All right, I’m flinging up my hands on this. I’ve poked at the 50 Shades Darker fundraiser repeatedly, and I think I’m basically shouting into the overwhelming roar of THE WORLD BEING ON FUCKING FIRE, so I don’t feel that bad, really. Also, the few responses I’ve gotten at all to trying to fundraise off the oncoming Valentine’s shitshow were, “No honey, I can’t do that to you.”
I love you too, guys, though I did volunteer for this gig. But I can’t say I’m sad that I’m not going to have to have yet more pop ballads ruined for me forever. (Seriously. Every time one of the songs that got used in 50 Shades of Gray comes on, I attempt to rip my radio out of my car to make it stop because I still remember that fucking awful movie.) I’m also imagining all of the disposable donation money is currently being flung at worthy causes like the ACLU and Standing Rock and the NAACP and CAIR because, again, THE WORLD IS ON FUCKING FIRE, so I can’t begrudge anyone that. We all have limited resources.
I guess my question is to you, people who enjoy listening to me rant about fucking awful movies I watched while drunk, is this moment over? Should I find a different way to humiliate myself in public to get people to fling money at charity? (And wait to do it until the world is no longer ON FUCKING FIRE?) Should I attempt this shindig one more time when the next Transformers movie comes out, because at least it will be less sexually disgusting okay well maybe, I mean we are talking about the franchise in which dudes metaphorically pissing on each other’s legs over the virginity of an underage girl was a major plot point?
You’ll recall that last year, I tangled with Fifty Shades of Grey for the bargain price of $843 and somehow managed to crawl my way out with only a mild hangover.
I’ve been training. I’ve been drinking a lot of beer. But I see that the sequel has stepped up its game as well, and gone the full this could totally be an episode of Law & Order: SVU. And I have no doubt it heard what I was saying last year, about it still not being as bad as Transformers 4. It’s out for revenge.
So here’s the deal. If you want to see the grudge match between my liver and Jamie Dornan’s bulging right eye, you better pony up the money for charity.
The goal is $1000. I think that’s a not unreasonable price to put on my sanity. $1000 by February 14, 2017, and I will see this steaming yech of weirdly shot abuse apologia and attempt to kill myself with alcohol poisoning before the credits roll. And I will take notes for you. And I will write a review. And just to sweeten the pot, I will video myself attempting to explain the plot while still drunk, and post it on Youtube.
Because this is such a special, special kind of movie, the rules are a little different for your charity donations. It’s still honor system – donate money, then contact me via whatever method you prefer and tell me how much. (Also, if you want to remain anonymous, do let me know.) But like last time, I want all donations to go to domestic violence charities. And as you donate, I’ll compile the list of your favored charities so more people will see who’s doing good work out there. I’ve also copied the charities from last year over, so you have a starting point if you don’t know any local groups.
We’re a little more than two months out. My fate is in your hands.
CURRENTLY: $0/$1000
Fuck you I ain’t goin’.
Charities:
[Insert your charity here]
TESSA (confidential support for victims of DVSA in Colorado Springs)
And by the way? The manager at my local Alamo Drafthouse, who now recognizes me on sight, initially assumed I was there to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Oh no, I told him. Gods of Egypt. His eyebrows went up and he said, “Wow, your job must suck.” (He knows I write reviews for pay sometimes.) No, I assured him, it’s because people donated money to charity to make me watch this. How much? $305. “They didn’t pay enough,” he said.
Alex Proyas must be some kind of culinary magician. No doubt with help from the studio and a terrible script, he managed to take $140 million worth of metaphorical cinematic vegetables and garnishes and POOF! turn it into a film salad that’s equal parts insulting, lazy, and boring, the kind of salad that strips the skin off your tongue and takes a sour dump in the back of your throat and there is not enough wine in the world to wash that taste away, you just have to wait for the cells to die and slough off naturally.
Here, let me illustrate where this film falls, via Venn diagram.
Hit the sweet spot, aww yissss
The inexplicably white pantheon of Egypt walks the Earth and rules the Nile valley. Super white Osiris (Bryan Brown) wants to retire and crown his party boy jerk son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), so all the other gods are throwing a party. Then Set (Gerard Butler), sporting an excellent spray tan, shows up and murders the shit out of Osiris while the other gods sort of stand around awkwardly and try not to make eye contact. He then calls upon the powers of computer generated graphics to become a shiny animalbird transformer and beat the shit out of Horus in the first of the movie’s many unarresting fight scenes, rips out Horus’s eyes, and only refrains from killing him because Hathor has a nice rack. Set immediately declares that the afterlife will now be a capitalist enterprise and the only way to get anything nice is to buy your way in with money. And by the way everyone who doesn’t have money right now will be a slave.
As this happens, we get white Aladdin knock-off Bek (Brenton Thwaites), who is a strong, independent man who don’t need no gods. His girlfriend Zaya (Courtney Eaton) is Horus’s number one fangirl, and is enslaved by an architect guy whose main job in the film is to construct a towering black obelisk (with a gold vein on one side) for Set, which is basically the only appearance of wang in a film about Egyptian gods. Zaya gives Bek the plans for Set’s vault, which is basically Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool, and he goes there to steal Horus’s eyes back. He gets one eye, singular, and then tries to escape with Zaya. The architect guy shoots her through the boob with an arrow and she is tragically fridged, except there’s not even really any manpain about it.
Bek decides he’ll help Horus get his other eye back (so Horus can turn into a CGI birdman) if Horus will bring Zaya back to life. They go off on a buddy adventure through fantasy Egypt, during which Bek decides that gods are okay, he guesses, and Horus presumably undergoes some sort of character development. While they’re doing that, Set methodically goes about whacking all the other gods, except for Isis, she already killed herself in grief over Osiris, and yes you just read that sentence. Once he’s collected the whole set of god body parts, Set goes full Satanic Ritual and basically makes himself an Egyptian God Voltron. Bonus points for the part where he literally inserts the glowing brain of Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), the only one of the gods who is black, into his own skull.
Take a moment to let that one wash over you. I’ll wait.
Thus empowered, he goes up to Ra’s awesome skyboat, throws dad out into the void, and then invites the serpent Apophis to eat everything??? because???? it???? will give???? Set more power????
Deep breaths, Egyptian mythology nerds. Deep breaths.
CGI things happen, there’s fighting I guess, Set loses, whatever, I kind of mentally checked out at that point. I just mostly remember that prior to her resurrection by a newly humbled, nice-guy Horus, Zaya had absolutely perfect lip gloss for a corpse.
Entire books could be written about how wrong the mythology is in this film, beginning with the fact that Christian good vs evil framing ruins everything, please stop making chaos gods into the devil, thank you and goodbye. But that would be a waste of someone’s perfectly good time that they could use to pick their nose or scratch their butt crack or a million things more productive than giving this film a second or even first viewing. And by the way? When Set plays God Part Voltron, the piece of Osiris he has, the piece that poor Isis couldn’t find before she offed herself as a side note, is Osiris’s heart. His heart.
The really upsetting thing here though is that there is a lettuce cameo in this movie. (Aha, so that’s why ze started with an incredibly strained salad metaphor.) When Horus, Bek, and Hathor go to Thoth’s library to get his help, Thoth is examining the scientific merits of a head of lettuce. It’s like the screenwriters signaled to us, hey, we totally did this research and know about the jizz lettuce wraps and the wangs and all, but we decided to write this bland as shit movie instead.
I have never been simultaneously so pleased and so angry to see a goddamn head of lettuce. Here’s your lettuce, assholes, but there are no wangs. NO WANGS.
Apparently I talk a lot with my eyebrows when I’m drunk.
Well, no wangs other than Set’s giant black stone Wang of Evil (yes but can you make it taller), which considering the absolutely delightful racism exhibited in the casting, well. Those are some stygian depths perhaps best appreciated from a distance.
So with all that going against it already, the sheer badness of the directing and acting in Gods of Egypt is really just the oh-god-that’s-not-actually-dressing on the lettuce. This movie should make it into a screenwriting course as exhibit A for this is how we don’t do voice over. The dialog is forgettable at best, awful at worst. And I don’t know if it’s an artifact of the extensive CGI shit they had to do to make the actors playing the gods twice as big as the humans so maybe they were all just acting in isolation in green closets, but none of the dialog actually sounded like dialog. There was no flow. It was actors, many of whom we know can turn in a decent performance, barking out lines by rote without any kind of interplay or response. It was weird, disturbing, and really fucking annoying. We’re talking Plan Nine From Outer Space levels of woodenness, here, but without any of the bizarrely kitschy charm lent by tiny plywood tombstones and pie-plate UFOs. Instead we get overblown visuals that are occasionally breathtaking (Ra’s spaceship hauling the Sun up over the edge of a flat Earth springs to mind here) but probably squarely to blame for the fact that every actor appears to be shouting their lines from a green screen vacuum.
And it’s boring. This movie is so. Fucking. Boring. It’s 127 minutes (still shorter than Transformers 4‘s 109 hour running time, mercifully) that should have been maybe 90 minutes, padded out with boring as shit action sequences with random moments of bullet-time slomo so I guess we can appreciate how cool this is. This film is fucking genre salad all thrown together (buddy comedy, action, romance, family drama, etc) and dressed with cheap exploitation because they spent their god semen budget on birdman transformer effects. The only character whose motivations make any sense is Bek, who presumably loves Zaya because we’re informed of this fact, even if they have the emotional resonance of two slices of plastic-wrapped American cheeze being rubbed together. Set wanting to let Apophis consume the entire world only makes sense if you consider it’s his only way to escape this fucking movie and then okay, maybe he’s doing us all a favor.
In that thoroughly awful way, maybe there’s one tiny, very well-disguised blessing to the unforgivable whitewashing of Gods of Egypt: at least no cowardly studio exec will be able to point to this shit salad and bleat that it somehow “proves” no one wants to watch fantasy movies starring black (and other non-white) actors. If any real lessons stick, like oh maybe it’s past time to stop trying to make movies about ancient (fantasy or otherwise) Egypt that headline white people, that remains to be seen. I don’t do sucker bets.
And remember, kids, if someone wants to sell you a salad, take a good, long look at it first and see if that dressing is really what they’re advertising.
As promised, here are my handwritten notes I took in the movie! You can track my inebriation by how bad my handwriting gets. Not as bad as 50 SoG, I’d say: Gods of Egypt notes
Think this movie sounds awful? Feel bad for me? Donate money to a good cause, to prove my suffering was not in vain!
And if you like what I do in general, hey. I have a Patreon.
And lo, in the year of our Lord 2016, Hollywood is giving us an Egypt so white it almost looks like the Oscars. Just kidding. One of the Egyptian gods (Thoth) actually is played by an African-American actor, which makes this movie significantly more diverse than the 2016 Academy Awards and let’s just contemplate that for a minute.
I have been making fun of this movie from the first moment I saw the trailer, because even if you ignore Gerard Butler gnawing on the scenery, it just looks terrible. My Clash of the Titans senses are all a-tingle; I spent endless hours (at least twenty-seven) of my life trapped in a theater with that movie while my will to live withered away. You could not pay me enough to go watch this train wreck of white people with faintly British “fantasy” accents and CGI.
But guess what? You CAN pay a charity enough to make me watch it so you don’t have to, if you’re feeling simultaneously sadistic and giving. And considering the absolutely blinding whitewashing of this film, I feel a charity theme coming on.
MEET THE CHARITIES
Act For Change is a British charity devoted to promoting not just actors of colour, but LGBT, disabled, and female artists as well. I have created a fundraising page with them, please donate there for ease of tracking. Monetary amounts are in GBP, but I’ve done a test donation and they take American credit cards just fine. (Alternatively, if you’re still having problems, you can contact me via email and we’ll work something out.) Americans, right now 1 GBP is running around $1.50, calibrate your giving accordingly.
Classics in Color is a NYC-based theater company devoted to classics as well, focused on ethnic, gender, age, and physically challenged inclusivity.
So this is the deal:
Donate to Act For Change at my page, and I’ll get told how much and your work is done. If you donate to the other two charities (or don’t use the Act For Change page) I’ll need you to inform me via tweet, blog comment, email, or smoke signal that you gave and how much. We use the honor system here; if you tell me you gave someone money, I’ll believe you.
Either way you decide to go about it, if you, my tormenters blog readers and friends, donate $300 to the above charities by February 26, I will see this movie the next day, Saturday February 27, and then I will write about it once I’m sober enough to type. I will also scan my notes for you as soon as I’m able.
GOAL MET: £241.51/£220 ($336.45/~$305)
BUT KEEP DONATING!
Here’s the plan: I will be seeing Gods of Egypt on Sunday (28th) and will have review and notes for you on Monday the 29th!
Offer your gratitude to these monsters people who love both my suffering and diversity in the arts:
So back in February, a bunch of people donated the princely sum of over $800 to domestic violence charities to make me watch and blog about 50 Shades of Grey. I’d hoped to get a bit more money for charity by holding my handwritten notes hostage; that didn’t succeed.
After thinking about it, and looking over said notes (wow, my handwriting does some amazing things when I’m drunk) I’ve decided:
These are kind of hilarious and I think people should be able to read them.
I’m just going to make the inclusion of the notes standard from now on, to go with the blog post. Charity still wins.
Sorry, I no longer have my notes from the horrible TMNT remake, but those were probably not nearly as funny, as I did not get nearly that drunk.
A lot of people have been asking me about this one. Come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?
AHAHAHAHAHAHA ha ha ha haaaaa
Well. Uh. I like the Rock? And the geologist isn’t wearing a white labcoat? And watching the Rayleigh wave go through LA is… kind of cool, even if it’s moving way too slowly?
Oh, who am I kidding. HOW THE FUCK IS THERE A TSUNAMI EVEN AGH Deep breaths. This one must be aiming for a spot on the DVD shelf o’ bad geology, right between Volcano and The Core. Fuck you, my liver can’t take this right now.
So here’s the deal. Donate money to charity, and I will watch this movie and write a review of some sort for it. Raise more, and you get my notes. Don’t raise enough money, and I won’t go, but charities still get money, so yay! The price I’m setting on this turd is $400$300. (You get the Rock’s biceps discount.) The movie comes out on May 29, but I have company from out of town that week so will be unlikely to see it until June 1 at the earliest. So that gives you nearly two weeks to come up with the money if this is going to be a thing.
As usual, honor system. Donate, then contact me via social networking site, email, or messenger pigeon to tell me how much you donated. If you don’t get some kind of acknowledgment from me, I didn’t get the message. (If you prefer your donation to remain anonymous, please tell me that too.)
Progress: $155/$300
THANK DAMN YOU
Zig Zag Claybourne ($20)
Emily ($10)
Madred ($100)
Pat ($25)
ETA: Sorry to say, but the time for this has passed and the goal wasn’t met. So I don’t have to see the movie (Yay!) and charity got $155 (YAY) so I think we all still win. :)
I went on Saturday. I had two beers and three hurricanes in a little over two hours. I am not ashamed to admit that I got really fucked up in a way that had nothing to do with the movie. I also took notes. 14 pages of notes. I am kind stunned by how bad my handwriting gets by the end.
By the way. If you guys want all 14 pages? Pony up another $156.61 to the charities and I will hand over the scans. Want to know what you’re missing? This is page 5. Of 14. (By the way, my housemate claims that she has a video of me drunk calling one of my friends and telling her about the movie. Which goes on for something like 9 minutes. She says you can have it if you hit $1250.) After thinking it over, I decided to scan my notes after all. Enjoy.
I invite you to think about that for a moment and shed a tear for my liver.
Assholes that got thrown out of the Alamo Drafthouse while watching 50 Shades of Grey review by Rachael Acks
I sat in the theater and drank alcohol. There were people talking loudly in the back of the theater, which was very unusual, due to the fact that I was at the Alamo Drafthouse and talking is verboten. But man those plucky patrons! Going on about Dornan’s butt and oh my god the book, and did you see that, and look he has a helicopter oh my god!
I am so glad this table was in the theater, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to follow the extremely complex plot of this geopolitical thrill-ride. I would never have known, for example, that Jamie Dornan has NIPPLES. HE DOES, YOU KNOW. TWO OF THEM. RIGHT THERE. OH MY GOD. His slightly bulging right eye and pained expression invite you to look closer if you dare, but we all know you can’t handle this sort of difficult truth: the nipples are capitalism and the surging buttocks the corporatist state that is the inevitable result of the unfettered free market, which doesn’t give oral. Oral is for closers.
As Christian used one of his approximately six million grey ties (HE LIKES GREY. GREY GREY GREY THERE IS A COLOR THEME YOU POOR FOOLS DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND, GREY LIKE THE MORALITY OF OUR INCREASINGLY COMPROMISED STATE) to tie up Anastasia as a daring commentary about the tangled issues of international trade and the corporate espionage it often encourages, these fine explicators were thrown out of the theater. Realizing that they would be leaving us without their guidance, they threw their drinks glasses on the ground in despair. And apparently at some other customers, but is there anything wrong with wanting to put someone else out of their misery?
“Bitches! Fuckers!” “I can buy this movie! It’s good! FUCKERS!” were the last words of these brave souls as they were herded from the theater by the extremely large and friendly manager. It’s true, you know. We were indeed the fuckers and bitches for being stuck in the movie, now rendered completely incomprehensible without their help.
But! Every cloud has a silver lining. The fine drama of their exit was a damn sight more interesting than watching Anastasia bite her lip while I cringed at the sad mistreatment of an otherwise nice, if boring, tie. And even better, the manager came in at the end of the movie and gave us vouchers that I can spend on something that isn’t 50 Shades of Grey. As much as it tears at my heart to do so, of course. Seeing the movie just wouldn’t be the same without the interpretive commentary running in parallel.
Grade: A+, would heartily recommend again while watching a similar movie
Okay you want the actual review? Fine. See below the fold.
So fine. You did your part. I’ll do mine. I will see this abortion of a movie by February 21st. Probably on the 21st, because I seriously do not want to get as fucking wasted as I’ll need to be in order to survive on a work night. That’s just a recipe for disaster.
Of course, you realize that your job isn’t done yet. Talk to your friends. Talk to your enemies. Talk to your local chapter of the Illuminati. Let’s see another $250 on the table to help the victims of domestic violence. Because I’m going to take notes in this movie. I always take notes. And they will be handwritten, drunken, angry, bewildered, and no doubt increasingly poorly spelled as my blood alcohol level steadily climbs. Kind of like my Transformers 4 notes. But. You know. The knob of agony goes to 11.
$250 more. You can do it. Hey, and if you get even more than that I’ll… shit, I don’t know. Wear a suit or something.
I just had a seventh person ask me if I’m going to see Fifty Shades of Grey and rant about it like I did with the quasi-porn of a different sort, Transformers 4.
The short answer is: Fuck you.
The long answer is: No really. Fuck you. And you. And especially you. I’d rather watch a 48 hour loop of Age of Extinction with my eyes pinned open like I’m the fucking vic on some episode of Criminal Minds without the benefit of a single milliliter of alcohol in my system. This goddamn movie is going to make Michael Bay look like he’s fucking Gloria Steinem in comparison. Okay?
So this is how it is. $400 to charity got me to watch a movie so fucking awful that I was drunk before it was halfway through it and writing pitiful notes to my waitress. You want me to watch a gross quasi-porn movie with unsafe “bondage” and an abusive relationship that I’m supposed to believe is somehow romantic that’s going to have me chewing on my own seat because it makes me so goddamn angry? A movie that will probably make me bust an aneurysm in self defense so I can leave via ambulance before the opening credits finish? Pony up the fucking dough. That’s what it’s going to take. Put your money where your inarguable sadism is.
Okay, okay, I will be seeing Fifty Shades of Fuck My Life Greyon February 21 or 22 thanks to the sadistic monsters listed below. But this is no excuse to stop giving. Here are some bonus reasons why you should keep donating to anti-domestic violence charities:
If you fucking assholes give $1,000 to charity, I will give you my handwritten notes. Because there will be handwritten notes. You know. Like these.
And IF you sadistic motherfuckers manage to make it to $1,250, I will attend this shit show of incipient alcoholism wearing a three piece suit and a tie. My suit, for the record, is gray.
BONUS GOAL: IF you evil bastards get to $2000 donated to anti-domestic violence charities, local author Michael Ashleigh Finn will come with me to the movie and be my designated driver. And then write a post for you all about the horrors of watching the movie sober.
So that’s what it takes. Start giving. It’s honor system, so communicate with me via social media, email, or dropping a comment here and I will add you to the total. (If you would prefer to remain anonymous, just say the word.)
Charities I will accept for this round of suffering:
TESSA (confidential support for victims of DVSA in Colorado Springs)
Notice a pattern here yet? I don’t know, assholes, there is just something about this fucking movie that really makes me want to see money get given to charities that help the victims of domestic violence. I wonder why that could be. But you know what? Any charity that serves victims of domestic violence is okay. Please provide links if you have a favorite and I will add it to the list.
Well, you did it, so I did it, so here we are. Charity gets $300 and you get to make me suffer for a little over an hour and a half. There was unfortunately no drinking accomplished during this movie, but that was because I had two tablets of vicodin on board to help defeat the rawness of the healing incision in my foot. This may be why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made not one iota of goddamn sense to me, though my housemate assures me it made no sense to her, either, and she was completely sober at the time.
But I’m going to try to be positive about this.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Lips for the lipless
Remember how, back in the heady days when Transformers didn’t have lips and no one had even conceived of the idea of making a movie out of a fucking board game, the teenage mutant ninja turtles were either animated or played by dudes in costumes obviously made out of rubber, the way god and nature intended?
Remember when practical effects were a thing? I miss those days.
Now you get this endless protean horror that’s the result of a weird and highly illegal genetic experiment that involved Shrek, college frat boys who just desperately needed some beer money, and something unidentifiable, perhaps the last shreds of Michael Bay’s conscience which had until now been kept preserved in a jar of pickled eggs in the recess of some broom closet. It looks something like this.
I LIIIIIIIIIIVE
Which is a fucking cruel thing to do to someone who is one prescription pain medication, let me tell you. There is shot after shot of all four of these horrors grouped around and staring down on an unconscious or confused character, and every time it felt like I’d been caught in the kind of bad trip I could expect if the drugs I was on weren’t legal and had potentially been cut with some kind of weed killer. I’d experience this full body twitch of terrified revulsion while I waited for a set of those rubbery CGI-lips to press against the screen and begin to siphon my soul from my body while another chanted Y’ai’ng’ngah / Yog-Sothoth / H’ee-L’geb / F’ai Throdog / Uaaah.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: A significantly shorter movie than Transformers 4
Pretty much all of the fighting takes place between rendered characters. And while there’s more visual coherence than you get in the average Transformers movie, where it looks like bundles of scrap recycling getting battered together over and over, this made up for being able to tell what was happening by bring incredibly fucking boring.
What I can’t blame on the vicodin is the bit where they felt the need to make Shredder’s suit sort of… transformer-ish? Partially mechanized? Come on, guys, Shredder was badass enough on his own, making him half swiss-army-knife is really not the way to impress. I think at one point he might have wielded a corkscrew or the wine bottle opener.
Apparently the hellturtles learned their techniques from Splinter, who literally taught it to himself from a book that he found discarded in the sewer, which thankfully was a pictorial instruction manual in the way of ninjutsu. I wish I was making that up. I wish I was making any of this up. I wish this had just been some sort of anesthesia-induced fever dream, and I’d soon wake up to find it was still actually Thursday and I’ve just fallen asleep with a copy of The Mountains of Madness over my face, then I’d think about the horrifying turtle-lips and vomit a lot.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: If you like exposition, then have I got a movie for you
Because there’s a lot of it. Exposition, I mean. Really meaningless exposition. I never thought I’d accuse old-school TMNT of being sort of intellectual, but in comparison, yes? Because at least the old ninja turtle writers seemed to realize that certain things could be left unsaid, and that certain bits of exposition didn’t need to be repeated over and over again. It strikes me that in a movie that barely made it to 100 minutes, maybe the director could have gone out on a limb and, I don’t know, shown us a few things instead of telling.
When Sacks gets mentioned to Splinter, he takes the opportunity to explain why Sacks is evil and in league with Shredder (which he knows because…reasons?) instead of the movie having a couple of scenes to say develop Sacks as a character, have him betray April and the turtles, and show he’s evil. Why make this decision? It wasn’t in the interest of running time.
And if you like background info dumps, this is a wonderful movie. Want to hear several times about April and her dad and her connection to the turtles? Got you covered. What about the foot clan? There is like a foot clan forecast in every scene in which they tell you what activity level to expect! Useful! (They are also apparently the only evil ninja clan in the history of ever to be so terrible at ninjutsu that they use guns, but then have worse aim than the average Stormtrooper.)
I don’t know, maybe the turtle lip budget was running severely over at that point. If there had been less exposition, there would have been more scenes with the turtles, and more souls would have needed to be harvested for Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat of the Woods With A Thousand Young.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: One third the female characters, slightly less sexism.
So the movie is about April, a lady reporter who, as far as I can tell, suffers from severe, untreated exercise-induced asthma, because she’s always short of breath in every scene no matter what she’s been doing. And Vernon, her camera guy, with whom she has a pretty awesome kind of bro-ish friendship except at incredibly random and awkward intervals the script has this hiccup and decides that oh yeah April is a girl so Vernon should hit on her. Because that’s what boys do. Like the time Vernon drops April off at Sacks’s house and literally says, “Nothing better than dropping off a pretty girl at a rich guy’s house.” He was randomly neckbeard fedora-y, except he has no neckbeard, but at one point he literally does wear a fedora. A fedora that he immediately disavows in apparent confusion when called on it.
It’s almost like there was this script for a boring but fairly normal movie, and then someone realized Michael Bay was involved and thus ran it through a random creepy sexist comment generator. Or maybe there was a whole subplot with Vernon that got left on the cutting room floor, in which Vernon has at times been replaced by a terrifying clone made from mutated white bread, and the only way you can tell them apart is that the real Vernon is just sort of doofy and doesn’t creep on his coworker.
But anyway, Vernon and April team up with the four ninja turtles who are, if I recall correctly, named Nerdy Turtle, Manpain Turtle, Generic Turtle, and Creepy Turtle. Or if you believe the script, Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, and Michaelangelo, but I think my names are much more accurate. There are sad attempts at witty banter. The only turtle who is even slightly likable any more is Nerdy Turtle, but he still looks like he’s going to eat your soul from within the film so that doesn’t help at all.
Yeah, that? That’s Donnie.
I found Creepy Turtle personally upsetting, because Mikey was actually my favorite from when I was a kid. And yet the moment he shows up on screen he starts hitting on April, including uttering the immortal line: “She’s hot. I can feel my shell tightening.”
Hello ladies, you can call me Dr. Reptilove
Back in the day, Mikey was a kind of free-spirited party turtle. Apparently in the year 2014 that translates to “let’s party like it’s Steubenville.” It’s gross. And every time Creepy Turtle said something fucking creepy, you know who I heard laugh? Not the kids in the theater. The dads. And that made it approximately a million times creepier.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: It could always be worse
There were actually two scenes in the entire movie that I really liked… because they were the ones that reminded me most of the turtles I grew up watching. Early on, there’s a scene where Splinter is trying to get the boys to admit where they went, and he finally breaks their silence by tempting them with the mystical “99 cheese pizza.” That was cute. And then toward the end, all four of the turtles are in an elevator going up a long way, and then they start beat boxing using the beeps from the elevator. That, too, was cute.
The rest?
Maybe all you need to know is that the word Cowabunga is uttered only twice in the entire movie, right at the end. First, with appropriate enthusiasm. Then again with the sort of “gritty grimdark I’m about to walk away from an explosion while putting on my sunglasses” tone that made me want to weep in despair.
But fear not. The turtles have a new catchphrase: Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!