Dragonball: Fast & Furious

By The Pajiba Staff | DVD Releases | July 28, 2009 |

By The Pajiba Staff | DVD Releases | July 28, 2009 |

Fast and Furious: Awesome movie. If you’re an idiot, so writes Dustin: “With Fast & Furious, at least you get what you signed up for: Inordinate amounts of ass served on plates, fast cars, meaningless car chases, loud hip-hop music, mean-looking scowls, and a plot as dumb as a box full of county-fair moustache rides. It’s shitballs retarded, which should’ve been apparent when they subtracted eight characters from the original’s title and gave us an ampersand. Indeed, it’s dumber even than the first movie. But it sure is easy to watch. And I kind of appreciate that screenwriter Chris Morgan doesn’t deign to insult anyone’s intelligence with lame plot twists and interweaving storylines; he rightfully assumes that the vast majority of the target audience has no intelligence to begin with. Hell, you know just how bad a guy is by the color of his skin — the darker the complexion, the more evil he is. Plus, you never for a second have to think about what you’re watching —just sit back, and when the credits roll, you only have to think hard enough to sponge off the drool that’s collected in your lap and stumble back out to your car. Just try to remember you’re not in the movie theater anymore before you decide to fishtail that mini-van out of the parking lot.

Dragonball Evolution: He only saw 14 minutes of Dragonball Evolution, but Dustin was able to sum it up: “It’s practically impossible to underplay the weaknesses in Dragonball, which is running even keel with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li for worst film of the year (though, Dragonball could’ve done with an injection of Chris Klein’s insane overacting). With most empty special-effects extravaganzas, you can at least expect an actual special-effect extravaganza. Not so much here: The effects are like something out of an old “Star Trek” episode: Wimpy and unimaginative, although in this instance, it’s not because the technology doesn’t yet exist to create better ones. Indeed, I’ve seen more impressive displays at children’s science museums. I might also note that the slo-mo sequences we’re a little too slo-mo — I may have fallen asleep during one of those interminable round-house kicks. Clearly, the budget was used instead on catering; everyone involved looks as though they were wondering around set in the midst of a crippling food coma. A wise decision, I’d guess, since the poor participants in this fraud probably won’ t be getting a lot of paychecks in the near future. They need all the nutrition they can get to sustain them until Larry Clarke comes calling.”

Miss March: Truth time. And this kills me to admit, but of all the reviews I’ve written for this site (somewhere around 500 plus), this is the one I’m most embarrassed by. Not because it was poorly written, but because it was dishonest. It was one of my overly hyperbolic reviews, which was meant to be interpreted as sarcasm (and it was, for the most part). But the truth is: Miss March is a fucking hilarious movie. On the day I reviewed it, I just thought something was wrong with my brain that I’d laugh so much at a movie as juvenile as Miss March was. But it really did kill — it had the spirit of Bring it On, only it was arguably funnier. It worked as a fast-paced, quick-witted, parody on bad teen sports movies. I just couldn’t admit that to myself at the time, so I copped out. All of which is to say: Rent or buy Miss March. You may be as pleasantly surprised as I was, and perhaps equally incapable of admitting to a intelligent crowd just how much you liked it.

Bart Got a Room: Prisco, uh, he hated it. “What starts off as a bland tedious romantic comedy fiercely descends into a shitfest of horrendous situational comedy like a teen starlet shedding her nice girl image by gangbanging herself pregnant and wet-vaccing her cooter clean during the Easter Seals telethon. If you aimed your fireworks display at a nursing home, you couldn’t have ended up with a more wretched finale. Not only does Hecker despoil an excellent cast, he manages to stomp flat any hope of a charming moment by making stupider and stupider plot twists. Hecker thinks he’s coming off like Neil Simon, but instead he’s about as witty as Simon the retarded bathtub dweller Mike Myers used to play on “SNL.” I wanted my money back, so I could spend it hiring Cambodian rebels to hunt down the filmmaker and cut him into shark bait. I just didn’t care for it.”