Movie Review -- Dodgeball (2004)

Dodgeball -- "If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball"--Patches O'Houlihan.

Where does the average guy go to escape his everyday life and get in a few reps on the weight machine? Where can you go and workout without fear of mocking (even if you are dressed like a Pirate)? What gym in the world would a nerdy cheerleader wanna-be, a guy who dresses like a pirate, an overweight father of two, and a slacker all be welcomed with open arms? Average Joe's is the answer to all those questions.

Sadly, that may not be an option for much longer if Globo Gym has it's way.

What you get in DodgeBall is a battle of David versus Goliath, average guy vs. freaky fit, tool vs. slacker!

Average Joe's is run by slacker Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn). Gym members include: Steve the Pirate (Alan Tudyk) who's aptly named that way because he...drum roll please...thinks he's a pirate; Justin the young uncoordinated cheer leader wanna be (Justin Long) Gordon the odd overweight father of two (Stephen Root)  and many more.

Peter runs the gym with the reckless abandon of a mega millions lottery winner. Meaning he doesn't really pay attention to the finer points of running a business...like paying mortgage, collecting dues, etc. Peter is served notice by his bank that his mortgage is about to defaulted on and he is about to lose his gym.

Bad news for Peter, but good news for White Goodman (Ben Stiller) owner and operator of Globo Gym. Think any major fitness club...on steroids! White is looking to purchase the little gym across the street and the only thing that can stop him is Peter and his crew of wacky gym members coming up with $50,000 in about a month.

Through this whole process we are introduced  to Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor).. Kate is assigned by the bank to make sure that the Globo Gym acquisition of Average Joe's goes smoothly. It's obvious from the start that she like Peter. It's also obvious that she's repulsed by White. In what is one of my favorite lines in the movie Kate's response to a White come on is, "Actually, I threw up a little in my mouth."--comedy gold!


When the idea of holding a car wash to raise money fails miserably there is only one thing the guys can do. Play competitive dodgeball. How does one learn about competitive dodgeball you ask? (and thank you for asking) It seems Gordon is a fan of obscure sports, hey he gets the magazine! All the team has to do is beat a local girl scout troop in the local regional qualifier and they are on their way to Vegas. They get their collective asses handed to them. Thankfully one of the scouts failed her pre-match drug test!

With the help of former ADAA (American DodgeBall Associationn of America) Superstar, Patches O'Houlihan the team is whipped into shape prior to their televised matches at the World Championship of Dodge ball on ESPN 8 "The Ocho". An event so great it's billed as, "Better than the World Cup, World Series and World War II combined!" With such wisdom as,. "If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball." and "if you can dodge a car, you can dodge a ball". Patches gets this motley crew in shape. Well, he gets them in shape once Kate joins the team.

From there you get some good hardcore dodgeball action. The teams competing in Vegas remind me of what would happen if WWE wrestlers mixed it up with your local Roller Derby Queens.

You round out the cast with a cameo from David Hasselhoff as the coach of the German team. Gary Cole and Jason Bateman as the announcers from ESPN "Ocho", and brief appearances by Hank Azaria, William Shatner, Chuck Norris and Lance Armstrong. Overall you get about 92 minutes of slapstick comedy at it's finest.

For full effect make sure you watch the special features with out takes and deleted scenes. Pay close attention to the separate feature on Justin Long. basically it's a five minute gag reel of him getting pummelled with dodge balls! You really can't go wrong with abuse like that!

Stiller is amazing in most everything he does. Movies like Permanent Midnight, Keeping the Faith and The Royal Tenenbaums showed he had dramatic chops along with the ability to be a comic actor. The fact that he and Christine Taylor are married makes the scenes they have together that much funnier.

If you're looking for a way to relax and laugh for an hour and half you could do a lot worse than Dodgeball.

Movie Review -- Slither (2006)

Slither -- as if the world needed one more example of why Nathan Fillion is awesome...here it is!

As slap stick horror films go this one is in third place on my all time favorite list. No. 1 - Evil Dead, No. 2 - Shaun of the Dead, No. 3 - Slither.

Nathan Fillion stars as Bill Pardy, chief of police in a small town who soon has to deal with an alien invasion that is essentially turning the town folk into mindless zombies.

The fun starts when the sexually frustrated Grant Grant (played by Michael Rooker), after being shut down by his wife, goes for a walk with a townie who picked him up in the local bar. While stumbling home through the woods they come across a giant slimy egg/meteor. It would seem that from that point forward the least of his problems would be having two first names!

Grant Grant gets infected and becomes the fleshy epicenter of rest of the movie.

Like with most zombie comedies, of recent memory any way,  there's a romantic sub-plot. Seems that Chief Pardy has been carrying a torch for Grant Grant's wife Starla (played by Elizabeth Banks) for a long time. As the bugs slowly start to turn Grant and other town's folk into mindless zombies, or worse in some cases. Pardy teams up with his deputies, a local girl who was able to escape being turned and the foul mouthed town Mayor Jack McReady (Gregg Henry).

McReady's expletive laced out bursts paired with Pardy's spot on dead pan make for some comic gold. Thrown in a rant on no Mr. Pibb  in the middle of an alien take over. An attack by a zombie deer. And more disgusting slug like aliens than you can throw a hand grenade at and you have the makings of a classic.

Fillion has always been a favorite of mine. From his days on Two Guys, a Girl & a Pizza Place (a show so old that I forgot he was on it!) to Caleb the secondary big bad of season 7 of Buffy, the short lived Firefly and now as the title character on ABC's hit show Castle. Fillion brings a sense of humor and charm to each and every role that makes you care...no matter how silly the role.

If an alien/zombie/comedy/romance/action/horror film plays to your taste...you need to watch this film.

Simon Sez (1999)

Simon Sez -- Simon Sez....watch it all, if you can!

Now, this isn't so much going to be a review of the movie as it will be a look back on a film that should never have been made. Really, what was some studio exec thinking when this got pitched, approved, made and then distributed?

Staring basketball superstar Denis Rodman (it was 1999 remember) and comedian Dane Cook, before he was the crazy stand up star that he is today. This movie is BAD. Not bad as in bad ass...or bad as in good...but rather it is Bad as in NOT GOOD!

Who would have thought that Rodman's supporting role in the 1997 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Double Team would lead to his character, Simon, getting his own movie? Raise your hand if you saw that one coming. Now take a step back into line and stop lying to yourself that you knew this was coming.

What you get in Simon Sez is a mix of bad dialogue, good fight scenes, crappy special effects, and half hearted attempts at comedy from Dane Cook and John Pinnette (who I actually liked here for some reason). Honestly I'm so unmotivated to re-watch this film to properly give a plot outline that I am going to just steal it from IMDB: A tattooed Interpol agent helps an old classmate find the kidnapped daughter of a computer software tycoon.

In case anyone was wondering...re-watching the movie is totally an option. In case you don't believe me...I submit this picture as proof. My DVD collection is vast and from time to time I have some really bad movies that I seem to love.

Simon Sez is one of those films. For some reason, I still can't put my finger on it, I still like this movie. With all its short comings this should be relegated to the 2 for $5 bin at your local store. It should stay there until they have an everything must go sale and make that bin down to 5 for $5.  I actually think that's how I got this copy.

This would fall in line with Hudson Hawk, Young Einstein (Yahoo Serious), Howard the Duck, and the greatest film I own....Leonard Part 6 (Bill Cosby) as movies that I have no right to like as much as I do. Really I wouldn't hold it against you if you judged me by that list. But, somewhere there has to another person who likes those same films, right?

Review time....

Today my sights are set on a fun little film that you need to watch (repeatedly) if you haven't seen it before.

Galaxy Quest

If you look back and fondly remember old sci fi shows like; the original Star Trek, the original Battlestar Gallactica, Buck Rogers, etc.. then you may find a soft spot in your heart for this movie.

Basically, it's the story of the cast of a cult Sci Fi show. The 'crew", years after the show has been off the air. is doing what many cult favorites do...they're working the conventions.
You have the former child star (Daryl Mitchell), the hot actress who really didn't do anything on the show (Sigourney Weaver), the angst-y British actor who now hates the character and catchphrase that made/broke his career (Alan Rickman), the mellow almost strange engineer (Tony Shalhoub), the random "red shirt" crew member who would always die in every show (Sam Rockwell), and of course  the cocky lead who still thinks he's big news (Tim Allen).

The action begins when Commander Jason Nesmith (Allen) is approached at a convention about what he thinks is a paying gig. Turns out it is actually a group of aliens who have been watching the "historical records" of the spaceship NSEA Protector.  Basically, the dummies have been watching reruns as if they were the Earth History Channel (and it wasn't even Nazi week).

From there hilarity ensues! It's a combo fish-out-of-water and standard Sci-Fi spoof.  But in an absolutely fabulous way. You will also recognize a ton of other actors throughout the movie. Not big names...and you may not even know the actors names. But, if you watch TV and moves there a lot of fun appearances including: Justin Long, Enrico Colantoni , Missi Pyle and more!

Where most spoofs try to reference a specific scene in a movie Galaxy Quest hits the broad strokes of the genre and does it with vigor! It's a ton of fun, really funny and in my opinion holds up well to re-watching. Probably in my top ten of Comedy moves....which I now want to sit down and think about...that may come later today if I have free time!

Two...Two...we got Two?!!

Russell Peters...you are a funny man and you have ruined my life! (but in a good way)

Comedy has always played a big part in my life. Growing up I think I was the only kid I knew who would prefer to listen to a stand up comedy tape (that's right...CASSETTE tape) rather than music. Thanks to my father and grandfather I was raised on the likes of Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks and many more.

I was transfixed by Cosby the stand up (and then the TV Dad) "Noah, Right!" "Buck Buck" and anything having to do with Fat Albert were my favorites. The bit where he talked about how until the age of 9 he thought his name was dammit and his brother Russell's name was Jesus Christ always got me. 

Carlin's "Class Clown" was, and still is, one of my all time favorite comedy albums. Al Sleet "the Hippy Dippy Weatherman" and the "7 words you can never say on television" are classics not to be outdone. Carlin's humor grew as I did...I got the underlying jokes as I got older...not just the silly stuff. And there was also some profound observations to be had.

I can still remember when I talked a high school teacher into letting me play "bad words", off his Parental Warning album, in class as a part of a speech about context. The routine goes that there are no bad words..just words used in bad context. Carlin then proceeds to list off about 50 racial slurs only to pronounce that the words aren't "bad" but rather it's the context of how they were being used! To this day my favorite class presentation.

As I grew older I picked up other comedic tastes: Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Richard Jeni, Dennis Miller, Denis Leary, Lewis Black, and so forth. To my parents credit they never censored what I listened to...as long as I didn't repeat the curse words in public. Hell as a young white boy growing up in central Illinois my first two CD's I ever owned were Ice-T's "Home Invasion" (listen to the first track titled Warning if you dare) and Wu-Tang Clans "Enter the 36 Chambers".

It was my junior or senior year of high school though that a comedian came to my attention that changed the way I would look at things. That man was Eddie Izzard.

Eddie has a brand of humor that is part story telling part observation and part off the cuff train of thought. He's the only stand-up that I've seen live more than once and he opened my comedic mind to realm of international comics.

I had always been a fan of Monty Python (yeah...I was that kid) and the comedy shows of England. But, I had never really paid attention to stand up from other countries. Once I started to look at Eddie I found other talented comics such as: Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, Jimmy Carr, Omid Djalili and the aforementioned Russell Peters.

Basically I have a 24 hour comedy channel going on in my head at any given time! While this is entertaining it can cause problems. Laughing is fun...unless the situation calls for being serious. Then you drop into something that the BBC Comedy "coupling" described as the Giggle Loop

"You are surrounded by people for a moment of silence when the Giggle Loop begins... Suddenly out of nowhere this thought comes into your head: the worst thing I could possibly do during a minute's silence is laugh. And as soon as you think that you almost do laugh -- automatic reaction. But you don't, you control yourself, you're fine. Whew.

But then you think how terrible it would have been if you laughed out loud in the middle of a minutes silence. And so you nearly do again, only this time it's a bigger laugh. And then you think how awful this bigger laugh would have been. And so you nearly laugh again, only this time it's a very big laugh, it is an enormous laugh. Let this bastard out, and you get whiplash. And suddenly you are in the middle of this completely silent room and your shoulders are going like you are drilling the road. And what do you think of this situation? Oh dear Christ, you think it's funny!" Jeff -- Coupling - Series 1 - Episode 'Sex, Death & Nudity'

Wish I could say I have never been there...but that's not the case. While the giggle loop is reserved for somber situations there is the close relative that I like to call the "what the hell is that idiot laughing at" (granted it needs a new title). This is when a word or phrase that, out of context isn't funny, makes you laugh out loud like a bloody fool.

Take the word Speed (la Vitesse)...or the phrase we got two! The first is Eddie Izzard/s observation that the movie Speed in French isn't La Vitesse it's...Speed. and the second goes to Russell Peters who riffs on all things Indian and, well...I don't want to ruin that joke!

Basically what I'm saying is that I laugh for no reason and I blame my dad (who thought he was Cosby when I was growing up!)...and Cosby, Carlin, Brooks, Pryor, Leary, Izzard, Peters, Black, Carr and so many more that my brain hurts just now!

Also, a big shout out to Richard "Jeff" Coyle for playing one of the funniest characters ever to grace the small screen and bog up my mind with phrases like: Unflushable, The Zone, The Giggle Loop, Porn Buddies...etc.

Eddie...

Still the funiest man on the planet!

The Ten Commandments (Carlin Style)