Willow (1988)

We're sticking with the fantasy genre this week and reviewing Willow, or, as I like to call it, George Lucas presents Lord of the Rings.

C'mon. This movie is a complete rip. Not only does it steal the basic premise of LotR and replace the ring with a baby, but there are also ideas stolen from Gulliver's Travels and The Odyssey. The funny thing is that if you watch the special features, there's a featurette that starts off as follows: In a world full of sequels and movies with numbers behind their titles comes Willow, a completely original adventure. Sure, George, keep telling yourself that.

It's really not a bad movie, but it's far from being great. Val Kilmer is really the only human main character. Everyone else is a fucking midge or a midgier midge or a goat or something.

The best part of the movie is that the entire two hours is filled with racial slurs and hate crimes. Everyone calls Willow "Peck," which I'm pretty sure is a midge version of "Nigger." Everyone's like, "Move, Peck," "Out of the way, Peck." Then they'll push him over. It's pretty funny. Apparently the Elwyn are the Mexicans of this fantasy world.

Speaking of midges, George Lucas must be a god to those people...and not just because he towers over them. Lucas put more midges to work in the 80's than any circus, carnival, or freak show. If you thought the Ewok village put Midges to work, you ain't seen nothing yet! There's an entire Midge society in this movie! Hundreds of legit midges in a midge village built to scale. Maybe Tim Burton should have watched this movie before he hired a single Oompa Loompa and cloned him a million times for his crapfest Charlie remake. Fuck you, Burton. Fuck you and your shitty remakes.

Back to Willow, there's your typical fantasy elements here. A magic midge, a mighty warrior, a shape-shifting Gandalf with a vagina, monkey trolls, a two-headed dragon, the evil queen from Sleeping Beauty, and two comic relief characters that just piss you off more than anything. Lucas might have well just plugged R2D2 and C3PO into this one and called it a day.

I remember watching this as a kid and thinking, "I'll probably bash this in a movie blog twenty years from now" and lo and behold, here I am. That was a pretty good prediction considering I didn't even know what the Internet was at the time. Not a great 80's flick but there are some fun moments (most courtesy of Val Kilmer) and you'll never see a movie with more midge power than this one. Now they have robots for that sort of thing.

Why It's Watchable: Try not to stare with your mouth agape as an entire midge village, built to midge scale, comes to life right before your eyes! Plus it's always fun to watch George Lucas FAIL!

Best Quote:

High Aldwin: Go in the direction the bird is flying!

Bungelcutt: He's going back to the village.

High Aldwin: Ignore the bird. Follow the river!

The Princess Bride (1987)

Uh oh...KEVIN ARNOLD ALERT! KEVIN ARNOLD ALERT!

All right, I know he has a minor role, but he's still in there.

The Princess Bride is one of those rare movies that you watch as a kid and still love just as much as an adult. As a kid, I loved the sword fights and the R.O.U.S. and the storming of the castle. As an adult, I love the humor and the satirical look at fairy tales. It's just a good movie. It really does come off as some old fairytale a grandfather is telling his grandson (Kevin Arnold). It's innocent and fun and there's some twists here and there (Westley dying catches you off guard the first viewing), but you know true love will prevail in the end.

The characters are perfect. I couldn't picture anyone else playing any of the characters. When the movie was first being cast, Andre the Giant wasn't available. Instead, the director was looking to hire a nobody to play the giant, Fezzik...a nobody named ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER! Can you imagine Arnold saying, "Anyone want a peanut?" Anyways, Andre was made for the part, as was pretty much everyone in this film. The only character I don't really enjoy is Billy Crystal's portrayal of Miracle Max, which comes off as a little too Jew-heavy for my taste.

My family and I used to quote this movie all the time and then I married a woman who quotes the movie AND knows all the lyrics to the music. Everyone knows "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" and "Inconceivable" and "As you wish"...at least everyone should. People are so lame nowadays. Whenever I quote a totally sweet movie and no one knows what I'm quote from, all I can think is...INCONCEIVABLE! And yes, I know what it means.

Why It's Awesome: Just listen to the settings and tell me the movie's not awesome: Cliffs of Insanity, Fire Swamp, Pit of Despair. And one other small factor...KEVIN FUCKIN' ARNOLD!

Best Quote:

Buttercup: Westley, what about the R.O.U.S.s?

Westley: The Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.

Westley is then immediately pwned by an ROUS.

Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)

Now comedy fans will swear to their dying breath that Holy Grail is the superior flick, but, personally, I've always been a bigger fan of Life of Brian. If it weren't for Christian idiots considering the movie to be an affront to Jesus Christ (which it's not), I think Life of Brian would get a lot more credit.

Sure, there's some goofball stuff here (the scene where everyone is hiding from the Romans in the most ridiculous hiding spots ever) and some quality British humor (the Roman guard correcting Brian's Latin rather than punishing him for defacing the Roman capital), but there's also some quality social commentary, too. It's a fairly accurate portrayal of the religious hysteria, fanaticism, and persecution during Jesus's lifetime (and let's be honest, that shit still goes on today).

The scene that sticks out in my mind as just being the perfect satirical statement about religion is the scene where Brian addresses the crowd (who now think he's the messiah) and he tells them that they don't need to follow anyone, that they're all individuals. And then the crowd responds, in unison, "Yes...we're all individuals." Perfect. And I'm sure that's the scene that religious zealots hate because that's the perfect depiction of their "flock." And I'm sure the scene with the group of crucified men singing "Always look on the bright side of your life" didn't help either.

Of course, then there's the scene with the space aliens driving around with Brian in the back of their spaceship so there's a nice contrast between the thought-provoking and the just plain silly. And to this day I can't say Biggus Dickus without cracking a smile...

Why It's Awesome: The greatest British comedy troupe of all-time makes a movie so controversial it's banned in Norway. What's better than that?

Best Quote:

Pontius Pilate: Anybody else feel like a little giggle when I mention my fwiend....Biggus...Dickus?

Inception = The Most Overrated Movie of All Time

I don't usually comment on new releases, but, as an intelligent fan of film, I feel it's my personal responsibility to chime in on the buzz surrounding Chistopher Nolan's Inception, now #1 at the box office for three consecutive weeks.

Let's get this out of the way: Inception is a good movie. Visually - an amazing piece of cinema.

I will not argue that this is a bad movie. I will, however, argue to the death that Inception is not only the best movie of the year, but also "one of the best films ever made." Nope, no way, not even close. I have already almost forgotten the movie. In fact, if it wasn't for the insane comments on boards across the Internet, I would have already forgotten the movie and moved on to awaiting the EPIC arrival of The Expendables on August 13.

Allow me to explain why Inception does not deserve the fan boy worship it is receiving.

First, the aspect that boggles my mind is that people are claiming this is one of the best written movies ever. FALSE! Script-wise, this film is an absolute mess. Act I is ridiculously long and bogged down by an insane amount of explanation. Rules are set up early in the film (basically the first hour is nothing but set-up for the actual story) and then nearly every one of these rules is broken at the end (If you die in a dream, you wake up...except in THIS dream, if you die, you will fall into purgatory, never to escape...EXCEPT now we can come pull you out of purgatory, thus negating all the emphasis we placed earlier on the importance of not dying).

The movie fails in the same way that movies like Minority Report fail. In order to get the story going, the audience needs to be force-fed way too much explanation in order to justify the fictional universe of the movie. And before anyone says something asinine like, "You just didn't get it!" Oh, I got it, asshole. It really isn't that complex; it's just too complex to be effective in a movie. I think the reason people are praising the writing is because they didn't understand the story and for some reason dumb people convince themselves that if they don't understand something, then that must mean it's awesome.

Second, the ending that people are claiming is the best ending since Planet of the Apes (the first one, not the shitty Marky Mark version), was LAME. The most cliche ending of a movie about dreams is that the main character doesn't know if he's dreaming or not. I PRAYED to every deity that I know that that was not how the movie would end and that's exactly how it ended. People, let me explain something: There's no ambiguity here. He was obviously still in the dream. His kids were the same age, wearing the same clothes, and the top was still spinning. There's no question here. Still dreaming...not interesting...cliche...lazy writing...

See, the problem is that we're so used to watching shitty movies like Transformers or The A-Team that when a decent movie is actually made, we blow its greatness way out of proportion. The same thing happened when Dark Knight hit the theaters. Great movie, but did it warrant any awards (for the living or the dead)? Probably not. People are so overwhelmed by shit these days that when they're thrown a life preserver, like Inception, they praise it as their savior. Inception was just a good movie, folks...nothing more.