Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.food.taco-bell Path: news.cinenet.net!news.isi.edu!news.aero.org!news2.trw.com!news.he.net!newsfeed.concentric.net!news-peer-west.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!uunet!in2.uu.net!world!kibo From: kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) Subject: Re: Tubby Sponges Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 08:07:01 GMT X-Battlestar-Galactica-Date: 8162 centons, 89 microns, .02 abians References: <01bd796a$8ef29a00$8977accf@furry> <6j0of6$898$2@nntp1.ba.best.com> <6j3ju2$is0@saltmine.radix.net> Nntp-Posting-Host: ppp0a004.std.com Organization: welcome datacomp X-Newsreader: MT-NewsWatcher 2.4.4 Lines: 179 Xref: news.cinenet.net alt.religion.kibology:62958 alt.food.taco-bell:4308 X-Cache: nntpcache 1.0.6 (see ftp://suburbia.net/pub/nntpcache) moe@Radix.Net (Ted Frank) wrote: > > [rant about bad movies deleted] > > Which brings me to Bulworth. > > They put the utterly grotesque Bulworth logo on the Beverly Center the > other week; I commented to Kia upon its ugliness. Yeah, the Beverly Center is pretty ugly. Especially when Anne Heche is standing in front of it (to lay the charges that explode the nonexistent building across the street so that the little boy can stand under it crying and the girl sees him and runs over and grabs him and then they both stand there crying and Tommy Lee "Interchangeable With Harrison Ford" Jones sees the building falling on them and he runs over and grabs them and then they all stand there like idiots and the building falls on them and they're all okay but at least he kept them from getting dusty, and then Anne Heche's face pops up center screen again and the screen cracks. I'll confess: I didn't feel one way or another about Ellen DeGeneres, funny standup comedian trapped on an unfunny sitcom, until she announced she was a lesbian. Then I realized I had a mild case of the hots for her. Then I found out she's dating Anne Heche, and now I can't stand either of them because Ellen obviously only dates ugly people. And she's a lesbian. So the second part would keep her from dating me. > K: "What *is* Bulworth?" > T: "It's a movie about an aging senator who becomes a rap star." > K: "Stop trolling me." > T: "No, really, it's a movie designed to alienate as many people as > possible. That was Roger Ebert's theory regarding "Frozen Assets", the _other_, _worse_ sperm-bank comedy film that came out as the same time as Ted Danson's/Whoopi Goldberg's awful sperm-bank comedy. "Frozen Assets", starring Corbin Bernsen as a sleazy executive at a sperrrrm bank, only he doesn't know it's a sperrrrrrm bank, is a movie you could only enjoy if you simply giggle every time you hear the word "sperrrrrrrrrrm". So as Ebert pointed out, it would appear to those six-year-olds who can sit through tedious movies about bank embezllers. My personal favorite movie with no possible audience segment is "Bugsy Malone", the all-singing all-dancing Mafia musical... with an all-pre-teen cast (led by Scott Baio!) The kids drive around in miniature Depression-era cars powered by pedals, and they have these "splurge guns" that shoot white glop at each other, and then it harden and turns them into mummies. No grownup could POSSIBLY watch this movie. No child could POSSIBLY sit through it. That's how my movie ratings system works: **** -- Everyone will like it, except for a few cranks. "Citizen Kane", etc. *** -- It's likely that a normal person will like it. This is as good as Star Trek or James Bond films can get. ** -- Bad, but there are a few slow people who will enjoy it. "Waterworld". * -- Nobody could POSSIBLY enjoy it. I.e. "Tank Girl". And the second axis is the little nuclear bomb icon, for those special movies we talk about on a.r.k: (boom)(boom)(boom) -- Everyone, even people who don't "get" irony, will laugh at the unintentional humor. I.e. "Plan 9 From Outer Space". (boom)(boom) -- Any astute movie fan with a functional sense of humor will giggle constantly for ninety minutes. "Star Trek 5". (boom) -- Serious devotees of bad films will find something to make fun of in the background of one scene. So we have an intentional entertainment axis and an unintentional entertainment axis. A movie that gets one star and no bomb is "nobody will like this under any circumstances". The best cases, of course, are four stars and no bombs, or one star and three bombs. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any cases of four-star films getting multiple bombs. It would be great if Stanley Kubrick would hit his head on the camera crane and make a four-star-three-bomb-stravagza. > Any of the baby boomers are going to want to avoid it because > of the horrid urban soundtrack. And if Warren Beatty couldn't bring in > the youth crowd when he was shtupping Madonna, he isn't going to do it by > pretending to rap." > K: "Stop trolling me." > > Beatty is associated with "Ishtar," which is unfairly regarded as a > horrible movie. It was certainly an overexpensive and not especially > good tribute to the Hope-Crosby "Road" movies, Wouldn't a really bad movie be the PROPER tribute to the lame Bob Hope canon? Ever TRIED to watch a Bob Hope movie? I recommend starting with "Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number!", one of the few that at least gets a bomb. For Phyllis Diller's inept attempts at overacting, and of course my favorite, the "PULL ROPE TO DROP WALLS" scene. > but it wasn't "The > Postman" by any stretch of the imagination. But one of the things most > notable about it was how *bad* Hoffman and Beatty were in singing. So > why a movie featuring Beatty doing nothing but? In a leftist political > satire, no less? Okay. Suppose Kevin Costner as The Postman sang. What would he sing, and what would the title be? "THE POSTMAN ALWAYS SINGS TWICE" comes to mind, but it would need a subtitle to make it extra-serious: "A SERIOUS MOTION PICTURE EXPERIENCE". > I can't imagine this movie being anything less than a disaster. When the > comment of Dr. Gates -- who, as a liberal African-American intellectual > of a certain age, is almost certainly the ideal demographic -- is > that Beatty "sounds more like Dr. Seuss than Dr. Dre'," the writing is on > the wall. > > Then again, a studio executive that would commit $30 million on the > cliche' "Man with life insurance policy puts contract out on self, then > changes mind" deserves whatever they get. I sense a Fox sitcom pilot in the works. Every week, a different inept hitman would try to kill C. Thomas Howell, and every week he'd ineptly avoid the inept hitmen with the help of C. C. H. Pounder as a mysterious FBI agent! > With Costner, at least, you > salve his ego, and he might give you another "Dances With Wolves" down > the line, so you blow the money on the sure-fire bomb. But Beatty? Well, you could at least get another "Dick Tracy". You know, the movie where every five minutes they stopped the film and a Disney executive came out and said "HEY, DID YOU HEAR THERE ARE ONLY SEVEN COLORS IN HERE YET?" for a total of sixteen times during the film. And, of course, I spent the whole time just sitting there shouting "That stripe on his necktie's yellowish-orange! His shoes are a different brown! The cardboard sky has a gradient painted on it!" > The sad thing is that if a right-wing Hollywooder -- Stallone or Heston, > say -- pulled nonsense like this, they'd be ridiculed. Cf. the Rambo > movies, one of which bothered to be a moderately entertaining example of > the comic-book-action-movie genre. But because Beatty's movie pushes the > politically correct buttons, it's getting press for its "intellectual > subtlety" for its pious wrongheaded platitudes, just as the mildly > humorous but heavyhanded "Bob Roberts" was lionized for "biting satire." > And when "Bulworth" fails, it will be because it was "ahead of its time," > rather than because audiences didn't buy the malarkey. So how about if a Scientologist, say John Travolta, were to make a wacky comedy about a bumbling, boozing, womanizing President, who had Clinton hair and talked like Clinton and slept with Gennifer Flowers, what would happen then? I think that would be a good idea for a movie, but only if Clinton and Travolta got into that face-changing machine from "Face/Off" so that Clinton could infiltrate the Church of Scientology and blow away L. Ron Hubbard (Rutger Hauer). > Don't buy into the hype. Start making fun of "Bulworth" today. I like the way Beatty mumbles all his lines unintelligibly. And hey, it's a comedy about a total idiot that nobody realizes is a total idiot! You know, like "The Cable Guy". > NOT FUNNY: Bulworth. > STILL NOT FUNNY: Bulworth the Clown. > FUNNY: Bulworth the Clown the Clown. DEFINITELY NOT FUNNY: "The Cable Guy the Clown the Clown the Clown the Clown." > -- T. > Now, if they had given Beatty > a bright yellow raincoat, and had > him solving crimes, *then* you might > have something. If he has a wacky > next-door neighbor. And a tar pit in his living room, and stock footage of a chimp blowing a raspberry. And Fred Williard would play himself. -- K. Ah, Fred Williard, he classes up any sitcom.