Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

When we show up, we win.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Giving up is unforgivable.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

This blog will pay for itself.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

You are here: Home / TV & Movies / Movies / Early Morning Open Thread: Blockbuster Season

Early Morning Open Thread: Blockbuster Season

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Haven’t seen anything about this summer’s upcoming movies that would tempt me to spend $25 and an evening. Not even much, beyond a couple of documentaries, that I’d bother adding to my Netflix queue. Lindy West’s review of “Burkas and Birkins” made me laugh, though:

… SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled c#nt like it’s my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls…

(Many more laughs when you read the whole thing. Just not out loud in front of your boss, or small children.)
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Thank the trickster gods for the infinite blessings of the interwebs. If I want to watch cartoon antics and antisocial subhumans blowing stuff up, there’s the political news. And for romance, soap opera, and classical tragedy, there’s YouTube…
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(from the YT comments: “kwaheri= goodbye. The song is about this girl who caught her bf cheating and is like breaking up with him, but the guy is trying to deny it whilst trying to win her back.”)

Reader Interactions

62Comments

  2. 2.

    asiangrrlMN

    I gotta say, I didn’t care much for the review. It made me wince in several places, including what you excerpted. However, I do agree with the sentiment.

    @Alex K: I will read Ebert’s review. He is more my style. Just read it. What a refreshing palate cleanser.

  3. 3.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: My pregnant friend (whose husband is out of town) wants to go see a movie tomorrow. She has free passes and a couple of ideas in mind, but I’m not particularly interested in much out right now. I did talk her into watching Persepolis with me, which we both enjoyed, so I suppose I could trust her judgment on this matter.

  4. 4.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: Really? Did you ever watch the show? Um, yeah. You might want to rethink that trust you have in her judgment. Full disclosure: I never got the appeal of the show.

  5. 5.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: Never watched it, and I trust my friend enough that she won’t come anywhere near that cinematic atrocity. Of course I have to account for the pregnancy thing, so I will have final veto power no matter what. This assumes we squeeze in a movie tomorrow as I have other tasks to attend to before I can go play so it might just end up being dinner.

  6. 6.

    Warren Terra

    I won’t hold my hopes too high for the film, but the Scott Pilgrim Versus The World trailer is fairly entertaining.

  8. 8.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: Oh if she even thinks of suggesting it I’ll preempt her. The last thing my bruised gay ego needs is THAT chick flick. Although for some bizarre reason (I think it’s Vanessa Redgrave) I’d go see Letters to Juliet.

  9. 9.

    Mark S.

    What I can’t get over is the damn thing is 2 1/2 hours long. Guys who are seeing it with the hopes of getting laid are in for a very long show.

  10. 10.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: Well, I would say any movie but is probably a good solution. And, why would that movie bruise your gay male ego?

    @Mark S.: If a guy took me to that movie, he would definitely go home with blue balls.

  11. 11.

    freelancer

    On the basis of the reviews alone, I am eager to see SATC2 the same way you want to sit down and watch Birdemic: Shock and Horror or The Room.

    This is a brilliantly funny, pithy review from the Chicago Reader:

    Clotheshorse and relationship journalist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) frets that her marriage to Mr. Big (Chris Noth) is going stale when, on their second anniversary, he presents her with a nice plasma-screen TV instead of more fucking jewelry. She’s still worrying about this as she and her gal pals fly to Abu Dhabi to be pampered by pretty, servile young men in an ultra-luxurious hotel, though their idyll of shopping, champagne, spa treatments, and leering single-entendres abruptly explodes when randy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) and a handsome Danish architect violate local standards of decency on the hotel beach. Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles.

    but I think this is my favorite review (so far):

    The script’s official excuse is that Samantha hopes to handle the resort’s PR. In terms of story the trip gives Carrie a fidelity crisis when she runs into former beau Aidan (John Corbett) in a marketplace. But the true reason for the trip is to send the franchise into new vistas of glitz and glamor. As Samantha, always the blunt one, puts it, “We need to go someplace rich!”
    …
    Do they ever. At the Abu Dhabi airport, each woman is escorted to her own chauffeured Rolls-Royce. At the resort, each woman is assigned her own butler. As the head butler leads them through their penthouse suite, he catalogs every amenity and adds about 15 minutes to the running time.
    …
    A fascination with the trappings of wealth – specifically, designer labels – has always been a “Sex and the City” hallmark. But here the franchise steps beyond wish fulfillment to prostrate itself before the golden calf of materialism. Consumption hasn’t been so conspicuous since the court of Caligula. Future Bolsheviks will use “Sex and the City 2” as a recruiting film.
    …
    Nearly as odious is the puerile sanctimony expressed about the “plight” of the veiled Muslim women (Carrie and Co. don’t let any actual human rights abused trouble their feeble minds, they just care about how the women are forced to dress). Just when you think this movie couldn’t become more unbearable, here comes the big karaoke scene. Yes, our heroines take the stage to belt out Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” in the most jaw-dropping spectacle of faux-empowerment since whatever Kate Gosselin did last week.
    …
    But no scene made me seethe as much as one shared by the two characters I always liked best, Miranda and Charlotte. As they vacation half a world away from their families in a $22,000-a-night suite, these two women with full-time nannies moan about the hardships of motherhood. Realizing they might be alienating much of their audience, they acknowledge that some mothers can’t afford nannies. In a patronizing gesture, they raise their glasses and say, “To them.”
    …
    One behalf of my own mother and the millions of others women who raised children without servants, may the two of you choke on your cosmopolitans.

    Marie Antoinette’s head is spinning clockwise, and her body spinning counter in her grave. This movie is going to be scathing, and awesome.

  12. 12.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: Sex and the City is the ultimate queen magnet. Any guy going in there even if he’s with a female either is hella desperate to get some tail or has a few of their sexuality wires crossed. Before Carrie Bradshaw I had no clue what a Mahnolo Blahnik was. Now I wish I didn’t.

    @freelancer:

    I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles.

    I read this and all I could think was Rush Limbaugh has a new torture method.

  13. 13.

    Warren Terra

    @Freelancer
    There was this awesome hilarious Q&A themed spoilerific Transformers 2 review that convinced me to see it (by Netflix) just for the awful spectacle. But at least that film had explosions.

  15. 15.

    Mark S.

    @freelancer:

    I really encourage anyone who loves bad movies to watch The Room. It is really the Citizen Kane of bad movies.

    “Oh, hi Mark.”

    @Yutsano:

    Man, there is practically nothing playing right now that I want to see.

    @asiangrrlMN:

    Ha!

  17. 17.

    Yutsano

    @Mark S.: Wait, is that the horrendously bad movie every celeb in Hollywood is falling all over themselves to see? You saw that? I’d go just to say I did it, hell I’d take freelancer and rejects from the farmer’s market.

  19. 19.

    Yutsano

    @Mark S.: Wow. I just watched two clips. Oh, My Gravy. Words fail. The worst part is they STILL sound more articulate than Sarah Palin!

  22. 22.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Mark S.: Wow. Is that supposed to be drama or comedy?

    And, I was being serious. Guy wants to get laid? Take me to a movie with Alan Rickman and/or Helen Mirren and/or Johnny Depp and/or Maggie Cheung in it.

    @Yutsano: Hey, I am too much woman for one person to watch. So, you’re telling me that you won’t be my queer pal for the bi gal?

  23. 23.

    Yutsano

    @asiangrrlMN: I will cook you dinner, I will bake you cookies, I will tell you honestly whether that outfit looks good on you, but I draw the line at movies made into TV shows designed for a particular demographic that I have zero way of fitting into. My gay pal side has its limits. And don’t even try to beat me over the head with the fake marriage certificate. I’m drawing the line in the sand here. Or here. Well maybe over to the left…

    Oh, I left out I will bash all the men that done wronged you, either over copious amounts of alcohol or pints of Thai food and chocolate.

  24. 24.

    asiangrrlMN

    @Yutsano: But but but…damn. You preempted me with the brandishing the fake marriage cert bit. OK. I will settle for dinner, dessert, and a ‘What are you doing? WHAT WHAT WHAT are you doing?” It’s the least you can do for your fake-wifey.

  25. 25.

    freelancer (itouch)

    @asiangrrlMN:

    Believe it or not, the writer/director/star of the move marketed it on a billboard in LA for 3 years straight. When it took off as a rocky horror style cult event classic, he pivoted and said it’s an intentional comedy.

    I found the room, and birdemic (omfg, makes the room look like Shakespeare) as well as actual awesome things like the BBC miniseries “State of Play”, via BJ’s most polarizing figure, one A. Sullivan.

  26. 26.

    Yutsano

    @freelancer (itouch): Something decent came out of Sully? Unpossible! I refuse to believe it! Sassy gay friend he sure as hell is not!

    Incidentally, The Room has made something like ten times what it cost to make. Kinda scary what a vanity project can get you in this day and age.

    @asiangrrlMN: There will be other perquisites. In fact it really is amazing what I can be talked into if you ask it the right way.

  28. 28.

    asiangrrlMN

    @freelancer (itouch): Yeah. It says it’s an American dark comedy over at IMDB.com. And, I was reading birdemic as bir-de-mic, and I couldn’t understand what the hell? Until I looked it up. Ugh!

    Did you know that you are now my keeper?

    @Yutsano: Yes, please. All of the above. And, if you can prevent me from dating one in the future….

  31. 31.

    Yutsano

    @freelancer (itouch): The second rule is that you are not allowed to communicate with your ex in any way, shape, or form, and under no circumstances whatsoever are you to initiate the contact.

    The third rule is the ex has one week to remove all claimed possessions from the premises. Any materials remaining after that time period are free game for removal and/or destruction.

    I can go on, but you’re getting the general idea.

    @asiangrrlMN: My screening methodology is quite strenuous. It involves full background checks including employment, criminal, litigation, and credit histories, along with testimonials from at least two unbiased witnesses. Then he’s allowed the initial contact, which shall be strictly monitored for any warning signs or danger signals. The merest hint of psychotic or boorish behavior is grounds for immediate contact termination. This is before you’ve said ten words to him. And that’s on my good days.

    BTW fair warning: late night troll alert. I think he’s one of JC’s old crowd back when he was a right-winger.

  33. 33.

    Yutsano

    Okay I’m at my limit. I shouldn’t be up this late anyway. Wifey if you’re e-mailing me I’ll read it when I awaken tomorrow. Night y’all.

  34. 34.

    Mark S.

    @Yutsano:

    late night troll alert. I think he’s one of JC’s old crowd back when he was a right-winger.

    Where?

  37. 37.

    RSR

    I’ll be taking my boys to Toy Story 3 as an end of the school year treat. Other than that, I doubt I’ll be seeing any of the ‘mainstream’ films at the cinema.

    BTW, if your near southeastern PA and like a little adventure with your movie experience, check out the Guerilla Drive-In.

    http://www.guerilladrivein.com/

    16MM feature films shown at secret locations near West Chester, PA. Find the MacGuffin to know what and where! The movies are shown in appropriate locations — Repo Man in a junkyard, Caddyshack on the links, Ghostbusters in a haunted fort.

  38. 38.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @asiangrrlMN: Yes. Good fun for everyone! I remember drooling over a GQ with Clive Owen and Paul Bettany wearing perfectly fitting suits – the male doctor didn’t understand, but the female nurse did.

  39. 39.

    El Cid

    Ha, ha, ha.

    After the Washington Post‘s editorial page editors Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl have so promoted right wing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe throughout his 2 terms in office — calling him the ‘savior of South American democracy’, and even lying and making up words in documents to implicate his foes — they recently reported on a massive scandal going on for several years on how Uribe’s administration used their national intelligence agency (using U.S. provided surveillance equipment) to spy on every sector of the nation which impeded him, including not only human rights workers and opposition politicians and journalists but prosecutors and even the Supreme Court justices himself, even passing on the intel to death squads to use to assassinate labor organizers and a professor, all the while claiming that no matter how closely in his office the agency was being commanded — including his personal secretary — it was

    In response, like he does with anyone who opposes him, Uribe declares the Washington Post as penetrated by criminals, and by this he means ‘because they reported on the spying scandal including recent charges that my own brother collaborated with right wing death squad paramilitaries from my own family’s estate‘.

    Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the Washington Post was penetrated by criminals, after the U.S. newspaper printed allegations by a former police major that the president’s brother Santiago Uribe led a paramilitary group, reports El Espectador.
    __
    “Criminals have the ability to turn a Nobel Peace prize winner into a useful idiot, to make a useful idiot of a priest, and penetrate a serious newspaper like the Washington Post,” Uribe said.

    Serves the Washington Post right. Fluff a guy who promoted right wing pro-landowner narco-trafficking death squads all his life, and don’t be surprised when he turns on you if you report what all the Colombian newspapers have been filled with for the past 2 years.

    Uribe’s certainly right that the Post is often penetrated by criminals, considering the Iraq war cheerleaders and anti-regulatory hacks they give space to, and he’s certainly right that the Post is mostly filled with idiots, though one might question the ‘useful’ descriptor.

    Ha, ha, ha.

  40. 40.

    WereBear

    So, Sex and the City is consumer porn.

    (I really miss my hyphens. Not using them makes me look less trendy.)

    The only thing that ever drew me towards it was Chris Noth, and that is not enough.

    I always felt Martha Stewart was homemaking porn.

  41. 41.

    Punchy

    LDW cut by the Seahawx? WTF? Bears! Pick up this guy! I dont GAF if he’s facing a 4-game DRS, we need the power in da backfied. Forte just aint cuttin it.

  42. 42.

    Nutella

    Best comment from that review:

    Wait: the plot of the movie REALLY IS that Carrie et al travel to the middle east and free all the oppressed Muslim women?

    SERIOUSLY?

    They don’t hate us for our freedoms, people. They hate us for this.

  44. 44.

    dmsilev

    I like the NYT’s review:

    …the director, Michael Patrick King, a chance to wink, nod and drag out Liza Minnelli to perform “All the Single Ladies.” Her version is in no way superior to the one in “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” and it is somehow both the high point of “Sex and the City 2” and a grim harbinger of what is to come.

    Ever get the feeling that critics spend all year saving up barbs just for movies like this?

    dms

  46. 46.

    Sheila

    When was the last time Hollywood made something original? Action movies with sequels. Remakes of films that were made better the first time. Remakes of remakes that were made better the first and second time. Movie versions of plays or books that were better in their original form. Mark of a culture in decline. There are a great many highly-creative people in our culture, but they have little voice these days. It is important for all of us to support them when we come across them, be they independent film-makers, visual artists, musicians, authors, playwrights. A culture is only as good as its arts.

  47. 47.

    Splitting Image

    I’ve never seen an episode of Sex and the City. I have the same weird disconnect to this thread that people who’ve never seen Seinfeld must get when they hear one of the many pop culture references that came from that show.

    Some funny reviews though.

  48. 48.

    Janet Strange

    Back to are there any movies coming up that look interesting. I think I might want to see this one. Agora. From the review:

    At first glance “Agora,” a rousing, finger-pointing drama from the Chilean-born director Alejandro Amenábar (“The Others,” “The Sea Inside”) is a bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.

    Not predictable appeals to me. The reason why I find most Hollywood movies a waste of my money is that you know pretty much everything about how it’s going to go after the first 5 or 10 minutes.

  49. 49.

    Tom Hilton

    The good thing about movies this terrible is that they can inspire really entertaining reviews (the NY Times’ was my favorite).

    And given all the talk here about terrible movies, I assume everyone is planning to see Best Worst Movie. “He’s a small-town dentist with a secret…”

  50. 50.

    fucen tarmal

    the real tragedy of the second video was the casio-tone “soundscape”…

    here is a song with romance, soap opera elements, classical tragedy(a foreshadowing of gwb?), also too a stones shout out, a baryshnikov name-check, and a punchline before the break you should see coming from a mile away.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVgUZyKXjpE

  52. 52.

    R-Jud

    @Janet Strange: I have been aware of that film for a while, but knowing both the work of that director and what happened to Hypatia, I don’t think I could bear to watch it. Love me some Rachel Weisz, though.

  54. 54.

    QuaintIrene

    One of the first summer casualties seems to be that SNL spin-off, ‘MacGruber!’ I don’t think it even went out to the usual reviewers; only reviews I could find were on internet sites and blogs. And now it seems to have sunk out of sight.

    Saw some line, ‘Will it fall to the SNL curse,?” Most of these flicks based on SNL skits don’t fail cause of some curse. It’s cause most of them are god-awful. ‘The Ladies Man’ or ‘It’s Pat!’ anyone?

  56. 56.

    Warren Terra

    @QuaintIrene
    SNL the TV show became unwatchable 20 years ago when they started stretching every mildly funny idea good for 60 seconds to 5 interminable minutes. Why would anyone give them 100 minutes?

  57. 57.

    Warren Terra

    @OriGuy
    It seems like a good topic, but the film got rather bad reviews, and apparently it’s quite heavily fictionalized (the 2nd act, in England, is completely fabricated) and politically sanitized.

  59. 59.

    Cain

    Speaking of movies I was reading the review for “Waiting for Armageddon” on Netflix, and I read this comment from it:

    The woman who has cult eyes and looks like shes on the verge of orgasm as she talks about how when Jesus returns, she will be fighting at his side, sword in hand. These people petrify me. They get off on

    It occurs to me that defenders of the 2nd amendment actually think that the guns can be used in Armageddon against the rest of us when the Jewish guy who preached peace to his fellow man comes back to kick everybody’s asses.

    I’m not sure where she’s going to get a sword when the big war comes. In any case, I enjoyed reading the comments. Evangelicals are a little more crazy than muslim fundamentalists since those guys I can kind of understand their motivation. Despite being a deceitful, manipulative bunch of assholes.

    cain

  60. 60.

    OriGuy

    @Cain:

    I’m not sure where she’s going to get a sword when the big war comes.

    All those Christian bookstores in the stripmalls keep them in stock in the back room. They’re waiting for Armageddon to put them on the shelves.

  62. 62.

    mclaren

    Hollywood no longer produces movies for adults. Movies are now made for 7-year-olds, and feature CGI explosions, giant robots, giant lizards, machine gun firefights, spandex superheroes and various forms of violence against women, up to and including rape, torture, murder and the ubiquitous switchblade held against the trembling girl’s throat.

    Only foreign films are worth watching. Sweden and France have produced the best ones in recent years.

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