Omni's Random Video Noise

Kissing, Dogs, Fish, Fishing, Steak Sandwiches, Tuna Sandwhiches, and good god let me just bitch about this right now:

There's this really terrible joke in the movie that Murtagh's daughter is gonna be on TV and it turns out she's in a skimpy swimsuit to sell condoms, this naturally triggers too-old-for-this-****-Murtagh go on off on a conservative dad tangent, but it's comedically undercut by his youngest daughter shrugging it off since she's apparently been pretty much thoroughly desensitized to the taboo subject through her "Human Development" class at school which Murtagh scoffs at.

The joke here is that Murtagh is once again behind the times dood, and lagging behind is more progressive and socially conscious wife and children.

That's a joke.

It's a FINE joke, except it arrives hot on the heels of a "DAD! We've agree to boycott tuna because of the dolphins that get caught in the nets!"


And so, like a collapsing star, all of the humor in that scene is violently sucked out of existence, funnelled through the point of a needle to twist through space and spill out all over someone's face like a bad bean burrito come back for revenge.

Do I really need to explain why this completely destroys your progressiveness joke? Two words: demonstrable stupidity.


"Why not, honey?"


"So you're worried about the dolphins?"


"But we eat tuna, why aren't you worried about the tuna?"


"Well?"


*whips out gun, shoots child* "WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT USING FALLACIES UNDER THIS ROOF!? DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME!? I WILL NOT BE SPOKEN TO THAT WAY!"

Foolish daddy, doesn't understand that it's normal to learn about sex, now let's tell him that Big Sister's a lesbian and her boyfriend is actually a girl trapped in a boy's body.

Anyway, Lethal Weapon 2 follows the original largely well in tone, but I'm afraid it loses in two relatively substantial departments:

The first being Riggs' instability is no longer a unpredictable focal point of the story, the character development is already come and gone, so scenes like the one in Murtagh's bathroom seem only cute, if even homoerotic, than actual moments of character development. Both characters feel well worn into their own skin, and that's great, I really got a sense for the sort of person Murtagh was, but sadly, again, I was much more distant from Riggs.

And this is due in no small part due to his Overnight Romance with Eva Braun. I say Eva Braun because there's literally nothing in the movie to convince anyone that she isn't secretly working with the racist bad guys or that she isn't racist herself. I mean, just imagine that pillow talk:

7 minutes and 47 seconds in we see our secondary protagonist graphically blow a horses brains out with a shotgun and I am violently reminded of this conversation I just had which serves as just one of countless occasions in which I am made to feel like the odd one out, like I'm some picky bitch who whinges at the smallest most inconsequential things. "Meh~ they have horses in them so I don't like them, mehmehmeh" *easily provoked gag reflex*

The rest of the movie follows a revenge plot about a freed slave killing slave owners with absolutely no mention whatsoever of the horses that are bridled, ridden, and exhibit similar symptoms to what you might call Stockholm Syndrome, you know that thing that makes Samuel L. Jackson a bad guy even though he has no good reason to be a bad guy?

He's just a slave who's used to being a slave, and as much as some particularly unimaginative people might disagree, that most certainly happened and it's far from beyond unthinkable to consider the similar manner in which non-humans like horses can be trained to perform certain tasks even though they are well outside their own personal best interest and even come, by manner of what is commonly referred to as "the carrot and the stick", to rely upon that system of interaction.


This is the point at which I really am upset. You see me typing in all caps, changing font sizes, and dropping F-bombs left and right, but if you haven't yet gleaned by my wildly inconsistent vernacular, I'm sincerely insincere about how much movies anger me. I really don't get angry, it's been years since I've really been angry, and I consider myself a fairly patient person, pushed only to barest limits of what I hazard to call "tolerance" by the sort of arguments TONGO was fielding in the veg*nism thread.

That... that gets to me in a way you have no idea. It's an absolute betrayal of the precise manner of logic we all take for granted, accepted for when it benefits us and ignored at the earliest convenience. Because we daren't think we're wrong, because our ego is at stake and no matter how much suffering is sacrificed to our ego, it's only our own suffering that can supercede it. It's selfishness in it's most basic virile form, it's stunts our critical faculties and takes what would otherwise be something reasonably enjoyable like Django Unchained and ****ING INVERTS IT. Someone reached in arm deep, grabbed hold of the other side and ripped it inside out so the heart beats on the outside and yet no one acknowledges it, not because they're afraid to, but because their whole world is inside out, EVERYTHING they know is one of my ****ing fever dreams full of irreducible equations that have me wake up to splitting headache as my mind grasps for that fading abstract paradoxical space that I had once been invested in, but now can't remember how.


Django Unchained, to the eyes of someone who never stopped staring into the sun is a good movie. Jamie Foxx's a badass, Christoph Waltz is enjoyable, Samuel L. Jackson is a curious baddie, and of course Leonardo DiCaprio positively disappears into his role as the Big Bad within seconds of screentime. The story is an easy sell, the humor is off-color, but on-point, and to be honest about the only thing I'd really complain about is the extraordinary amount of squibs that fail to escape Tarantino's movies.

THAT IS... save for the most glaring issue with the movie. It doesn't end with horses, but starts with horses and horses are a cruel bloody staple of western cinema.

I'll say it once: You can not make me empathize with a character who escapes slavery through his enslavement of others. The movie even intentionally lampshades this point by lingering on Django removing all of the equipment from one of the horses before he rides it. They're in chains too, but this parallel, even plainly evident to Tarantino himself, was not enough to convince him, or even the creators of Tombstone for that matter, that the same logic should extend to the movie's production.

And so, in my most sincerest of sincereties... Quentin Tarantino?

**** you.

Nope!

Kissing, Dogs, whatever those Things were that they were making eat each other.

I beg you recall what I said about A Better Tomorrow when I said the movie started off clunky and ended really really good.

Kinda had the opposite experience here.

The opening scene of this movie, I thought, was excellent. It did a fantastic job of sucking me into a emotionally charged family moment before the spotlights come on to a great big *DOOM* and you lean back in your seat because this is about to be a pretty friggen' epic sci-fi ride.

Then we skip ahead 26 years.

Oh. Uh... really? I was, uh... kinda interested in seeing how that experience would come to affect this character, but we're just going to get empty looks at his present which somehow remained perfectly intact for nearly half this guy's life? Okay...

Anyway, so it's still pretty cool, I mean, yeah it's not infrequently just human characters with some solid color body paint on, but there's some neat stuff here that really gives me big Star Trek and Star Wars vibes, just that whole intergalactic community of aliens going on. There's some really neat looking locations too, in fact I daresay the backgrounds looked gorgeous, I really liked them.

The humor is obviously a pretty significant part of the movie and a couple lines get a giggle out of me, but uh... I dunno, as much as I enjoy the somewhat inappropriate soundtrack, the 80s references really feel like cheap fish-out-of-water jokes that are, again, 26 years old now. I like the vague absurdity that rings the fringe of movies like Return of the Living Dead, but the premise of all these characters and their singular gimmicks; Main Guy wants to be called "Starlord", Main Girl is your stereotypical Ice Queen, Whatshisface takes everything literally, Rocket doesn't like being denigrated as a raccoon, and Groot only ever says the line, "I am Groot", the jokes just aren't punchy enough most of the time and when much of the dialog exists purely to set up these lines I feel like a lot of it goes to waste.

I think my favorite joke was just when Whatshisface says "Nothing goes over my head, my reflexes are too fast, I would catch it", everything after that just didn't live up and this is before the halfway point of the movie.

AT the halfway point of the movie, everything just grinds to sudden friggen' halt when Main Girl opens her mouth and vomits exposition all up and down Main Guy's face about how she has a tortured past and you should feel really bad for her because that sad piano music just this second started playing. Main Guy does that lean-in-for-a-kiss thing, and it simply doesn't matter whether they subvert it for a joke or not, they've now officially shipped these characters, I'm completely ripped out of the movie and left adrift in space as my role as an observer now becomes identifying cliches.

Almost immediately after this point fatigue got to me and I seriously just closed my eyes for a good 10-15 minutes while the movie was playing and just listened to it. A whole lotta banter about how we gotta save the world, and think about the galaxy for once, and I'm going with you or without you, so here's the plan.

I open my eyes and everyone's flying off to the final battle, THANK GOD, just ****ing get on with it already.

Anticlimax.

...

Really? We just out-of-nowhere manage to take down the Big Bad's ship which he survives so we punk him out with a dance? Eh...

It wasn't terrible, but I'd hoped for something more and I ESPECIALLY disapprove of using that scenario to feebly try and call back that excellent opening scene with his mom on her deathbed, HOLY CRAP that was misguided. Had the rest of the movie been on the level I might've thought it touching, I mean it's nothing I haven't enjoyed in other variations...


...but it's barren of any of the narrative weight some actual character development would have accumulated by this point in the movie.

It's the neat sort of movie for geeks who like to pick out cameos by Stan Lee and Lloyd Kaufman, but for me it just needed a good push in either it's story or comedy departments to really kick off the ground.

Pizza, Pork, Eggs, Tuna Casserole, Marriage, hell even Sex, it did not keep it clean.

This movie was pretty much just what I expected it to be, but a teensy bit funnier. A got a couple good laughs out of it, I really liked the extreme self-awareness like the X-Men references and the pointing out of tropes like the Superhero Landing (he now owns the tvtropes quote) and whatnot, I really liked those. A few self-aimed jabs at Ryan Reynolds who I've liked since Just Friends, stomached in Buried, and avoided in The Green Lantern (which is also referenced). A bunch of comments about general geekery really do hammer home that Deadpool really is a superhero fan's sort of superhero and here they've perhaps broadened him a bit to catch the more casual comic book movie fans that will recognize jokes about distinguishing "origin stories" and "ensemble casts".

I've really little familiarity with the Deadpool character, but I know that irreverence is a big part of his character. Unfortunately, you can take irreverence too far and what could have been an amusing subversion of superhero tropes featuring a self-depricating character without the classical sense of justice could have worked brilliantly and I do say that there are regular moments of cleverness in the movie, particularly in regards to the dialog... but then you just got potty humor.

Farting followed by "hashtag #driveby" is as millennial and juvenile as it gets and hearing Deadpool reference Twitter and Facebook and go on about drugs, ****, sex, and even **** WITH sex is more than enough to dial the funny meter way down for me.

The tonal whiplash that comes from ripping back and forth between the goofy and over-the-top present to the awkward and too-serious origin story doesn't do it much favors either. It just begins with Deadpool in a cab picking gum out of the seats, it seriously couldn't just stay there, we needed to stick to convention and give him a tragic backstory? There isn't even any lampshade hung on this, we just get this self-aware parody that can't even remain a parody.

Was I supposed to connect to his relationship with this girl? Am I supposed to treat this like Mask or something? What happened to Death? Why is he dating Copycat?

Whatever, just as I figured they bent too low for the jokes and even put a bullet in Deadpool's rectum while they were at it.

I figure this movie is aimed at the sorts of people who are either diehard Deadpool fans or just haven't heard these sorts of jokes before.