The Critcal Frog: Mystics In Bali

So in my cultural studies class, we`ve been discussing the different aspects of multiple cultures and their tastes for certain kinds of films. And from what I`ve learned during the times i don`t have my headphones on (best idea ever- why didnt I think of bringing headphones to school years ago?) is that people in the eastern regions have a certain flair for horror. Sometimes, they`re good, as in the case of the original version of The Ring, but other times they fall flat on their faces, like they do in today`s feature review, Mystics in Bali, where the characters undergo horrors like they were mild annoyances.

The film stars a girl named Cathy, hopefully not the one from the comic strip, as she undergoes the most horrifying black magic on earth with the emotions of a person who realizes the pizza delivery man forgot the garlic bread. Throughout the film she is haunted by a sorceress known as the leak master, and her and her friends/lover experience multiple horrors with bland faces.

Now I haven`t been able to get the entire movie- copies are very hard to come by- so I`ll just try to summarize the parts I was able to see. Bear with me, because the plot is annoying and difficult to get as it is, not to mention I couldn`t get much translation. On a side note, when I got up from the couch to get refreshments, I banged my knee on the table..... bad luck, or the sorceress`s curse?

The film opens with the previously mentioned Cathy exploring Bali, India. She happens upon a sorceress, who offers to teach her black magic. Cathy accepts, but clearly not understanding that you don`t trust people who offer to teach you black magic is betrayed. Her body begins to be taken over by the sorceress, and we have many scenes where she vomits green bile and/or scares people with odd looks. How else to explain a scene where she and her boyfriend are making love when she pukes out some living mice, and the two look at it and make small talk as if somebody just told a racist joke at a party?

Anyways, we get a lot of puking and black magic, and the girl is turned into a floating head with organs still attached to the neck, because why not. She scares a pregnant woman (though again, the woman seems unfazed), and headbutts another flying head into the room, after which.... well, if I was to put a picture of two floating heads sexually assaulting a woman on the blog, I`d probably end up on the government watch lists, so let`s just say that happened.

Eventually, about 3/4 of the way through the clips I watched, we meet a magical warrior. He has no back story, no plot- in fact, he just appears out of nowhere for no good reason but to slay the sorceress. Indeed he challenges her to a fight, where she turns into a pig demon with heaving bosoms and shoots lightning (which apparently the film decides she can do now) and fights the hero before being vanquished by the daylight, which the film neglected to tell us could happen.  I really can`t explain the film myself very well, so here`s some pics:

Here we see the evil sorceress....thing.

And here we see either the bravest or highest people on earth.

       

She seems to take being a disembodied head very well.

And now I`m on some kind of watch list, aren`t I?

And to top off this marvelous scene, here are the guys` reactions to seeing disembodied heads eat an unborn baby out of a hoo-haw:

"Yep, nothing abnormal here. Just a head eating an unborn baby straight from the vagina.. Normal sight here in Bali."

Ah, horror films. You never cease to entertain me, be you good or bad. In this case, you`e bad. But you still manage to entertain. Well done.

The Critical Frog: North

I know I haven`t been writing a ton this month, but I wanted to pay my respects for the late great Roger Ebert by taking some time off to improve my writing. But since I can`t go a month without writing, I`m going to do sir Ebert one last good deed before I close up on Roger Ebert Month and we can move forward into the half-year anniversary of the blog. And of course, the film I tear into in memory of Ebert is one of his most hated of all time- a beast of a picture simply known as North.

When most people saw the commercial for this (me included on an old video), we basically just saw another kid-friendly comedy attempting to appeal to families. But all that changed after Ebert came back from the film and famously wrote in his column (and I quote from his later book):
 "I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."
DANG. That`s got to be the most outright brutal criticism of a film I`ve ever seen. Pardon me while I wipe away a tear of happiness.

Okay, I`m back. But wow, if Ebert had that much hatred for a film (bear in mind, he watched the Super Mario Bros. movie, I Spit On Your Grave and Caligula), how bad can it really be? Really bad, apparently.
But if Ebert hated it, I`m fairly certain I will (I`ve almost never disagreed with his writings, except perhaps on the topic of Daddy Day Care)- get me a suitcase and parka, and let the spirit of Ebert flow through me, because it`s time to look at one of the worst films of all time. Every stupid, vacant, audience-insulting moment of it. Hold on to your underpants- we`re going North.

The film opens with North, played by Elijah Wood, spazzing out after his parents argue about his father`s job at the pants factory (which apparently earns him enough money to buy a large and well-stocked mansion) and passing out. As a guy who`s parents divorced when I was a baby, I can`t really say that I`ve seen this firsthand, but I do know that all parents argue and it`s just another part of childhood to witness it. And I`m fairly certain that in no modern society does a child pass out when his parents argue for 2 minutes.

After North comes to and finds his parents have loosened his pants (no comment), he goes to his secret place (a not very secret living room display smack in the middle of a mall) and notices a man in a bunny suit there (That`s Bruce Willis as the bunny- yes, Bruce Willis, from Die Hard). North explains his problems to Bunny Bruce and decides to divorce his parents. When North tells his friend, a school reporter who only appears in extreme close-ups, North`s parents go into a comatose shock. Due to their inability to testify, North is allowed to wander the world in search of the perfect parents.

His first stop is Texas, where a very stereotypical Texan couple takes him in (This couple is supposed to be a pair of cowboys, but I guarantee if you walked into a saloon wearing one of their costumes an actual cowboy would come up and punch you in the face). The couple really wants to fatten North up and proceeds to sing a song about how they want to raise him to become the spitting image of their dead son Buck, a big fat jock who was killed in a stampede (as the cowboy man says, it was a mighty big loss). North, of course, disapproves of this idea. He shares his feelings with a cowboy he meets on the range (Bruce Willis again) and decides to continue on his odyssey.

Next he travels to Hawaii, where he meets Mr. Ho (who`s first name I hope is Gung), the mayor. North seems to be having a good time, and it looks like the Asian couple are the perfect parents, but they then reveal that they want to use him to sell Hawaii to tourists in the same manner of Coppertone (with the kid`s buttcrack being shown). North (in his only smart move in the film) decides that his behind plastered all over Hawaii isn`t worth these parents, and after discussing the issue with a beach bum (Bruce Willis, yet again), heads off to stop number 3.

Stop number 3, however, is the most racist of them all: North touches down in Alaska where he is adopted by a kindly Eskimo family. They seem nice, but they explain to North the Inuit practice of pushing elderly people out to sea on ice floes after outliving their usefulness. This bugs me because I studied this for a bit, and the Eskimos only did it in serious emergencies, like food shortages or in times of disease. Just pushing them out for whatever is horrible and offensive to the Inuit and Eskimos in general. Anyways, North decides that one bad apple spoils the entire bunch and goes off.

Stop number 4 is an Amish family, who North immediately rejects because of their commitments to hard work and no electricity. While those may be things Amish focus on, I`m pretty sure they don`t always talk like surly fishmongers and have 3 sons all named Ezekiel. He also goes to Africa, China and Paris (where he meets a couple of Jerry Lewis fanatics) before he finds a good family.

And so North reaches his final stop, the Nelsons, a kind and benevolent family who are just happy to have North as a son (and as a bonus, Scarlet Johanson is his new little sister). The Nelsons are the typical Happy Days Family (a new Critical Frog term, my take on Ebert inventing new movie terms), the family that always has fun and any issue it has can be solved with a small talk and charming music. In short, they`re just nice people.But North STILL has problems with this perfect family, and decides to forget the idea of parents and run away to New York.

Meanwhile, his little reporter pal and his new lawyer have become the richest people on Earth from profiting off North`s crusade. In a clearly terrible business plan, the kid attempts to hire AN ASSASSIN to KILL HIS BEST FRIEND and use him as a martyr for child separation from parents. Of course, his plan fails as North defeats the assassin with help from a Fedex Driver (Bruce Willis, for the 4th time- for crying out loud, could they get anybody else?) and is reunited with his parents. Is that the end of the film? God, I wish: North then finds himself waking up in his thinking place. That`s right, just to add insult to injury, a crappy movie just added the crappiest ending of all time: The Dream. Not since Super Mario Bros. 2 has this ending been hated so much.

OVERALL RATING: 0/10
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Rob Reiner made this? Seriously? Rob Reiner, who made The Princess Bride? Wow.
Why ANYBODY would want to make a film like this is beyond me. It`s bad, it`s offensive, it`s bland. and overall it`s stupid.  God bless you, Roger Ebert- you managed to sit through this in one sitting. It took me 4 20-minute intervals to be able to put up with this garbage. This is single-handedly one of the worst things I`ve ever seen in my life. You were right again, Roger, this time from beyond the grave.
Well played, Greatest Film Critic Of All Time. Well played.

The Critical Frog: Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo

(Well, it`s April, 1 year after the death of my idol Roger Ebert, which mean`s it`s a Frog event: Roger Ebert Month. This month, after my fond farewell expressed last time, I`ll be looking at one of Ebert`s least favorite movies of all time, and then taking a week break in May to relax myself and prepare for my half-year anniversary post. Until then, enjoy the unofficial part 1 of Ebert Month.)

Show of hands: who here hates Rob Schneider? Everybody? Good.
So, in case you couldn`t tell by that opening sentence, I don`t like Rob Schneider. I don`t know, I just don`t think he`s funny, and his humor is crude and immature. Maybe it`s the critic in me that refuses to laugh at his bad sex jokes, but I have the feeling that he`s just a nice guy who gets hyper when people complain about his terrible movies. And in no film is it clearer than the disaster of media known to us humans as Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

Starring the dreaded Rob Schneider as a male prostitute (or man-whore, as the film points out every 5 minutes), this film has gained some infamy as one of the most hated films of all time. But definitely the big reason It's gained such a following is how brutally Rob Schneider defended this hunk of crap.

When this film was attacked by my fellow critic Patrick Goldstein (no, I`ve never met him, but any critic is a fellow critic), Rob Schneider retaliated by hurling insults at Goldstein, calling him unfit to criticize the film because he never won a Pulitzer Prize (by Schneider`s logic, I`m not fit to criticize anything because I`ve never won any awards for my blog). Roger Ebert, the champion of critics everywhere, fought back with one of his most memorable quotes: "As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.". Tis quote went down in history as one of the most brutal put downs of a film ever, and today I`m going to see why a film like this deserves such a scathing comment- although the name may have tipped me off already.

Deuce Bigalow, a lowly fish tank cleaner, leads a double life as a Man-Whore. He lives in Malibu, were his wife recently died during a shark attack (not a Sharknado though; that would be too amazing for this film). He is invited to Europe by his former pimp, T.J Hicks, to take time away from Malibu and help T.J solve a mystery. It turns out that a serial killer is going around murdering male prostitutes (oh, I`m sorry, Man-Whores), and T.J wants his best friend to return to the prostitution life to draw out the killer- because that`s totally what I would ask my best friend to do. Deuce, being stupid, agrees.

Deuce meets a German man-whore, Heinz Hummer, who he later finds in an alley. Deuce believes he is stoned, so he takes him back to T.J`s houseboat. When T.J arrives, he can tell that Hummer is dead, but Deuce seems more interested in dead Hummer`s genitals- he unzips the man`s pants to see if he is "well-endowed", as in, if he has a big penis. Luckily a tour boat spots him before things get even weirder and Deuce is arrested as a gay gigolo killer.

Deuce eventually gets out of prison after being questioned by Gaspar, a police inspector who hates male prostitutes (and kudos to the filmmakers for not putting in a prison rape scene) and discovers that T.J saw the real killer exiting a store. Deuce officially returns to the life of a male prostitute and enters a meeting of the European Man-Whore society to flush out the killer. He fails, but is given a list of "clients" who may be the perpetrator. He then meets Gaspar`s niece Eva, who has OCD, who of course Deuce falls in love with and later goes to the aquarium with her (wasn`t there a murder on the loose, Deuce? Think you should work on that first?).

Deuce then meets numerous clients who may be murderers, and because there`s only one perfect girl in the Deuce Bigalow world all have defects: there is a woman with a tracheotomy who sprays drinks through a neck vent, a woman with a hunchback, a woman with big ears (clearly related to Spock) and a woman with a very large penis for a nose (I don`t think I want to know what happens when she sneezes). Deuce doesn`t have sex with any of them, so I`m seriously starting to question his Man-Whore effectiveness.

At the moment, does this sound at ALL like a movie you would want to see? Sex jokes in movies are all fine and dandy, especially in a film that uses them well (the Austin Powers saga), but this film does it with no taste or style at all. But back to the plot, if you could call it that:

The only clue the gigolo can find is a photo from the Man-Whore society, which leads him to soe evidence that convinces Deuce that his newly beloved Eva is the criminal. He tries to tell Gaspar, but he refuses to listen and even drops hints that he is the murderer (he already told Eva, but why would he do that?). Deuce, again in a mind-blowing display of stupidity, rides with Gaspar to the Man-Whore society awards show, where the finale will obviously take place.

Eventually, Gaspar pulls a gun on Deuce and reveals the almost plot twist: he was the killer all along, which Deuce should have known if he had listened to Eva or Gaspar earlier. Gaspar reveals that at one time he wanted to be a Man-Whore, but got his penis blown up in an accident with a penis enlarger he borrowed from a classmate (was it Swedish made? If it was, I`m fairly certain I know who lent it to him). He blames Man-Whores for the loss of his penis, career and dignity (not that he had much dignity to begin with), and wants to kill them all with a bomb hidden in the trophy to be awarded to the best Man-Whore of them all. Deuce attempts to stop Gaspar by challenging him to a sword fight, but quickly gets his behind whipped.

However, the penis-nose lady and the hunchback make a reappearance to capture Gaspar and give Deuce time to knock him out with a trophy. The detonator is removed from Gaspar`s hands, and Deuce is granted the Golden Boner award for his bravery (like the Oscars, but with a big dick). But as he and Eva share a kiss, the statue`s penis connects with the detonator (oops). Having just committed mass murder of Man-Whores, the couple pretends nothing happened and pick up T.J from prison, who is happy to share his newest prospect as the gang walks off into the sunset- Gay Man-Whoring.

OVERALL RATING: 0/10
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This film was not funny. Not at all. It wasn't funny, touching, action-filled, or even entertaining. There isn`t even a sex scene (in a film about gigolos), and if you can't put a sex scene in a film about a prostitute, you`re in trouble. Ebert was right: this movie sucks. A lot.

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, this is not over. For there is one more film to tear into......

The Critical Frog: Musings On Roger Ebert

No sarcastic review today. I don`t want to write it, and you don`t want to read it. I`ve got some thinking to do in the memory of the great Roger Ebert.

It`s the 1-year anniversary of the death of Roger Ebert, perhaps the best movie critic of all time. And since I didn`t have a blog at the time of his death last year, I never had a chance to express how I felt about it. And I`d like to share what effect the legendary critic had on me. This is really hard for me to write, because the death of my idol is still a very touchy subject but I want to explain what he was to me. So I`ll try to get you to understand, like a critic should....god knows, I need it right now.

I can`t honestly say I grew up with Siskel and Ebert- Gene Siskel died before I was born (although from what I`ve seen, he was great too), but I can say that Siskel`s untimely death revealed an important point about Ebert: his personality as a critic without his best friend.

What made Ebert amazing in the craft was that after Gene`s passing, he wasn`t just "And Ebert". With many duos, when one quits, the other cannot maintain the act for long (imagine Bill and Ted without Bill, or Spongebob without Patrick) and it eventualy crumbles. But by his own will, Ebert decided to carry on and become a greater critic than anyone. By working onwards from his partner`s death, Ebert carried on his legacy for Siskel and himself simply because he could and wanted to.

Ebert was honest and unbiased in his movie reviews, which I try to remain in his honor (but I do have swayed opinions), but what made Ebert the best critic I`ve ever seen was his utter determination to do what he loved. Ebert passed away last year, but up until the day he died he was watching movies, blogging, and generally dong what he loved. The determination exerted by the guy was a beautiful image of a man wanting to keep working until he died simply for the purpose that it brings him joy. And that`s what I think being a critic is about: finding the joy and disappointment in entertainment. I don`t think all movies are bad, and I`m just trying to do what I love: provide ample feedback about things I`ve seen as a movie critic. This is what I want to do, and like the great Ebert, I`m doing it.

Roger Ebert was probably one of my biggest motivators to enter the field of criticism. When I saw the news that he had lost his battle with cancer, I cried. And to honor him, to honor the legacy of criticism as an art form, I write my opinions in hopes that one day they will be as well-respected as his were. And someday, I will carry on the legacy of Siskel and Ebert.

It`s been a year now since we lost the giant of the movies, but he will not be forgotten. He directed a movie.... should I review that some time? Maybe, but that`s not important right now.

Today, The Critical Frog has taken a break from harsh criticism to say my long-overdue farewells to the king of critics. I raise my glass to you, Roger Ebert, in honor of your legacy, wherever you are. And somehow, somewhere, I`ll see you at the movies.