planetdan.net movies

Monday, October 18, 2004 :::

Team America : World Police

Rating:

Why I saw it: B*Dubb wanted to see it.

What I think about it: I have to admit, although I rarely ever watch the TV show, the South Park movie was quite inspired. So it wasn't much of a challenge to get me to see this movie, although I thought the idea of puppets doing vulgar things seemed a little low-brow. Team America is no South Park, but it has its moments for sure. The sad thing is that most of the movie gets its laughs from being shocking rather than being clever, which is a bit disappointing. To be fair, it does have some pretty spot-on parodies of the modern day action movie, especially in terms of the dialogue, but those laughs are few and far between. Most laughs come from the absurdity of watching puppets have sex, or watching bloody severed puppet limbs explode on screen, or watching celebrities get skewered mercilessly, just for the sake of being nasty. It's almost as if you keep watching just to see what else they can get away with. Team America is as offensive as can be, and juvenile as hell, but I laughed throughout most of it, and I was even a little impressed by the puppetry, which I realize was totally not the point, but whatever. Someday, the stuff in this movie isn't going to be shocking anymore, and there will be little left to garner a laugh, but until then it's pretty funny stuff.

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::: posted by dan at 11:09 PM :: #

Sunday, October 10, 2004 :::

I Heart Huckabee's

Rating:

Why I saw it: Because David O. Russell directed it and Lily Tomlin starred in it.

What I think about it: It's almost impossible to describe and to call it ambitious would be a HUGE understatement. It's a comedy starring Marky Mark that actually tries to find the meaning of life while at the same time satirizing the existential dilemma. And then it gets weird. But it's fast and funny and outrageously conceived, and the mere concept of Existential Detectives that the film creates is so completely intriguing and absurdly compelling that you can't help but be impressed by the sheer inventiveness of it all. It doesn't entirely succeed in the end, meaning it all comes together with less profundity than you might imagine, but it's unlike anything you've seen before and so thoroughly entertaining along the way that you won't care. It's not light entertainment, though, it's dense and complex and thematically cerebral, but it's also goofy, absurd, slapsticky and completely original. At the very least, it's trying new things, and the results are often hysterical. See, I told you that it's unclassifiable. I shouldn't even have tried. Oh well. And I don't want to sound like a gushing nerd, but Lily Tomlin is a genius and Shania Twain should stick to singing, if even that.

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::: posted by dan at 11:24 PM :: #