Is it gross?

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.

Recently, Netflix added a bunch of content from Starz Play to its selection of instantly available movies, and now my Netflix queue is filled with a lot of great movies. Included is Enchanted.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I absolutely loved Enchanted. I gave it 5 stars — and not only because it was filmed two blocks away from where I lived in my senior year of college. It was thoroughly enjoyable and reminded the world that fiction can make the world seem like it sucks less.

However, I found an issue with the premise of the film. What made the evil Queen Narissa think that Edward’s marriage with Giselle would result in her losing her thrown? Since when did the marriage between a prince and princess elevate them to King/Queen status? Or was she afraid that Giselle’s forces, combined with Edward’s, would create an unstoppable alliance?

Additionally, when it was obvious that Robert was Giselle’s one true love, why was she still insistent upon killing them? The threat (as dubious as it was) that Giselle posed no longer existed.

So that’s all I’ve got. Stay tuned for my comparison of Princess Diaries and What a Girl Wants. And potentially for my analysis of parallelisms between Enchanted and Pan’s Labyrinth.

Sorry about not writing for a while. I’ve been busy and relatively uninspired… that is, until I saw One Last Thing.

Featuring an all-star cast of the greatest actors in Hollywood left over after Stephen Soderbergh chose his cast for Ocean’s Thirteen, One Last Thing (2006) is a film that combines The Girl Next Door and the ironically macabre to make terminal illness look both terrible and amazing.

In this film, Dylan Jameison, played by Michael Angarano who also played young William in Almost Famous, is a terminally ill high school foundation that requests a date with an alcoholic fashion model as his last wish. The hour and a half length of this film is largely focused on Dylan being not on a date with her but wishing he were. That is, until the very end, in which the model spontaneously drives down to Philadelphia, picks Dylan up from his death bed, drives him to the beach, fishes with him, falls in love with him, and then falls asleep with him on the beach.

In the morning, the model wakes up to find a corpse laying next to her.

Also in this film are Cynthia Nixon, Wyclef Jean, Gina Gershon, and Matt Bush, the guy on that AT&T commercial that doesn’t appreciate roll-over minutes.

The end.

What were my first thoughts after watching Shanghai Kiss? I believe it was, “finally, a Chinese Garden State!”

Shanghai Kiss is about a guy who doesn’t really get along with his dad and is living in Los Angeles, trying to start a career as an actor, when he finds out that a member of his family dies.

He also meets a quirky girl that he pushes away and eventually realizes that he loves.

Oh, and about two-thirds of the way through the film, you realize the tragic story of how his mom died.

Sound pretty good? It was. I enjoyed both Shanghai Kiss and Garden State Handshake. It’s just unfortunate that it went straight to DVD because, you know, lead actor Ken Leung is neither Zach Braff nor not-Asian.

My only real issue was listening to Kelly Hu’s broken English. Why? Because in reality, her English is fine. I’d know. I watched her in Martial Law. To me, listening to Hu’s accent was like listening to a white guy playing a Japanese guy named Kobayashi, speaking with a fake Japanese accent (The Usual Suspects, anyone?)

So that’s it for today’s Cut to the Chase. For those of you that enjoy my cuts to the chases, you’re all in for a treat. I was a saucier ordered the Netflix player for my TV, meaning that I’ll probably be watching even more straight-to-DVD movies.