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The Hat Trick, vol. 3: The Good Guy
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by RFP
For the Hat Trick, we reach into a hat and pull out a movie that we are forced to watch and review. Why? Well, why not? I reached into the hat and this is what I got....
"I want to touch her where she pees"
The Good Guy (2009)
starring Alexis Bledel, Scott Porter, Bryan Greenberg, Andrew McCarthy (all star cast!)
Remember those short stories you wrote when you were 16?
If you never tried to write a short story when you were 16, do you remember when that kid you used to know wrote a short story and made you read it?
The Good Guy is what happens when someone takes the short story that they wrote when they were 16 and turn it into a screenplay and eventually a barely released indie romance film starring a former Gilmore Girl.
Your setting is a brokerage firm on Wall Street or maybe somewhere left of Wall Street to avoid confusion with a much better movie dealing with a stock brokerage firm. In this firm, most of the key players have Top Gun style nicknames like Shakerspeare, Steve-O, and Cash.
Andrew McCarthy plays Cash, the head of this particular firm. The Good Guy is what happens to former Brat Packers whose careers peak in 1987. For the two of you who are wondering, I believe career fell off drastically after Mannequin. You can't get any better than Mannequin.
Anyways, McCarthy's Cash has a penis for a brain (or brain in his penis? eh?), so that everything that leaves his mouth is either precluded by a variation of "fuck" or is dripping with not-so-subtle sexual innuendo. Example: "That guy couldn't sell vagina on a pirate ship. Daniel is a lovely fella. He's about as much fun as chlamydia."
That's the level of quality we're dealing with here.
The narrator is Tommy Fielding (Scott Porter), the hotshot head seller at the firm, who has everything in life, including deep thoughts such as: "If you thought Wall Street was full of bullshitters, you should try having a relationship here" followed by the ever-popular, perpetually cliched "love is a warzone" metaphor. If you're Pat Benetar, you'll disagree and believe that love is a battlefield, but to each his/her own.
He's mostly referring to his main girlfriend, Beth (that Gilmore girl, Alexis Bledel), and the several other relationships he has scattered throughout the city, but that's definitely a "twist" that I completely ruined for you, but that you should see coming from the start if you are a sane, coherent human being.
Tommy has to mentor Daniel, a shy broker in the firm, after one of the top sellers there takes a better paying job. Daniel's standard is a joke which goes: "What do you call a fish with two knees? A two knee fish." He's what your parents and Huey Lewis would call a square. So am I, since I just made a Huey Lewis reference.
In a wacky twist o' fate, Daniel sees Beth in a bookstore while on the phone with Tommy. Tommy says to go make a move on the cute girl in the bookstore, not knowing he's advising his boy to mack on his lady. UH-OH!
In order to further groom his protege, Tommy continues to blow off Beth when she wants to hang out and chat, all the while giving Daniel advice on how to woo the mysterious book store girl. UH-OH!
In another inspired scene reminiscent of the almost iconic scene from The 40 year Old Virgin where Steve Carell has his chest waxed and yells "Kelly Clarkson," Beth and her friends chat about life and relationships while getting their vaginas waxed. One of her friends blurts out "Oh bitch fucker!" Humor.
At any rate, Daniel finds out that Tommy and Beth are dating at their company party and ends up being the only male in Beth's book club.
You can probably connect the dots here as to how this one ends. All I can say is that the ending to The Good Guy is the most sickeningly sappy happy ending that I have ever seen.
The Final Word: "Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with bulimia at all" - Shakespeare, a black broker with a faux English accent, trying to pick up a girl at the bar
My rating for The Good Guy: I reached into the hat to pull out a rabbit and pulled out the steaming, rotting remains of Andrew McCarthy's career instead.
-RFP
Follow RFP on twitter: @mretailslave
The Hat Trick, vol. 2: Revenge of the Bridesmaids
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by Amanda
So, we decided to do a trick, with a hat, and movies, and reviewing. Randomly, I pulled out Revenge of the Bridesmaids. Joy.
A TV movie, made for ABC family. They describe it as :
Abigail and Parker run into their friend who has lost the love of her life.
Netflix describes it as:
Raven-Symoné and Joanna Garcia star in this comic romp as two pals who return to their hometown only to discover that their mortal enemy (Virginia Williams) is now engaged to their best friend's ex-boyfriend. Naturally, the girls aren't going to take this lying down. In the interest of true love, the pair conspires to halt the impending wedding and reunite the real lovebirds ... even if it means employing all manner of trickery and deceit.
I describe it as:
Tripe.
The whole 87 minutes left me waiting for the end. It's the same story, women being catty and manipulative to get what they want, because it's for LOVE. Bah. After the one couple breaks up, he has a romp with the other "frenemy", she lied to the groom about a pregnancy, and out of duty instead of intelligence, he decides to marry her. The two meddlesome friends show up for some stupid thing, find out their other friend is miserable because she made a mistake, and decide to sabotage the wedding. They almost fail, and then everyone lives happily ever after. The end. No consequences.
Memorable quotes? How about when they are referencing the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, and completely muck up the plot. Or at the end, when there's a banner that says "The thinky girls are back"?
Really, this movie was wretched, I cannot seem to think straight enough to string enough sentences together to properly communicate how contemptible this movie is. I would rather eat human flesh than see this again. It's not even bad enough to be awesomely bad. Or amusingly bad.
moral of the story? if you don't like your life, ruin someone else's, and yours will improve greatly.
My Rating: I reached into a hat to pull out a bouquet and I got leprosy instead.
- Ro-Ads
https://twitter.com/#!/mandasaures_rex" target="_blank">Follow Amanda on Twitter: @mandasaurus_rex
The Hat Trick, vol. 1: Deep Blue Sea
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by RFP
Last night on Twitter, Amanda, better known on this site as Ro-Ads, got ahold of me and said that we should jump start this venerable website again. She thought we start out by putting a bunch of movies in a hat, randomly grab one out, then watch and review whatever movie we drew out of that hat. This is what I grabbed...
"Beneath this glassy surface, a world of gliding monsters"
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
starring Thomas Jane, Samuel L. Jackson, LL Cool J, Saffron Burrows
If "The Notebook" has taught me anything, it's that Alzheimer's is a horrible, tragic disease and if the rest of pop culture has taught me anything, it's that the future is a bleak, hopeless disaster.
What do these two things have in common and how do they both relate to "Deep Blue Sea"?
If a movie takes place in the future, inevitably some unimaginable occurrence has plunged the planet into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. These events could include, but are not limited to:
1. The ever-popular zombie apocalypse. However, at this point everyone has formulated a foolproof zombie plan, so a potential real-life zombie apocalypse should be thwarted within a matter of days. (ex: I Am Legend, 28 Days Later)
2. A robot uprising. (ex: The Terminator movies; I, Robot; The Matrix trilogy)
3. An alien invasion. (ex: District 9; Battlefield: Earth)
4. A catastrophic environmental disaster that leaves humans on the brink of extinction and the complete breakdown of normal society. (ex: 2012; The Day After Tomorrow; Children of Men; Escape from LA, Mad Max, Waterworld)
5. The last and, in my mind, scariest one: the animals take over.
Anyone who watched "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" knows that the primates of the world were given increased intelligence through a series of experiments designed to cure Alzheimer's Disease, a trait that was passed genetically from generation to generation.
When the planet is controlled by damned dirty apes, where is the only place that's safe? The oceans, maybe? Not so fast. There's always those hyper-intelligent sharks to deal with. Sharks given increased intelligence in "Deep Blue Sea" as a result of what? That's right: experiments designed to cure Alzheimer's.
How can any human survive in a world where super smart sharks and super smart monkeys are trying to kill us all?
Robert Neville (Will Smith) in "I Am Legend" attempts to cure cancer and, instead, turns most of the world's population into rubber-faced rage zombies. The faceless scientists in "28 Days Later" test some strange virus and, a few monkey bites later, there's thousands of zombies sprinting across England.
Now you know why PETA is against animal testing in laboratories. They're just trying to save the world.
Digressions are my curse, I apologize, so let's talk some more about Deep Blue Sea.
In Deep Blue Sea, Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) genetically engineers three super intelligent Mako sharks in order to harvest their brains for an Alzheimer's cure.
Naturally, when crazy scientists muck around things not meant to be for this earth, shit goes south in a hurry.Thomas Jane plays the shark wrangler hired to keep these Makos in check while Preacher (LL Cool J) is the cook who becomes the de facto shark slaying badass.
These sharks eventually become aware of their captivity and yearn to escape to the…wait for it…deep blue sea.
Samuel L. Jackson, making his 157th film (approximately) of the '90s, plays the generous benefactor who funds this experiment. He also gives this memorable pep talk to help pull the survivors together:
"You think water's fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder"
That scene is sums up the entire movie as a whole: awful, vacuous dialogue with loud noises and sudden action design to startle your average moviegoer.
However, Ladies Love Cool James and I do too. LL Cool J's Preacher, the foul-mouthed, god-fearing cook in the lab is a fun character to watch, despite the lame material he has to deliver.
For example: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Because I carry a big stick and I'm the meanest mother fucker in the valley! Two sharks down, Lord! One demon fish to go! Can I get an Amen?"
LL Cool J also provides a song to the movie's soundtrack called "Deepest Bluest", the opening line of which is "Deepest, Bluest, my hat is like a shark's fin" So, yeah, the soundtrack is of the same quality as the movie. Cheesy, forgettable, yet so much fun to laugh at. As Preacher says when the final shark is blown up in a sequence that any shark movie connoisseur would immediately compare to the granddaddy of 'em all, Jaws, "Bring me some sushi!"
The Final Word: Carter Blake (Samuel L. jackson): "No, what you've done is taken God's oldest killing machine and given it will and desire. What you've done is knocked us all the way to the bottom of the goddamn food chain. It's not a great leap forward in my book."
My Rating of Deep Blue Sea: I reached in the hat to pull out a rabbit and found a TURD instead.
-RFP
https://twitter.com/#!/MRetailSlave" target="_blank">Follow RFP on Twitter: @mretailslave
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