Double Review: Spider-Man: Homecoming / Despicable Me 3

Spidey and the Minions once again return to the Silver Screen ...but should they have?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Am I the only person out there who is just plum sick of people using the word "community" as if they were real places? 

You hear this shit all the time on the news. There's the "black community," and the "gay community" and the "Muslim community" and the "transgender community" and "the feminist community" and well, just about every other "community" you can think of. Interestingly, though, you never hear media people refer to right of center interests groups as communities. You'll never flip on the TV and hear Martha Raddatz use the term "the Christian community" and you'll never read anybody on HuffPo refer to "the gun community." And I'm pretty sure no one has EVER used the terms "the white community" or "the male community" or "the straight community" at any point in history. Some in-groups, it appears, are simply beyond representative identity politicking, I take it.

What I can't fathom, however, is how the media keeps getting away with using the term "community" to describe the perceived opinions of millions of people. For example, how many times did your hear CNN and MSNBC and Fox News use the term "black community" during all that Ferguson and Trayvon claptrap? Does that mean that every single black person in America is part of some AARP-like organization? Does every black man, woman and child in the country get a newsletter every month and a plastic card to keep in their wallets as renewable reminders of their own intrinsic blackness? Does it mean blackness alone supersedes all other factors, including socioeconomics and geographical location, in determining one's overall societal value? 

I mean, is it really a "community" if the members of said "community" have a.) never met 99.999 percent of the people allegedly inside it and b.) don't even have an existential awareness that 99.9998 percent of the people allegedly inside it were ever born and coexist alongside them at the same point in time and space? You know what, let's take a look at Merriam-Webster's entry on "community" and see if the "insert random special interests group here" definition of the word is even technically applicable ... 

What a minute ... doesn't this make people who live in communities, technically, a bunch of no good, stinkin' COMMUNISTS?!?

Strangely enough, the same word keeps popping up - "common." As in, for a community to exist it has to have "common interests," a "common location," a "common history" and "common characteristics." 

Well, right out the gate we can put a big old red "X" over "common interests," because there's no way any group of a million-plus people - let alone one numbering in the hundreds of millions or even billions - can share the exact same interests. Does a multi-billionaire Saudi oil baron have the same interests as some Muslim family bringing in $40,000 a year living in Dearborn, Mich.? Are the interests of Jay-Z and Thomas Sowell identical? Does Peter Thiel have the same interests as some homeless drag queen living in Hell's Kitchen? Not even close, bud. They might share one common trait, but their socioeconomic and political wants - and even existential, day-to-day needs - fluctuate immensely.

Put another big red X over the part about "a common location." So black dudes living in Anchorage have the exact same set of self-preservation interests as black women living in Miami, and transwomen living in San Francisco work under the same conditions as a closeted homosexual living in Riyadh? Sorry, but contemporary circumstances completely outweigh any sense of perceived brotherhood here. Despite that one celebrated communal trait, their divergent surroundings create entirely different existential needs and ideological wants, and that makes any attempts at erecting a pan-cultural identity logically impossible. 

A "common history" doesn't come into play here, either. Does a black guy in Mississippi who comes from a long line of sharecroppers and slaves have the same "common history" as a guy who just moved to New Jersey after working I.T. in Lagos for ten years? Do Muslims in Indonesia have the same "common history" as Iranians? Do gays and transgenders in New York have the same "common history" as gays and transgenders in Moscow? If community is steeped in a sense of shared ancestry, then there's NO WAY the contemporary media definition of "community" is anywhere close to being possible. 

And then there's that stuff about "common characteristics." This one, I suppose, makes a good bit of sense, but at the same time - isn't saying people who share similar physical features have to have the same opinions and outlooks on life just BECAUSE of those features just a teeny, tiny bit prejudiced? 

Doesn't using such terms belittle individuals and subsume their personal beliefs and character in a giant vacuum of ascribed traits? Don't such collectivist labels thrive on sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people? Aren't such descriptors enforcing an opinion on people and appointing whoever's using it as the legal guardian and spokesperson for millions of individuals without their permission? 

I mean, isn't saying all black people think alike, you know, kind of racist? Isn't saying all homosexuals have the same values systems a bit homophobic? Isn't saying all Muslims share the exact same ideological views the definition of xenophobic and bigoted? And on top of that, don't you think it's plum stupid - and literally impossible - for millions of people to foster the same central beliefs based on just one common characteristic or trait?

You know, let's just come out and say it - "community" ain't nothing but a slightly ritzier way of propagating stereotypes and deriving individuals of their right to represent themselves in the public eye. But that's modern day collectivism for you - an unyielding obsession with identity politics, but only the identity the liberal Wehrmacht wants you to have.

Spider-Man, seen here symbolically giving the white patriarchy what-for by scaling a giant cock-shaped monument to George "Slave-Killer" Washington.

Speaking of things that prolly shouldn't exist, Spider-Man: Homecoming might just be the worst Spider-Man movie yet, and considering how bad the two Andrew Garfield movies were, that's saying something. 

The really disappointing thing about Homecoming (which, indeed, revolves around an actual homecoming dance at Pete Parker's P-TECH high school) is that the first act is just tremendous. You've got a downright fantastic subplot about Michael Keaton stealing alien technology from the first Avengers movie and using it to sell black market death lasers to low-level hoods and gangbangers and watching Spider-Man run around trying to find criminals to thwart (only to accidentally web up a dude for breaking into his own car and spending the rest of the afternoon blowing up Iron Man's phone talking about churros) is a hoot and a half. Alas, everything after the 40 minute mark gets progressively (regressively?) worse, complete with a third act so bland and by the numbers that they may as well have just spliced in the grand finale from Power Rangers and I don't think anybody in the audience would have been none the wiser. Sheesh, at least Logan and Get Out had the decency to only start sucking in their respective third acts, guys -  meanwhile,this one doesn't even wait until we sneak up on the one hour mark before it starts blowing the proverbial goat.

In case you're wondering how heavy they're laying on the whole hooray for diversity/political correctness is our only true god shtick, we're less than ten seconds in before Michael Keaton's character is criticized for using the term "Indian" instead of "Native American," and for that one linguistic transgression alone we just know he's evil incarnate. Anyhoo, he's your average pissed off old white guy who's mad because the gubberment came in and kicked him off a job cleaning up all the destruction at the end of The Avengers, so naturally, eight years later he's become some kind of weapons kingpin that flies around town in a furry bomber jacket hijacking transfer trucks for the LULZ. 

We watch some cell phone footage of Spider-Man's appearance in Civil War, then Spoon's "The Underdog" starts playing while he walks around his technical high school talking to his morbidly obese Filipino friend about Lego Star Wars toys (so, yeah, this is basically the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man, except Miles Morales is a white British kid trying to sound like he's from Queens.) 

Of course, this is Diversity High we're talking about here. Peter's physics teacher is a black woman, Flash Thompson is now a scrawny Indian and we've got not one but two competing love interests retconned from white girls into biracial actresses (including a stand-in for Mary Jane who literally looks more like Dale Gribble's son from King of the Hill than Kirsten Dunst) And just so you can rest you worried little head easy at night, this incarnation of Spider-Man is also a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker, which comes in handy when he accidentally blows up the local Cuban-owned deli. 

So Spidey swings around to "Blitzkrieg Bop" and his fat friend finds out his true identity and convinces him to be his sidekick and all the girls in P.E. play "fuck marry kill" with the cast of The Avengers and Captain America shows up in a detention video and Betty Brant is doing the morning news program at school and Peter goes to a party in the suburbs and realizes his web shooting powers are practically useless there and we encounter a bunch of crooks using anti-gravity weapons and electro-earthquake gloves to jack ATM machines.

Everything up to this point is pretty hunky-dory. In a way, it almost becomes sort of spiritual adaptation of that old '90s comic Astro City, kinda-sorta-somewhat showing us what civilian life is like in an alternate reality where giant space monsters just fall out of the sky and dudes wearing their underwear outside their pants shoot laser death out of their eyeballs to stop purse snatchers. The subplot about the low level criminals becoming super villains by stealing alien technology is absolutely fucking brilliant, giving us great depictions of C-leaguer bad guys like Shocker, The Prowler and even the goddamn fucking Tinkerer and I loved all the little touches that showed how the superhero industrial complex permeates every nook and cranny of "normal human being life" in the MCU. 

And then, the movie starts losing momentum. Aunt May (played by Marissa Tomei) does nothing but squander valuable screen time (although her Tara Tainton-esque looks will undoubtedly inspire a plethora of Rule 34 incest porn on the Netz) and Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man shtick (he plays a mentor of sorts to Peter) has become a watered-down self-parody at this point. And then we learn Spider-Man's high-tech suit has a Siri-like voice-activated virtual assistant inside it named Karen, and good gracious, is their interaction boring and unfunny as shit. And hey, wouldn't you know it, a good 15 minute chunk of the movie is dedicated to Spidey and Karen bickering back and forth while stuck in Damage Control's deep storage vault - lucky us. 

By the time Spidey and the local Academic decathalon team make it to the nationals in D.C. (interestingly, the school has no jocks to speak of - then again, why celebrate athletic ability in THIS cinematic universe when technology and experimental liquids can turn you into physical death machines without even once having to hit the gym?) the movie has completely ran out of gas. The elevator collapse in the Washington Monument (which Zendaya's character won't go into because she claims it was built it by slaves) is without drama or intrigue (why the fuck is Spider-Man afraid of heights, anyway?) and the allusion to the first Raimi movie kiss comes off as hokey and even mildly retarded (although I did like one student likening the perilous incident to, of all things, a Bon Jovi concert.)

The last hour of this movie is like having to push a dead car uphill. We watch Spidey monkey around with "enhanced interrogation mode" voice changers and he pulls a barge together in a scene ripping off I mean, homaging Spider-Man 2 and Tony Stark takes his costume away and we learn Liz Allen's dad is actually the Vulture (small world, eh?) and Spidey has to fight Shocker while wearing a crappy homemade suit with ping pong ball eyeballs and, inevitably, Spidey and the Vulture get involved in a poorly lit, abandoned warehouse fight (complete with an ode to The Amazing Spider-Man #33) and there's one more nightvision sky battle and the Vulture is bested in battle and Liz Allen has to leave town while her dad's on trial and Zendaya is appointed the new academic decathlon captain and Tony Stark wants to make Spidey the newest member of the Avengers but he turns it down so he can finish high school and at the very end, Spidey gets his old, cybernetic costume back and Aunt May sees him putting it on and she says the "f-word" and the movie ends. 

Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man movies felt like honest-to-goodness, self-contained stories with a beginning, middle and end. This movie is just one, long, continuous and ultimately, unimportant middle that feels more like a random episode of your favorite sitcom than a standalone feature film. So, yeah - it definitely feels like a real Marvel Cinematic Universe offering, alright. 

We've got one dead body. No breasts. Multiple heists. One carjacking (committed by Spider-Man, if you can believe it.) Exploding deli. Exploding barge. Gratuitous Ramones. Gratuitous references to larb. Gratuitous overly-complicated hand shakes. Kung fu. Anti-gravity gun fu. Laser cannon fu. School bus fu. And, of course, thing thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place, diversity quota fu.

Starring 21-year-old Tom Holland as the 15-year-old Peter Parker, even though the actor himself looks more like he's 12; Michael Keaton as the Vulture, although it's woefully apparent he'd rather be starring in a Birdman sequel; Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan, basically Spider-Man's Avengers-appointed babysitter; Zendaya as a half black version of Ally Sheedy's character in The Breakfast Club; Marissa Tomei as the most fuckable version of Aunt May in any form of media; Jacob Batalan as the token fat friend always asking Spider-Man questions about his webbing; and Robert Downey Jr., as the guy phoning it in for another $20 million payday. 

Directed by Jon Watts, whose previous films Clown and Cop Car are actually pretty fucking great, who also co-wrote the script alongside five other credited writers, the bulk of whom sound very, very Hebrew. 

All I can afford it is one and half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, but only if you leave at the 40-minute mark and don't pay for the ticket.

I, for one, was shocked by the surprising number of anal rapings throughout the movie.

While we're on the subject of franchise cash cows, we might as well mull over the latest Despicable Me movie while we're at it. Now, I've got no problem saying it, I'm one of the few people out there who unironically adores the Minions. I thought Despicable Me 2 was just peachy and I thought their 2015 spin-off was even better. Hell, I almost came this close to buying a jug of Minion-shaped shampoo that smelled like bananas recently. 

But this Despicable Me 3 is just a big old disappointment, through and through. It starts off decent enough, with one of them South Park homos playing this mustachioed child actor turned omnicidal Dr. Doom clone whose entire armada of doomsday weapons based on 1980s kitsch using bubble gum to steal a humongous diamond. But since Gru and his wife can't apprehend him, both of 'em get shit-canned by the new head of the international coalition of secret agents or whatever the hell it's called, and I'll be damned if she isn't animated like the most obvious caricature of a Jewess you've ever seen. Seriously - she's *yay* close to being the Happy Merchant's long-lost sister, and it's amazing. 

So the Minions get sick of Gru's bullshit and they go on strike and then we've got a new subplot about Gru's dad being a hitherto unmentioned super villain himself and what do you know, he also has a twin brother he didn't know about neither living in the faraway kingdom of Freedonia (hmm, does that name sound just a wee bit familiar?) where he pretends to be a pork kingpin but - of course - he secretly wants to be a super-duper villain, too. So we get a lot of long-lost sibling bonding and even MORE subplots about cheese festivals and some fat kid trying to marry one of Gru's daughters and another daughter trying to hunt down a unicorn and the Minions go on Sing and get arrested for breaking into the building and they all get sentenced to prison where they slowly but surely realize Gru isn't that bad of a master, after all. 

You know the ending already. Gru and his brother steal back the diamond from the '80s-flavored villain but they have a falling out over whether to keep it for themselves or take it to the secret agents commission. Sure enough, the villain manages to get his revenge by abducting Gru's daughters in a giant mech, and from there, only the combative siblings and the Minions on a dirigible mostly made out of toilet parts are the only thing that can keep Hollywood from being incinerated by death lasers. 

What a pity it is to see what was the closest thing Hollywood had to a modern day Marx Brothers franchise turn into just another predictable, by-the-numbers "apocalypse porn" summer bummer - I haven't been this disappointed at the local Multiplex since that time I took Nancy Kloppendinger to go see G-Force and my zipper got stuck at the 50-minute mark. 

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts (and for fuck's sake, if you're looking for 'em in a movie like this, you deserve to have Chris Hanson and the po-pop paying you a visit.) Gratuitous Michael Jackson. Gratuitous dance-fighting. Gratuitous shin-kicking. Bubblegum fu. Rubik's Cube fu. Key-tar fu (complete with the opening solos from both Van Halen's "Jump" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing.") Tranquilizer dart fu. Giant robot fu. Laser death ray fu. And the thing responsible for the movie existing in the first place - Universal Pictures being totally out of new ideas fu. 

Starring Steve Carell in a dual role as Gru and Dru (even though their voices are practically identical); Kristen Wiig as Lucy, this time around a much more assertive mom than she was in the last flick; Trey Parker as lead bad guy Balthazar Bratt, who at one point calls another character "a son of a Betmax"; Julie Andrews as Gru's mom, who was paid millions of dollars for about four lines of dialogue; Miranda Cosgrove as the bookish daughter who has to rebuff the marriage proposal of an obese boy at a cheese festival; and Dana Gaier as the precocious middle child, who proposes Gru try online gambling to supplement his income. Written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio (who apparently need a break after churning out stuff like Hop and The Lorax every year or so) and directed by Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda, both of whom are so clearly so sick of this shit it's actually kinda' depressing. 

I give it two stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, even though you'd probably have more fun making your hair smell like bananas instead. 

Read More

DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Alien: Covenant' / 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2'

Are you ready for a double shot of totally needless, painfully formulaic sci-fi summer cashgrabs? WELL YOU BETTER BE.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

I'd like to say a couple of things about the "death" of Obamacare, if 'ya don't mind. 

From the get-go, we all kinda-sorta knew it wasn't going to work. I mean, they couldn't even get the fuckin' website up and running until three months after the first enrollment period, and things have only gotten worse from there. Even all them dimmicrats, I reckon, figgered the numbers just weren't going to work out in the end. From the get-go, the whole Obamacare program was marred by two totally incompatible goals: 

1. Make insurers accept everybody, even those really sick motherfuckers who will take out literally millions in health care services but only pay in about $19.25; and...

2. To help cover those costs of giving the formally uninsurable medical coverage, we'll just force all them young whippersnappers who are spry and healthy to BUY insurance they really don't need and prolly won't ever use under threat of imprisonment and all that extra money circulatin' around in the insurance pools will SURELY cover the costs of caring for all them old, poor and sick fuckos mentioned above. 

Now, in hindsight, it seems like somebody up there in D.C. woulda' gotten off Obama's nuts and asked the following question: "Pardon, me, senor Obama, but do we know for a fact that the amount of insurance money generated by all them young folks legislatively forced to buy health coverage plans will be enough to pay for all the health care those formally uninsurable sick fuckos are going to be takin' outta' the system?"

Now maybe I'm checking the wrong websites, but I've yet to see one C.B.O. spreadsheet saying the "make the young invincibles make up the difference" strategy was - or would ever - be enough to fully cover the costs of the sickest people in America getting what is tantamount to free medical care (and don't give me any of that bullshit about co-pays, neither; even if you do pay about $3,000 a year in health care costs, that don't mean shit when you're receiving $300,000 a year in health care services you, yourself, aren't personally responsible for paying back.) 

And with that in mind, I wonder if anybody in the Obama camp asked this prickly li'l follow up question: "hey, B.O., just a quick 'un - let's say all them young whippersnappers do sign up for health coverage, but instead of not usin' it, they actually bilk it for all its worth on doctors visits and medications and even surgeries none of them really need just because they're able to get 'em at super-duper-reduced costs now?" 

And with that little brain tickler on the docket, I wonder if anybody dared asked this little head scratcher during the formative phase of Obamacare: "does it really make that much sense to force employers, especially the smaller ones, to offer SOME kind of health coverage for employees, even to people who don't want it or don't need it? And if we're forcing employers to offer insurance, what are the odds they'll just pick the shittiest, low-cost coverage they can get that really won't do diddly for the few young whippersnappers who actually might legitimately need to use it?"

Well, apparently those obvious questions never got asked, and as a result, all the big name insurers wound up cutting their loses and just up and LEFT Obamacare before the bottom really fell out. Shit, even the states that opted to expand Medicaid ended up getting burned like mothefuckers, with 24 out of the 29 expanded states reporting doubled budget expenditure increases under the program.

There's a real simple lesson to be learned here, kids. If you're going to go all-in on a massive entitlement program that'll tally up trillions of dollars over the course of a decade, you best damn have a fool-proof plan to keep the necessary operating revenue a' flowin'. That's the fundamental - and ultimately, fatal - problem with the A.C.A. From the very beginning, Obama and pals thought they had a mathematically viable, two-pronged plan to make everything work. Unfortunately, their "let's make all the 18-34-years-olds shoulder the costs" scheme didn't exactly pan out the way they had hoped. 

Now here's the big philosophical mistake the dimmicrats made with Obamacare. They simply figgered making healthy young folks buy health care to avoid a $695 tax penalty would be enough to pay off the exorbitant medical bills of people who plan on being out of work and dependent on the government dole for the next 30 or 40 years of their lives. Nowhere in the implementation process did any of those assholes in Washington contemplate the numerous blind spots in their plans. They NEVER wondered if young people forced to buy health care insurance would wind up using it on non-emergency services simply because they now had the option. They NEVER wondered if young people forced to buy health care would simply take the $700 hit on the chin instead of paying an extra $2,400 a year for something totally and completely pointless. They NEVER wondered if old, fat, sick, formerly uninsured assholes would bilk Obamacare for all its worth without returning even a fraction of a percent of the money they took out of the coffers. They NEVER wondered if the idea to build the entire funding mechanism of the program around a subset of the population for whom unemployment and underemployment is rampant was really that dandy of an idea in the long haul. They NEVER wondered if the whole fucking thing was going to inordinately benefit older (and still working) baby boomers and reduce their overall share of the Obamacare pie even though THEY were the ones using up the lion's share of he funding while simultaneously increasing costs and decreasing quality of care for younger, lower-income employees and blue-collar and working-class families. They NEVER wondered if, instead of continuing to pay ballooning private health care insurance costs, people would a.) get rid of their plans altogether, b.) pick a lower-priced, crappier plan that put more of a burden on fellow taxpayers or c.) have to resort to other entitlement programs - like Medicaid, food stamps, etc. - to shoulder the sticker shock of premium increases. They NEVER wondered if the rapidly increasing insurance costs would force employers to lay off employees, in turn, eliminating revenue pools for companies, insurance providers and the federal government itself. And, of course, they NEVER wondered if investing billions (bordering on trillions) of dollars into the health care of terminally ill/disabled/unemployable beneficiaries without any kind of financial return on investment MIGHT not be the most sustainable financial strategy.

Or, to boil it down to a single sentence, this is why Obamacare crashed and burned: them folks up on Capitol Hill wanted to spend a whole hell of a lot of money on something that would never recoup the losses of getting off the ground to begin with. 

We've all read Bitter Pill and know all about the collusion between the O. Administration and the heavy hitters of health care insurance. What the tried-and-true blues still haven't grasped is that by putting the fundraising onus on the private market, the dimmicrats more or less set the whole Obamacare structure up to fail and fail miserably. When it comes to making moolah, all Barry O. and his brethren know how to do is tax the fuck out of everything and everyone. Not only did the legislation take away the dems' best financing source, it took away pretty much the only financing source they know anything about. 

If you're gonna' burn money, you best have one hell of a plan to earn money along the way. And - a shocker, I know - Obama and the rest of them lib-uh-rals just don't (and perhaps never will) understand how to pay for something without using somebody else's wallet. And - unfortunately for fans of the A.C.A. - it looks like the dems picked them a pocket with nothing but dryer lint and expired coupons inside it.

Alright, guys, we need some fresh ideas for the movie. How about, this time, we have the aliens jump out of their backs instead?

Speaking of totally pointless cash-grabs, not only is Alien: Covenant the worst movie in the entire Alien franchise - yep, it's even worse than those stanky-ass Alien vs. Predator movies - it's EASILY the worst movie Ridley Scott has ever directed. Don't let those dick-ridin' four star reviews over at the fat, bloated corpse of Roger Ebert's website fool you, this thing is just utter rubbish, ironically as bad (if not worse) than Alien Uno ripoffs like Xtro and Leviathan.

While Prometheus was a pretty disappointing movie, it at least felt like it had a little bit of life in it. Covenant is so by-the-numbers bland that by the time the xenomorph finally shows up - at the hour and thirty minute mark of a two-hour movie - you just couldn't give any less of a damn. Next to Power Rangers, it's the most inconceivably, unforgivably bad movie I've seen all year. Not only is it an insult to the once venerable Alien franchise, it's an insult to anybody unlucky enough to shell out actual money to see this drivel in a brick and mortar cineplex.

The movie starts off with Michael Fassbender sittting in a chair, wearing a skintight track suit critiquing baroque art. Then he starts playing classical piano and talks with his designer about the meaning of life and where humans came from. Then he pours some tea before we learn it's the year 2104 and there's this spaceship hurtling through space with like 2,000 people on it and a fire breaks out so the crew is freed from their sleep pods but the captain of the ship dies when he's thawed out and holy shit, one of the survivors is Kenny Powers.

This time around, we don't got no Sigourney Weaver or Noomi Rapace, but we do have this one no-name broad who has a haircut like a 12-year-old Austrian boy crying over her dead husband while watching him climb mountains on an iPad. Then the new captain says a bunch of techno-speak gobbledygook about "core code reviews" and "recharge cycles" and has a tough time winning over his suspiciously multicultural crew. 

Everybody drinks liquor out of Styrofoam cups and tinkers with equipment lifted from Metroid Prime as the dead body of the former captain gets shot out into the blackness of space. And good lord, is the CGI in this one remarkably bad - if you thought the computer generated effects in Resurrection were dog-shit, you will be amazed at just how little progress has been achieved 20 years later.

Anyhoo, they stumble upon a planet (apparently, it's the one from Prometheus) out of nowhere and decide to visit it, because why not? The captain and boy-haircut-girl complain and argue about what to do for a couple of minutes then Kenny Powers calls some woman "sugar tits" and they run around with GoPro cameras on their backpacks checking out the shrubbery (the slow-talking, semi-Native-American guy is amazed the place has wheat, of all things) and then one guy stomps on some black Prometheus goop behind some shrubs and smokes a joint and a bunch of alien gnats fly in his ear and borrow underneath his cochlea. So, 100 years from now, one of the world's most abundant and ubiquitous grains will be extinct, but marijuana will remain plentiful? 

The monotone-voiced Indian fellow finds a giant alien-headed temple in the woods and thinks it's "some kind of vehicle." Of course, they all venture into the dark, vagina-shaped cave and start poking ancient alien turds and more microbes start flying through their nasal passages. Then the weed smoker starts puking black tar all over the place so they have to take him back to the ship and he starts convulsing and then a giant boil starts pulsating on his back before a ravioli monster jumps out of his skin and a mulatto woman slips on his blood and tries to fight off the mini-albino xenomorph monkey with a knife like she was doing battle with the possessed Zulu doll from Trilogy of Terror. After they accidentally blow up their escape pod with pulse rifle fire, another dude starts puking blood and another of them mayonnaise turd monkeys jumps outta his back and starts running around screaming like E.T. trying to claw everybody's eyes out. And before I forget, one thing I should add: 

In this movie, the alien neomorphs know kung-fu. 

Think I'm yanking your chain? No siree, Bob, there's actually a part in the movie where one of them little buggers literally does a flying spin kick outta Double Dragon. That one got me so bad, I had to rewind the streaming video ... I mean, politely ask the projectionist to kindly unspool the film THAT I PAID MONEY TO WATCH so I could rewatch the scene and make sure it wasn't some sort of meth-tainted Diet Dr. Pepper-spawned hallucination.

So naturally, even though all the space colonists have laser guns, they can't hit the fucking thing and it winds up biting off two peoples' faces. Then Michael Fassbender shows up out of nowhere (albeit in a druid robe with a haircut like Christopher Lambert's in Mortal Kombat) and leads the survivors to a temple with thousands of Vesuvius-like ash-mummified corpses of those giant, nose-less Albino guys from Prometheus. Of course, the scene is so dark you really can't tell what you're looking at, so it's not that it matters or anything like that.

So we get some exposition on what happened after the ending of Prometheus (long story short, everybody got attacked by space lice and died horrible deaths, even Noomi Rapace) and the Fass-bot tells them they're probably infected and he pulls out a pair of scissors and cuts his bangs off because I guess that was as good a time as any for a new 'do.

After the Fass-bot looks at diagrams of butterflies and performs a flute solo for five minutes (no, for real, I counted the seconds), there's some meandering campfire dialogue about the captain and boy-haircut-woman about his insecurities about being a leader and then we get a flashback of all the bald albino giants getting attacked by a microbe swarm and the Fass-boy gives us another monologue about love and duty and a woman gets her head bitten off by a bigger albino space monkey monster, but all the gore shows up in quick-cut, edited-by-somebody-with-ADD form so you can't even enjoy watching bitches get their faces chewed off in this damn thing.

Then the alien morphs into squash-headed Gollum form and the space captain shoots it while the Fass-bot is trying to give it a lecture on Dianetics and then the robot shows off a vial of alien juice and all the facehuggers he took to the taxidermist and it's revealed he's the one who crossbred the xenomorph into existence (which completely contradicts the ending of Prometheus, but really, who expects "continuity" anymore?) So at the movie's 90-minute mark, the iconic alien egg finally shows up and, of course, the captain gets face huggered and a chestburster leaps out of his ribcage and Fassbender says some shit about creation mythology which I guess is supposed to be ironic because he admonished one of the crewmembers earlier for having faith in religion. Then majestic music plays while the the alien grows from fun-size Snickers bar to full gown space mutant like some sort of acid-spewing Shrinky Dink. Then the Fass-bot kills the space pilot (in a scene more or less copied from Ridley's own Blade Runner) and then the full-sized xenomorph shows up and it's all CGI and it literally looks like a wet trash bag. 

The escape ship (which, fortuitously enough, has a giant deck on it) arrives and the final girl climbs outside the ship and fights it. The crew throws the alien off (bitch, you thought) and lick their wounds and make breakfast and then their Alexa device lets them know there's some kind of unidentified creature on the ship so they grab their space lasers and find this one woman mangled like a piece of bloody beef jerky while the xenomorph kills a dude while he's trying to bone a woman in the showers. Eventually, they manage to push the alien out of an airlock, but LOL, the robot kills everybody in cryogenic sleep and makes Alexa play Wagner while he pukes out amber embryos for his intergalactic bug collection. And that, folks, is how this turd casserole finally ends. 

We've got 12 dead bodies. Two dead aliens. One dead android. About ten thousand dead albino Roman giants without noses. Two breasts. Acid to the face. Attempted robot rape. Face stapling. Security camera biting. One autopsy. Evil Dead ripoff Alien-vision cam. Gratuitous spacewalks. Gratuitous John Denver. Gratuitous references to the work of Percy Shelly. Gratuitous H.R. Giger sketches. Kung fu. Cyborg fu. Giant mechanical claw game fu. Airlock fu. And the thing that more or less makes the entire movie possible, some serious animal husbandry fu.

Starring Michael Fassbender in a dual role as both the space colony android Walter and David, the robot with a God delusion who says lines like "breath on the nostrils of Oz" like he honestly means it; Katherine Waterston as Danny, the extremely, extremely poor-woman's Ripley; Billy Crudup as space captain Chris Oram, who tells an android "I'm totally going to fuck up your perfect composure" with a straight face; Danny McBride as Tennessee, the redneck spaceship pilot whose protruding gut doesn't prevent him from running away from the face-raping grasshopper monster; and a whole bunch of character actors who wind up getting killed, either by nasty chest parasites or having their heads used as space creature toothpicks. 

Directed by Ridley Scott, who's trying so hard to get that Alien/Blade Runner crossover green lit that he forget to make an actual movie this time around, with a script by John Logan and Dante Harper, and really don't even have that for an excuse as to why the film turned out so shitty.

I give it one and a half stars out of four and that's me being generous. It's a predictable, overlong, over-pontificating, pseudo-intellectual, soulless cash-crab so bad it makes Alien 3 look like Aliens and makes Alien: Resurrection look like ... well, a less terrible version of Alien: Resurrection, I suppose.

Adam Warlock, Pac-Man and Uatu the Watcher all have cameos in the new Guardians of the Galaxy flick. Sadly, Master Order, the Chef from BurgerTime and The Beyonder remain M.I.A. in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Speaking of things nobody really needed, the second half of this week's big budget sci-fi double feature is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, a flick I'd consider mildly better than the original - but then again, seeing as how I didn't think numero uno was really all that great to begin with, that ain't exactly the loftiest of praise. 

So the movie begins in Missouri in the 1970s, with a young Kurt Russell driving through the countryside and taking his date to Dairy Queen (hooray for shameless product placement!) before showing her this glowing flower out in the woods. After that, we skip 34 years into the future to watch the Guardians bicker and banter about Drax's nipples while Baby Groot dances around during a team battle against this ginormous barracuda-faced squid monster. After that, some people wearing gold makeup get angry at them for stealing some batteries and then that green chick (who looks just like The Mask with boobies) gets into an argument with her blue robot sister (yeah, I'm not sure how that's supposed to work, either) and then there's a whole bunch of rapid-fire, PG-13 dick jokes for the next few minutes, then the gang crash lands on some weird alien world. Then a decidedly older-looking Kurt Russel shows up and there's a Howard the Duck cameo and SLY Stallone tells an alien with a giant frosted Christmas ornament for a head to buzz off at a space bar. At this point, we're introduced to this praying mantis chick who is apparently every bit as autistic as Drax, except she's an "empath," which is sorta' like being a telepath only instead of being able to read people's thoughts, she can read people's feelings. Yep, that's what we've gotten to, folks - superheros whose superpower is emotional bonding. 

Then Star-Lord goes on this long diatribe about how he used to tell everybody David Hasselhoff was his dad in middle school and Rocket Racoon, Groot and the blue dude who was Star-Lord's adopted daddy in the first movie (oddly enough, played by the dude from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) get captured and Kurt Russell reveals his name is Ego and that he's Star-Lord's real papa and he's got the same celestial ability to manipulate molecules as his pop. 

Because the story isn't hard enough to follow, we then have a a whole bunch of Klingon-GWAR monsters show up, then Star-Lord and Ego argue about Star-Lord's mother and we have this long spaceship mutiny subplot that drags on for about 15 minutes. Then Star-Lord makes a whole bunch of references to Cheers and the green girl and her robo-sister get into an underground karate fight and they find a whole bunch of skeletons all over the place and then the emotional telepath mantis-woman explains that Ego has been running around impregnating alien life forms and eating his offspring for billions of years and then the movie devolves into FORTY MINUTES of been-there, done-that CGI apocalypse porn nonsense, complete with all of the pink and blue flashy things and creeping electro fog and everything crumbling and exploding while the camera spins 'round and 'round and the cast pirouetting in the air in slow-motion exchanging witty one-liners that we've seen in the last act of literally every big budget wannabe summer blockbuster since 2010. Then Star-Lord kills Ego by turning into Pac-Man (no, for real) and his daddy melts into the sand and the blue dude sacrifices himself to save everybody and then some random space man gives Star-Lord a Zune and "Surrender" by Cheap Trick plays and there's about four or five teasers for the sequel and that is that, kids.

We've got 63 dead bodies. Two dead beasts. Rat alien rodeo. Monster carving. Spider-eating. Darts to the face.  One guy kicked out of an air locker and frozen solid by the coldness of space. Gratuitous 1970s AOR soundtrack. Gratuitious Pac-Man references. One outer space funeral, with multiple references to David Hasselhoff. Landmine fu. Electroshock fu. Laser cannon fu. Laser arrow fu. Energy projection fu. Cavernous kung fu. Giant machine gun turret fu. Enemy bonding fu. And of course, the thing responsible for this movie existing in the first place, some serious sequel hook fu. 

Starring Chris Pratt as Star-Lord, the ringleader of the Guardians who drops lines like "did you make a penis?" and "you're just jealous because I'm half-god" like anyone over the age of 12 would find it witty; Zoe Seldano as the green chick who spends most of the movie rebuffing Chris Pratt's romantic advances and feuding and fussing with her android sibling; Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer, who is basically an autistic version of Kratos from God of War; Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket Raccoon, who has to suffer such humiliating put-downs as being called "a trash panda" and a "a triangle-faced monkey"; Kurt Russell as Ego the Living Planet, whose human form bares an uncanny resemblance to Dan Haggerty; Michael Rooker as the blue guy who gets blown up at the end; and Vin Diesel, who gets paid millions of dollars to literally say three words over and over again.

Written and directed by James Gunn, who takes no chances on the follow-through and is being promptly rewarded with millions upon millions of dollars to draw up Volume 3 as we speak. 

I give it two stars. Jimbo says check it out, or just watch any of the other Marvel movies because they're all pretty much the same thing at this point anyway.

Read More

DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Logan' / 'Get Out' (2017) Movie Reviews

They're two of the most critically acclaimed popcorn pictures of the year ... but are they anywhere near as good as the Rotten Tomatoes hive mind would lead you to believe?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Alright, time to update my biannual list of phrases only assholes say. If anybody you know or run into uses any of the words, terms or platitudes below, rest assured - without a shadow of a doubt - they are 100 percent bona fide assholes, through and through.

"Due Diligence" - Yeah, I know that, technically, this has to do with following the proper legal steps in order to sell a property or some other shit, but I've heard way too many people use it to describe rudimentary day-to-day affairs in the office. And its always used in this defamatory, condescending manner, too. You never hear anybody praised for doing their "due diligence," it's always used in the context of trying to fuck somebody over for not doing what you thought they were supposed to do in a given situation. That, and if you say it enough times, it starts to sound like the name of a 1980s gay porn star - i.e., Dewey Dylan Gents Stars in Hungry Peckers Vol. 8. 

"It Is What It Is" - Now here's a term that's just flat out fucking pointless. Traditionally, the idiom meant something was unchangeable so don't bother trying to fix it, but now people seem to use it to simply refer to a predicament as ... well, simply existing. For example, I once heard someone refer to a carton of melted ice cream as "it is what it is" - which is what, exactly? Couldn't you just say it IS melted ice cream instead and you'd get the exact same fuckin' message across with about three or four less syllables? 

"Extenuating Circumstances" - As a general rule, anybody who uses legal or criminal justice jargon in daily conversations are almost universally guaranteed to be assholes. But people who use THIS little phrase are unquestionably sphincters of the highest order. What does "extenuating circumstances" mean in the dictionary? Well, it's basically anything that happens to a person who does bad shit (or is accused of doing bad shit) that can be drudged up to make his or her actions (or accused actions) sound a little less bad. For example, "sure, I robbed that motherfucker, but I really needed the money so I could buy my dying mama some cancer medication that our Bronze plan wouldn't cover." So from the get-go, it's a term mechanically meant to defer blame, or at the very least, lessen the personal responsibility of a given deed. The problem in daily discourse, however, is that people always use "extenuating circumstances" to refer to anything that puts pressure on somebody, whether or not it directly or indirectly leads to someone doing something negative. This one is sorta' the inverse of "due diligence," because you rarely hear people use the term in a disparaging manner: indeed, you are much, much likelier to hear someone praise someone for excelling in the face of "extenuating circumstances" (getting all their work done, despite having to pick up the kids at school early or coming back from a root canal, etc.) than you are to hear stories of people generally fucking up because of "extenuating circumstances." So structurally, it's a term that has a concrete meaning outside of daily life that has been malapropriated in figurative public lingo to mean more or less the exact opposite of what it etymologically means. And a good goddamn, should we all hate people with such a blatant disregard for our cisgendered English language.

"Rushed To The Hospital" - Have you ever heard of anybody not being "rushed to the hospital?" It's never "taken to the hospital" or "driven to the hospital" or "transported to the hospital," it's ALWAYS "rushed to the hospital." I especially hate it when you see somebody on the news use it, as if such were a statement of objective fact. Just how fast do you need to be going to qualify as "being rushed?" Anything above the Interstate speed limit? And doesn't "rushed" itself sorta' imply you're acting in haste and reckless abandon, anyway? 

"A Can Of Worms" - Now this one doesn't make any goddamn sense. To open a can of worms means to cause controversy or disarray, but let me ask you this ... have you ever seen a fuckin' can of worms anywhere in your life? Where exactly does one procure a can of the like, and what is its core utility? Fishing bait? Eating up bad soil? You called just as easily use the term "Pandora's Box" or even the old "Apple of Discord" to figuratively express the same concept, but no, we have to keep using the "can of worms" metaphor because worms gross people out, even though nobody can explain why a bunch of worms placed inside a can somehow represents dissension or disorder. I mean, shit, if some giant 900 times taller than you and 9,000 times your body weight scooped you and your invertebrate kinfolk out of the dirt and jailed you inside a cylindrical container, wouldn't you kinda' expect desperation and disharmony as a logical outcome?

"Beautification" - This one is just P.R. bullshit-speak. Whenever someone says they want to "beautify" something, what they really mean is they want to spend way more money than necessary to clean something up and decorate it. You hear this one a lot in local governance from people who are convinced that the reason gang members won't stop shooting each other isn't because their neighborhood is an open air market for heroin and AK-47s, but simply because there's too much grass growing out of the sidewalk and all the rundown houses sure could use a nice coat of pastel colored paint. 

"Walkability" - I've heard urban supremacists use this term for more than a decade and I'm still not entirely sure what they think it means. Long story short, there's been this long-running effort to gentrify ... I mean, improve the quality of life ... in inner cities and surrounding suburbs by limiting the number of roads and increasing the amount of "walking" space and, ugh, bicycle lanes, in downtown areas. So, in essence, it's really just a ploy to make certain areas off limits to anybody who doesn't live nearby or isn't willing to pay an ass load of money to park three miles down the road simply to bask in the warm, homey glow of shitty coffee shops and boutique businesses prolly run by wife beaters and drug addicts. Show me a person who has ever used the phrase "walkability" in his or her life in any connotation other than fleeting jest and I'll show you somebody you don't EVER want to talk to, for any reason. 

"Mixed Multi-Use" - Hey, what do you know, it's another highfalutin term used by people who really, really want to make sure poor people can't afford to live anywhere near 'em. Essentially, "mixed multi-use" is a buzzword for developers who want to build these gargantuan facilities that combine all sorts of things - apartments, stores, restaurants, hotels, skating rinks, etc. - into one massive complex that's really more of a mini city-state than a shopping center. Store this one in your memory banks, folks, in case you hear someone trying to champion the cause in your neck of the woods - primarily, because whoever's planning on building the damn thing is almost assuredly going to demand you and your fellow taxpayers in the city are going to pony up some "local funding" to fiance their shitty little retail Wiemar Republic.

"Dwelling" - Now this one is just classist as all fuck. Really, the only kinds of people who use the term instead of "housing" or "home" are either pretentious fuckwads who think using synonyms for common terms make them look smarter to everybody or prejudiced assholes who think those miserable plebs who live in apartments instead of owning their own property are just the scum of the fucking earth. I actually heard someone use the expression"high-density multi-family dwelling" as a euphemism for apartment complex once, like that was the official Latin binomial nomenclature. I didn't slap him across the face and put him in the old Ultimo Dragon reverse sleeper, but in hindsight, I prolly should have.

"Untenable" - You ever notice how people never use the world "tenable," but you hear "untenable" used all the fucking time? Tenable is basically just a fancy way of say "defensible" or "justifiable," but come to think of it, you rarely hear either of those two words without a big fat "UN" placed before 'em, too. Hell, we might as well just lump in everybody who uses a surfeit of "un-" words to go along with this one. If you ever hear someone talk about things being "uncouth" or "unenlightened," that's pretty much a dog whistle for you to never, ever give one iota of half a percentage point of a fuck what they have to say about nothing. 

"Taken To Its Logical Extreme" - Also sometimes erroneously expressed as "taken to its logical extent," which doesn't make any damn sense in and of itself. This is almost exclusively uttered by people trying to take a higher philosophical ground on something. This is a phrase generally used as a counterpoint to an argument they really can't refute, so instead they reframe a person's statement by taking the core thesis of said statement and making it as absurdly totalitarian sounding as possible - you know, as if that highfalutin fantasy consequence in any way, shape or form negates the initial soundness of the original statement to begin with. Example: "Well, Billy, while it is true that some terrorists may be able to sneak into the country from Syria, that kind of perspective taken to its logical extreme means promoting the sort of draconian nationalist immigration policies of Hitler's Germany, and humanity cannot dare stand idly by while another Holocaust takes place." 

"Sold A Bill of Goods" - So basically, this means someone tricks somebody else into investing into something that really isn't worth the investment. But according to Google, "a bill of goods" merely means "a consignment of merchandise," so how exactly is "sold a bill of goods" supposed to intrinsically denote deception or fraud? Is it to be taken hyper-literally, to mean that at some point in time, someone has been stupid enough to pay somebody else for a bill of their own goods? This is a totally illogical idiom that could be fixed with a simple tweak - "sold somebody else's bill of goods." But nobody has the forthrightness to update the old saying to make sense, which means anyone who still uses the expression just don't give a fuck about illogical platitudes because their agreed-upon societal meaning kinda' sorta' makes sense. And fuck those people, hard. 

"Laughable" - Hey kids, did somebody say something you didn't like but you don't really know how to counter it? No problem, just fire back by calling the statement "laughable," as if the fact you find it hilariously without merit is an actual substitute for tangible proof negating the other person's claim. This is the ultimate self-affirming vocabulary assholery, a term that elevates the speaker's objective antipathy of another speaker or statement to a state of artificial subjective tautology. There is no reasoning here - "x is 'laughable' JUST because y thinks so." Indeed, it's impossible to prove the "laughableness" of ANYTHING as a concrete statement, because it's an entirely objective and non-scientific concept. But I assure you, every goddamn day you're going to encounter somebody using "laughable" as part of their offensive vernacular; alas, these poor, rhetorically-challenged dildo-heads will never grasp what's truly laughable about their go-to linguistic riposte is just how definitionally impotent the alleged "barb" ultimately is.

Forget plot, or character development or nuance or deeper sociocultural contexts: we all know the thing that really held the Wolverine movies back were the lack of "f-words."

Speaking of things that don't have the good sense to die when they should've, the first movie in our back to back double feature this week is Logan, which is supposedly the last time we'll ever see Hugh Jackman in a X-Men movie - which, as we should all know by now, is kinda' like the executives at Paramount swearing up and down the last Jason movie was the last one for real, when they're already making plans for another movie next year.

This one's been getting a lot of hype from fanboys on the Internet, who are praising it as the best X-movie ever 'cause it's rated R and has lots of swearing and blood and shit in it, because "mature entertainment" inherently means people saying "asshole" and limbs getting hacked off, and as apparent by the success of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, not a whole lot else. And if you're wondering just how much the suits at Fox are running with the newfound freedom of the R-rating, rest assured the first line of dialogue in the movie is indeed old Wolvie muttering "what the fuck." And trust me, he gets to say it many more times throughout the film's opening sequence, in which he stabs a good half dozen Meskins to death for trying to jimmy the hubcaps off his pick-up.

Alright, exposition time, kids. It's the year 2029 and Wolverine is now stuck driving limos around the Texas/Mexico border, usually with drunken frat boys in the back screaming "USA! USA!" at that wall. Then the movie's main villain shows up (he's got a metal Erector Set for a hand and speaks with the worst Southern accent this side of the chick in VooDoo) and he asks Wolverine to hand over Professor X 'cause he's got Alzheimer's now and the C.I.A. ain't exactly sure what to do with the world's most powerful telepath running around talking to toasters and trying to mind probe his box of Depends - especially one that's living in a grain silo in Laredo with his albino lizard face live-in boyfriend. 

So anyway, old Wolverine decides to take a break from driving across the border to pick up Metamucil and 5 peso opiates to drive a woman and her kid to Canada for $50,000. Of course, the next time he sees her she's got a giant fist-sized hole in her neck and then that the guy with the robo-hand follows him back to Professor X's silo and the dead mamacita's daughter KO's him with a monkey wrench and that's when Jean Luc Picard says "see, I told you she was the chosen mutant!" Then there's an all out siege by the federales and we learn the girl has claws and knows Gymkata just like Wolverine, and as a result, a good six or seven federal employees have their jugulars sliced open with multiple shish-ka-bob skewer fists. Then Wolverine finds an iPhone and watches a video from the dead girl's mama and he learns that there's this black ops medical research center in Mexico that's experimenting on a bunch of junior high school mutants so they can turn 'em into top secret super soldiers and Wolverine learns the girl is actually his genetic clone so he does what anybody being pursued by an army of covert, cyborg execution squads would do - he robs a convenience store for an extra phone charger and drives the old Prof and Wolverine, Jr. to Oklahoma City so they can read old X-Men comics and make really, really forced allusions to that old western Shane. 

But Prof. X kinda' gives away their location when he accidentally gives everybody in the Great Plains a brain enema, so the three take refuge in the home of a random rancher family somewhere in the heartland (and yes, for those of you that grade films on multicultural points alone, you'll be happy to know it's an all black family of aspiring rodeo performers and corn producers.) Then pretty much nothing happens for the next 20 minutes, then another Wolverine clone shows up and slaughters everybody in the house except Wolvie and his test tube daughter and naturally there's an all-too-brief claw-to-claw karate fight but there's this subplot about the super metal in Wolverine's bones poisoning him so he has to abandon the fight and steal a rusted out Chevy Blazer and high tail it to South Dakota. And by this point, he looks something worse than half-dead ... he looks like a stunt double for Mel Gibson. 

So Wolverine Girl drives him to North Dakota where all of the other escaped mutant middle schoolers have set up some kind of outpost in the wastelands and then the mutant-killing army closes in on them and we've got all sorts of great death scenes in the mix, including this one part where a girl freezes a dude's arm and karate chops it off like Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat and another part where a girl slings a couple of pine needles into some dudes' faces at 2,000 miles per hour. Then Wolverine comes in for the save, and he stabs a million billion soldiers to death but not before they shoot him a million billion times, too. And that's when the other Wolverine clone shows up for an encore performance, only this time all the mutant kids band together and mummify his ass in Spanish moss before dropping an ATF van on his larynx. But that still ain't enough to put him down for good, so Wolverine Girl has to load an adamantium bullet into a handgun and pop a cap in Evil Wolverine's ass (you know, for the media to be so virulently anti-gun when it comes to public policy, they sure do enjoy using firearm violence and children as contrived plot devices in their movies, don't they?) Of course, the big question you have to ask yourself if you haven't seen the movie is whether or not Wolverine survives the ordeal, and without giving away the grand finale, let's just say ... oh, fuck it, he gets impaled on a tree branch and dies. But the best part comes at the very tail-end of the movie, when Wolverine Girl is giving an impassioned, tearful eulogy for Logan, but you can't help but laugh your ass off the entire scene because there's this one black kid who looks just like Fat Albert cradling one of those 12-inch Toy Biz Wolverine dolls in his hands throughout the whole procession. And THAT'S how the multi-million dollar Wolverine cash cow gets sent to pasture, folks ... pending, of course, the fine suits at Fox DON'T back up the Brinks van to Hugh Jackman's front door and tell him to take as much as he wants for one more go-at-it ... which, surely, would never, ever happen, right? Right!?!

We've got 53 dead bodies. No breasts (what's the point of even going for an R rating if you ain't going to show us some tit-tays to go along with the f-words, guys?) Two motor vehicle chases. One border fence demolition derby, with train collision. Albino sunlight torture. Gratuitous mind control vibrating camera effects. Gratuitous Shane references. Gratuitous road trip bickering. Throat stabbing. Face puncturing. Arms literally broken off. Random acts of senseless violence against a pick-up truck with a shovel. One exploding armored paddy wagon. Kung fu. Magic bullet fu. And of course, the thing that pretty much makes the whole movie possible, a whole hell of a lot of razor sharp claw fu. 

Starring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, who's still walking around in a wife beater and stabbing people, only this time he gets to do so while saying lines like "in real life, people die and no asshole in a leotard can stop it;" Patrick Stewart as the dementia-addled Prof. X, who curses like a sailor, needs help going to the bathroom and almost makes everybody in Oklahoma's heads explode; Dafne Keen as the daughter of Wolverine, who doesn't say a whole lot in the movie but is responsible for at least half its bodycount; Stephen Merchant as the swishy assisted living attendant vampire; and Boyd Holbrook as the movie's central villain, who most certainly ain't no Magneto, that's for damned sure. 

Directed by James Mangold and written by Scott Frank and Michael Green, who I'm pretty sure came up with the idea for the movie after watching Children of Men and Little Miss Sunshine back-to-back one weekend.

I give it two and a half stars out of four. The first hour is pretty good, but after that, things start dragging like the muffler in a 1987 Toyota Camry. Still, its prolly the best X-Men movie ever made, which - I know - is sorta like bragging about being the kid with the highest grades in special ed, but you know what I'm trying to say here. Jimbo says check it out, but be sure to pop open the No-Doz for that slow, slooooooooow second act.

Hey, you know what I bet would be a great way to address white racism? By making a movie that literally hinges on the idea that black people are genetically superior human beings!

And while we're on the subject of vastly overrated movies, our second flick in this week's double feature has been drawing a lot of acclaim from people who apparently have never heard of The Stepford Wives before. Essentially, that's all Get Out is, only with the feminist subtext replaced by your standard Black Lives Matter rhetoric, and with a substantial amount of Invasion of the Body Snatchers-inspired paranoia thrown into the mix for good measure. Of course, this being a movie directed by a guy Comedy Central brought in to play a poor man's version of Dave Chappelle, all of the incessant anti-commie sentiment from Don Siegel's 1956 classic has been subbed out for a "healthy" dose of anti-Caucasian fearmongering instead, but really, would you've expected anything less from the same ethnomasochist pop cultural machinery that gave life to stuff like Dear White People and The Birth of a Nation?

So the movie cold opens with some black dude walking through a subdivision at night, getting chloroformed and chucked into a WHITE car, because goddamn, who needs subtlety, right? From there, we're introduced to an interracial couple living in New York; the black photographer who does nothing but artsy-fartsy black and white photos of the inner city slums asks his white girly friend if her parents know he's black and she reassures him by telling him her dad would've voted for Obama a third time if he could and they are in no way, shape or form involved in any anti-niggerdom. On the way to daddy's woodland estate, they hit a deer and a cop asks to see the boyfriend's ID and his girlfriend acts like that's the most racist shit she's ever seen in her life and then I think about that time my girlfriend's car got broken into by a black dude and when the cops arrived they asked to see my ID and that other time I was a passenger when my cousin got into a fender bender and the cops asked to see my ID and realize "holy shit, I'm a victim of the oppressive white state, too." Then they actually get to the girl's parents' place and the dad keeps talking about how much he enjoys seeing deer die while the black groundskeeper just stares at them like one of those old Magic Eye paintings. Then dad gives the boyfriend a walking tour of the place and talks about how Jesse Owens beat his daddy in an Olympic qualifier and how much of a privilege it is "to experience another person's culture" and then his girlfriend's brother shows up and tells him he would make a great Ultimate Fighter and then the girlfriend apologizes a million times for her folks committing the same prejudicial microaggressions as the cop from earlier. 

Then the main character goes out for a smoke and the groundskeeper runs past him like the fucking Flash and the maid makes the old Chris Benoit throat slice gesture towards him then when he goes back inside his GF's mom asks him if he wants her to hypnotize him into quitting smoking so now every time she taps a teacup with a spoon he falls into coma and he starts falling into a BLACK abyss and then ... oh never mind, it was all just a dream sequence. Except the next day, he goes out to talk to the groundskeeper and he asks him what he was doing so long in the tearoom last night but before he has time to dig into the matter any deeper a whole bunch of people show up for the annual extended family get-together and all these rich white people keep touching him and telling him how "black is in fashion" and then he talks to this blind art gallery dealer played by the dude who voiced Bill on King of the Hill and later that night he calls his buddy who works for the T.S.A. (who is also dog-sitting for him) he thinks some strange shit is afoot and he tells him he thinks there's some kind of sex slavery thing going on.

So the next day our main man encounters this one light skinned brotha' who enunciates very clearly in proper English and prefers to shake hands instead of fist bump and he thinks to himself "OK, now I know something isn't right here" and he takes a picture of him with his iPhone and the flash causes him to have a nosebleed and he attacks him. Then, while he and his girlfriend go for a hike in the wilderness, everybody else at the estate participate in a silent auction where the big prize up for grabs appears to be ... well, the black boyfriend. 

Then our primary protagonist sends his T.S.A. buddy a picture of the guy who went crazy on him and he recognizes him as some dude who used to work at a theater in Brooklyn. Then the boyfriend starts snooping through his girlfriend's old photos and finds pictures of about two dozen other black dudes she was boning and when he goes downstairs, his GF's brother wallops him with a lacrosse stick and he wakes up tied up in a Barcalounger in the basement and he watches a video starring his girlfriend's grandaddy explaining what a "coagula" is and eventually, he figures out "wait a minute, what these crazy crackers are doing is taking the brains out of old white dudes and putting them inside the bodies of young black people," and he gets the wise idea of stuffing cotton (of course it would be cotton - it just had to be cotton) into his ears so the mind control audio won't affect him and that's when it's time for his great escape. And without giving away too much of the grand finale, I assure you - there is going to be a LOT of honky blood flying all over the place. 

We've got eight dead bodies. No breasts. One dead deer. One motor vehicle collision. Skull sawing. Attempted trans-racial brain surgery. Scalps roll. Fork to the hand. Knife to the face. One antler impalement. One self-inflicted shotgun blast. Gratuitous white girl strangling. Ear plug fu. Ornamental fruit fu. Lacrosse stick fu. Attempted rear naked choke fu. Repressed memory fu. iPhone fu. And the thing responsible for the entire movie, ironically oversuspicious reverse-racism fu.

Starring Daniel Kaluuya as protagonist Chris Washington, the bug-eyed Sidney Portier wannabe who eventually scores one for Black America by slaughtering three times as many white people in one night as O.J.; Allison Williams as serial coal burner Rose Armitage, who you know is no damned good because she eats her milk and cereal separately and says lines like "you are just so sexy people are unplugging your phones"; Bradley Whitford as Daddy Armitage, the neurosurgeon who says white people are "gods trapped in cocoons"; Catherine Keener as Mama Armitage, who's really only in the movie to keep stirring her black-person-mind-controlling cup of tea over and over and over again; Caleb Landry Jones as the scraggly haired brother that asks his sister's boyfriend if he would like to 'rassle at the diner table (which is actually a customary practice in most Southern families, you uncultured bigots); and LilRel Howery as the absolute best thing about the entire movie, the airport security guard who says lines like "Jeffrey Dahmer was eating the shit outta' niggas' heads," and "they've been abducting black people, brainwashing them and using them as sex slaves and shit," marking perhaps the first time in pop culture history the T.S.A. has ever been shown in anything even remotely approaching a positive light.

Directed and written by Mad TV alum Jordan Peele, whose idea of combating white prejudice is making a movie where every white person in the world secretly wants to be inside a genetically superior black body with the central message that black people should be wary of anybody who doesn't look, sound and act the exact same way they do.

I give it two and a half stars out of four. The build-up in the first hour is pretty good, but the third act just falls apart with too much comedy that ain't funny, too many "jump scares" that aren't even close to being scary and - the backbreaker - a supremely awkward attempt at delivering some kind of "profound" sociocultural statement on black/white relations in post-Ferguson America so damned muddy you're not even sure what point the movie's trying to make chewing up way too much of the running time. Jimbo says check it out, just as long as you heed Public Enemy's advice and go into it not believing the hype.

Read More