I’m Having a Baby

I’m Having a Baby is a poor excuse for a movie…no wait, it’s reality.  I get things confused so easily these days.  I’m due to have a new baby virtually any minute now (or not, these things don’t really adhere to schedules, apparently), so Musty Movies will be taking a hiatus until I can form coherent thoughts again.  “Why start now?” you might be asking.  HA HA HA HA.  Once the baby stops spitting up on me every four minutes and I don’t have to concentrate to the follow the plot of Dodgeball, I’ll go back to making fun of old movies.

Run Lola Run

Running with a mop on your head is not recommended.

Run Lola Run is the story of the titular woman trying to prevent her boyfriend from getting killed by mobsters.  For no clearly explained reason, Lola gets to relive the day until she succeeds.  It’s like Groundhog Day, but with less Bill Murray and more red wigs.  Lola runs in one direction, jumping over obstacles and avoiding baddies while a clock ticks down.  If she fails, she has to start over at the beginning of the movie, but she only has three tries and oh just read the manual for Super Mario Bros. 

The movie gets off to a great, energetic start.  Music pumps.  Credits that I can’t read because they’re in German scroll by as a cartoon character runs and runs.  Then, the movie starts and an actual person runs and runs through a drab city while some unenthusiastic German techno throbs in the background.  It has all the excitement of a high school track meet, or more accurately, three largely identical track meets in a row. 

Little things change between attempts (oh, the goomba is headed left this time!), but since everyone is a bad person, it’s hard to care.  The whole thing only takes 80 minutes or so, but since the movie just replays virtually the same footage three times, it managed to bore me to tears.  By the third go round, I was thinking of taking up knitting just so I’d have a needle to shove in my eye.  Luckily, I remembered the fast-forward button before inflicting ocular trauma on myself or, God forbid, knitting a scarf. 

Even when I made it to the end, Lola has no impact on the actual resolution of the story, even though the whole mess is her fault to begin with.  She just ran and ran for no purpose it all.  She might as well have been on a treadmill eating Häagen-Dazs.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

The Fly

I think this is when he's...80% fly? Hard to tell.

The Fly is the same general story as Spider-man: nerdy scientist guy gets his DNA kick-started with some bug juice and gets superpowers.  In Spider-man, this has the side-effect of making him emo because he can’t sleep with Kirsten Dunst.  I almost never get to sleep with Kirsten Dunst, yet I don’t have pages of terrible poetry filling up my backpack.  Just delicious Suzy-Q’s.  In the slightly more realistic version portrayed in The Fly, bits and pieces start falling off of the scientist until he’s a horribly disgusting creature oozing various fluids.  Whoops, there goes my appetite for Suzy-Q’s.

The yucky fly-scientist is played by Jeff Goldblum, probably to save money on make-up.  His love interest is an intrepid lady reporter who, since this is 1986, has the exact same haircut as him.  She meets him at a nerd party and follows him back to his abandoned warehouse  lair research lab to report on his amazing teleportation discovery.

In reality, she’s there to let the audience know how to feel during the various stages of Goldblum’s transformation: curious, loving, horny, impressed, horny, skeptical, slightly less horny, concerned, then finally freaked the hell out.  Despite this helpful guide, I started out at the freaked the hell out stage, because seriously.  Have you seen Jeff Goldblum?  Would you follow him into the depths of an industrial park at night where no one can hear you scream?  His “research” probably involves a lot of latex gloves, grainy webcam footage, and letters cut out of magazines.

The whole movie’s stock and trade is being gross.  The transformation is shown in great detail, as is Jeff Goldblum having sex.   Regardless, the movie does a good job of showing what would happen if a man turned into the grossest man-fly imaginable, so it’s worth watching as long as you haven’t eaten for a couple days.

Rating: Must-see

Did I fast-forward: Yes, because Jeff Goldblum has sex.  I may not be able to sleep tonight.

Hombre

Apache Paul Newman does not give a crap about this white man’s review.

Hombre is the story of a Paul Newman raised by Apaches, then adopted by the movie Stagecoach.  Right down to the Hierarchy of Races (White>Mexican>Apache) established in the first ten minutes of the movie, this is the same movie.  An eclectic group of travelers get on a stagecoach and ride off to an uncertain future.  To be fair, the non-titular stagecoach is stolen part way through the movie, so it’s more like No Stagecoach from that point on, but that’s just picking nits.  And we all know I only pick nits when they’ve achieved full ripeness for baking my famous nitpie. 

The movie is called Hombre because nobody knows Paul Newman’s name.  No wait, that’s not true.  It’s John Russell.  Everybody knows his name, except this one, unimportant, guy.  Heck, he has three names, though they never tell us the other ones.  Maybe Hombre is one of them?  I don’t know.  This is supposed to feed into the mystery of a man raised by Apaches, but as far as I can tell, all being raised by Apaches does is make you an asshole.

After Newman cuts his hair, he speaks in nothing but monosyllabic phrases that can be Google translated as “Screw off.”  He studiously avoids doing anything, ever, because he, like, doesn’t care man.  So he’s less like an Apache warrior and more like a high school senior.  He’s an excellent shot with a gun, always knows what to do, and can survive in a desert with nothing but the glint in his deep blue eyes. 

Naturally, he uses these superpowers to make a nice woman destitute, get an innocent man who tried to help him killed, let a woman be kidnapped, and leave six people to die in the desert.  He presumably does this because white people were so mean to his Apache friends.  So really the movie is all about the most aggressively passive-aggressive case of White Guilt ever.  So that’s different from Stagecoach.  Everything else is the same, so just watch Stagecoach instead.  Or The Mummy.  I hear that’s good.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: No