Review – Baseketball

I was completely amazed to actually be enjoying a film this stupid by the guys who created South Park. Sure, the humor’s as juvenile as it is dumb, but when you come home Friday night after a long work week, sometimes you need a movie just like this. And despite the emphasis on all varieties of offensive humor, somewhere under all the bathroom jokes there’s actually at least the bare bones of a parody of sappy, sentimental sports movies. Mildly amusing

Review – Quarantine

Ah, the things I’ll sit through to get the ever-elusive Q to round out my every-letter-of-the-alphabet goal. This is an exceptionally dull and amateurish effort about a future dystopia in which disease victims and political dissidents are put in concentration camps. The plot, to the extent that there is one, focuses on a muddled mess of thuggish police, beautiful resistance operatives, and an ordinary guy in over his head. I guess there’s supposed to be a message in here somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be anything much more profound than “dictatorships are bad.” In other words, pretty boring stuff. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – EdTV

I’m not sure if this is a rip-off of The Truman Show or vice versa. The simple comparison is that this picture is a lot more realistic and at least a little more amusing than Weir’s production. Here our hapless hero knows that he’s on television all the time. Thus the plot focuses on the human drama of a man, his family and friends coming to grips with the constant invasion of privacy rather than the efforts of the television people to keep him from finding out that his life is a TV show. As with many Ron Howard movies, it tends toward the melodramatic, has more than its share of sappy moments, and features his brother in a supporting role. Despite all that, it’s got a few worthwhile bits. Mildly amusing

Review – Jaws 3

Between Lou Gossett, Dennis Quaid and Lea Thompson, there’s gotta be enough money to buy up all the prints of this barker and make sure nobody ever sees it again. At least Quaid and Thompson can argue that they were relative unknowns at this point; Gossett had been nominated for an Oscar before picking up a thoroughly unconvincing southern accent and employing it herein. If you’re watching this third Jaws movie (connected to the first two by the slenderest of threads) on video, part of the reason that everything looks out of focus is that the original theatrical release was in 3-D. Quick hint for movie people everywhere: 3-D equals stinkaroo. There are exceptions to this rule, but they’re few and far between. And this definitely isn’t one of them. It’s hard to say what’s cheaper, the script or the effects. Decisions, decisions. See if desperate

Review – Jaws 2

I guess after the first big-ass shark movie the studio felt like they needed to get a sequel into theaters as quickly as possible. That would explain why they’d release a film with this many continuity errors and other technical slip-ups. Sure, they got some of the original cast members back (notable absences include Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw, though of course Shaw’s twin excuses were that his character died in the original and the actor himself passed on in the interim between movies). Sloppy work and weak script aside, this flick’s most serious failing is the rubber fish, which they set ablaze early on. I suppose the burn scars were supposed to make it look scarier, but ultimately they just make it look even more fakey. Roy Scheider does his best, but in the end even he can’t save this one from the ranks of the mediocre thriller. Mildly amusing

Review – Drop Dead Gorgeous

This movie would have been a lot better if it didn’t fare so badly against the films it appears to be copying. On its own it’s an amusing fakeumentary about a small town beauty pageant in which a contestant and her mother literally kill off the competition. It suffers from mild cases of excess sentiment and silliness, and ultimately it’s not quite as clever as it pretends to be. Other than that, the overall production is well-crafted and features a number of genuinely funny moments. I would have considered it quite good indeed if it didn’t automatically demand comparison with the likes of Waiting for Guffman, a film with which this goofy romp simply does not compete. If you haven’t seen Guest’s movie (or perhaps even if you have), however, you should find this one thoroughly enjoyable. Mildly amusing

Review – Dragonheart

As one might suspect, this is a sword and sorcery flick jam packed with many of the old saws that plague the genre. However, a fresh element or two can also be found among the costume pageantry and histrionic heroics. For example, the tale centers around a dragon and a knight who team up to dupe villagers into paying the latter to rid them of the former. Though the movie is prone to lapse into sappy sentimentality, there’s also some genuine humor here and there. This film is also the first I’ve seen in which a creature created entirely on computers actually has a little personality (aided by Sean Connery’s voice). Mildly amusing