Movies I Have No Intention Of Seeing, #36




Click


starring Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, David Hasselhoff (yes I said DAVID HASSELHOFF!) and Christopher Walken



You know what? Fuck this movie. I'm already as angry about this movie as I was about The Lake House. Instead of a magic mailbox that sends letters through a mystical portal of time (and before you kidnap a postal service worker and torture him or her in your basement in order to prise free the secrets of time travel, remember Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are using the same mailbox, which means the letters never pass through the hands of the USPS) this movie's high-concept premise has to do with a magic remote control that actually works on people and things. Like instead of rewinding a movie, you rewind to, say, high school before you were fat and balding and hopeless and crippled with despair, reduced to writing an allegedly humorous blog.

I find the whole idea of both The Lake House and Click to be offensive. Because there just isn't enough going on in the everyday of people's lives that we have to make these tortured focus-group ideas pieced together Frankenstein-like from some goddamn committee charged with spitting out movie formulae like algebra problems. Sometimes they're even actually about algebra problems.

I want this movie to fail. I want the people involved with it to fail. I want this movie to suffer painfully, linger on for a few weeks, just long enough for people to decide that they won't buy it when it comes out on DVD either. I want the people who approved this concept for the screen to be rounded up and... I want... I... uh...


Oooooooh, Kate Beckinsale...

She's lovely, sure, but that's beside the point. The point is that some studio head has a retarded nephew who entertains the family when they gather for holidays (Passover, Hanukkah... look, I said studio head) by trying to use the TV remote to turn down the cat. They laugh and laugh until they cry only in the end they're not sure if they're crying from too much laughter or because of the grotesque human tragedy of it all. So all loaded up with guilt and shame, this studio guy tells the room full of hack story-idea people "I want a movie about a retarded boy with a magic remote, pronto!" Then he slams the door with a flourish and stalks off to lunch featuring two martinis and a receptionist.

Once in the room, the idea takes on a life of its own. It's a short trip from "retarded boy" to Adam Sandler and here we are. Yes, here we (by "we" I mean "those of you who are able to leave your homes") are: stuck on this final pre-Superman weekend with this tiresome dreck that I take as a personal insult on behalf all Americans who are meant to swallow this brackish pabulum without so much as a... um... a... uh...


Ooooooh, Kate Beckinsale...

And Christopher Walken, my God. Sometimes his forays into retarded comedy pay off ("...more cowbell!" etc.) but mostly it's Wayne's World 2 or worse. In this one he plays the guy who makes the magic remote and you can tell he's a mad scientist type because he's got Mad Scientist Hair and he wears Mad Scientist Clothes. Just like everything else in this movie, a total waste of money and creative energy, assuming anyone (besides Mr. Walken) has any actual creative energy to be wasted in the first place. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it's too late to round up all the prints and burn them on a bonfire while we the liberated dance around it, stripped to the waist, our bodies painted only with smoke and sweat, dressed only in crude pants stitched together from the scraps of cast-aside "casual Friday" Hawaiian shirts.

You know what, I want another Beckinsale picture.


I'll be honest with you people, I'm leaning. Despite all my protestations, this does have Kate Beckinsale in it. She is hot. But then that wasn't nearly enough to make me see Pearl Harbor or either of the Underworld movies. But the hesitations there can be explained by my irrational fear of both vampires and Josh Hartnett.

This one... I don't know. I mean, like I said, it seems really stupid. And this is coming from the guy who recommended Nacho Libre last week. It should get the Andrew Shue Mark of Death on the Babysitter scale, but I'm reluctant. If only there were something that could decide it for me one way or the other...



Done and done.

One (out of 3) on the Hot Babysitter Scale.

Rescued, but just barely.



Pops


NON-SOCCER RELATED REQUIRED READING POST-SCRIPT

Mrs. Pops is on vacation next week. That means lots of planned activities where I load up on Paxil and pretend I'm part of human society. So posting may be hit-and-miss this coming week. Get your affairs in order now. Just in case.
- posted by Pops @ 10:46 AM