting everyone like “Johnny” in the film for a few hours afterwards. I think this is a movie bad enough to require a few more times, and it’s rare that any movie I’ve seen with a Rifftrax holds up to repeat viewings. I’m usually “laughed out” for a while. There is a deep grain of comedy here.

This sort of niche humor gets under my skin and I’d love to be able to share it with someone else “in the know” but my wife wouldn’t sit through a movie that bad without Korean subtitles. For anyone else that wants to get started, here is a comprehensive guide to the movie.

Amazingly though, The Room does have a Korean connection. Tommy Wiseau stated that he got the rumored $6 million it cost to make this movie by importing leather jackets from Korea. Outstanding.

I haven’t been able to watch as many movies as I’d like for the past few weeks, with my computer being out of commission, making Rifftrax inaccessible for the movie I had in mind. I made up for it with a vengence this weekend, watching “Twilight” and getting the accompanying Rifftrax synced up. The only jokes I had heard about Twilight was about glitter paint and pale dudes, so I had no idea what I was in for when I started.

What the hell America? Why was this popular? This movie has made $379,912,947 in worldwide box office releases according to Wikipedia! There is a limit to the number of times this lady saw the movie, so it couldn’t be all her cash propping up that total. I know that there was a rough time where everyone was frazzled about the 2008 election campaign, but that still doesn’t excuse this movie from making money. The Rifftrax was good to listen to, as it soothed the pain somewhat, but I think the movie left me so shellshocked that I was numb to all laughter and goodness. For me, the scene where the PTSD set in was the scene with the vampires (who glitter, and are “deer eating vegetarians”) play baseball and growl at each other. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

As bad as Twilight is, the sequel sounds around twenty times worse.

I was left so disturbed by how poor the entire movie was that I woke my wife up and helped her get ready to go out. We had plans to visit the Daejeon Art Museum in the afternoon. It was both for exercise and to see something different for a change. We walked across town in the cold/rain waiting for it to start coming down. The art museum was pretty interesting. It wasn’t nearly as big as the European art museums, or the museum we visited in Seoul, but it was a nice walk, and it was cheap to get in.

We decided to see “Monsters vs. Aliens” at a theater on the way back to kill some time. My wife and I haven’t been to a movie for a while, and it was the only thing of any interest to the both of us. I thought it was going to be projected in 3D, but we saw a standard version of the film. The movie’s voice cast was excellent and hilarious. The animation was good, but all the characters seemed perfectly created to sell toys.

“It was good, but not Wall-E good,” my wife said. The story was a standard kid friendly trope with a few clever jokes now and again. I particularly liked Stephen Colbert and Seth Rogan’s performances. The Close Encounters of the Third kind gag had me laughing. There are worse things you could see, like Twilight. Don’t see Twilight unless you have a thing for glitter paint and pale dudes. It’s terrible.