The DU Movie RevU FU

[ElboRuum]

A brief look at the state of cable TV selections currently available.

FU #1:

The Dukes of Hazzard:

A puerile chunk of excrement from our friends at Broken Lizard, the guys that brought you Beerfest and Super Troopers (not a bad movie really), meant to be a good ol' trip down Nostalgia Boulevard with a farcical twist. Make Beau not only the dumb one but also the one with no skill around the ladies, and Luke equally dumb but a hair better at getting laid, take about 150 pounds off of both Boss Hogg and Uncle Jesse and wrap all of these misses in a story that, granted, sounds like a Dukes of Hazzard plot, and you have a remedial attempt at humor so simplistic and vapid, you can almost see and smell the little happy fart clouds as the movie zips erratically around the cinematic atmosphere.

Oh, and by the way, boys. Daisy Duke was a brunette. The only thing you got right was the fucking car. You know, I never found myself missing the commercials more.

FU #2:

My Super Ex-Girlfriend:

Honestly, this is the kind of movie I like. The kind that makes you stretch your imagination. Superheroes are often portrayed as paragons of what is good. Those who go out of their way to do no harm to the communities they serve. Now, often, what is forgotten is the underlying humanity. These people have lives, their "secret identities" carefully masked behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Quite ingenious really. They must have love interests, things they do on the weekend when they aren't saving a world of people who are ostensibly powerless from their own foibles. What happens when the normal problems of relationships enter into the pristine world of justice and goodness? What does a jilted superhero do?

In this movie, we find out, and don't care. The only thing this movie taught me is how tall Uma Thurman is when filmed side by side with Eddie Izzard. Or maybe Eddie's just short. I dunno, things being ostensibly relative and all.

I also made the realization that anyone with the last name Wilson who acts and whose first name ISN'T Rainn needs to go away for a while, at least until next Thanksgiving. Yes, the one bright spot was the reliable quirk of Rainn Wilson who served as a Costello to Luke Wilson's, um... not Abbott... no, his performance was like an unintentional impression of the catatonia of those mental patients who've received a hair too much electroshock treatment wandering around in the background of One Flew Over A Cuckoo's nest.

Luke Wilson (also in The Family Stone, which I won't be FUing today because I can't SIT through the fucking thing) plays Luke Wilson in every role he is in, and as such is only a hairs' breadth away from the time where the market for "likeable, sensitive, yet oddly introverted and tragic in speech and manner" dries up. And while Owen Wilson is busy cornering the other half of that market (basically the same type of role, only replace "sensitive" with "overly convivial and genuinely stupid but well meaning", Rainn is taking up some slack by actually acting.

Uma, on the other hand, known for her wide range, is going the Johnny Depp route by taking every role that she can get her hands on no matter how good or bad. Now I like Uma, and wish her the greatest success. But dearest Uma, you may have the acting chops, but not even your resume can save a movie as bad as this one. If you aren't careful, even Quentin's going to stop calling you for roles in his latest paean to some dead cinematic style, even though he has a really odd obsession with your feet.

While this movie isn't precisely a whipping torture, it is a self-inflicted death by at least 500 paper-cuts, all from the pages of a boring script, acted by people who looked like they'd really wanted to do something else.