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“Gump saves Antartica! Swim Forest, Swim!” –Susan

***spoiler warning - this review gives away the plot***
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Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley have a developmentally challenged penguin baby who joins a Mexican gang and winds up in the slammer.

I went with my sister and her kids to see this movie over the holidays; my oldest nephew was confused.
“What’s the moral of the story?” He asked his mom on the way home.
“I mean,” he continued, “I thought it was that you shouldn’t be mean to people just because they’re different, but if they hadn’t been mean to him, they all would have died.”
He had a good point.
Because the other penguins think he’s causing bad juju resulting in the fish shortage, they run him out of town and in his frustration our hero swims to Florida and winds up in a zoo. Why didn’t he just swim to Chile? I guess it has something to do with his disability, but in a Forest Gump show of endurance, he makes the full journey without drowning. People in Florida quickly realize that this penguin is special after he runs into the wall several times and then starts to soft shoe his way around the enclosure. They glue a radio transmitter to his back and release him in Antartica. They follow him home and realize there is something “funny” about all the penguins. This prompts world-wide liberal action and fishing in the antartic is outlawed–whether this is due to concern about mercury levels in fish or just the threat of penguin genocide is unclear.
Also, what’s with the villification of seals?
If you like penguins, you’ll find this movie cute anyway. Mexican penguins are cutest though, penguins with US accents are all a little “funny”.

“Finally, some candy that doesn’t taste like cooties!” –Kai

Let me tell you about my formative years. While many children were content with food that was targeted for their demographic, I felt alone and disenfranchised.

A popular pastime for children was to go to the local minimart and shoplift candy. Although I would never personally participate in breaking the law, later we would hang out at the swing set while they would pour Nerds into their mouths. “No thanks,” I would respond politely, when offered a box. “They taste like cooties.”

Maybe they were happy living insipid lives of petty crime, eating boxes of watermelon and grape flavored cooties, but I longed for an escape. I needed more. I needed something that couldn’t be shoplifted; something for an intelligent connoisseur of the finer points in life.

I needed Men’s Pocky. I am whole again.

“Wait… did he cover cheese? I don’t remember. Did he… damn! Guess I’ll have to read it again.” –Susan

Whoa! Bill Bryson, settle down. Settle down.

During the period I was reading this book everyday on my commute, I told some coworkers in a meeting that lichens are actually made up of algae and fungus working together in a symbiotic relationship. This information, while interesting, had nothing to do with the meeting at hand but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Bill Bryson does much the same thing. Did anyone ask Bill Bryson how the earth was created and what sort of sexual perversions Carolus Linnaeus might have had? Doubtful. And yet the man wrote a tome.

Fortunately for those of us who aren’t Laura, Bill Bryson is not actually a scientist. He gives us information in a most entertaining way and is able to explain things on our level with our words often through interviews with experts in each field. Bill Bryson is funny, charming and sweet, and now probably eligible to be a contestant on Jeopardy.

I bought the book on tape for my parents to listen to and they loved it. I love it because the text can be daunting (500 pages) but you can pop in any of the five cds at any time and be entertained and educated, they do not necessarily have to be enjoyed in order. This is the rare book that I would recommend in audio recording format.

Supervolcanos, identification of mosses, Darwin’s decision not to write a book about pigeons despite the urgings of his editor, all of the dinosaurs, particle accelerators, why cumulous clouds are prettiest, North American fishing trends, shoplifters of unusual items, the lording of Kelvin, Parkinson’s favorite conspiracy, topography of Des Moines…. cheese?

You will be offended more than once by this movie, you’ll probably be offended more than a half dozen times. You will also laugh so hard that you have to gasp for air. Probably more than a dozen times.

It’s all of 84 minutes long, but I’ve been unable to get a single one of those minutes out of my head since I’ve seen it. If you think about it too hard (and I really recommend that you don’t) the people who are “hurt” the most by this movie are the people most likely to harbor ill will toward others, which is great social commentary no matter how it’s presented.

Make for glorious benefit Sacha Cohen’s bank account and go see this. He’s going to get the fuck sued out of him, and comedy this edgy deserves to be made.

Plus… it has a bear!

Grindhouse - a genre of films that eschews artistic bullshit to cram in a more reasonable amount of sex, gore, and violence.

Let me just describe the plot in its entirety, because let’s face it… no amount of plot is going to convince you to watch this movie one way or the other, you’re either down or you’re not.

The movie opens with a young girl is playing with an old man in a park. Turns out he’s “playing” with the little girl, which turns her mute. Ok…

A dozen or so years pass and our heroine has missed her bus to her therapy appointment. Today is her lucky day though, a nice young man has purchased a new car and would love to give our lovely heroine a ride into town.

He takes her out to dinner, gets her drunk, and spends the next two weeks getting her addicted to heroin. Fun times!

Why might the nice young man want to get her addicted to heroin might you ask? Well, it sure makes it easier to convince her to become a hooker. Except the first John he brings her she ends up attacking, so he removes her eye, hence the title.

Now, one might think “Hmm… that’s interesting…” But what you don’t know is that they actually show an eye being removed from a human head (reportedly a corpse). In slow motion.

And that’s when the movie gets good.

She has three customers, one who mostly just slaps her around and takes pictures, another who likes to get rough and occasionally goes for a bit of anal sex, and a dominatrix lesbian. The customers give her money, which is never really explained, and the director doesn’t hold back on long slow motion shots of XXX action (often interspersed with shots of her doing heroin, learning karate, becoming an expert marksmen, and learning how to drive a rally car).

Wait… Karate? Marksmen? Rally car?

Yeah, you see, with the money she gets from her customers she slowly teaches herself how to take revenge on all of the people who have wronged her, because her parents died of heartbreak and her only friend and fellow prostitute ends up getting killed.

One day she takes all of her money, buys a fuckload of heroin and a car, and starts a slow-mo killing spree. For the last 1/3 of the movie she’s basically stuck in a slow-mo 1970’s version of the Matrix.

What’s not to love?