Serious Actors Seriously Acting.

Disgusting Inappropriate Filthy Hilarious Hellspawn Godsend.

Specifically designed to make you call your Congressman and complain, MOVIE 43 will offend, distress, embarrass, infuriate, ejaculate, and give you anal warts.

Not your average ensemble cast movie where everyone is trying to be more serious than their peers in order to win that Golden Globe, MOVIE 43 takes its A-Listers, jams them into gross-out vignettes so funny that you will miss half the raunchy dialogue from laughing so hard… and gives them anal warts.

A bedraggled Dennis Quaid pitches a movie idea at studio exec Greg Kinnear. We launch into a series of vignettes that are supposed to be this movie – returning intermittently to this throughline where Quaid becomes so desperate with the obsequious Kinnear that it turns into a hostage situation, Quaid trying to extort funding out of Kinnear at gunpoint. Seth McFarlane, Will Sasso and Common also squeeze into this storyline.

Meanwhile, the R-rated vignettes bludgeon us with dialogue as sharp as the boxcutters used to hijack the 9-11 planes (too soon?), over insane little plots so deformed they will make Republicans rethink their views on abortion (too mongoon?).

1) Kate Winslet on a blind date with Hugh Jackman the Chinballian (well, that’s actually the species name for the alien from MEN IN BLACK 2 – but you immediately get the picture, right?). And everyone in normal society is quite nonchalant about Hugh’s hairy naked scrotum and testicles hanging where his Adam’s apple should be. Everyone except Winslet, who makes the ooweh! vomit sound, so she’s aces in my book.

2) Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts home-school their son, giving him all the alienation, bullying and loneliness required from school life; mum Naomi schooling him in his first awkward high school kiss. It would be awesomely hot if it weren’t awesomely wrong. And awesomely hot anyway.

3) Anna Faris, after a year of dating boyfriend Chris Pratt thinks it’s time to move to the next phase – being pooped on. Not “shitting” – you shit on a whore, as J.B. Smoove points out – but you “poop” on someone you love.

4) Emma Stone and Kieran Culkin (so much more street cred than Macauley!): vital, urgent teens at a checkout counter, who need to be inside each other if only they could curb their vital, urgent hate for each other.

5) The iBabe – a naked hottie robot that plays music, with the fan to keep her circuitry cool located in her “vagi-port.” Aasif Mandvi and Kate Bosworth try to explain to clueless CEO Richard Gere why the iBabe company is fending off so many lawsuits from young boys getting their fingers chopped off.

6) Robin the Boy Wonder in full costume (Justin Long) tries to speed-date, with the specter of Batman (Jason Sudeikis, also in full cosplay) lurking around every corner. “He makes me wear this outfit!” whines Robin, as Batman cockblocks him with Lois Lane (a smoking hot Uma Thurman) and Supergirl (Kristen Bell), who apparently has mungabush.

7) Chloe Grace Moretz (oh my God! Truly the most beautiful woman in the world right now!), has her first period on a date with young Jimmy Bennett (growing up in front of us on film; remember him as Young Kirk in STAR TREK 2009?), while older brother Christopher Mintz-Plasse goes bananas trying to find something to suffice as a tampon. Then insouciant father Patrick Warburton walks in and proves why all men are pigs.

8) Gerard Butler as a Leprechaun captured by Johnny Knoxville and Sean William Scott, who want his pot of gold. What a potty mouth on that tiny fucker!

10) Stephen Merchant (THE OFFICE) and Halle Berry on a first date, playing Truth Or Dare. By the time Merchant surgically turns into an Asian man on a dare, it’s probably gone too far…

11) Coach Terrence Howard in a 1959 film about the First Negro High School Basketball Team, assuring the desperately scared black team, “You’re black, that’s why you’re going to win.” “You mean we gotta give 110%, coach?” “Not 110% – 50%, 3%! And you’re still gonna win!” “You mean if we follow in the footsteps of the lord?–” “No, not the lord! They’re white, you’re black – this is basketball!” As an example of why they are destined to win, Howard asks one of the boys to take out his foot long dick and wave it around. If only that scary white team wouldn’t come into their locker room and taunt the poor Negroes with their pasty skin and small dicks…

12) In the grandest Looney Tunes tradition of combining mischievous cartoon mascots with live action, Beezel the cartoon cat despises Elizabeth Banks getting between him and his master Josh Duhamel. Beezel will do anything to crush kill destroy Banks while he wanks to pictures of Josh in a bathing suit. But then, don’t we all wank to pictures of Josh in a bathing suit?

There’s nothing deep in MOVIE 43 (except maybe one of those foot long dicks); written, and directed by various teams, each working on their own vignette, it’s constructed purely to destroy liberty and sobriety. An overwhelming undertaking, my question is, Who oversees the whole shebang? Each vignette even had its own editor and producer, so who was at the top of the dirty pile cutting this all together? Oh, and my other question is, Will there be a sequel – and will MOVIE 44 be blasphemous enough to burn off these anal warts?…

END

Alice in Wonderland meets Alice Cooper.

This movie scared the pants off me. Which in turn, scared young children and women with small hips, as I walked out of the theater, pantless.

I must be dreaming
Please stop screaming

With CORALINE, the MPAA once again proves how little grasp it has in correlating asinine Ratings to actual content. Even as I entered this PG-13 “3D stop-motion” animated movie, there were lines around the block for the premier of the R-Rated FRIDAY THE 13TH, yet I cannot imagine how axe-killing teens could be more chilling than a parallel world where people have sewed-on buttons for eyes!

From a celebrated book by Neil Gaiman, director Henry Selick (director, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS) brings us this morbid tale of a cute little blue-haired girl who goes “through the looking glass” (actually, she crawls through a small door in the wall) to a mirror world where her parents do not ignore her (like her real writer parents who are always hunched over computers), feed her delicious dinners (instead of glop), and lavish love on her (instead of what seems like barely tolerable babysitting). Everything is the same but opposite in this Other World – except her Other Mother and Other Father have buttons sewed on in place of eyes.

That in itself is something out of a medieval torture tale. But it gets worse. Much worse. And by worse, I mean better.

Coraline, the wide-faced, blue-haired girl, is voiced by Dakota Fanning, her parents, voiced by Teri Hatcher and “the PC Guy,” John Hodgman. They’ve moved to a townhouse complex in the desolate country, where the neighbors define wacky (probably because they’re so isolated in the first place); Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French (ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS, dahling!) voice two frumpy old actresses with cute Corgis smoothly gliding about on feet covered by their long fur (their dead Corgis are stuffed on a shelf, dressed in angel wings); Ian McShane voices a stick-thin old circus performer with a beachball belly who rears performing mice. And Coraline meets a local boy with a terribly insecure stoop, Wyborn (Robert Bailey Jr.), whom she starts taunting darkly with her nickname, “Why-Were-You-Born.”

Coraline finds a doll in her new house that looks like her, except with buttons for eyes. She calls it Little Me, and its secret is revealed soon enough when Coraline discovers her eerie utopian mirror family.

There are fantastical musical numbers in this Other World, an especially stunning piano interlude by Other Father (performed by John Linnell of They Might Be Giants).

The ultimate “crossing over” for Coraline would be to let her Other Mother sew buttons in place of her eyes!…

CORALINE is not for little kids. Unless we ourselves have foisted on them so much vanilla for so long that we don’t realize kids are actually intelligent enough to handle terrifying visions like a piano with hands holding a man’s mouth shut to stop him from revealing secrets, a ringmaster’s suit being animated by hostile rats from within, despairing ghost children trapped behind a mirror with missing eyes…

The dark marvels come at us unrelenting, one amazing spectacle after another; it’s not even “darkly funny” – it’s just freakin’ DARK.

This movie is apparently the first to be made with this new 3D Stop-Motion process. It is astounding to look at. This is not your LITTLE DRUMMER BOY stop-motion (1968, Rankin-Bass), or even Nick Park’s exemplary WALLACE AND GROMIT (1989) – although an honorary mention must go to the man who made stop-motion an art form, Ray Harryhausen – CORALINE is smooth enough to be a 3D cartoon, yet retains that suggestion of jerkiness that lends it an organic feel. The use of lighting is amazing: shadows moving across a field as if clouds are passing in front of the sun, use of darkness and fog and three-dimensional background turning two-dimensional.

We’ve been subjected to the advertising for so long that we imagine it’s “Tim Burton’s” THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, but now we see the darkness might not have been all Burton’s; it was Selick all along who brought the darkness to the celluloid that Tim Burton expressed on the written page.

The parallels with Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass are many: the talking cat, people trapped in mirrors and snow globes; the crazy characters having tea, a wicked matriarch, a grin sewn onto a boy’s face… even the clever trick of Coraline’s name (reverse two letters, it is “Caroline”)…

But it’s the parallels with Alice Cooper that are the reason why I need to go back through the looking glass to find my pants.

END