The Last Airbender (2010)

There's an old saying in writing: show, don't tell.  

This film takes that idea, kicks it in the nuts, stabs it in the ribs with a rusty shiv, then lights its carcass on fire and wears the charred skin like a suit so that the image and smell linger long after you stop watching.  

If that wasn't bad enough to make for a truly bad film, the acting is about as good as an episode of Saturday Night Live where the actors are reading their lines from a poster board just off-screen.  I get that they're children for the most part, and that they are driving the entire plot through close-ups and conversation, but if you're going to make a fantasy movie, the actors are going to have to pull off some seriously weird lines.  It's just part of the job.  

I'd summarize the plot for you, but since the actors spend 100% of their on-screen time doing that, I don't want to rob them of their only useful job in this pile of loosely coiled, steaming excrement.  Besides, I don't care enough.  Not about the characters.  Not about the story.  Just not at all.  

Make no mistake, this is not a "good" bad movie.  This here is just a plain, old-fashioned, horrible film.  After watching these people talk to one another about things for over an hour (and then narrate to "mix it up" a little), I wanted to punch the population of the world in the face for going to see this movie to the extent that they did.  Shame on you, worldwide film-going audiences.  Shame on you.

But I made it through.  With the help of some severe inebriation, I braved the excruciating exposition and total lack of any character doing anything that might get the viewer to the next plot-point.  Honestly, I don't recommend the level of annihilation that this film requires.  There may not be enough intoxicating substances to last us as a society if too many people try to endure all 100+ minutes of this apathetic talk-a-thon.  

What I do know (because it was said so many times) is that if you kill the Avatar, he'll just be reborn again.  Maybe they should have killed him.  That way he might have been reborn into a decent movie.  

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie

A magic shop owner keeps horribly deformed children captive in a garbage pail. Those mentally challenged kids escape and befriend a fairly normal looking kid. (Isn't that always the way it goes?) They form a clothing company to help him win the heart of a girl and then break out into song (SONG!?!?!) That is your plot for The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. That's what you've done to yourself. Great job society.

Seriously though, I was part of the problem as much as anyone else. My backpack had a rubberbanded stack of the cards when I was about nine years old. It was about an inch thick and worn around the edges. So, yes, I fully implicate myself in this tragedy of a commercial....er, movie.

Oddly, the Ali Gator character sounds exactly like Carl from Aqua Teen. I tried to find an audio clip online to illustrate this little tidbit, but apparently no one cares enough about this movie. And rightly so. It certainly earned a place (at one time) among the lowest 100 on the IMDB list of all movies, ever.

By the time I was finished with the film, the film wasn't yet over. In fact, it went on for another hour. (running time: 96 minutes) But I did learn two valuable lessons: always make friends with a biker gang, and children's movies are a super-weird kind of disturbing.

This movie creeped me out. A little bit like Teeth did. That will probably mean I'll be dreaming of this tonight:

Gamera the Brave

Well I'm immediately interested because the first five minutes has a serious "Dragon Wars" feel to it. But then it quickly lulls into the age-old story of the hallucination prone son of a father-son duo finding an egg that hatches a turtle which grows to be a giant, rubber-suited monster. But this journey is certainly not a speedy one and you'll find yourself wanting to take a moment to clear out your internet-browser cookies in order to stay awake. You also should know that the Japanese title of the film was "Young Braves of Gamera". Because that should stink in your nose a little like this film quickly does. And it's set in 2006 so we know nothing too terrible happens.

Between getting up for more beer. Sizing up the fridge contents to see if there might be some puzzle-combination that renders me dinner. And getting up to double-check that there's no more beer, I gathered some nonsense about a medical operation, a levitating and mischievous baby turtle, and some sort of political intrigue about sinking ships. And then I went to make my dinner. And then I thought that I was finally witnessing the holy grail of kaiju (the consumption of a person by kaiju) but I was fooled. That's when it happened.

I heard the roar of a kaiju from the kitchen and ran out to see. There was actually a split second of cool kaiju moment. And then gone again.

So I finished cooking dinner and then turned off this piece of crap so that I could watch something good.

Lesson learned: If you find a weird egg - that thing is a kaiju.

Grab some psilocybin before you Return to Oz

In honor of an older Alice returning to Wonderland (or Underland, as the case may be) in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, I've tasked the Netflix delivery dog with fetching me Return to Oz. In this "children's" film, Dorothy has developed a psychosis from her verbal diarrhea about her visit to Oz and must undergo shock therapy in order to become a regular little girl without an imagination. Thankfully, she drowns instead. Upon her drowning, she returns to Oz and meets some new friends in order to destroy the Emerald City.

The decision to incorporate (and thus possibly introduce to a young audience) a technique that still haunts the psychiatric community because of its barbarity seems like an odd one, to say the least. What results is a film that should be a bigger hit to the drug crowd than the original coupled with Dark Side of the Moon. It's a little like Labyrinth if it had been cross-pollenated with Dark Crystal in The Neverending Story's poppy fields and snorted with a healthy dash of Willy Wonka's river tunnel.

Thankfully, viewing this film raises some pertinent questions: Was there an R2D2 clone in the Oz books? Did George Lucas sign off on that? What are the ethical implications of bringing a mishmash of inanimate objects to life (with a jar full of the Powder of Life) and then watching as they fall apart due to your negligence when assembling them?

Listen, I hate movies that are so safe that they hit every trope in Hollywood's playbook and close with the flowery description of how everything worked out fine for everyone (in case there isn't a sequel). At the same time, there are certain expectations you bring to genre's of film that simply cannot be tossed willy-nilly in favor of "experimentation." I don't want every movie be Luke Skywalker becoming a Jedi, but there is a certain truth that is only accentuated by provocatively subverting it. What I'm talking about is the amalgamation of a number of disparate elements that probably should come together in a specific fashion. Music, success, failure, main character traits - these things all interconnect in a specific way when we see certain types of films. The "children's" genre is no different. It must (as one line of thinking goes) avoid certain elements of life that parents of its time would find especially objectionable and incorporate elements which parents would like their children to hold in esteem and aspire to. If those elements shift as time passes, the films must reflect that, right?

Maybe this film (and by extension Where the Wild Things Are) just means that we are a bit further down Wonka's river tunnel than our parents were - that we've opened our minds to the real weirdness that being a child involves and we wish we could be a part of that again.

Sounds about right to me.