Actors Get the Chicks, Not Writers

Like Marty McFly, Owen Wilson has jumped ship. Yes, he left the USS Anderson years ago and Slate is just catching up. Who can blame Owen for taking the easierier/wealthier/more chick-laden route as a romantic comedy lead instead of a co-writer of real human comedies ala Marshall Brickman.

Owen jumped ship in the port of paradise and ended up hitting his head on an iceberg in the south pole. And as the penguins marched past, they took turns kicking him in the balls as he lay in a pool of his own money and improvisations.

Wedding Crashers is the worst movie of the year. Wedding Crashers is the second worst movie of the last ten years after Robot Stories, in which, "like [with] all excellent movies... the focus never strays from the human heart"--Peter Hartlaub.

"People say we only use 10 percent of our brains, I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts." Owen has become his character in the Wedding Crashers, leaving his real job to crash bad romantic comedies in order to pick up chicks with corny improvisations.

I almost walked out of Wedding Crashers after almost puking on the seat next to me. It is the kind of movie that Hollywood makes because it thinks Americans are stupid and knows they are amoral. It espouses the Catholic idea that you can sin your whole life and go to heaven if you repent. That's what Americans do, they screw over their neighbors, they fuck their friends and business partners in the ass (and not in a good way) and then they find true love and turn over a new leaf. Then they get divorced and the world bends over again. Wedding Crashers says that true love is out there and as long as you get it, it doesn't matter how you get it, because once you get it, your sins are washed away. If you see a woman from across the room that is so attractive that she just might be "the one" it is your right and duty to get her "by any means necessary" because true love is the ultimate end and ultimate good and to arrive there, your sins will disintegrate. Rape the girl, murder her other suitors, its all fair game. If she smiles but walks away, she smiled, she knows she wants it. If she is not the one, no harm done, you're just another asshole free to repent at some future date.

Gays are horrible, mentally deranged lunatics; women are dumber than rocks and nails; smooth-talking, good-looking amoral men are OK as long as they are heterosexual and commit vice in pursuit of the one female that God has chosen for them. This is a movie that American businessmen would love and Owen Wilson should be ashamed of.

This is what it feels like to sucker punch Wes Anderson

Just read an article on Slate (here) that pretty much sums up my entire opinion on the Wes Anderson/Owen Wilson guiding light idea. While Anderson is in possession of a keen, unique eye for color and detail, it is Owen W. who provided much of the narrative punch that allowed Rushmore to soar and kept Royal Tenenbaums with its head above water. Baumbach I have no hope for. Like G. Lucas, Anderson seems to have insulated himself against conflict by selecting his collaborators from the large, babbling pool of sycophants eagerly waiting to kiss the hand of their king.

I also recommend the two articles linked at the bottom of the Slate piece. They go a little too far in their dismissal of the nancy-boy movements of late, but it's worth it for the jibes they get in against Jonathan Safran Foer in the Little Blue Smurf Boy piece.

I Am Bowed, But I Am Not Broken

What do you do when your girlfriend tells the whole world the most amazing news ever before she tells you? When she blogs about how, when she was living in Danville, Stella's Groove-Returning Sex Machine was getting his groove back with a healthy daily doseage of Tossed Man Salad in the very next room???

You cry. You cry, and you cry, and you cry, because you're all alone in the world. All alone! Then you watch the new Walk The Line trailer, and you read the new George Saunders story in the New Yorker, and maybe, just maybe, the world seems a little bit better.

A little.

The Prediction

While websites like superherohype.com resign themselves to reporting that Spiderman 3 will have 4 villains, I say phooey. You heard me, phooey!

-there are all kinds of villain reports, at least 4 that seem very real, yet Raimi hasnt yet done more than one villian per film, out of his own love and respect for each villian that comes from his reading of the comics as a kid. So why now would he just throw in every character ever, following the formula that brought the batman franchise down? By golly, I say he wouldn't! Perhaps though, he could handle 4 villains spread of two movies. Clue number 1!

-I read an interview with Raimi a while back in which he said he and his brother Ivan were finishing up a "50 or 60 page" treatment that they would then hand over to Alvin Sargeant to flesh out into a full script. 50 pages is a damn long treatment for one film, but, I submit to you here and now, it seems quite a reasonable length for TWO films. Clue number 2!

-Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire are both only signed on for 3 films. Both have said during past interviews to promote 1 and 2 that they weren't interested in spending their whole careers making Spider-Man movies and that the third would be their last. Does this stump my argument, you wonder? On the contrary, it is my greatest evidence! It seems to me that the perfect way to convince them to do a 4th film is to shoot it at the same time you shoot the 3rd. Clue number 3!

-They've done two films, films 3 and 4 of a franchise are potential death traps (see Batman), films become rehashes. So what can the Spider-Man franchise do to avoid following the same boring path as Batman and Superman. Shooting 3 and 4 back-to-back would give them a close proximity in release dates and would be a perfect excuse to give 3 and cliffhanger ending. What do you do with MJ and Peter's relatinship at this point? How about have them break up at the end of 3, then get back together in 4? Reasonable? More than reasonable, I say. Clue number 4!

I'll stop there, so you all can catch your breath and call your friends. Just remember this, you heard it here first (or thereabouts).