The Big Lebowski

Dude.

The Big Lebowski  is a stoner movie, which means you either need to be a sixteen year old or a stoned 35 year old to enjoy it.  At my advanced age, it’s not cool to hang out with sixteen year old boys, and my stoner neighbor got arrested recently, so I’m forced to fall back on my own counsel.  My counsel says that this movie sucks.  Everybody in the movie is an idiot, and do a bunch of idiotic things while non-sequitors circle them like stoned vultures.  Rather than being funny, the movie settles for being weird and off-putting.

The main character has a name, but prefers to go by the name “the Dude.”  Every character in the movie talks about how inspiring it is that he’s so relaxed (stoned), but he spends the entire movie freaking out about one thing after another.  I’m more chill than he is, and I just slapped a hobo because I ran out of toothpaste.  His crazy friend is more fun, and also gets to live out a fantasy of mine by telling Steve Buscemi to shut up every time he opens the misshapen teeth-lined maw he calls a mouth.

There’s a lot of time spent in a bowling alley, so we see a ridiculous amount of footage of the camera rolling down the alley, rolling through the ball return, and hanging out inside the ball itself.  My best guess is someone made a student film showing off how clever he was with bowling ball metaphors and some movie dude did another line of cocaine and said, “This is awesome!  Make it 117 minutes long!”  Struggling to pad the run time, he made the characters repeat every line of dialogue 17 times like a stuttering West Wing parody.  There are only a dozen unique lines of dialog in the movie, probably even less if you remove all the times they say “dude.”

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

Scanners

A harrowing battle scene. Suck it, Braveheart.

The basic premise of Scanners involves people with super brain powers engaging in psychic dueling, which is not particularly cinematic.  The best the filmmakers could do is show two people squinting really constipatedly until someone’s head explodes.  Try this: Go to a bathroom where someone has just finished a particularly nasty bit of business.  Look at yourself in the mirror and try to divide 1,486 by 29 in your head.  See that series of expressions on your face?  That’s almost every scene in the movie.

The exact psychic powers that all these mutants, called Scanners, have are poorly defined.  Sometimes they can barely distract a ferret and the next minute they can make a phone booth explode.  That’s a pretty impressive power given how the only thing flammable in there is the yellow pages.  Then again, this was the 80’s, so everything is probably coated in hairspray.  The abilities of the Scanners waxes and wanes with the needs of the plot.  It’s basically X-men but with no unique abilities or budget.  There might have been more to the story than that, but I kind of fell asleep for some of it.  I dreamt of unicorns!

The climax is a duel between the bad and good Scanners that is mostly a lot of sweating and grunting, leading to my wife coming in sleepily and asking me to turn down the gay porn again.  Eventually, body parts start exploding and catching fire until somebody wins by doing something that is never previously established as possible.  Look, sci-fi has enough problems not being terrible.  At least establish some rules so I understand what’s at stake, or at least what’s happening, during the climatic fight.  Otherwise I’m just watching sweaty dudes making eyes at one another and that makes me uncomfortable.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: Only in my dreams.

The Prince and the Showgirl

Feel the passion!

In the interest of full disclosure, no one has ever considered The Prince and the Showgirl a must-see movie.  Any movie featuring Laurence Olivier, one of the most respected thespians of all time, and Marilyn Monroe, who is…not, as a romantic comedy couple is probably better lost to the mists of time.

For the first thirty minutes, we watch as Olivier does his level best to date rape Monroe.  As the titular Prince, he tries to make it with whatever hot piece of tail he stumbles across when visiting England.  Monroe wardrobe malfunctions her way into his heart, so he plies her with alcohol, lies to her, and blocks the exits from his bedroom.  At some point, Stockholm Syndrome sets in and Monroe is suddenly convinced she loves him.

By this time, the Prince has begun to have date raper’s remorse, since Monroe won’t shut up with that high-pitched giggly voice of hers.  The stalker becomes the stalkee as Monroe keeps finding ways to impose herself on the Prince’s social circle before he’s forced to flee the country.  Supposedly the Prince has fallen in love with her before he ditches her for eighteen months, but even Laurence Olivier can’t sell that. 

Even beyond the awkward romance, the movie is inexplicable. Much of the movie deals with the political intrigue between the Prince and his son.  The Prince’s son plans to overthrow him, but is convinced not to by Monroe, possibly just to quiet her bat squeals.  Somehow the Prince says this happy turn of events could lead to civil war in the Balkans.  Since this is 1911, the movie might be implying that Marilyn Monroe started World War I.  For that theory alone, this weird little movie is worth a watch.

Rating: Must-see

Did I fast-forward: No.  Muting is not the same as fast-forwarding.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

They could rob my bank any day.

I’m not really sure what the point of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is.  The movie covers the very tail end of the outlaws’ career as they flee America for Bolivia.  We’re not given any reason to care about the characters or events of the movie, any more than I care about the dump I took just because I spent two hours with it.  The movie relies on Robert Redford’s Redfordiness and Paul Newman’s Newmaniness to give the main characters personality.  While their charms are not inconsiderable, I’m trying to watch a movie here, not be bedded by them.

Most of the action revolves around the outlaws being chased by a posse that we never get to see up close.  There’s like half an hour of Redford and Newman riding a horse, stopping, breathlessly saying, “I think we lost ‘em,” then widening their eyes as they see silhouettes on the horizon, and saying, “Oh my stars, they are still coming, the game is afoot!”  When they finally have to fight after fleeing the country, Redford kills like thirty Bolivians.  This is after spending the whole movie hemming and hawing over fighting the mere six Americans that were chasing them before.  I guess that clears up the exchange rate on posses at the turn of the century, but it feels incongruent.

The movie’s not unpleasant, a quote that probably won’t make the movie poster (“Not Unpleasant” – Musty Movies), but it’s not really memorable either.  The beginning is pretty good, but then the movie muddles along until the over the top ending.  One watching tip though: Mute the movie whenever a musical montage of riding a bike or a slideshow of Our Trip to New York starts.  There hasn’t been a soundtrack this inappropriate since I hired a barbershop quarter to sing “God Save the Queen” at my 4^th of July barbeque.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast-forward: No