Preemptive Critics
‘Lucky Number Slevin’
Greed, laziness, voyeurism, nose picking, double-parking, farting in public and carpentry: the slevin deadly sins.
This movie confuses me.
Who are the good guys? Who are the bud guys? Why is Josh Harnett jumping face-first through drywall? Who bets on horse number slevin?
I’m confused here. Is Morgan Freeman a bad guy? Because he wasn’t in “Million Dollar Baby.”
Is Bruce Willis a good guy? Because he wasn’t in “The Whole Nine Yards.”
Is Lucy Liu supposed to be a good actress? Because she wasn’t in “Charlie’s Angels.”
What confuses me most is how much I want to see this. I’ve seen the preview six or slevin times by now and I still don’t know exactly what it’s about. The clips the trailer shows are shorter than my attention span, just barely.
And despite not picking up on the plot, I am able to tell that it has guns, explosions, and healthy conflict resolution through violence.
That’s enough to make me preemptively love this movie.-
-by Steve Shinney/steveshinney@cc.usu.edu
‘Benchwarmers’
For over a century, cool kids have thought they were better than loser kids because they were better at baseball.
For just as long, loser kids have hoped their easy grounders would take a bad hop and catch one of the cool kids in the junk.
From this great notion comes the movie “The Benchwarmers” starring Napoleon Dynamite, Joe Dirt and Deuce Bigalow (third base gigolo?)
This film goes out to every kid who only got to play three innings, because the league rules wouldn’t let the couch bench them the whole game.
Despite most people saying this movie looks like a scriptwriter had a dry heave too close to his keyboard, I like this film because the producers seem to have used a similar style as to what I used when I played baseball.
When I played ball, my strategy was to stand way out in right field, pollute the air with my inane chatter and if I missed an easy pop up, blame it on the fact the sun was in my eyes.
“The Benchwarmers” game plan is to be released the same weekend as “Phat Girls,” fill the airwaves with inane trailers and, when the movie tanks, blame it on the fact that Rob Schneider is in the film.
I respect that.
And I preemptively love this movie, no matter what you say.
-by Steve Shinney/steveshinney@cc.usu.edu
‘Take the Lead’
What do you get when you take a Spanish actor with swashbuckling skills and tell him to act like a Frenchman with a flair for flamenco?
Zorro waltzing at the storming of the Bastille. You know, watching that kind of movie would be as fun as throwing darts at Josh Hartnett.
Actually, though, you would probably get something like “Take the Lead.” This movie is what would happen if “Evita” started “Dirty Dancing” with “Boyz N the Hood” after coming up for a drink.
The film’s cheese-lovin’, wine-tastin’, war-dodgin’, toe-tappin’ main character is Pierre Dulane, flawlessly played by Antonio “I know ‘Spy Kids’ sucked” Banderas.
By flawless, of course, I mean Banderas is as convincing as a Frenchman as Charlton Heston was as a Mexican in “Touch of Evil.” (Just imagine Moses parting the Rio Grande).
I know synergy and corporate crossover is the name of the game, but, seriously, Donald Rumsfeld is a more convincing Frenchman.
The moral of this movie, so far as the trailer goes, is two-fold: first, hip-hop gets you girls, but ballroom gets you goddesses in skimpy, silk dresses. Second, believe in the power of your dreams and don’t shoot people for drugs or take money for sex … or something like that.
For giving us “Dead Poet’s Society” on a dance floor, I preemptively hate this movie.
-by Matt Wright/mattgo@cc.usu.edu