Is it gross?

Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior is an action film starring Tony Jaa, who is supposed to be the next big martial arts movie star. Tony Jaa typically stars in movies about a warrior trying to get something back. In The Protector, it was an elephant. In Ong Bak, it is a Budda head.

Jaa’s character Ting is from a rural village in Thailand that is training to become a monk. In the beginning, his Muay Thai instructor says to him, “Ting, now that I have taught you the ancient secrets of Muay Thai, I ask you never to use it.” Ting agrees, and the rest of the movie is about Ting using the secrets of Muay Thai when Don, a drug dealer from Bangkok, steals the village’s Buddha head.

Notable in the film is Ting’s tournament in a Bangkok fight club. There, Ting fights three guys in order of decreasing skill.

1. First, he fights Big Bear. Big Bear is a very large Australian fighter who is shown beating everybody up. Ting defeats him in one move.
2. Then, he fights Toshiro. Toshiro is a Japanese fighter and looks like an idiot and moves his feet very fast. Presumably he is very good at DDR.
3. Finally, he fights Mad Dog. Mad Dog doesn’t seem to have any skill, but he does have tattoos and a bandana. Throughout the duration of the fight, he just seems to go around throwing stuff at Ting. This includes a chair, table, bottle, refrigerator, and a live electrical cable. Ting eventually beats him.

Also in the movie:

• There’s a big low speed “car chase” with underpowered, motorized rickshaws.
• Ting fights a Burmese fighter that injects himself with steroids before the fight. Presumably, the Burmese fighter also lifts weights and then supplements his diet with protein during his recovery period (otherwise, the steroids wouldn’t do anything), but this is not shown in the movie
• In one of the final scenes, the bad guy threatens to smash the Buddha head with a sledge hammer. Ting’s friend George sacrifices his body and jumps on top of the Buddha head. I’m not sure why he decided to jump on the Buddha head when he was equidistant to both the Buddha head and the guy swinging the sledge hammer, but he does, and he later dies as an even bigger Buddha head falls on both him and the bad guy.

In the end, Ting returns to his village with the Buddha head, George is dead, lots and lots of people are very badly injured, and the villagers are happy because their symbol of peace is back. The end.

Coming up on my Netflix instant stream queue, I’ve got The Other Boleyn Girl. It’s the story of Jan Boleyn and how jealous she is of her sister Marsha.

Gracie and Viola are two girls with similar problems. They want to beat their school’s rival boys’ soccer team, and they both have vaginas. To overcome this obstacle, the two have very different strategies.

Gracie’s strategy starts with asking her father to train her. Then, she and her father petition the school board to allow girls to try out for the boys team. When she tries out, she makes junior varsity. Then some how, she gets put into the varsity game where she helps her school defeat their rival team. And thus you have Gracie (2007), starring Carly Shroeder, Dermot Mulroney, and Elizabeth Shue.

Viola, on the other hand, is not one for bureaucracy. She dresses up as her brother, goes to boarding school in his stead while he is in London to secretly enter a contest with his band. Viola ends up living with Duke, the captain of the boys soccer team, and she trades love-help for soccer help. Eventually, Viola makes varsity, wins the game against the rival high school, reveals to the world that she is a girl, and seduces Duke. And thus you have, She’s the Man (2006), starring Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum, and Laura Ramsey.

Note to movie directors: If you’re trying to make girls look like they are good at soccer, please first teach them how not to run like girls.

Remember back in the day when “tough” generally described the people that could physically hurt you? Generally, this would be the bully that was bigger or the big group of kids that you feared because they had less to lose than you. The movie You Got Served doesn’t follow this pattern.

You Got Served is a about a bunch of people that exist in a world where dancing is equivalent to a weapon of violence, and dance crews battled in an ambiguously illegal dance warehouse led by Steve Harvey’s character. David and Elgin (played by Omarion and Marques Houston, respectively) are the leaders of a dance crew with a winning track record at their local street dancing competitions when Wade and his crew of rich kids from Ocean County challenge them. Elgin accepts the challenge, only to find out (just before the beginning of the competition) that a member of his crew has joined Wade’s crew and given away all of their moves. After losing, Elgin and David confront Wade, where Wade replies with the movie’s title line, “You’re just mad ’cause tonight, you suckas got served!”

This bothers me because:

1. I think it wasn’t that they were served but that you stole a member of their team, learned all of their moves, took $5,000 from them, and then acted as though you were better dancers.
2. Wade and his crew are talented dancers that act tough, but in reality, they were not threatening. I don’t know how no one threw a punch.

In the rest of the movie, a bunch of irrelevant bull shit happens (there’s another storyline that has something to do with drug dealing), a kid gets shot, Elgin and David fight, and they eventually battle Wade’s crew again and win.

Step Up 2: The Streets, on the other hand, seems to get it right. It’s also kind of the opposite of You Got Served. Instead of a bunch of impoverished minorities trying to gain respect by competing against a group of tough, rich white kids, it’s a bunch of un-tough kids at a fancy school trying to gain respect by competing against a group of tough, impoverished minorities. Andie (played by Briana Evigan) is really hot and fun to watch for an hour and a half. She goes through a bunch of crap, enrolls at a fancy school (Maryland School of Arts), gets kicked out of her street dance crew called 410, and starts her own with kids from MSA. They then spend the rest of the movie trying to gain respect and compete against her old dance crew. At one point, a bunch of guys from 410 assault one of the kids from MSA. Why is this good? Because 410 is perceived as tough because of the physical threat they pose and not their dance ability!

So how does this tie into Never Back Down? Simply, Never Back Down and Step Up 2: The Streets, are the SAME MOVIE. Here are their plots.

(Andie/Jake) is a very talented (dancer/fighter) who has been transferred to a new school due to (her/his) delinquent past. (She/he) often thinks about (her/his) deceased (mother/father) who got (her/him) into (dancing/fighting). At this new school, (Andie/Jake) end up competing in a big illegal (dance/fighting) competition that is so illegal that its location/date information is only distributed by text message just before the competition begins. Once the competition begins, something goes awry, so (Andy/Jake) does not end up competing for the title. So instead, they take the competition outside where they battle it out on their own. To accommodate this, members of the audience turn on their headlights and make space. (Andy/Jake) then wins. And despite doing lots of crazy shit on asphalt, nobody seems to be hurt.

Okay, so the two movies are somewhat similar, and Step Up 2 has several moments where its plot just doesn’t make sense or they dubiously recycle characters to move the plot along, but I actually really enjoyed both Never Back Down and Step Up 2 and may have to purchase them on BluRay now that I’m getting a BluRay player.

…on second thought, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. But I did really enjoy them.

Sally, clear my calendar for tomorrow (Sally’s my secretary). I’m going to go to the crafts store so I can buy 7 white t-shirts (one for each day of the week) and a silk screening kit. I’m going to make 7 t-shirts that say, “I <3 Audrey Tautou” (it’ll be a variation on the “I <3 NY” t-shirts.) It’s how I will express my feelings about Audrey Tautou.

Did I always feel like this? No. I was once a Natalie Portman guy (before she got into all of that Star Wars prequel stuff. Yes, there’s lots of themes in it. It’s the Bible in Space). But then I saw Priceless.

I’m not even going to describe the movie. I Netflixed it, rated it 5 stars and fell in love with Audrey Tautou. I think I may also start looking for a Sugar-momma to buy me nice things and use me for my youth.

On my Audrey Tautou high, I decided to see the film Happenstance (also Netflixed). If I had to describe it, I’d describe it as the French version of Twenty Bucks but without the twenty dollar bill tying all of the stories together. Audrey Tautou was still adorable. My only complaint: Audrey Tautou is on the movie poster, but her image on the movie poster looks nothing like what she looks like in the film itself.

Which brings us to Garden Party. This movie was American, and I imagine that if Simple Plan (ooooh high school is sooo hard!) was given the opportunity to make a movie, it’d be this. Actually, no, the movie is actually somewhat more complex and interesting. But not too much more.

Just like Happenstance and Twenty Bucks, Garden Party is another variation of the six degrees concept. There’s a bunch of things going on with a bunch of different people, and at some point, they each see each other. One of these stories involves this teenage emo-singer that’s kind of poor but is discovered and immediately gets signed. And as I recall, the rest of the movie was about teenagers having sex and doing drugs.

Oh what? There’s a Ricky Nelson song of the same name? I wonder if that will be involved at all…

So there you have it. Coming up — how to take care of Tyler’s ferrets…

The Phantom of the Opera is a gothic novel from 1910. In 1986, Andrew Lloyd Webber decided, “Broadway doesn’t have enough flashing lights and loud bangs, so I’m going to make this into a musical.” In 2004, Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin, Ice to meet you), directs the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of the 1910 novel.

In this movie, Gerard Butler (300, he was Sparta), is a guy who has trouble dealing with his hideous face, so he terrorizes an opera house. He’s also in ridiculously good shape and somehow has a dungeon hidden under the opera house.

So how does the phantom terrorize the opera house? Well, he makes threats that terrible things will happen unless he is provided:

1. A stipend
2. A box seat in the opera
3. [Insert list of things that just piss people off. For example, make Christine (relatively young and unknown) play the lead role, and make the diva Carlotta (played by Minnie Driver) play the silent page boy.

Really though, I am a big fan of the music in Phantom and the fad Phantom Workout which became popular after the film adaptation came out (you too can look like Gerard Butler!) I sometimes wonder though if the Gerard Butler’s role in this film had adverse affects on history. IE, Xerxes found out that Gerard Butler went around singing about his problems, giving Xerxes the confidence that his immortals could take on the Spartans.

This is a very good movie. It is about a man who has a car but needs keys to get into it. However, on his way out the door, he realizes that he doesn’t know where his keys are, and he’s on a time constraint so he has to find them soon!

To find them, he tries the following:

• He checks his pockets
• He asks his wife if she had taken them
• He retraces his steps
• He stresses out about being late
• He checks on top of the kitchen table

At a key moment late in the movie, he uses deductive reasoning:

• the car was parked in his drive way
• he definitely drove home last night
• his keys must be somewhere in the house

He then checks on top of the kitchen table again and finds them. He then drives off to the urologist.

This is the second great movie I’ve seen about a man who cannot find his keys.

There’s nothing better than coming home after a busy day of work and finding that the Super Mario Brothers: Super Show! is available on Netflix instant streaming. In this show, Captain Lou Albana plays Mario in a live action about the video game character Mario. Each episode looks like this:

1. Captain Lou Albana and Danny Wells (playing Luigi) act stupid and reinforce Italian stereotypes for 5 minutes.
2. A 15 minute cartoon that has nothing to do with the first five minutes.
3. Live action again for the last 5 minutes. Albana and Wells concludes their story, which has nothing to do with the previous 15 minutes.

I really liked the first episode. The cartoon part starts with King Koopa as the captain of some sort of 19th century casino river boat. One of his henchmen come up and alert him that there are no stow-aways. Koopa is skeptical and gets the feeling that the Mario Brothers have gotten on board some how.

And wouldn’t you know it — in the next scene, Mario and Luigi are cheating in a game of Go-Fish with a mean-looking turtle.

Hint to Koopa and his goons: It’s the two Italian guys and the mushroom-looking guy! Mario and Luigi are the ONLY human guys in your world! Post up flyers near all of your guard stations:

• If you see two guys with a mushroom-looking guy, it is probably Mario, Luigi, and Toad.
• If it’s one short fat guy and one tall skinny guy, it’s probably Mario and Luigi.
• If you see two guys wearing trench coats, it’s probably Mario and Luigi.
• Mario and Luigi always wear their red and green overalls under any disguises. You can check for this.
• Racial profiling is probably not a big deal considering that you’ve already committed kidnapping. You can probably get away with checking all humans.

I’d like to end on this note: Magic Johnson is the guest star on the second episode. He somehow shows up behind Luigi’s medicine cabinet and tells him that he broke his trophy (in a bizarre basketball move…) and asks Luigi to fix it. Luigi tells him he can fix it faster than Magic can do a dunk (or something like that). Magic says, “wow, that’s fast. I’ll see you in a couple of hours then.”

??????

For those of you that haven’t seen John Tucker Must Die, there’s a scene where four girls are thinking about ways to punish John Tucker. After Brittany Snow’s character claims that estrogen supplements will not help women increase breast size as it in fact interrupts natural hormone production, the four girls some how come to the conclusion that they should somehow get John Tucker to take estrogen.

After taking estrogen, John Tucker, in the middle of a basketball game, becomes “sensitive” and complaints that another basketball player is being “mean.” After injuring himself, he stomps off the court, claiming that the coach never listens to him.

Here were my thoughts:

1. That’s not what estrogen does.
2. This is why Hillary Clinton was not elected president.

hmm…

Jet Li’s action thriller The One is a film about the classic struggle with ones self, interpreted literally, spanned across multiple universes, and the struggle is fought with martial arts. If you remember seeing the trailer, you’ve probably just about seen the entire movie.

What did I learn from watching The One? I’d say that on the off chance that I become really powerful and end up fighting a version of myself from another universe that’s only good at kung fu, I should learn some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to counter his kung fu.

But one thing bothered me about this movie: the characters in the movie were unsure what happens when there’s only one version of Jet Li’s character left. They speculated that he may become a God…

But given that there are 125 universes

…and in each of the universes, every human is mortal

…and that the same person in different universes will lead different lives

…which make it unlikely that every person in the universe will die at the same time

doesn’t this mean that there’s always going to be a point for every person where there’s only one version of him left?

I just decided based on rereading this post that this movie was terrible.