Oz: Unspeakable and myself have started an unofficial tradition of sorts due to the magic of “all you can eat wings” night at Quaker Steak & Lube (lol Lube).  Copious wings and alcohol are the key elements, and then typically we head back and watch one of the roughly 72 million movies he seems to have in his collection.

Un: That’s only half the battle.  It all happens on a “Tuesday,” and not only are there two of us doing the review, we probably also will see two movies: one oldie and one new release at the nearby theater.  We don’t have a second movie this time, because we’re still getting our chops down, and everything at the theater this week blows.

Oz: Also, I’m a terrible planner/scheduler/doer.  I won’t be held to your human notions of time!

Oh, and speaking of inhumanity, this week’s pick is one of the most outrageously douchiest self-important movies brought to you by M. Night Shyamalanalanabobanabananafanafofana.  The quick version is: this movie sucks.

Premise: .5/5

Oz: Did you ever wonder what it would be like to watch a stupid-as-fuck fairy tale that a wanker of a director whose first two movies were good probably just by accident would be like?

Un: No.

Oz: Yeah, me neither, but we damn well did it anyways.

The movie starts with some shitty animation that I guess is supposed to evoke an idea of cave painting while the narrator (and I don’t even know who the hell he was supposed to be—was he even one of the cast of this movie?) tells a story about magical people that live in the water and how they used to tell human beings how to be awesome, but humans wanted to own everything so they moved away from the water and lost touch with the water people.  The fact that our narrator makes every sentence sound like a question in this opening “backstory” does not bode well for our chances here.

Un: He’s inflecting it that way because he’s in the recording booth and looking up at M. Night Shycantbelieveitsnotbutter, unsure.  Like, “Am I reading this right?  This is seriously your movie?”

Oz: I guess I couldn’t blame him for that.  After that opening is done, we get to meet our perennial loser apartment complex superintendent, Cleveland Heap (what is that, some half-bastard Cleveland Steamer?  That’s kind of what this movie is, after all).

Un: Ok, at this point I don’t know whether that’s a reference to Giamatti playing Harvey Pekar, or if it’s just another typical West-Coast dig on my beloved C-town.  Either way I’m insulted.

Oz: Cleveland stutters occasionally, and he has a mystery on his hands.  What’s the mysterious mystery?  Go on, guess!

Un: Someone is in the pool?

Oz: You cheated.  But anyways, on his way to solve the mystery, Cleveland screws up the cardinal safety rule around pools: walk, don’t run.  He falls down, then falls into the pool because now he’s suddenly unconscious for some reason.  Good thing the femme fatale of after-hours pool usage was there to save him from drowning—nevermind that dry he probably weighs three times as much as she does soaking wet.

Turns out, she’s a “narf” (yeah, that’s what they call her) named “Story” (roll your eyes with me here) and she is one of those people that we were being lectured about in the opening sequence.  Now it’s up to Cleveland to find the “vessel” she needs to see so he can write something that’ll be so amazing it’ll change the world.  Want more wankery?  The guy she’s supposed to be a muse for is none other than M. Night Shagrath (whatever the hell his character’s name was supposed to be) who’s writing a book called “The Cook Book” that’s going to be important to someone someday.  The minute I saw his face in this movie, I just wanted to hit him.  I know what kind of movies you make!

Un: Like this one.

Oz: Oh yeah, I forgot this was a movie and not a series of awkward disjointed conversations.

Un: Let’s not be so vague!  The snarf’s vessel (I guess that makes M. Night Slimer a catcher, not a pitcher) is going to inspire a liberal from the midwest to become president and inspire Hope and Change.  So, I guess Obama read the Cook Book.

Oz: The only cook book I can think of that would be of any interest at all is “To Serve Man” from that Twilight Zone episode.

Un: There’s a few recipes in the Anarchist’s Cookbook that could drastically change the potential of this film.

Oz: So that all happens about 40 minutes into the movie, and so it should be over right?  If only we were so lucky.  Now we have to spend the rest of our running time figuring out what all the other idiots in the apartment complex are supposed to do and why we should care.  It doesn’t work.  And I can no longer find one thing that brings me joy in this movie.

Cast: 1/5

Oz: I don’t know if it’s fair to blame the actors in this movie for sucking out loud, or if I can still just pin all that on M. Night Sharmarmalade’s terrible script and directing. Basically, I hate everyone.  Paul Giamatti plays Cleveland, and fails to stutter with any consistency and fails to do much more than walk around all hump-backed and sad most of the movie.

Un: Maybe M. Night Shyllbuythatforadollar just told him “Just keep doing Harvey Pekar, except less hostile and more pathetic.”

Oz: Other times he’s delivering preposterous dialog and easily convincing everyone in the apartment complex that he really does have a water fairy in need of help that only they can provide.  Narfette—sorry, Story—is played by Bryce Dallas Howard who pretty much just looks vacantly at the camera and mumbles her lines.

Un: You almost get to see her naked though.

Oz: Well, there is that.

Un: So, yeah.

Oz: But you don’t actually ever see her naked.

Un: No, you don’t.  That is true.

Oz: Anyway, we’ve also got offensively stereotypical Chinese mother and daughter, who are in way too much of the movie and way too damn annoying when they’re in.  Then we have stereotypical stoners who are stoners that are stereotypical and utterly meaningless to the plot.  Then we have stereotypical  kvetchers Mr. and Mrs. Bubchik (Mrs. Bubchik likes to tell people about how her husband has a growth on his ass, bad breath, etc—“but don’t tell him that I told you that!”) who aren’t really even in the movie until near the very end but are supposed to be in some way important for some reason that’s never explained.  There’s a guy who just stares silently at people that walk past his door (which he leaves wide open at all times for some reason) and always has war footage on his TV—for some reason he’s also important and though he barely has any dialog whatsoever Cleveland really values his opinion.

Un: He’s watching the Hitler Channel, and Cleveland really values his opinion on Eugenics.

Oz: Trying to remember who else we’ve got . . . oh yeah, crazy old hippy cat lady, she exists.  And there’s also a Mexican guy who’s got 5 daughters that don’t even speak English (another great stereotype), but we quickly forget them because they’re only ever shown in the first minutes of the movie and never again until the very end, where they magically also become somehow important.

Do you see a trend here?

Un: Pools are dangerous and should be avoided?

Oz: And M. Night Shymallrats movies.

In an all-stereotype cast where no one makes a damn bit of difference Shystermalan suddenly tries and utterly fails to make these characters interesting or relevant to everything (hell, it would’ve been nice if they’d been relevant to anything) that’s been happening all movie long, as if he kind of forgot where he was going and Stephen King’ed the ending.  But even the worst psychic retard story King wrote is an absolute marvel of artistry and plotting compared to this crap movie.

And let’s not forget the aforementioned douchewankery of M. Night Shyneonyoucrazydiamond’s making himself the real important guy to the story and the whole reason a narf shows up in their pool in the first place.  Even though Giamatti does all the real work in the movie, Shyamwhatiyamandthatsallwhatiyam is the golden boy who gets to change the future (spoiler, he also finds out he’s gonna be killed by someone for writing “The Cook Book”, but we don’t get to see that because why should we have anything cool in this movie?).

Un: That’s not entirely fair.  She didn’t just show up for M. Night Shyakabob, she also showed up to teach everyone some valuable life lessons: Stereotypes are true, and pools are dangerous.

Oz: The only character that was kind of enjoyable in the movie was the critic Harry Farber—Shyamalandshark writes him to be a bitter arrogant fuckwit who’s pretty much just a wannabe hyperliterate asshat.

Un: Except that he’s awesome.

Oz: Yes!  His attempts to make critics look like pompous dicks backfires, because he’s the only one that entertained us through most of the movie and the dickish things he says are pretty hard to disagree with, especially in reference to this movie.  His best lines are when Cleveland asks him how the movie he saw one night was, and he said it was terrible, “Characters were just walking around saying their thoughts out loud.  Who does that?”

Un: He also asks the question “Why does everyone like to stand around and confess their love in the rain in movies? To which Cleveland replies “Maybe it’s a metaphor for purification, starting anew?”

Oz: Farber’s awesome acidic cut-down: “No.  It’s not.”

Un: We were going to give the cast 2 out of 5 for this character and particularly this dialog by itself, but then Farber goes and blows it later by, as Oz called it, “trying to ‘Scream’ his way out” of being killed by the monster.  He does this by announcing aloud to himself the rules of horror movies just before he runs.  See what he did there?  Saying his thoughts out loud in a movie, but in real life, BUT IN A MOVIE.  Oh my meta-god, how could we both have been so blind.  Someone get M. Night Shantytown an award for this movie’s genius, perhaps one in the shape of a large golden cock.

Technical:  1/5

Oz: Fuck this.  Shyamylanta really looks like he thinks he’s some kind of auteur with this movie.  First off, he has an unhealthy fetish for keeping the camera pointed at empty spaces where characters or dialog were just happening, but since moved on, leaving nothing in camera view but maybe a window or a blank wall.  On top of that, we have to watch endless scenes of the goddamn apartment sprinkler system going off and empty poolside chairs.  He also really hates it when characters who are having a conversation can both be seen in-frame together and avoids that in an almost obsessive way.  All of his “artistic” flourishes (quick zooms that seem to change the scale of a space being a favorite technique for this movie) don’t impress, they distract from what’s actually going on in the movie and reminded us of just what a pretentious fuck Shyamalondoncalling must be.

Un: Then we have the actual “special effects,” which again suck.  Seriously—the monster scrag or skrull or scrunchy or whatever the hell the grass dog thing’s name is really looks like shit.  When it’s in shadows or you just catch a reflected glimpse of it, it was kind of cool, but when you see it in its full CG or head-puppet “glory,” you realize it looks completely fake, cheap, and frankly stupid.  Like this monster just wandered in from some SyFy channel original somewhere.

Popcorn Factor: .5/5

Oz: Pretentious is only one of the many choice words that would describe this movie.  In true Shyamironman fashion, there’s a lot of whispering, attempts to build atmosphere, and a story that’s supposed to keep you guessing until the very end.  Staring equals scary, whispering equals important, this whole movie equals metaturd.  It seems to be trying to be a metamovie about writing a story, but it does so in the wrongest, laziest way possible and every character is trash.  The moral of the story (which obnoxious Chinese party-girl spells out maybe halfway in) has something to with how no one knows who they are, and some mumbo jumbo about finding your voice, or your heart, or something, and also something about being childlike and wanting to believe there’s more than just shitty ol’ world out there.  We just need magical weirdo water nymphs and a bunch of batshit insane neighbors to make the world a better place?  Hell, I don’t know.  Unspeakable and I were still trying to figure out exactly what the premise of the movie is as the ending credits started rolling.

Shit, I don’t mind some whimsy and hopefulness and heroics, but this movie does all of those things as stupidly as possible and really just pisses me off.  Unspeakable and I figured that if we were going to rate the “Buzzkill factor” instead of popcorn, this sumbitch gets a 5/5 for . . . well everything about it.

Un: Yeah, it’s really not fair for the second movie to have a popcorn factor, cause we generally are drunk already at the get-go.  That and I don’t know how the math would work in an overall Star rating.

Stay tuned for the dual prequel episodes of Drunken Revel-review, with Clash of the Titans/Foot Fist Way and Iron Man 2/Ghostdog.  Maybe.  If we can remember that far back.

Oz: I already can’t remember that far back, but I have a feeling this damn water movie is going to be seared onto my soul for years to come.