What the fuck was Samuel L. Jackson doing in the movie Patriot Games?  If you haven’t seen the film, he is a black whatever in the US Navy.  I haven’t seen that type of shit since Denzel was King Navaling in Crimson Tide.  In the aforementioned movie, Jack Ryan kills an IRA member in England and the man’s brother makes it his life’s goal to kill Han Solo.  He crosses Baltic Avenue, Park Place, and one of those railroads to get to the land of opportunity so he can off him.  He shows up at Jack’s abode, and attempts to do him the wrong way.  His fellow compatriots only want the “royal” that’s there, not our hero Jackie.  At the end Jacknasty takes off in a souped up Jon Boat, and evil McScary chases after him.  This is basically an international version of the Dukes of Hazzard.  Of course, our home meat tricks him into going down a waterfall or some shit, and he dives off the side like Michael Phillips with the bends.  All is well and - at the end of the flick – you discover that Jack’s boys are good swimmers, because his woman is done swolled up with their second little tax break.  In the words of ToYoda, “Mmmmm, fertile he is.”

The IRA has always gotten a bad rap.  In reality, they’re just a bunch of gents who got real drunk and decided the fucking carpetbaggers who ran their island were a bunch of summer teeth havin – “Some are here, some are there” – bland food eating bastards who had no right controlling Northern Ireland.  I’ll be upfront and honest like a low hanging gut butterin up to the biscuit, my family should be called the Glenfiddich Bushmills.  Instead of Scotch-Irish, they should call us Kentucky Gentlemen Very Old Barton.  We aren’t a people as much as we are a drink with a loud opinion.  Whereas I’m partial to a pipe bomb strategically placed to help free oneself from oppression, I’m not saying death has to be part of a revolution.  Well, on third thought, yes I am.  It isn’t all Beatles’ songs and Nikes, it’s a fight for your fucking existence.  See the War of Independence and/or the Civil War – if you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up under the “You Should Know This You Stupid Bastard” section at your local library.  Come to think about it, what war isn’t about independence or versus a bunch of civilians?  If you’re not trying to independate yourself from someone, you’re not just gonna pick up arms like a pathologist trying to stock a pawn shop.  If you fight anyone, you’re essentially attacking their civility.  Even if you win, you’re still fucked because now you have a whole mess of motherfuckers just waiting for the right time to kick you in the governmental sack.

Isn’t it funny how wars got their names?  I mean, wars are evil shit and no one should wish that on anybody.  However, how did they come up with the name ”World War I”?  Is there a percentage of countries that have to be involved before it can be a world war?  Is there a waiting list?  Backwar passes?  I’m not sure.  There is that one war where we finally got the Brits to fuck off and go back to their joint.  We call it the War of Independence – I think the Brits call it “The Day the Music Died”.  It’s like just because we won, it was all about our independence.  If we had lost, it probably would have been called “The War Against English Aggression That Failed Miserably” – not as catchy, but closer to the truth.  I guess WWII, or Dubya Dubya Eye Eye, must have been like a sequel.  As we all know, every good book or movie needs a sequel.  How else do you explain Rambo II, Rambo III, and Rambo, or Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, and Rocky?  What do we learn from these examples of sequels?  Sylvester Stallone will box or kill gooks to get what he wants.  He would be an extremely dangerous motherfucker if you happened to be a Vietnamese boxer with a chip on his shoulder.  Incidentally, I used the word “gooks” for literary effect.  My uncle married a woman from Vietnam, I have two Vietnamese cousins, and I could care less what sexuality a person is…  

The site will be on another temporary hiatus while I enjoy a much-needed vacation and Mr. Smith continues his attempt to improve the law and our system of justice, but we’ll be back and possibly better than ever in a week or so. To explain or somehow attempt to justify my absence, the following two comedy classics both represent why I haven’t done much bloggin’ lately, and why that will continue.

Megavideo is set up so you can only watch 72 consecutive minutes before being cut off, but as with most restrictions on the Internet, there are ways around it. To play, hit red play button, close pop-up, hit green play button and enjoy!:

If the upcoming movie Your Highness starred anyone but Eastbound and Down’s Danny McBride and stoner extraordinaire James Franco, I would’ve said it reminds me of an awful, adult-oriented remake of The Princess Bride mixed with elements from every Cheech and Chong movie ever made.  I still don’t think it will be mentioned in the same conversation as other classic comedy films; but if the following video is any indication of what McBride is bringing to the table, it looks like he’s doing everything he can to make sure the movie is how he imagined it inside his own head.

In this morning’s post, I covered a number of the most unnecessary sequels that have been made in my lifetime.  Now it is time to examine the worst of the worst, the crème de la crap if you will.  So let’s take a look at this haters’ picks for the five worst sequels to good movies:

# 5

The Crow: City of Angels: The original film starred the son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, and rising star, Brandon.  He played a gothic-type superhero who is brought back from the dead to avenge the death of his fiancée.  You would think a freak accident that killed Brandon Lee during the final days of filming would have been enough to discourage a sequel, but the suits in Hollywood thought otherwise.  The Crow became a cult classic because it is dark, edgy, and provides a new take on the superhero genre.  The sequel copied and pasted the original plot, and attempted to capture the same feel by casting a guy who resembled Brandon Lee.  The director also refused to do the DVD commentary for the sequel, probably because he realized how much it sucked.

# 4

Teen Wolf Too: I agree that, in theory, two teen wolves are always better than one.  But if you can’t even talk the original Stiles into coming back for a sequel, you know you have a dud on your hands.  The second film stars Jason Bateman as the cousin of Michael J. Fox’s character.  He receives an athletic scholarship because of his family history, even though he has never played a sport in his life.  Yet instead of being a basketball star like his cousin, he becomes a boxer and soon finds that he too can turn into a wolfman.  He gains popularity and a harem of hot 80′s chicks, but loses his old friends and a little bit of himself.  You know, that old hairy chestnut.  Unfortunately, Bateman didn’t get the opportunity to emulate the sick playground moves that MJ Fox once threw down on the hardwood:

# 3

Weekend at Bernie’s 2: I have no problem admitting that I liked the first Weekend at Bernie’s because it was a funny idea.  And it featured the guy who starred in one of the funniest movies ever - Mannequin.  As you can read in the tagline, ”Bernie is back…and he’s still dead.”  But now he has some rhythm in that rotting carcass of his.  After being involved in a voodoo ceremony, Bernie now dances toward a buried treasure whenever music is played.  This leads the two main characters on a wacky trip to the Virgin Islands, and the viewer has to put up with unbearable scenes like this for 97 minutes:

# 2

Major League II: Even though I don’t really care about the sport of baseball, comedy films don’t get much better than the first Major League.  Oddly enough, the sequel has almost the exact same cast as the original film, and it still manages to suck big time.  I guess you could call it the Wesley Snipes Effect.  Instead of a rags-to-riches tale, Major League II takes place the year after the Indians won the pennant.  The plot plays on the negative effect it has had on the players, and the team’s attempt to get back on track.  So it’s a riches-to-rags-to-riches story.  There are a few funny parts, but trying to capture the essence of the original film proved to be an impossible task.  And not even Sheen’s warlock powers, tiger blood, and Adonis DNA could save it.  To this day, I still find myself repeating one-liners from the original film, and the actor who played Harris (Chelcie Ross) recalls my personal favorite for a fan in the following video:

# 1, The Worst Sequel EVER

Caddyshack II: I can’t even talk about this sequel with throwing up in my mouth a little.  The original Caddyshack is the alpha & omega of comedy films, and a movie that I can quote pretty much every line verbatim.  One of the things that made Caddyshack so great was the character casting.  Whether it was Rodney Dangerfield or Ted Knight, every part seemed as if it was written just for that actor/actress.  When you throw in virtuoso performances from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, it is not hard to see why this film continues to gain acclaim and new fans over 30 years after its release.  Attempting to make a sequel to Caddyshack was bad enough, but Caddyshack II would have been terrible even if it had not brutally slaughtered an original idea.  The gags were hackneyed, and uninspired performances by Jackie Mason, Dan Akroyd, and Unsolved Mystery’s Robert Stack made the film unwatchable.  Luckily this atrocious sequel did have one saving grace in the form of Randy Quaid, and this clip of his best moments represents the only ten minutes of Caddyshack II that’s worth watching:

A couple of days ago I read somewhere that they were making a sequel to the movie Ghost Rider, and the only thing that came to mind was, “Why?!?”  Although I didn’t see the first movie on account of my “No Nic Flick” rule (Raising Arizona being the only exception), the previews and subsequent reviews confirmed what I already knew to be true:  It was a 114 minute flaming pile of superhero shit.  With that in mind, there is no reasonable explanation as to why anyone would think a sequel is a good idea.  Besides Nic Cage, who will probably do anything to make some much needed IRS back tax money.  This also made me start thinking about various other “Part II’s” that should have never been on anything but the cutting room floor.  So here is my selected list of sequels that almost ruined the reputation of their predecessors.  This is written from the perspective of how I felt about the original films at the time they were released.

(In alphabetical order, Top 5 revealed later today)

• Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls - The first Ace Ventura is still one of the funniest films of all-time, and Ace Ventura 2 is the only role to date that Jim Carrey chose to reprise in a sequel.  Although it was recently rumored that Daniels and Carrey may return for a Dumb and Dumber sequel.
• Basic Instinct 2- The first film was pretty hot, and so was Sharon Stone.  This was a great movie to watch in 1992 if you were a teenager like me.  The sequel came out 14 years later and Stone had all but lost her sex appeal.  But the sequel did win several awards, namely the Razzie Award for Worst Picture, Worst Actress, Worst Sequel, and Worst Screenplay.
• Big Top Pee Wee – The sequel to Pee Wee’s Big Adventure is not only bad, it has one of the most bizarre endings I have ever seen.  To save a circus that was blown into his backyard by a tornado, Pee Wee feeds the elderly townspeople genetically-modified weenies from his hot dog tree.  These hot dogs turn the citizens into young kids again like the Frankfurter of Youth, then they go visit the circus to watch Pee Wee and Kris Kristofferson perform.
• Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey - In the sequel, Bill and Ted are killed, take on the Grim Reaper in a game of Battleship, Clue, & Twister, and try to stop evil robotic clones of themselves from destroying their future.  Any questions on why this made the list?  You can go ahead and add the third film to this list, too.
• Crocodile Dundee 2 - This film is alot like the original, except Mick Dundee goes to New York City and has your typical “country mouse” experiences – much like his girlfriend had in Australia during the first film.  The film did end in Australia, but unfortunately it didn’t end the adventures of Crocodile Dundee.
• Deuce Bigelow: European Gigelow- The first movie was pretty funny for a Rob Schneider project, and it helped popularize new terms like man-whore & mangina.  Well-known film critic Roger Ebert called the sequel “aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience”, and included it in his “Most Hated Films” list.  I personally think he’s still being too kind.
• My Summer Story aka It Runs in the Family – This little-known 1994 film is a sequel to the holiday classic A Christmas Story, and the only film on the list that I have never actually seen.  Even though I know little about this sequel, there is no way in hell it lives up to the original – even with the addition of Charles Grodin & Kieran Culkin.
• Predator 2- It is nearly impossible to top the acting prowess of the original film’s stars, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Carl Weathers.  The sequel to Predator replaced those legends with another formidable trio, but not even Danny Glover, Gary Busey, and Bill Paxton could save this cheesy, over-the-top sequel.
• Saw II – With the exception of Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, few films have milked a concept more than the Saw series.  The first movie was intense, gory, and delivered some unexpected twists in the end.  The second film added more gore for shock value alone, and was as predictable as a bible in a hotel nightstand.  It did star Donnie Wahlberg, but he’s never been the same without the New Kids.

Sometimes when I watch movies, weird and random associations began popping into my head at will.  The following summary is my twisted version of A Time to Kill – if you’ve never seen the movie, the post will probably not make much sense…but then again, I’m not going to say it will make sense to those who have seen the movie either.

At no time during the entire movie did anyone in the town notice that Keyser Soze (Usual Suspects) was prosecuting Jules Winnfield (Pulp Fiction) for murder.  The bad motherfucker is being defended by David Wooderson (Dazed and Confused), who was mentored through law school by Professor Jennings (Animal House) from Faber University.  This is not the type of stuff that would get past anyone in a town that had a local newscast, or an episode of Time magazine that had been published within the last 20 years.  I’m guessing the fireplaces in this small town burned analogs.  These were some of the most famous cats of the moment, and they were all up in this non-air conditionin’-having courthouse in the South while the balance of Jules’s life is hanging there.  Keyser has played off the leg dragging, and turned in his handicap parking pass for the role of loudmouth Southern lawyer.  Suprisingly, he doesn’t even try to get Jules to recite his “Valley of Darkness” colloquy to prove to the jurors that he did kill those racist and evil, but otherwise likable, boys.  At the very least, he should have at least tried to cajole him into talking about Big Kahuna burgers.  Once again, Keyser did not play full retard.

Professor Jennings apparently became a civil rights lawyer after teaching.  While he wasn’t sleeping with any college students like he did back at Faber, he had apparently picked up a fondness for the drink that rivaled any member of Delta Tau Chi’s, which caused him to be unable to lawyer it up any more.  He also apparently beat down a police officer while a protestin’ at some juncture and was disbarred.  He could give slurred advice with the best of them, and had the role of ole’ wise drunk on the sidelines down pat.  He seemed to be able to mentor ole David Wooderson into not doing anything more stupid than putting a sex offender psychiatrist/rapist on the stand.  I mean hell, you can only find so many people who will say a dude who shoots people with an automatic rifle is crazy, right?  The fact that they also happen to be rapists doesn’t make their opinions suspect, does it?  Nah.  The professor should have told Wooderson to leave his perpetually perspiring wife, who was married to Val Kilmer in Heat; because she bolts from him as soon as the salve met the sack, and she seemed to blame all the Klan shenanigans on him.  Like a man can control hate crimes?  I mean, those guys have unions and grievances procedures.  After an arrest, that’s nowhere near the end of the whole story.

Now, Miss Congeniality and Keanu’s bus driver runs around solving all the minor problems, ie digging up dirt on the prosecutor’s shrink and being the female equivalent to David Wooderson male eye candy, so as not to leave the screen too uneven.  The obvious spark between Congeniality and Wooderson is alright, alright.  If the attractive Judd had been sweatin’ it up to the oldies round these parts so long and hadn’t bore him a child, you know there’d be a lot more to be congenial about betwixt the two of them.  Wink, wink.  Nudge, nudge.

The former Notre Dame walk-on turned janitor from Rudy was also the Sheriff but, once again, no one noticed.  Jack Bauer even took day off from his federal duties to start a local KKK chapter, and still nothin’.  I just can’t freaking believe that all these famous people end up in this town, involved in this case, and the townsfolk don’t think anything of it.  Where the hell is Ryan Seacrest when you actually need him?  And of course, despite being a hit man and the best mass murder in Los Angeles, Jules is found not guilty and the town goes crazy.  And still no one asks for an autograph.  Everyone famous in the world should move to this town, because they apparently don’t mind the occasional violent rifle gundown, and could care less about having an inordinate amount of celebrities being involved in the workings of their daily lives.

For reasons that I can’t comprehend, the third installment of Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma’s House series will hit movie theaters tomorrow.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  It’s obvious the reasoning is based on the accumulation of green paper that features a veritable who’s who of famous dead white dudes.  The next logical question is whether or not there was that much demand from the public for a third movie about a black guy not named Tyler Perry masquerading as a stereotypical fat woman (I should point out the fact that Lawrence was cross-dressing long before Perry made a name for himself.  Oh, and the elderly female character he played on Martin was named Mama Payne, coincidence?).  I decided to research the box office receipts from the first two Big Momma movies as an indicator of interest, and what I discovered were numbers that would baffle Will Hunting.  In the U.S. alone, the first two films have combined to gross over $187 million since their release.  So, there’s a good chance the people who saw the other two will flock to local Cinemark Theaters in droves, and pay $12 to see Big Momma’s: Like Father, Like Son – unless they have developed common sense or good taste in movies since 2006.  Since this franchise is more popular than any sane person ever could have imagined, I’ve decided to mentally break down and give Big Momma fans an exclusive sneak peek into the unimaginative, fat-suit comedy they’ve been waiting five long years for.

Can’t Wait for the Movies:

Today is the 40th birthday of actor/comedian Rob Corddry, a native of Massachusetts who got his start as a fake news correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2002.  Corddry was a fixture on the show until he left in 2006 to pursue other projects, which initially turned out to be bit roles in films like Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.  His first major role came in 2010, when he was cast as the lovable asshole Lou Dorchen in Hot Tub Time Machine. I recently watched it for the first time, and to me, it’s like Back to the Future meets Old School.  While I think Corddry is the straw that stirs this comedy cocktail, it also features great performances by an 80′s teen icon, Dunder Mifflin’s warehouse supervisor, and some young guy who played a “teen at the party” in Superbad – as well as a couple of memorable cameos.

Megavideo is set up so you can only watch 72 consecutive minutes before being cut off, but as with most restrictions on the Internet, there are ways around it. To play, hit red play button, close pop-up, hit green play button and enjoy!

Today is the 63rd birthday of Carl Weathers, a former football player/actor who is probably best-known for playing the role of boxer Apollo Creed in the first four Rocky films. Although Weathers didn’t really go on to have the mainstream success of his Eyetalian counterpart, there are people like me who know him as more than just the guy who was pounded into the afterlife by Ivan Drago.  During his career, Weathers has also at one time or another been a Major whose arm is blown off in the jungle by a Predator from another planet, a pro golfer who had his hand bitten off by a gator, and a stew expert who teaches his craft to an aspiring actor named Tobias Fünke.  But perhaps his greatest role in my mind was that of Seargent Jericho Jackson, a no-nonsense cop who attempts to take down a dirty businessman played by Coach, with some help from Sharon Stone and a heroin addict who used to be a Nasty Girl. Get ready for some serious 80′s action. 

Megavideo is set up so you can only watch 72 consecutive minutes before being cut off, but as with most things on the Internet, there are ways around it. To play, hit red play button, close pop-up, hit green play button and enjoy!

In 1949, George Orwell wrote what many people back then viewed as a social science fiction novel, titled Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The setting of the story takes place in a futuristic super- state called Oceania, in a world where war, censorship, and government control/manipulation has become a part of everyday life.  Well, it has been over 60 years since the book was first published, and it seems to me that the word “science-fiction” is no longer a viable description for Orwell’s masterpiece.  I don’t remember ever seeing a  “prophetic” section in any of the libraries I’ve been to, so I guess non-fiction would probably be the best choice for its proper Dewey Decimal destination.

The 2003 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave: