Cease Fire!

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, the Cosmic Sitcom™ and Little Junkies have called a holiday ceasefire on our Craptastic Movies War™ to collaborate on our upcoming respective Best Movies of 2009 lists.

We’re working hard to watch as many movies as we can before the New Year. I’ve seen 50 of the year’s releases so far; I’m trying to get to 58. By contrast, the average American only sees about 6 movies at the theater in a year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Don’t worry, we’ll get back to our regular Blog vs. Blog programming, complete with infographicals, very soon.

Factoid

This year the domestic box office (U.S.) exceeded $10 billion for the first time ever.

Little Junkies vs. Cosmic Sitcom: It’s on.

Last night, Junkie1 and I began collecting data on the crappy movies in her extensive DVD collection. As you can imagine, this was a task fraught with conflict. We began by discussing how to define crap. She went on and on about criteria and rating systems and voting and … yadda yadda yadda … keep talkin’, woman, I’m gettin’ me some tea … I’m still listening :: yawn :: …

In the meantime, let me point out that since Avatar was part of what started the Blog vs. Blog event, the haters (I’m calling Junkie1 out as a proto-Avatar hater) can at least be funny, hence the Webcomic above. Seriously, this Australian dude has a beef with James Cameron, as you can read here:

Titanic was about 2 hours too long.

The Abyss was 30 mins too long.

The “special preview screenings” he organised to promote Avatar showed nothing more than I could see in trailers online, at the time. (I won tickets to one of these screenings and spent a LOT of time and effort to get there, only to be let down by Cameron once again)

The 3D in Avatar does not make the graphics better. (Those glasses are annoying and I have seen better CG graphics in computer games)

The $500 million you used to make this “epic” could have gone to something much better – like cancer research or a campaign to get people worldwide to stop using Internet Explorer 6.

“Let’s make the aliens look like Giant cat people!”. Wow. I expected better from you, James. Where is the originality there? That idea has been used so many times.

Among his litany of issues with Cameron, he condemns Avatar to receiving mixed reviews and becoming “this generation’s Dances with Wolves, but in space.” FYI, the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves has a 78 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes; Avatar is at 84 percent as of today.

State of the Crap

Anyway, back to Junkie1′s crappy DVD collection. Instead of a complicated rating system, we agreed to scan the collection, passing by movies we both liked or, while mediocre, didn’t sink to the level of crap. All this minus actually defining what crap is, because, like, who has time for that, right?

We did agree on some criteria for debating the possibly redeeming qualities of the films in question, namely:

1. Story
2. Characters
3. Plot
4. Believability
5. Success of the film’s dramatic or comedic intent
6. Production values
7. Visual effects (if applicable)
8. Rotten Tomatoes and Netflix ratings

We spent 45 minutes last night going through the first of five cabinets filled with DVDs. My Crap Count so far: 15. Hers, of course, differs. Stay tuned!

My growing list of the crappy movies in Junkie1′s DVD collection.
We’re only getting started, yo.

MINNEAPOLIS — You can only cut family so much slack, mostly because you share too much DNA to cast stones from your genetic glass house. At some point, though, lines must be drawn. And so it has come to pass with my sassy host/niece in this Coldest of Major American Cities™.

Last Saturday I was assaulted by a “film” starring Jenny McCarthy, “Dirty Love,” in which she tries to do her best Jim Carrey impression … falling far, far short. And yet my niece, whose love for movies and pop culture has until now done nothing but impress me, likes this movie. ¡Likes it! Naturally, Ms. McCarthy wrote this travesty herself, and it was directed by her now ex-husband. Don’t believe it’s as bad as I portray? Its IMDB plot keywords include the term cavity search. It gets a 4 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, along with reviews like the following —

Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage. (Stephen Holden, New York Times)

Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn’t rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent. (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

PROSECUTION RESTS. It’s really that bad. And my niece spent actual dollars on this film. She readily admits that she has a strain of appreciation for crappy movies (her words, not mine). But hearing of so many in her DVD collection worried me. Deeply. Even moreso when she joined the cynics in their pre-release dissing of James Cameron’s upcoming “Avatar.” ¡The hypocrisy!

Such talk made me wonder aloud whether what I had written off as merely her quota of guilty pleasure flicks was, in fact, a Problem. The intervention kind. Quota exceeded.

¡Blog vs. Blog!

So we’re devoting this week to a rational examination of her DVD collection. Yes, we’re talking spreadsheets, and also a database. There will be charts. Pie charts. Also the graphs. Possibly some Venn diagrams if y’all play your cards right. No screamfests here. Just data-mining that I’m confident will confirm my suspicion that, as she puts it, her “love for crap has gotten out of control.”

My duty as an uncle demands action.

So it’s blog vs. blog all week as we apply technology, sass and snark to identify her Issues. And then get her some help. Her sister will assist with the logistics. And in keeping us from escalating to cinematic violence.

You can keep track of my reasoned reporting here, or look askance at the lies she will no doubt purvey on her blog. Bring it, Little Junkies!