Screwtape Chronicles Archives: August 2007
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27 August 2007
Film Review: Hot Rod
I read somewhere that Hot Rod was originally developed as a vehicle for Will Ferrell. If that’s true, and who knows if it is because I read it somewhere on the Internet, then the script must’ve gone through major changes after it was handed off to the Lonely Island guys (Samberg et. al.). Will Ferrell vehicles are loud and dumb. I’m not talking about the movies where he plays against type, such as Stranger Than Fiction, I’m talking about the movies that he creates from scratch, such as Anchorman. Those movies are loud and dumb and absurd. Hot Rod most definitely is not. It’s absurd, sure, but it’s not loud. It steals more from Napoleon Dynamite than it does from Talladega Nights. And Napoleon Dynamite, while somewhat enjoyable, isn’t exactly worth stealing from.
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27 August 2007
Ocean’s 13: The Buck Fifty Review
So I’m going to start a new kind of film review, the “Buck Fifty Review.” I’m calling them “Buck Fifty Reviews” because they will be reviews of movies that I see at the dollar fifty theater here in Tulsa. Super creative, I know. As it turns out, I only paid one dollar to see Ocean’s 13 because of some sort of special pricing, but I had already decided to call this column the “Buck Fifty Review,” and I refuse to be a slave to unforeseeable circumstances. Plus I just like the ring of “Buck Fifty Review,” it works better than “Dollar Review” or “Buck Review” or something like that.
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20 August 2007
Film Review: Stardust
I used to wonder what it felt like to all those non-Harry Potter reading folk to see a Harry Potter movie. The Harry Potter movies are pretty good, but, like any adaptation of a book, they necessarily leave a lot of plot elements out of the film. Accordingly, people who only see the movies are only getting a portion of the story. The Harry Potter movies do a decent job of getting the main story onto the screen, but they always leave something out. Fortunately for that book-to-screen series, the excised events haven’t rendered the movies unintelligible. Sometimes, though, book adaptations leave out important plot points, thus making the movie accessible only to people that have already read the book. And, for the first half of Stardust, I really wondered if this was the case, because I kept thinking to myself, “Am I missing something here?” It’s not that the first half of the film was necessarily bad; it was pretty good, and funny, and pretty well acted and all that other stuff. I just couldn’t get my head around the story. I felt like I was missing some crucial plot element, some crucial introduction to the main character, or something else that I couldn’t quite figure out.
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17 August 2007
Film Review: Superbad
The question is: does Superbad live up to the expectations? Short answer: pretty much. If it came out before 40 Year Old Virgin, I’d probably be hailing it as the coming of a new age of comedy. Unfortunately for it, it’s not the first, so, short of reinventing the teen sex genre (which it doesn’t do), there was no way it could be as hilarious as advertised. The fact remains, though, Superbad is pretty damn funny. It’s not supergreat, but it’s not superhorrible either. I guess if I had to settle for the snarky one liner to describe the movie, I’d go with its superallright. And you can quote me on that.
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17 August 2007
Op-Ed: Oh Counterpoints, We Hardly Knew Ye…
So that didn’t work. I can’t say I’m surprised, to be honest. As much as I really wanted this thing to work, I think I always knew, deep down, that this whole idea was destined to fail. Talking about God is not an easy thing to do. Add to that two people on opposite sides of the equation, two people that are dead set sure that they are both correct, two people that almost derive pleasure from arguing, and well, you’ve got a recipe for less than civil conversation. And since we couldn’t keep the tone of our responses to a level that I thought was appropriate, I felt that it would be better to discontinue.
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14 August 2007
Op-Ed: “Everybody Is Stupid But Me”
Let’s say you (hypothetical you, that is) believe that God exists. You know that God exists, not only that, you know that a New Testament version of God exists, and everything that the Bible preaches is one hundred percent, no-doubt-about-it truth. It’s a fact. So that’s you. What about me? I don’t agree with you. I don’t know that God exists; maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. I also know that the Bible is not one hundred percent true. I have no way of proving this, though, which you politely point out. I reply by saying that you really have no way of proving your point of view, either. So. We’re just a couple of dudes standing there, stuck. We could keep talking, of course, trying to convince each other to switch sides, but really, after a little while, we’ll just be wasting our breath. Because, at your core, you think that everyone that agrees with your point of view is correct, and everyone that disagrees is an idiot, or blind, or misinformed, or something. And me? I think the same damn thing. So where do we go from there?
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12 August 2007
Counterpoints: The God Delusion - Chapter One
Chapter One of The God Delusion, ‘A Deeply Religious Non-Believer,’ is the true introduction to Dawkins’ book. In it, Dawkins begins to lay the groundwork for the major arguments against religious faith that are to come. In so doing, he splits the chapter in to two sections, ‘Deserved Respect’ and ‘Undeserved Respect.’ ‘Deserved Respect’ takes on the differences between Einsteinian religion and supernatural religion, while ‘Undeserved Respect’ seeks to explore the notion that, in Western society, religion is given more respect than it deserves. Read on…
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12 August 2007
Film Review: Rush Hour 3
As I said in my review of The Bourne Ultimatum, recent movie trilogies suck. Let’s go ahead and add the Rush Hour series to this list of crap. I feel kind of bad about having to do this, though, because the first two Rush Hour movies really aren’t that bad. I really like the first one because, before Rush Hour was a franchise, everything about it was fresh. Christ Tucker was genuinely funny, and, although we didn’t get the crazy ass Jackie Chan moves that are characteristic of his Hong Kong flicks, we did get some cool action scenes from Chan as well. Rush Hour 2 was also a pretty decent movie. It had a little of that recycled feel, but enough of it was new and funny to make it an enjoyable, if disposable, movie. Rush Hour 3, however, is where the good vibes come to end. I’m trying to come up with some witty flourish, or something else substantial to say about the movie, but really, there is nothing more to say than this: Rush Hour 3 really sucks.
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9 August 2007
Counterpoints: The God Delusion - Preface
And so it begins, the great experiment in which my brother-in-law, Charles Jones of pos51.org, and I set forth on what is sure to be a months long inquiry into Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Lee Strobel’s The Case for the Creator, and Alister McGrath & Joanna Collicutt McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion? (a book that seeks to specifically refute the Dawkins text). Will we make it to the finish line? Who knows. I’m working and writing three or four screenplays, and Charles is working and, oh, by the way, is married and has a newborn child, so demands on our time might intervene every now and then. And we might get so fed up with each other that we abandon the whole endeavor. But I hope not. I hope we reach the finish line. Because, to me, this is an important topic, maybe the most important topic that there really is. Does God exist? Read on…
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9 August 2007
Film Review: The Bourne Ultimatum
Recent movie trilogies suck. Look at The Matrix, or Pirates of the Caribbean, or the Star Wars prequels. They suck. All of them started with promise, delivering a very well made first film (except Star Wars, of course). Then all of them proceeded to get bloated as all hell in their second and third iterations, becoming convoluted, confusing, overlong, and less interesting than the films that spawned them. Which is why the Bourne trilogy is such a breath of fresh air. Instead of getting worse as they go along, the Bourne movies get better and better, choosing to use each previous film as a narrative building block for the next one instead of amplifying the most popular elements of the first film and losing track of any semblance of narrative, as is most often the case. Read on…
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