POTPOURRI

TV: Celebrity Poker Showdown is back on Bravo, and host Dave Foley is as drunk as ever! And that to me is funny. During his first season with the show, he was so drunk he routinely slurred words, and often had trouble focusing on the camera. I guess the producers had a word with him, because all through the next series of games, he seemed to have sobered up. But with the new season, which started this week, the cork is out of the bottle! He's back, baby!

As for the poker -- oh, man. I've watched a lot of cards on TV over the past couple years, and I have never seen the best player at the table beaten time and time and time again by sheerest, stupidest luck as Sara Rue was this game. And did Sara not look cute as all git-out? (And by "cute," I mean "smokin' hot.") Boy, she's lost some weight since she played last season. Not that she wasn't hot before; I'm just making an observation.


Yeah, she's just adorable. But adorable don't cut it, because Brad Garrett was pulling cards out of his ass. Sara's got two pair? Brad fills the straight on the river. Sara's got a straight? The board gets the same straight, meaning she and Brad split the pot. She should've knocked him out of the game about 87 times, and he just kept winning. It was brutal. And great TV. Good start to the new tournament.

---

MOVIES: In all my Oscar foofaraw, I neglected to mention the Razzies, which also announced its nominees on Tuesday. This may be the first year I haven't seen any of the films nominated for Worst Picture. I tried -- I saw Butterfly Effect, after all. And The Grudge! If those movies aren't bad enough to make the list, then I ain't never seein' Catwoman!

Wow, they hate Ben Stiller. He got nominated as Worst Actor for a record five films: Along Came Polly, Anchorman, Dodgeball, Envy, and Starsky & Hutch. (I think when they nominate someone, they just name every film he's been in that year.) Now, come on! He was kind of good in at least two of those films. I mean, I've grown sick of Stiller's frequently repeated nebbish-who-gets-caught-in-humiliating-situations roles, too, but at least he was doing something different in Dodgeball and his cameo in Anchorman. I thought he was great in both of those.

And the Razzies went after Dubya, too! Multiple nominations for his appearance in Fahrenheit 9/11. My favorite: Worst Screen Couple, for "George W. Bush & EITHER Condoleeza* Rice OR His Pet Goat." I never thought I'd say this, but: he's got my vote!

*It's actually spelled with two z's guys, but that's okay; it's a tough name, and it's not like she's been in any news stories recently that would allow you to check the spelling.

---

The second I talked up I Read the Comics So You Don't Have To, Josh goes and changes the name to The Comics Curmudgeon. Man! Now I have to change my sidebar links again!

While I'm being all self-referential, I'd like to thank Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings and Augie De Blieck of Various and Sundry for throwing links my way. Now, Augie is a fairly conservative fella, with, presumably, a majority of fairly conservative readers, where I, on the other hand, hate America. Oops! I meant, "am liberal." Oh, what a giveaway! My point is -- and I'm not saying the one thing has anything whatsoever to do with the other -- the thing is, the total elapsed time between Augie's link, and the first ever really bitchy political comment left on my blog, was two hours and fifty-three minutes. That's a funny little coinky-dink, innit?

MOVIES: Top Ten

I lied again. Today's top ten list is movies, not comics.

Wow, I saw a lot more movies this year than I thought I had. According to this list, these are all the films I saw in 2004 whose first theatrical release in America was during this calendar year. The ones I saw first on DVD or TV are marked with an asterisk. (Links go to my original review of the film, where applicable.)

We'll start with my ten best first:

1. Fahrenheit 9/11
   The most powerful, infuriating, chilling, and yes, important film of the year. I wish more of the people filling the seats for Passion of the Christ had seen this film instead, and had opened their hearts and their eyes to the real pain, the real horror, the real suffering happening to real people, right now.



2. Hero
   Epic in scale and emotion, this martial arts masterpiece was ceaselessly thrilling to behold. I look forward to seeing the current release House of Flying Daggers by the same director, which is, by all accounts, even better.



3. The Incredibles
   I can't believe an animated film better than Shrek 2 came along this year. That's a good year for animation. This is simply a great movie, not just a great cartoon.



4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
   Ceaselessly amazing in its visual inventiveness and its unflinching look at the power -- and the pain -- of love. Anyone who still denies Jim Carrey's acting prowess after seeing this film deserves a poke in the eye.



5. Spider-Man 2
   Is it the best superhero movie ever made, as Roger Ebert claims? Could be, could be. Only the original two Supermans even come close. It was certainly a giant leap forward for the genre, investing as much attention in its characters as in its spectacular action sequences.



6. Kill Bill Vol. 2
   The ultra-violence took a back seat to character development this time around, but that just meant more opportunities for the trademark Tarantino dialogue to flow. Super-cool, as are all things QT, but with an emotional resonance he's never before achieved.



7. Shaun of the Dead
   A great comedy and a great horror film, with surprisingly touching dramatic moments interspersed throughout the laughter and gore.



8. The Dreamers*
   I've tried before to write my review of Bernardo Bertolucci's wonderful film, but words failed me. It's a chronicle of cultural revolution, cinematic revolution, and sexual revolution. It's beautiful, it's ethereal, it's provocative, it's compelling, it's smart and seductive and it's the most erotic thing to hit the screens this year -- every word of which applies as equally to the film as it does to its breathtaking leading lady, Eva Green, making her transcendent film debut. She's as luminous and electric as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, as Grace Kelly in Rear Window, as Kim Novak in Vertigo. But with copious amounts of nudity.



9. Shrek 2
   Funny, touching, exciting, beautiful, even better than the original, with a great vocal performance by Jennifer Saunders as the Fairy Godmother nearly stealing the movie from that big green ogre.



10. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    The funniest movie of the year. Will Ferrell is unquestionably the new king of comedy.

TIED FOR ELEVENTH PLACE

Dawn Of The Dead
Best straight-up horror movie of the year, with incredible special effects and action, and an ending true to the zombie genre.

Garden State
The first half deserves to make the top ten; the second half kept it out. Still a tremendous debut film from Zach Braff.

Spartan*
A truly smart and suspenseful thriller, from writer-director David Mamet, with Val Kilmer showing he still knows how to act.

Team America: World Police
Another contender for funniest movie of the year, just edged out by Anchorman.

The Terminal
Spielberg and Hanks, together again. Funny and sweet, but with a miscalculated romantic plot with Catherine Zeta-Jones gumming up the works.

ALSO WORTHY

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Mean Girls*
The Punisher*

PROBABLY COULD'VE WAITED FOR THE DVD

Broken Lizard's Club Dread
The Bourne Supremacy
Hellboy
Starsky & Hutch

WISELY DID WAIT FOR THE DVD

50 First Dates*
Eurotrip*
Home On The Range*
The Lion King 1 1/2*
Man on Fire*
Napoleon Dynamite*
Taking Lives*

THE WORST PIECE OF CRAP OF THE YEAR (TIE)

The Butterfly Effect*
The Grudge

MOVIES FROM HELL: The Grudge

Let me tell you every single good thing about The Grudge, which I saw last weekend.

1) It has a few decently creepy images, especially that bit with the jawbone.

2)

3)

Hmm, I guess that was it.

As for the bad things, well, I don't want to write a novel here. I can pretty much sum it up with the fact that this is the most poorly written movie I have ever seen, with characters that would need two additional dimensions just to become one dimensional. There is nothing to the characters. Nothing. NOTHING. They exist only to be scared or killed. I have seen a lot of horror movies, and even the very worst make some effort at token characterization. This guy's a football star, this guy's a nerd who wants to get laid, this gal's a goth with attitude. But in The Grudge: nothing.

It doesn't help that Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was often so good on Buffy, is little more than an ambulatory mannequin here. If there's something going on behind those big, moist, googly eyes of hers, she doesn't let the audience in on it. She's an accessory, like a battery the film had to plug in to get the plot moving. ("Plot"? HA!) She moved to Japan to be with her boyfriend, but we don't get a sense of how she feels about that move. Is she frightened? Excited? Feeling displaced? Lonely? What? She works for a service that sends caretakers out to people's homes -- but how does she like her job? How did she get into that line of work? Is she a good person who likes to help others, or is it just a paycheck to her? Nothing about her exists other than to serve the machinations of the plot. She moved to Japan because the movie is set in Japan. She's a social worker because she has to go to the haunted house. Her boyfriend exists for the sole purpose of getting killed. (Whoopsie! Spoiler! Gee, I hope I didn't make you not want to see the movie now! Actually, you know what? I'm gonna spoil the hell out of this movie, so stop reading if you give a damn.)

The movie jumps around in time a lot, for no good reason. For no reason, period. As Roger Ebert says in his review, it's "a nuisance, not a style." Sometimes a young American couple along with the man's mother live in the house; sometimes it's just the mother. Sometimes a Japanese girl is the mother's caretaker, sometimes it's Gellar. And sometimes Bill Pullman shows up, even though he kills himself in the first minute of the movie. (Told you I was gonna spoil it!)

Turns out Bill Pullman is kind of the cause of all the badness in the movie; he's a teacher, see, and apparently one of his old students is in love with him, even though she's married. Well, the husband finds out, kills her, kills their son, hangs himself. Voila! Haunted house. Why she loves him... that's a mystery, one that's never explored. He's as much a personality-less drone as anyone else in the film. We never even see her interacting with him, we just see a bunch of pictures. By the time Pullman even becomes aware of her obsession, she's already dead. Also, why does Pullman then kill himself? There's no ghostly activity that drove him to drop off his balcony. Guilt? Who knows? His death has no impact on the film whatsoever, other than to provide a shock right at the beginning.

There's a lot of stuff that happens for no reason in this movie. Why is it set in Japan? No reason, other than the director is from Japan. The setting doesn't enhance the scariness, nor does the culture have any effect on the primarily American characters. A Japanese detective at one point says, "In Japan, it is believed..." blah blah curse, blah blah evil. But, even with that one attempt to justify it, really there's no reason for the location. What, we don't have ghost stories in America?

My favorite scene in the movie, by the way, doesn't have any ghosts, or anything scary at all. The female half of the young American houseowning couple is in the supermarket. She's confused by the foreign language items on the shelf. She picks up one foil-covered container, sneaks a peek around to see if anyone's watching, then pokes a hole in the top and sniffs to see what it is. OH MY GOD!!! That is just reams of information. That is fountains of character development. No, rivers. Oceans! By this film's standards, her character is now as fully fleshed-out as Hamlet. Don't blink or you'll miss it!

The movie's not big on dialogue, either. I'd say a good 80-85% of the film is people creeping slooooowly and silently down dark hallways. And a good 90% of what dialogue there actually is is along the lines of, "Yoko? Are you all right?" Followed by: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

No, Yoko is not all right. Which brings me to the one good thing about the movie, the handful of creepy images. Yoko is the first person we see killed by the ghost. All that is found of her is her jawbone. When she later shows up at the social agency where she worked, and her boss asks the above inane question, she turns around, and the lower part of her face is missing, with her tongue horribly lolling out of the crater. That's a good, creepy image. The ghosts of the wife and the little boy have disturbing faces, and make unsettling noises (spoiled somewhat by the teenage idiot and her idiot mother sitting in front of me at the theater, who both insisted on mimicking the cat-like wail of the boy, or the death-rattle croak of the wife. I hate people).

But those few scary components do not add up to a good movie. Hell, they barely add up to a movie. This was pure awful. I snuck into it after Team America, and I still felt ripped off.