Month: July 2015

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We welcome you back to more pulses of popcorn. If you’re trying to imagine it, it works not unlike the scene in Troll 2 where two underpaid actors have popcorn thrown at them from off camera in waves. You just have to watch for the husks ’cause those things will scratch your cornea.

We jointly discuss The Incredible Hulk[2008]. It’s hard to pin down exactly where it fails. Perhaps it’s the complete lack of motivation from the characters. Or maybe it’s the weird shit like the Lamaze exercises Ed Norton does or complicated transformation process to make the Abomination.

Weltall then talks about Last Action Hero(1993). If features the future Governator staring in a very meta film. It’s about a kid who gets sucked into an action movie, which this movie is. Charles “Lannister” Dance is the main villain who escapes to attempt to rule the world. Being self aware, any one who dares watch this will find it basically gives the scream treatment to eighties and early nineties action flicks.

Tim, breaking tradition of dragging ancient eighties movies out of their crypts, brings up Mirrors[2008]. It features Keifer Sutherland as a man who’s just tired of this bullshit. There’s a demon that uses mirrors which is mildly original. That the burned out department store he guards at night was built on an old mental institution is not. At least it’s not as dumb as the sequel which will get a treatment one of these days.

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Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, providing that you offer tartar sauce, breading and fry it first. Teach a man to fish and he’ll probably start asking you when he can go home while promising not to tell anyone that you kidnapped him.

Tim and Weltall free their captive and take on the nameless with John Doe: Vigilante[2014]. It’s a film where a man goes around killing people who are bad, or does he?, while wearing a mask. The movie aspires to ask the question if it’s moral to take justice into your own hands if the system doesn’t work the way you want it to. Then it just starts saying that, yes, it’s awesome to kill bad people for fun as long as you’re sure they’re really bad.

Weltall then talks about Jupiter Ascending[2015] because he wanted to spoil something besides that pound of ground beef he forgot in his trunk for six weeks. It features Mila Kunis as a queen bee who gets abducted by the crystal skull aliens and taken to meet house Harkonen. There she is proposed to be married before being whisked away by an angel werewolf with the flying boots from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Tim then prepares to grapple with a mob of old people by criticizing Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate(1962). It is the basis for many a parody and knockoff involving mind control and overbearing mothers that don’t cause their sons to stab Janet Leigh in the shower. So if you’ve never seen it and decide to rectify that, you’ll suddenly get a lot of references from that episode of Venture Brothers and it’ll be that much more familiar.

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Watching people through their windows turns out to be the perfect recipe, for murder! Or, at least it becomes the recipe for disaster in what Tim and Weltall will agree is probably the second best thing Dane Cook has ever been in, Waiting being number one. If you needed more hints, it stars Kevin Costner as he was attempting to wean himself off of the Oscar withdrawals, Mr Brooks [2007].

In it, Costner plays a serial killer who does it because he feels compelled to do so. Being as he’s the protagonist and a murderer, Hollywood can either make him snarky or filled with regret. While Kevin may have known he wasn’t aiming for an award he still wasn’t about to be a wise cracking stab dealer so morose and upset murder machine he is. It also has way too much time spent and focused on Demi Moore’s character.

Weltall then talks about Jinn. Yes, he wants to discuss Shaquille O’neal’s transformation in Kazaam as he ascends from genie to jinn by being wished free by a poorly supervised child. Or he might want to discuss the film Jinn [2014] because he’s quite the fan of middle eastern mythology. At the very least, it pays a few nods to the mythos you could quickly find out via a Google search.

Tim then talks about Vanilla Sky [2001]. Tom Cruise plays a man who ends up down on his luck due to a crazy blonde woman and ends up wearing a mask. So it’s like a more serious take on the Jim Carey vehicle, if you discount the transformation. Though it’s totally worth it to see Tom running around, screaming for tech support a the top of his lungs.