MOVIES: The Butterfly Effect

I just finished watching the DVD of The Butterfly Effect and... wow. That was interesting. I mean, don't get me wrong: it's a train wreck. It is definitely a failure. But it fails in such uniquely spectacular and fascinating ways, that I can't help but admire it a little.

First things first: I'll admit, Ashton Kutcher isn't as bad as I thought he'd be. I actually like Kutcher on That '70s Show. I've never been an Ashton basher. (Except for that Punk'd crap he does on MTV. That is some seriously lame shit.) I think he can be very funny. I just didn't think he'd be able to pull off a dramatic role. And... he doesn't, exactly, but like I said, he's not as bad as I thought.

Where the film goes wrong, and keeps going wrong, over and over again, is in the relentlessly brutal torture of its characters. The plot, as you know, is a remake of the "Stupid bug! You go squish now!" episode of The Simpsons... well, not really, but it might as well be. Kutcher, like Homer, finds a way to travel into the past, but every change he makes in the hopes of making the future better actually makes it exponentially worse. Ned Flanders never places the Earth under his totalitarian rule, but if the movie had been ten minutes longer, he might very well have.

Here are the horrible things that happen to Kutcher's character Evan before he even goes back in time. (Spoilers, natch.) Evan suffers from a series of blackouts. His father has been locked away in a loony bin. The girl he loves (Kayley) is forced to perform sexual acts with him on camera by Kayley's alcoholic father -- when they're only seven years old. (Eric Stoltz gives an amazingly creepy performance as the father, by the way.) The girl's brother Tommy watches them, and it turns him into a psychopath. Evan finally gets to meet his dad -- who then tries to murder him. Evan, Kayley, Tommy, and Evan's best friend Lenny accidentally blow up a woman and her baby girl. Yes, I said blow up. Tommy puts Evan's dog in a sack and sets it on fire. Lenny is driven into near-catatonia by these events. Evan's mother moves them out of town, leaving Kayley to fend for herself against her lunatic father and brother. And, to top it all off, when Evan seeks out Kayley again after a seven-year absence, he drives her to commit suicide.

Yeah, and that's just an appetizer. Perhaps you begin to see how comically over the top this film is determined to go.

Evan discovers that by reading the journals he kept growing up, he can project himself back in time -- it turns out the blackouts were during periods of time travel. If he concentrates on a journal entry concerning one of those blackouts, he goes back into his body at that time, and is then able to influence the events that happened during his blackouts. (Many more spoilers ahead.) First time he tries to do so, it seems everything is just peachy dandy. He's turned into a frat boy douchebag for some reason, but he and Kayley are happily in love. Then Tommy shows up and tries to kill Evan, but Evan kills him instead. Cut to: the slammer! Evan's doing hard time for murder. And for murder, you don't go to white collar resort prison. You go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Yes, that's right, on his first night in the joint, Evan gets introduced to the wonders of prison rape. Ouchie.

Well, Evan thinks he can fix everything, and he really really means it, this time for sure. He goes back in time again, and tries to keep Tommy from killing his dog, but through a whimsical miscommunication, he accidentally convinces Lenny to murder Tommy. Oopsie! Back in the future, Lenny is strapped to a bed in the loony bin, and Kayley is a scar-faced junkie whore. Let's try that again: Evan goes back in time to keep the woman and her baby daughter from getting blown up, and he's successful! Back in the future, everyone is happy and healthy -- even Tommy has turned to the Lord and changed his evil ways. Small hitch: the explosion blew off Evan's arms. Dagnabbit! Pesky time travel! Evan sees how much better off everyone else is, though, and decides to take one for the team and stay with this timeline. Then he finds out his mother is dying of cancer. To the Wayback Machine! This time Evan figures he'll get rid of the explosive before it can ever be used. Funny thing, though, little monkey wrench in the plan: he accidentally blows up Kayley instead. Butterfingers!

This time, back in the future, Evan's in the loony bin himself. He's got one chance left to put everything back in order, and he does so by going back to when he and Kayley first met, and telling her he will kill her if she ever speaks to him again. Nice and subtle, there, chief. But it works! Evan returns to the future, and by never having known him, Kayley and Tommy turn out just fine. It's a wonderful life!

The DVD has an extra little kick in the ass that I love. It ratchets up this unrelenting torture-fest into whole new levels of agony. There's the theatrical ending -- in which, eight years further down the line, Evan and Kayley pass each other on the street, but keep on going. There are two alternate takes of that scene -- one in which Evan turns to follow Kayley, and one in which Kayley and Evan stop and have a sweet little meeting. But then there's the director's cut. Oh ho ho, the director's cut goes an entirely different and jaw-droppingly sadistic route. On Evan's last trip to the past, instead of going back to his first meeting with Kayley, he goes all the way back to his birth. At the hospital, while still in his mother's womb, he gains his entire lifetime of knowledge. And he decides his best option is to (I have to italicize and boldface this) strangle himself to death with his own umbilical cord. I swear on my life that I am not making this up. The best option for everyone else in his life to have a happy ending is for him to commit prenatal suicide. Gee, I wonder why the preview audiences didn't embrace that ending?

It's an awful movie, but it's so original in its awfulness. Each new horrible wrinkle in time leaves you agog in disbelief. "He's got no frickin' arms?? Oh, come on!!" It actually began reminding me of Showgirls a little bit as it went on, just a total misfire of epic proportions. The very bad things stop coming across as very bad, but rather very funny. It's just ludicrous after a while. You just have to start laughing. And the movie (like Showgirls) is so committed to its badness. The fact that nobody who made this movie is aware of its badness makes it all the funnier. But the thing is, you can't look away! You just have to watch in gleeful awe at its audacious awfulness.

Would I recommend it? It depends on how much you like bad movies. If you made it through the entirety of both House of the Dead and House of 1000 Corpses, or, for that matter, all of Showgirls, then you might get some weird form of entertainment out of this film, like I did. If you want a good time travel movie, you're better off with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure than this thing. And if you want a good Ashton Kutcher movie... well, good luck.

POTPOURRI

MOVIES: I don't think I made this entirely clear on my previous entry, but in addition to mocking the Showgirls special edition DVD, I also truly, sincerely covet it, and plan on buying it this weekend. Damn right!

COMICS: Because I'm now listed on the Comic Weblog Updates page (and proudly so, I might add), I kind of feel some pressure to post a little more frequently about, you know, comics. So, in the beating a dead horse department: Eightball #23.

When I posted about it a couple weeks ago, my entire review consisted of:

I liked it fine. It made me a little sad. Louie was kind of a dick.

And I wasn't kidding. (Well, not much.) I mean, it's a good comic. Very good. What little I've read of Clowes' stuff has had the rare ability to make me feel something when reading a comic (most often, melancholy and a squirming discomfort... which is probably why I haven't read more of his stuff -- those aren't pleasant feelings in large amounts). I think he's really quite an excellent comics creator.

That said, I don't get all the hoopla. The comics "blogosphere" (I'm still lacking a better, non-idiotic term) seems to have risen up as one and decreed Eightball #23 its new lord and master. As I said in that previous post, this comic is being as infinitely praised and minutely deconstructed as if it were a newly discovered James Joyce novel.

I don't see all that. It's very smart, very enjoyable, it makes you laugh, makes you cringe, it's an insightful look into a troubled mind. But it ain't Ulysses. Or even Watchmen. Is it better than most comics? Is it the best single issue of the year? Maybe, maybe. But even so, I can't see writing a thesis on it.

Maybe that's why I don't write about comics more often.

TV: Last night on Bravo I caught a repeat of Kathy Griffin's stand-up special, The D-List (which, by the way, isn't even listed amongst her credits on IMDb.com -- that's odd). Basically, from her vantage point as a minor, minor celebrity ("For a while I was hovering around the C-List, but once you do 'Celebrity Mole' it's straight to the D"), she talks shit about all the better-known and infinitely weirder celebrities she encounters in her professional life, from a weepy, John Lennon-quoting Sharon Stone, to a menacing, profusely sweating Whitney Houston, to a near-comatose Anna Nicole Smith. And I loved it. You know there are millions of sick and twisted stories about the Hollywood elite floating around, and Griffin is your direct access to those stories. The humor flows naturally from the bizarre people and situations; she barely even has to craft punchlines around them, they're so hysterical to begin with.

The caveat is, you have to be able to take Griffin herself in order to enjoy her storytelling. She's got a grating, raspy voice, an abrasive, aggressive, sometimes flighty delivery ("Oh I forgot to tell you this!!"), and a far-too-chummy attitude with the audience. I can see how some might be turned off right from the beginning, and never even give her act a chance. Personally, though, I enjoy the whole package, and I'd really like to see this turned into a series of specials. I'll bet she's got enough stories to produce a new hour at least monthly, maybe even a half-hour weekly.

MOVIES: Hey, the dialogue is still better than Titanic

Classic cinema fans rejoice: Tuesday sees the eagerly-anticipated release of the special-edition DVD of:



The only thing that could make this better would be if the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 reunited for the commentary track. Although I find it hard to believe even they could make this movie any funnier.

Highlights from the story about the DVD release:

Among DVD extras are a tutorial on how to give a lap dance and audio commentary titled "The Greatest Movie Ever Made."

"It seems like this great lost Pinter scene where subtext is everything, until you realize that there absolutely is no subtext. They're just talking about eating dog food."

And my favorite line (italics mine):

Berkley took the worst of it for her garish masquerade as a stripper turned Vegas showgirl, but the movie also was a career low for co-stars Kyle MacLachlan and Gina Gershon. The actors declined interviews for this story.

No! They declined interviews about the most wretched, humiliating experience in their careers, and quite possibly their lives? Shocker.

Where the hell is Kyle MacLachlan, anyway? Gina Gershon survived relatively unscathed, and even Elizabeth Berkley still gets parts in high-profile films, bless her naughty little heart -- but man, poor Kyle. Before Showgirls, he absolutely was on the upswing of stardom, well on his way, I think, to becoming a genuine box office draw. Now, can you even remember the last film he was in that debuted on more than a dozen screens, if not directly on cable? Sad.

(And no, I'm not counting his role on Sex and the City because 1) it's not the movies, and 2) I hate that damn show.)

But at least Showgirls also destroyed Joe Eszterhas's career, which was a boon to mankind.

TV: What about Grape Ape?

The three-month free preview of certain premium package channels on DirecTV just expired, which means I must once again survive without VH1 Classic. And I don't think I can.

Oh, sweet, sweet VH1 Classic. Get this: it's a music video channel -- that plays music videos! No, I'm serious! (Music videos, for those of you who are under 25, and therefore may never have seen one, are short films built around a particular song, often featuring the song's artists pretending to sing, and, as often as not, buxom women in various stages of undress. And, if you've only seen music videos on TRL, here's the kicker -- actual music videos last the ENTIRE LENGTH of a song, and are NOT OBSCURED by fawning text messages from sub-literate dipshits with computer access in their detention facilities, and are ENTIRELY FREE of screaming idiots in Times Square superimposed over the screen! Hard to believe, isn't it?)

MTV was lost to fans of music videos a long, long time ago. If you want "reality" programming showcasing the most repugnant alleged human beings on the planet, if you want pranks performed by a B-list celebrity on C-list dupes, if you want "news" "documentaries" about breast implants and other real-life issues, as long as they involve tits, if you want millionaires rubbing your nose in your non-millionaire life by showing you their personal bowling alleys and movie theaters and 87 pimped-out Rolls Royces, if you want awards shows that can't even get the major winners to show up to the ceremony, hosted by anyone who once appeared on In Living Color who isn't Jim Carrey, if you want Gideon and Suchin Pak, for Christ's sake... then you want your MTV! If you want music videos, however -- or, even more specifically, non hip-hop music videos -- try checking in at about 3 AM, and maybe they'll throw a Creed bone your way.

The original VH1 is even worse. They rode a minor popularity wave for a while in the '90s, with non-video programming like Behind the Music and Pop-Up Video, but that eventually petered out, and rather than going back to showing the Video Hits that the VH in their name stands for, they went all-nostalgia, all the time. I Love the '80s! I Love the '70s! I Love the '80s Strikes Back! I Love the '90s! Even Best Week Ever, which attempts to manufacture nostalgia for last Thursday. And if it's not nostalgia, then it's crappy, crappy, crappy movies, like Grease 2 or -- and I still can't believe this one -- a heavily censored version of Showgirls. Which, truth be told, is almost as unintentionally hilarious as the original -- the fact that someone actually digitally added bras to all the topless women cracks me up.

MTV2, for the longest time, I thought was the answer to my music video quest. They're all about the music, right? Well, for all I know, they might very well have been -- up until the point that I actually started getting it. Then it turned into a rerun-dumping ground for MTV, broken up by four-hour blocks of hip-hop. Okay, I get it already: the kids love the hip-hop. But I'm pretty sure other music is still being made, check me if I'm wrong. Would it kill you to play a video of one of those songs?

But then there's VH1 Classic. Sweet, sweet VH1 Classic. I would gladly trade the dozens of channels which are devoted to people decorating other people's homes (by force, if necessary) for VH1 Classic. I would give up all 28 variations on the Discovery Channel, I would sacrifice at least 10 of the 12 sports stations, I'd even give them back UPN, if they would only give me my one music video channel that only plays music videos.

And when I tell you they play only music videos, I'm not screwing around: they don't even have commercials. At most, they break for a minute-long promo of something on VH1, or for a VJ to talk about Styx's current album, as though anyone gives a rat's ass about any Styx album more recent than 20 years ago. And then they get right back to playing a music video, all of it, all the way through, no announcer speaking over the beginning or end or anything. And then after that, they play another one. And another. Until you just want to weep for the beauty of it all.

The catch, of course, is that they're all older videos, at least five years old, I'd say, and usually more. The bonus is: no Creed! No Nelly! No Fred Durst! No Britney Spears! No Matchbox 20!

And again: I now have to learn to live without it. The free preview was wonderful, wonderful enough that I'd gladly pay for it -- if I only had to pay for that one channel. Instead, I would have to pay for a whole buttload of channels that I don't give a damn about, because DirecTV loves to screw you like that. "Why can't I pay a fraction of that price and get just the one channel?" I ask DirecTV. "Because sit down and shut up," they respond.

(This is why I don't get HBO. I can't just get the one HBO that has The Sopranos. I have to also pay for HBO2, and HBO West, and HBO East, and HBO Reykjavik, Iceland, and HBO Family, and HBO Sports, and HBO Comedy, and HBO All Fraggle Rock All the Time, and HBO Dance For Us, Clown, DANCE!!!)

So, in summary: crap.

Also, I don't get Boomerang anymore, either, which is okay, because I didn't watch it nearly as much as I thought I would, anyway. I guess my craving for Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat and Wally Gator and Magilla Gorilla wasn't as strong as I thought it was. Oh well.