A carnival of technology

The party is nonstop

Rated R for strong sexual content, language and some drug use.

Starring Snoop Dogg as the only rapper we all recognized.

Viewed 2005-04-26 by Mike Imamura, David Shea, and David Cantrell

Soul Plane is a rare gem on the Bottom 100 list, a small respite on the great journey. Soul Plane is something that is exactly what it set out to be. It’s a sort of modern blaxploitation version of Airplane, and it consists mostly of racial stereotypes and an unending string of dick and fart jokes. I don’t want to sound like that guy on IMdb who opens the discussion of a horrible movie with a “I don’t understand why no one likes this movie??!” comment, but I enjoyed it. I can see why people would hate the movie, since it’s raunchy and dumb, but it kept me laughing, which is exactly what a comedy is supposed to do. This movie is a fine thing amongst its company.

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• Weren’t they in Enemy Mine together?
• Sharks cannot back up.
• Let me know if you see some foreshadowing.
• Wait, I thought the shark was the protagonist.
• Hey look, there’s that grenade again.

Jaws 3-D was Joe Alves’ first and last time as director. I wonder if this movie was like Deep Blue Sea where Renny Harlin filmed a lot of plot elements and character development and they got cut when the studio said, “nope, gotta have more shark on screen.”

I give this movie 4/10 because it wasn’t so terrible that you couldn’t watch it. And if you watched it thinking it was sort of a satire, it’s not so bad.

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• Bad.
• Tired.
• Sleepy.
• Exhausting.
• I need a thneed.

I had high hopes for this movie. I liked Dr. Seuss books when I was a kid and thought this would be an enjoyable movie. It might have been if they didn’t get Mike Myers. Basically everything that Shea said above I agree with. This movie sucked. A lot. My favorite Seuss book is The Lorax.

I give this movie 0/10 because it was so terrible I had to force myself to sit there and watch it. Had we viewed this movie at my place, I would have probably gotten up to go to my computer.

Don’t mess with the hat

Rated PG for mild crude humor and some double-entendres.
Rated A-II by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 68 with an influence density of 0.57 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin, and zombie Dr. Suess.

Viewed 2005-04-19 by David Cantrell, Mike Imamura, and David Shea

This is the kind of experience I associate with a bad movie: an hour and a half that lasts forever and leaves me feeling physically and emotionally drained. Unlike Earthquake, which left me with a similar feeling, The Cat in the Hat lacked several key elements, like a plot, character development, and an inexplicable cameo by Walter Matthau.

A kid’s movie that’s watchable by adults is an uncommon thing, but I don’t see how children could enjoy this movie, either. Its outlandish colors aren’t nearly enough to overcome the flat acting and utter lack of whimsy. The most tedious portions are those when Mike Myers isn’t on the screen, like the first twenty minutes of the film where the setting is built by the conversations of child actors and clichéd threats of military school, but even when he is on screen, the cat just isn’t very interesting. The problem is compounded by the cat not being particularly annoying, either. He’s just there, occasionally doing something zany or amusing, but otherwise he’s just filling space and yelling “Oh, Yeah!”, as if he were some sort of less-fun cousin of the Kool-Aid man.

One thing I did find interesting about this movie was its departure from the the traditional movie family structure. The two kids in the movie are being raised by a single, working, mostly absent mother who’s dating some slob next door (played by Alec Baldwin). I’m sure that the CAPAlert guy had a field day with that one. This unusual tidbit makes better material for a paper in an English class than it does for a good movie, though. In the end, this movie needs to be driven by zaniness, and in that it falls flat. Several attempts at this, like the Cat in the Hat rave party, are confusing instead of surreal, and the cartoonish physics of the kids and the cat jumping appear almost grotesque outside of a cartoon.

Despite its position at the top of the list, The Cat in the Hat’s numbers belie its true awfulness. Jaws III was a much better movie.

The third dimension is terror

Rated PG.
Rated A-III by the USCCB (link)

Starring a fake-looking shark and a couple of cute dolphins.

Viewed 2005-04-12 by David Shea, David Cantrell, and Mike Imamura

Even in the trailer, Jaws 3 knew that it wouldn’t be a good film. The trailer that was avialable on the DVD consisted mostly of movie-trailer-voice man reminding the viewer of how much they enjoyed the first two films. In synopsis, “Jaws was really awesome. Jaws II was ok. And look, this one’s in 3-D!” That’s about the movie went, as well.

Lacking an Arrivision projector or those 3-D glasses, we were left with the two dimensional representation of the movie, which removed a rather crucial aspect of the original. Although the three-dimensional effects were used only for emphasis, to amaze the audience during action sequences—and the opening credits—the special effects depended on things popping out of the screen. The effects looked very fake and cheap, as if they were mostly made of hand-drawn images stiffly superimposed onto the film, so I would at least hope that the three dimensional aspect helped things a bit in the theater.

The movie has a fairly simple setup: we meet the now-grown Brody kids, learn of their current lives and conflicts and how the shark attacks of their youth influence them today, and then the shark shows up and messes up Seaworld. That’s really about it. Where the first two movies had well-developed characters, internal conflicts exacerbated by the external conflict of the shark, and breathtaking cinematography, this movie had flat reminders of the Brody children, a boring hard-ass park owner, and a pair of dolphins that occaisionally flipped around or ate some fish. The fake-looking shark was occasionally replaced with an even worse 3-D image of a shark. In all, Jaws 3-D was just a dull action movie, driven by a gimmick that has since become obsolete.