Sombrero Grande's Movie Mesa

Superhero Movie: Extended Edition
Review by Sombrero Grande

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Remember back when parody films actually possessed the possibility of being good? Back in the days of Airplane! and The Naked Gun!, moviegoers could rely on a silly, goofy laugh-fest that took the conventions of different movies and genres and effectively skewered them. Nowadays, ever since the popularity of the Scary Movie series, the parody genre has started letting any sort of trash in. Just so long as it contains a reference to some sort of genre in the title followed by the word "Movie," any roughly feature-length roll of celluloid will suffice enough to be called a "parody film."

Superhero Movie is a laughless trainwreck. It takes the basic plotline of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, tosses in a few references to X-Men, The Fantastic Four and Batman, and spews forth a staggering number of obvious "jokes" and poorly-staged pratfalls. It is a movie completely devoid of humor and worth. As a parody it fails because it never truly mocks anything except the intelligence of its audience. A new superhero designs his own costume but forgets to put eyeholes in, which leads to him bumping into a lamp. Seriously? Is that really the best kind of material they can come up with to parody superhero movies? And believe me when I say that, after seeing the whole of Superhero Movie, yeah, that's unfortunately the best they can come up with.

The saddest thing about Superhero Movie is that one of the producers behind it was David Zucker, one of the writers and directors of Airplane! and The Naked Gun! That's it, folks; the parody genre is now officially dead, left to be dry-humped over and over again until nothing remains but indistinguishable ashes. (Fun fact: both Leslie Neilsen and Christopher McDonald dry-hump corpses in Superhero Movie, perhaps as a poignant metaphor for what the filmmakers are doing to the parody movie genre, but I suspect it's more likely just because these morons think humping equals comedic gold.)

I expect nothing but trash from the other "Movie" parody filmmakers, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the ones behind Date Movie, Epic Movie and the upcoming Disaster Movie, but I expected better from Mr. Zucker than this garbage.

But perhaps it's unfair to single out Mr. Zucker for this atrocity, when the real blame should be place squarely on the actual writer and director of this steaming pile: Craig Mazin, whose previous work as writer can be witnessed in the movie RocketMan. You know, the decade-old childrens' "classic" wherein Harland Williams plays a spaceman who farts in his suit, causing it to inflate to comedic proportions? Yeah, think of jokes like that played out for an entire feature film, and you've got Superhero Movie.

The "Extended Edition" of the Superhero Movie DVD is branded "Longer, Funnier and More Outrageous." I have no idea what was added to the film to constitute this Extended Edition DVD, but, trust me, you don't want the torture of Superhero Movie to last any longer than it does. If it's now "funnier" then my heart goes out to any poor sap who paid to see this in a theater, as for the "more outrageous" part, well, cross out the letters m-o-r-e-o-u-t and o-u-s and you'll see exactly what Superhero Movie will leave you with.

Extras on the DVD include an equally unfunny alternate ending, deleted scenes, a "Meet the Cast" featurette, theatrical trailer and a commentary provided by Zucker, Mazin and Robert K. Weiss (which, I have to admit, I didn't listen to, as getting through the movie once alone was enough torture for one lifetime). The only humor to be found on the entire disc comes in a documentary entitled "The Art of Spoofing," wherein the cast and filmmakers talk about how difficult it is making a good parody and that they should know because they made one. Hilarious.

You want to see a parody movie done right? Rent Airplane!, The Naked Gun!, Hot Shots!: Part Deux, Spaceballs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstien or even Shrek. If you want to see just how inept something that wants to call itself a parody can be, only then should you ever try to subject yourself to Superhero Movie. Remember: with great ineptitude comes great suffering.

www.maskedmoviesnobs.com

Emmylou Harris - All I Intended To Be
CD review by Muchacha Motorista

I’m going to tell you right off the bat: I love Emmylou Harris’ new album, All I Intended To Be. Complete with original material as well as covers, it is an essential listen for fans of old country music and folk.

It is mournful, soulful. Not something you want to have playing at your kid’s birthday party or on a road trip with your girls to Vegas. But sitting on the patio in the sun in a quiet mood. Or sitting on the floor of a dark room with a drink. Or looking through old photographs of times gone by and missing the people in the pictures.

The songs on All I Intended To Be run the gamut. There’s Joan-Baez-ish storytelling in the sad songs of loss such as "Broken Man’s Lament" (written by Mark Germino) and "Kern River" (Merle Haggard). There’s songs that give hope in the midst of sorrow, such as Jack Wesley Routh’s "Shores of White Sand" where she sings, “Some say I’m sinking into the muddy waters, but somehow I’m sailing to shores of white sand.”

One of the most interesting takes at a cover is "All That You Have Is Your Soul." I’ve always loved Tracy Chapman’s version, and the first round of listening to Harris’ version left me with something to be desired. Where Chapman’s vocals give the mother’s cautionary tale instant depth and desperation, Harris’ voice seemed far too gentle. But I listened again, and again. And I can see the narrator in Harris’ version now as well. It isn’t the same mother that’s in Chapman’s version. This mother is a smoother, quieter mother. The narrator in Chapman’s version will have always known her mother’s story, will have heard the tale from as far back as she can remember. The narrator in Harris’ version may have found out her mother’s story and been surprised by her mother’s struggles and regrets. Both versions have merit unto themselves, and I really enjoyed hearing the different takes at the story.

I’ve always liked the title track from Harris’ Red Dirt Girl album for its honest depiction of despair, summed up in the line, “One thing they don't tell you about the blues when you got ‘em, you keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom, there ain't no end.” The song that hits the same note, and surpasses Red Dirt Girl simply because of the honesty and love in it, is my favorite song on the album: "Not Enough."

"Not Enough" (written by Harris herself) is about the loss of a loved one, approaching the mixed emotions one feels from a different angle. Instead of the passive “remember the good times” outlook, it explores the agony that all beautiful things leave behind after loss. “You’re in my heart,” she sings, “but that’s not close enough.” The years cut short and disappear, the memories are now only fading pictures, seeing the ties that bind lay severed. Poignant to a level of despair, but honest to every degree. The last line of the song cuts to the root of loss: “Life is long and life is tough, but when you love someone, life’s not long enough.”

If you’re in a good mood, pick up this album and set it aside. But when you’re blue and just want to give into it for a while, grab a drink, turn off your phone, and play All I Intended To Be as your soundtrack.

www.maskedmoviesnobs.com

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Special Edition
DVD review by Sombrero Grande

In anticipation of the May 22nd release of the fourth Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, all three "original trilogy" movies are being rereleased on DVD, sold both as a set and individually for the first time. I'm here today to talk for a bit about my favorite installment in the trilogy: Indiana Jones and Last Crusade.

Last Crusade plays the broadest of all the Indiana Jones movies to date--it contains the most moments played deliberately for laughs and cheers as even Steven Spielberg himself points out in one of the DVD's bonus features--but it works because of how seamlessly the comedy and action are interwoven together. With all the joking around and silliness, there's not a single "groaner" moment in the entire movie (sadly I expect that same cannot be said of Crystal Skull as the trailer alone already sports two such moments). Sean Connery (playing Indy's father, in case you've never seen the movie and/or live under a rock) provides a masterful comedic performance in particular and is largely the reason why many of the broadest scenes work. Watching him run along a beach with his umbrella, it's almost easy to forget the guy played the original James Bond.

Last Crusade opens with a peek back into a very fateful day for a young Indiana Jones. In the matter of a few minutes, the boy scout uses a whip for the first time, develops his deathly fear of snakes, and receives his trademark fedora while setting a precedent for the kind of frantic adventure that would embroil him all his life. The rest of the film deals with a grown-up Indy searching for his lost father who was in fact searching for the one and only Holy Grail when he went missing. But, if you're reading this then you should already know all about the movie and are merely trying to decide if you should pony up to buy this Special Edition DVD.

What's "new" on this release is a handful of unimpressive "all-new special features" that include a storyboard-to-film comparison of the circus train scene, photo galleries and trailer and PC demo for the new LEGO Indiana Jones video game. Not having a PC anymore I couldn't play the demo, but the trailer makes it look so similar to the LEGO Star Wars video games that I felt like I'd already played it with a different coat of paint. There's also a "new introduction" to Last Crusade featuring Spielberg and Lucas chatting briefly about the development of the movie; "Indy's Women," an American Film Institute roundtable discussion featuring Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw and Alison Doody reminiscing about their characters and acting in the respective films; and "Indy's Friends and Enemies," a fluff piece that describes the love-interests, sidekicks and villains of the Indiana Jones films so far. All in all, there's really nothing in these special features that is worth seeking out by anyone other than the most hard-core Indy fan, but those folks probably already know all the information presented within and already own the complete trilogy from the first DVD release.

Really the only significant reason to pick up these discs is because this is the first time the Indy movies have been available as separate purchases. So, if you didn't pick up the entire trilogy before and just want to pick up, say, Raiders and Last Crusade for a reasonable price (and don't want to even deal with Temple of Doom), then here you go.

www.maskedmoviesnobs.com

Bushspeak Volume 2: Fore More Years
CD Review by Sombrero Grande

Let me begin by stating that this is simply a review of a CD entitled "Bushspeak Volume 2: Fore More Years." If you want a review of George W. Bush as a U.S. President or even as a human being I'm sure there will be a bevy of opinions posted over in the Blogcritics' penny gallery (that is, if the still-ongoing discussions in the comment section of my The Essential Kenny G CD review are any indication). This review is not of a man nor an administration, just an assessment of a CD release and my recommendation for whom, if anyone, it would be worthy of a purchase.

With that stated (and likely all readers having already moved on), let me get to the CD itself. Bushspeak Vol. 2 is a collection of audio clips pointing out misspoken names, dates and just general grammar stumblings from George W. Bush during his second term in office. Pulled from numerous speeches, the content of the CD is broken up into six "chapters:" "Bushspeak on Bush," "Bushspeak on the People," "Bushspeak on History," "Bushspeak on the Rules," "Bushspeak on the Native Tongue" and "Bushspeak on Wisdom."

Now, there are a two important things that are immediately evident upon popping it into a CD player. One, is that its entire running time is just a little over twenty minutes. Second, is that all the audio clips of Bush are played twice--yes, twice--on the CD. After each sound clip is played in its respective "chapter," they're all rounded up in the CD's final track for the "Plainspoken Reprise of Chapters 1-6," meaning that there's only about ten total minutes of actual content on the entire CD.

Those ten minutes of clips are a very mixed bag to boot. They range from the honestly chuckle-worthy, such as, "Interestingly enough, right after September 11, one of the first places I went to was a mosque...I went back to the same center 50 years later," and "...one has a stronger hand when there's more people playing your same cards," to examples of Bush simply mispronouncing a word like "eclectic" or referring to Rosa Parks as "Rosa Park." Sadly there are far more examples of the latter than the former on Bushspeak Vol. 2, giving Bush-supporters reason to feel the album is a desperate attempt to grasp onto every slip of the tongue the President has made over the last four years, while Bush-haters are likely to end up underwhelmed by the lack of content.

I have to say that I picked up Bushspeak Vol. 2 expecting to get some good laughs out of it and was sadly disappointed not only by the brevity of the content but by the rather dismal assortment of clips as well. Bushspeak Vol. 2 is recommended for only the most hard-core of Bush-haters, the folks who'll spend their hard-earned money on anything and everything anti-Bush just to prove to themselves how much they truly loathe him. For the rest of us, we can just ride out the rest of Bush's term with an extra $6.98 in our pockets.

www.maskedmoviesnobs.com

The Mystery of Eva Peron
"Eva Peron Was A Saint And It Took Forever To Find A Place For Her Coffin"
Review by Muchacha Motorista

The last two documentaries I’d seen prior to The Mystery of Eva Peron were on John Steinbeck and Eleanor Roosevelt, so it isn’t like I require my documentaries to be MTV-style, flashy and current. I went into The Mystery of Eva Peron from what I consider to be a fair angle: I liked Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita and was interested to know more about the woman behind the character.

Instead, I was subjected to a mind-numbing two hours of jumbled footage and interviews telling me what a saint Evita was and little else.

I hardly know where to begin on the disorganization of The Mystery of Eva Peron. It jumps from her social work, to her death, to her birth, to her coffin, to her social work, to her moving to Buenos Aires, to the political atmosphere after her death, to her social work, to her coffin (again and again). As soon as I’d start getting some semblance of a timeline, the film would cut to an overly dramatic reenactment of people trying to figure out what to do with her coffin. I was left wondering more than once, “Wait--what’s going on here?”

Almost as distracting as the poor organization is the shameless slant. The tagline on the DVD cover is “The true story of Evita as told by her Father Confessor, her friends and… her enemies.” (Those ellipsis are indeed part of the tag line. Dramatic, eh?)

So you think you’re going to get a well-rounded story, right? Instead you get interview after interview about how wonderful Eva Peron was. For example, when a director of some of Eva’s early films is asked if she was a good actress, he replies that her talent was “not apparent” only because she was so nervous. In an interview with a prisoner (and torture victim of the regime) is asked about Eva’s social work he says to deny it would be like denying the color on flowers. This, from a man who had received electric shock torture until he went unconscious. When describing Eva’s death, her priest says she was holding his hand, didn’t spasm, wasn’t scared, and didn’t cry, but quietly "released her spirit to the Creator," and "had a beautiful light on her face." And there were a number of quotes about how her relationship with her husband was “sexless” or “not intimate,” but instead, a meeting of the minds only. How noble.

I will say this for the movie: it contains interviews with people who lived at an interesting time in Argentina’s history, and do have the right to talk about Eva Peron. I found their first-hand stories are infinitely more interesting than their praise on Eva’s social work.

It's only fair to mention some of the great footage in the film. There’s plenty of filler of people in crowds cheering or protesting (clearly from a different time), but there are also little gems of Eva’s early films, her trips to orphanages, her speeches, and her hobnobbing with leaders in Europe. It’s more interesting to search the look on her face for a glimpse of humanity, for a moment she forgets she’s on camera, as opposed to her commonly-seen public persona.

If you have a really deep-seated interested in Argentina’s history or in Eva Peron, this might be the hot ticket for you. But if you just like documentaries or the Evita musical, for goodness sakes, please avoid The Mystery of Eva Peron. Don’t cry for me, but don’t make the two hours I wasted in order to warn you have been in vain.

www.maskedmoviesnobs.com