Jesse Carrigan

Last thing (probably not the last thing): Jason Beghe (Allan) looks like he has aged approximately 8 years in the last 25. Look at this mofo: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1755696640/nm0000892?ref_=nmmi_mi_all_sf_4

Now that I've finished (the movie, that is) I have a lot to say. This movie is amazing. I agree that there are a ton of crazy things about it, from the monkey teeth to the monkey POV to the monologues to the nonsensical science. But I love all of it. ALL OF IT. I think there's some real tragedy in the movie. Allan's rage at his injury and the betrayal of the people around him (which is totally understandable) contributes to the terrible things that Ella does. Geoffrey was trying to help Allan by having Melanie train Ella, but through the experiment Geoffrey destroys himself, Ella, and the people around them. If not for the experiment, everything would have been great. The scientist's reach exceeds his grasp, and he's ruined by his own creation. Hubris; classic Greek tragedy.* I thought there was a ton of great camera work that ratcheted up the tension even though the whole thing was pretty hilarious. I laughed at Allan rolling around slowly while Geoffrey was running around chasing Ella and yet it was also really scary to imagine that happening while being trapped in a chair. The bird pecking at Allan's eyes was really disturbing, and Ella pressing the needle to Melanie's cheek was hard to watch. And that muhfugging jump scare near the end really got me, I'm embarrassed to say. I love this movie. *not a student of drama history, so I don't know for sure if this is correct, but it sounds good so yeah

Dammit, that last jump scare. You win, George Romero. You win.

Guys, I think I need help. I think I love this movie. WHAT DID YOU DO TO MEEEEE

The monkeys destroying the lab was pretty hilarious. Actually, a lot of this movie is pretty funny.

I'm just getting to this, and this may be controversial, but I'm totally with June. I find this first half with Allan and his struggle to come to terms with his injury to be really compelling. (I remain somewhat unconvinced about the monkey actors though.)

OH MY GOD I JUST THOUGHT OF SOMETHING ELSE. Satan Zuckerberg is supposed to be filthy rich, right? He has his own jet and takes off to Paris whenever. When he goes to his garage, there is room for exactly two cars in there: the red Lamborghini (?) and the white Bentley (?). (I probably don't have those right, I'm not a car person.) When he uses the garage door opener and Judith is standing outside, that garage door doesn't even look like it's big enough to get both of those cars in or out. I half expected to see a cheap metal rack with totes full of Christmas lights and ornaments next to a stacking washer and dryer given the layout of that garage.

Random sundry things that I am thinking about as I prepare for the episode to drop: I forgot another thing that made me laugh out loud: Lance Gross' old makeup at the end of the movie. It's the fakest thing I've seen since the anaconda in Anaconda. It looks like they bought an "Old Man" costume at the Halloween Boo-tique on clearance. Judith the marriage counselor at the end was played by a different actor. I thought maybe it was just the glasses and hair that were throwing me off, but no. So strange. Take a look at Jurnee Smollett-Bell's (Judith) filmography on IMDB and prepare to have your mind blown. This woman has been in a million awesome things. http://www.imdb.com/..._=ttfc_fc_cl_t1 I just took a glance at the Amazon reviews and I am VERY excited for Second Opinions. (I hope the people who were really surprised by the twist ending don't watch any of M. Night's movies, I don't think they will be able to handle it.)

That was Jessica Chaffen.

That should have been his name in the movie.

I'll defend the hosts here a little bit in that I recall Jason saying "I'm really not sure about calling him Blackie", but I agree with the sentiment. I was kind of hoping for a return by Brandon Johnson, personally. I love that dude.

Oh my God, you're right. I forgot about that. I mean, these two people have no idea how to communicate their needs and desires to each other. I feel like I'm taking this way too seriously, but they have some real communication issues that contribute to what happens in the rest of the movie. It's also so contrived. I feel like the conversation would have been more tentative. Like: SCENE The bedroom. Brice and Judith are brushing their teeth, getting ready for bed. Judith: Baby? Brice (mumbles through toothpaste): Yrs? Judith: You ever just want to... (trails off) Brice: Mmmm? Judith: Nevermind, it's fine. Brice (spits out toothpaste): No, what is it? Judith: Do you ever just want to do it somewhere different? Brice: Like...where? Judith: Like the kitchen. Brice: ... Judith: Just, hot, kinda like...animals, you know? Brice: We make food in there. Judith: Nah, you're right. Brice: It's kind of weird. Judith: I guess. Brice: I mean...if you really want to... Judith: No, no, it's stupid. Forget it. Brice: ...ok... Both awkwardly climb into bed. END SCENE I'm no screenwriter, and that probably sucks, but it seems more true to the characters to me. Why would she just attack him? I guess the implication is that she's so fired up by Harley that she's an insatiable sexual banshee, which is a whole other set of problems.

Time for some serious talk. I should credit Ta-Nahesi Coates at The Atlantic for helping me come to this conclusion, but I think there's an important distinction between racism and prejudice. Racism is the system of oppressing, differentiating, and dividing people based on race that has been a part of American culture since the inception of the republic. The most obvious example is of course American slavery, but the system continued long after the 13th Amendment was ratified in the Jim Crow laws of the south and the Chicago Housing Authority's discriminatory policies, among others. We've addressed a lot of those kinds of legal issues, which is a good start, but the less obvious effect of racism is in the erroneous patterns of belief or ignorance that become part of the framework of how people think about (or perhaps, don't think about) other people of a particular color. Prejudice, by contrast, is the kind of irrational fear and hatred that we think about with the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and less extreme things like not wanting people with different skin colors to marry. Clearly these things are related and woven together, but are subtly distinct. One of the problems of eliminating racism is that no one wants to be labeled a racist, so we can't even bring up the ways that we may be personally prejudiced which in the aggregate lead to racism. Thus, those things get pushed down, become empowered by avoiding the light of exposure to better ideas, and perpetuate the cycle. Ultimately, my belief is that colloquially, we're all a little racist, because our culture is so infected and affected by racism. If we could be more open and honest about that, and confront and defeat the ways that we are individually part of the problem, I think we'd get farther along the road of eliminating the systemic issue. I may be wrong about that, but the status quo certainly isn't working. /serious Personally, I think Lance Gross (Brice) is way hotter than Robbie Jones (Harley), but I'm a straight dude, so what do I know.

I feel like there was a period of time where there were majority black casts in a number of movies that had pretty big cultural cachet. (Thinking of Spike Lee's work, Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, etc.) I didn't grow up in anything that would be considered a diverse environment, but I was familiar with those films. For some reason that kind of cast just doesn't seem to exist anymore except in Tyler Perry films.

I don't even know how to say how I feel about having watched this. Maybe the best word is conflicted. I'm going to go out on a limb here with a small positive. This is the first Tyler Perry movie that I've ever seen, and it was pretty much what I expected. There were a number of small comedy bits that I thought landed reasonably well - I laughed a few times. ("I'm taking you to the $5.99 buffet" was a favorite.) Mostly, it was a bad combination of boring and offensive. The bummer to me is that (how do I say this) I don't have a problem with some of the kernel of the movie, that a big part of marriage is sticking it out through the lean times and not letting yourself get sucked in by every set of hot abs that goes by. I felt like there was something kind of true about these characters letting their marriage get away from them, taking each other for granted, making poor choices, suffering heartbreak, and finding a kind of closure. In different hands, I feel like there's an idea here that could work. At the same time, I can't think of a weirder set of responses for people to have to each other than these characters did. Harley is clearly a sociopath/psychopath and is completely inappropriate toward Judith from minute one. I snorted so hard when he said "Are you getting turned on right now?" that I almost had an aneurysm. Brice had what I would consider to be maybe the most bizarre line when Judith was slapping him in the kitchen to initiate sex (the part where he said, "this is weird" was the least weird part, followed by the weirdest part) which was "if you want to go in the bedroom and do this the RIGHT WAY, we can do that." What? I can understand being weirded out by the sudden violence, but if my wife kissed me like that in the kitchen my pants would be halfway off before any of that started anyway. (Too much?) But "the right way"?? Just...strange. The gay jokes were very uncomfortable. The older women were bizarre. The heavy-handed moralizing and ultimate shaming of Judith felt really icky. I feel (and hope) that it's possible to have a position that the numerous challenges of marriage are worth working through without demonizing people whose marriages don't work out.

I noticed the audio, but I've done enough live mixing and recording to know that sometimes things don't work as well as you would hope and I wasn't worried about it. Thanks for taking the time to work on it and make it better for us, I appreciate it I and know many others do too.

Everyone told me not to watch "LOL" and I didn't listen. It was a terrible, terrible mistake. This movie is very bad, and not in a wonderful, entertaining way, but in a "Last Airbender" kind of way. I don't understand how this got made, I don't know who the intended audience is, and I feel awful for having spent my time watching it. The kicker is going to be that this was all a sick joke to get us rubes to watch this monstrosity and the gang is talking about something great instead.

I was at the show (it was truly a magical experience) and I had a very, VERY important question that I didn't get to ask. 1. Patrick Swayze is in this film, which is set in New York. 2. Dalton, Swayze's character in Road House, is driving a car with New York plates and went to NYU (which, as we all recall, is in his medical file for some reason). 3. Given these facts, should we posit that this film hints at Dalton's career in dance before he becomes Sam Elliot's protege and the baddest-ass cooler in the world? This would explain his astonishing shoulder work with which he seduces Kelly Lynch's character, as well as his battle with bizarro Patrick Duffy that looks like a dance-fight.

I actually thought that was the beginning of the movie, and I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't. Then the tigers started showing up later and I thought, this is the perfect production company to make this movie.

Sounds like we have a convergence with another great HDTGM movie, The Devil's Advocate, in which Keanu Reeves' character is named Kevin Lomax. I'm imagining a world in which Kevin and Eddie are brothers and have divergent adventures as a lawyer for the devil and a martial artist, respectively.

I'm also with June, I realized that I do love me a good training montage. It actually did seem kind of ingenious how he improvised things. Also JCVD has the best training face ever.

I thought they were specifically NOT trying to assassinate Stavros. They go through this whole thing about needing to capture him alive and about the sniper rifle being modified to shoot tranquilizer darts. In which case the other people, including Stavros' son, weren't in danger of being killed, so there was no reason to hesitate. Also they did a terrible job of planning for the other hundred cronies with automatic weapons, and I have no idea how they thought that was going to go. That whole operation was preposterous.

There is a shot when he ends up on the island after failing to capture Stavros where the video monitor shows that he's being identified, and his name is revealed to be Jack Paul Quinn. JACK. PAUL. QUINN. I don't know why they just didn't add the extra syllable and make it Jack-Paul Van Quinn, you're not fooling anyone.

There were a couple of images that just made me laugh. When the guy shows up at JCVD's villa and leers at his wife for a bit, there was a moment where he says "Come on Jack, you can't retire until he does," and then walks past JCVD. The scene ends with JCVD making this face... ... and all I could think of was that during this take the guy farted as he walked by. Then, during the training montage, I thought his weight training with the tub was weirdly sexual, and then this happened: It's just water. I think.

Also, JCVD's wife says to Mickey Rourke when he buys her horrible sculpture, "My husband loved that swan. He thought it was a cow." But the only instance where he says anything about it is when he is running to the phone at the beginning and yells "Catherine, your damn cow got in my way!" I did not detect any affection for her awful reconstitutions of garbage.