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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

He’s concerned it’ll set before he gets it in the wash.

M is really boring.  The movie was released in 1930’s Germany, and it’s pretty common for movies made before the discovery of ADD to have scenes that run so long an innocent viewer might assume the camera operator snuck out for a quick schnitzel break leaving the actors to yell at each other in German for a few extra minutes while the subtitles give up and start rolling quotes from Mein Kampf.  So little happens that if it was written down, it’d be more of a pamphletization, not a novelization.

Other than the 70% of the movie where nothing happens, M’s a great movie!  It manages to convincingly portray a man trying to elude a town full of Germans angry at him. He’s a serial killer of children, so he probably deserves whatever’s coming his way.  Still, watching 1930’s Germans hunting a man through the streets, marking him so he can be clearly identified…I’m probably reading too much into it.  Then again, the killer is played by Peter Lorre, a Jewish man who had to flee Germany after this movie was made for fear of his life.  I guess I’m reading exactly the right amount into it. The whole thing has a creepy Holocaust training video vibe to it.

Nobody other than the killer, has much of a personality aside from “Angry German”, making it difficult to care as they s-l-o-w-l-y hunt for the criminal.  I suppose it didn’t take a lot to make Germans angry in the 30’s.  There are numerous scenes where angry citizens take up arms, and criminal syndicates have more success than the police at tracking down the killer.  I think that’s supposed to be a pointed social commentary, but if I was to make a “Top Problems with Germany in the 1930’s” list, “Too Inefficient at Hunting Down Jews” wouldn’t exactly bubble to the top.

Rating: Musty

Did I fast forward: Yes

The Capitol is visible through every window. Waiting. Watching.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the most American movie ever made.  Halfway through, I was overcome.  I turned to the nearest flag (Go Mets!), saluted, and began to sing “God Bless America.”  I don’t really know the words to the song, so it degenerated into embarrassed mumbling and they kicked me off the bus.  Even if your movie involved a bald eagle making out with the Statue of Liberty, it would be less patriotic than this one.

It’s easy to be cynical about a movie where a nice man gets surprised elected to Congress and defeats corruption through nothing but pluck, but this movie gets away with it.  It has such a strong sense of purpose and place that you really want justice to come against the ambiguously evil and corrupt political machine in Washington.  Nothing in this movie could ever actually happen, no matter how many times Jimmy Stewart says, “Aw shucks.”  You couldn’t get away with making this movie today, and not just because it would be awkward to watch Jimmy Stewart’s corpse for two hours.

It’s not until after post-coital with the American Dream that you realize the movie is actually poorly constructed.  There’s a lot of plot threads that don’t really go anywhere, and the ending somehow lacks the punch it should.  Really, the movie should have been longer.  Wait, who’s typing this?  It must be my evil doppelganger.  I never want a movie to be three hours.  No, don’t steal my identity, doppleganger!  Oh, great, now there are goatee hairs in my keyboard.

Rating: Must-see

Did I fast-forward: No.