STEPBROTHERS MIA 2: I WANT TO BELIEVE

Saw a bunch of films because I have no life and that’s what I enjoy doing. Double-featured SB and MM.

Sadly, SB was the best of the bunch by far.

I’VE GOT SPOILERS FROM MY CHEST-PUBES TO MY BALL-FRO

STEBROTHERS

Criticizing STEPBROTHERS for having a weak script is like faulting McDonald’s for not being nutritious. I enjoyed the film and laughed consistently. There are some funny setpieces and several great jokes. At the end of the day, though, the film is forgettable because we don’t care about the characters.

As far as arcs go, Will Ferrell is a good singer but has stage fright (because of his dicky brother) and John C. Reilly owns a drum set and gets mad when you rub your sack on it. Since that’s all Ferrell and Adam McKay give us for goals and motivation, it’s not that big of a deal when the two rock out “Volare” (hilariously sung for some odd reason to the music for “Con Te Partiro”) at the end. With a couple less jokes and maybe a few more lines, these snippets of motivation could have been expanded into some additional dialogue and plot. Maybe John C. Reilly can’t work with other people. He’s been kicked out of fifty bands, despite his great drumming. Maybe we see him and Will try to perform, they get in an argument, and Will can’t sing in public. A little something would have gone a long way towards making us care that the two characters get what they want.

The script could also have used a little editing to parse the structure into a more traditional three-act template rather than the meandering flow it has going on for it.

But kudos for having a woman tell John C. Reilly she wanted to roll him up in a ball and carry him around in her vagina.

MAMMA MIA!

I love Abba. Some would say that makes me gay. But it doesn’t. My love of cock does.

I also love musicals. MM was very disappointing.

First, the story was lacking. Musicals don’t even need great stories or complicated plotting. My favorite of all time is CATS, and that’s basically just a thread of redemption plot used to string together unrelated cat songs (and damn those cats for not choosing Mr. Mistoffeles, the original conjuring cat, to go to the Heaviside Layer). MM gives us a girl whose mom was a bit of a player back in the day. She slept with three guys around the same time, leaving our heroine – who is about to get married – with no idea which one is her daddy. So she invites all three to the wedding, hoping to figure it out.

This leads to… Not much. Meryl Streep gets a little annoyed. And our heroine’s fiancé
is bothered that she snuck around and didn’t tell him. And that’s about it. What the movie should have done is have the heroine’s plan backfire horribly. Her fiancé calls off the wedding because he feels she doesn’t trust him. And her mom is so freaked out by the sight of these three men from her past that she goes AWOL. Then the heroine and her three possible fathers must track down the mom and the fiancée and make everything right again.

There are also way too many songs. I love almost everything Abba does, but by the time “Take a Chance On Me” kicks in, the movie’s ended. Then there are like ten more songs, including some credits numbers. And did we need Colin Firth singing about Paris?

Also, the film does things, like making Colin Firth gay – that happen too quickly. I was confused when he was frolicking around with a fey Italian guy. And please, Hollywood, let’s retire pairing everyone up at the end of romantic comedies. It’s enough the hero and heroine get together. We don’t need Stellan Skarsgard and the Hobbit ending up in love as well.

And Pierce Brosnan does a lot of things well, including being Bond and playing likeable scumbags. Singing is not one of those things.

X-FILES 2

Loved the TV show until it went off the rails. Liked the first movie and how it expanded the mythology and the characters.

X-FILES 2 hits the theme and characters correctly. It sets up a conflict between Mulder and Scully – he can’t stop his work and she can’t be with him unless he does. And we get some interesting scenes with a pedophile priest hoping for redemption through visions that may enable him to save an FBI agent.

But the rest of the script is awful. It’s fine to do a monster-of-the-week plot, those were some of the best episodes of the show. But this monster is a pair of completely mundane gay Russian organ couriers. That’s not scary, it’s just odd. Proving the bad guy is nothing special, Scully takes him out with a board to the head. Which makes the fact that he killed Amanda Peet’s special agent (by pushing her down an elevator shaft in a construction site) even sadder.

If we’re going to watch Scully and Mulder return after six years, let’s give them something worthy of their time – a vampire, aliens, a dude that eats peoples’ livers, even those inbred freaks from “Home.” This wasn't just a bad X-FILES movie, it was one of the worst episodes of the show.