UNDISCOVERED -- Movie Review by Porfle

(NOTE: This review originally appeared online at Bumscorner.com way back in 2005.)


The dog rides a skateboard!

I'm serious! She pushes it along with one paw, and then jumps on and whizzes down the street! Holy smokes! It's freakin' awesome! The DOG rides a freakin' SKATEBOARD!

And when she rounds the corner and disappears, then the last thing that might possibly elicit any interest in the movie known as UNDISCOVERED (2005) also disappears. But I'll always have that memory--the dog rides a skateboard. (sigh)

And now, the review proper:

Aspiring musician Luke Falcon (yes, that's really his name in the movie) encounters a woman on the subway who is REALLY HOT, according to the script. Her name is Brier (Yes! Holy gosh, yes! That's really her name!) and she's a model, and she thinks he's really hot too! But before they can consummate their bond of mutual hotness, a closing subway door comes between them. Brier picks up a glove that Luke has dropped and holds it up. "You dropped your glove!" she astutely observes. Luke, being the quintessential romantic guy that women who read romance novels swoon over, immediately throws the other glove at her just as the door slams shut. Oh, my garsh! He's the king of the "meet-cute"!

I first encountered the term "meet-cute" thanks to Roger Ebert. I think he made it up, but I could be wrong. Anyway, to me it seems as though as soon as Roger identified the phenomenon of the "meet-cute" then sensible filmmakers would begin to avoid it lest they be accused of indulging in cliche'. But not the makers of this film. They embraced it. They began their film with a classic, nerve-wracking, teeth-grinding "meet-cute."

Not only that, but right afterward Luke informs his brother that he has been "smitten." Guys, how many times have you ever told another guy that you've just been "smitten"? Enough times to get your ass kicked? Well, just minutes into the movie it's overwhelmingly apparent that Luke should get his ass kicked but good, but he doesn't. He's too busy moving to L.A. to pursue a career as a rock star. A rock star that you may listen to, but not me, because his songs suck. Oh, my gompers, do they suck. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Guess what? Brier's moving to L.A., too. She's a model, but she wants to be an actress, so she's going to take acting lessons and try to break into the acting business. Can she act? Only as well as the actress playing her, which, unfortunately, means "no." But who cares, because--oh, joy--one of her fellow acting students is none other than Ashlee Simpson! Yippee! It just keeps getting better!

Can Ashlee act? That's a pretty interesting and important question, since acting would seem to be a real career booster for her. Lots of successful singers have become big-time actresses, thus bolstering their "double-threat" entertainment value. Will Ashlee be one of them? No, she won't. Her acting style consists of goofy smiles, googly eyes, and coy, cutesy expressions. But it fits right into this coy, cutesy movie, so all's right with the world, eh? Harrumph!

Well, in a nod to cinematic believability, it turns out that Ashlee (or Clea, as she in known in the movie) is Luke's best friend, and she takes Brier to the nightclub where Luke is performing his insanely crappy songs. Yes, that's right -- two strangers who had a brief "meet-cute" in New York and then seperately moved to L.A. just happen to run into each other just as soon as they get there. Why, it's fate! Or bad writing, or something.

But there's Luke (played by Steven Strait, now appearing as "Stevie" in the Starz series "Magic City"), singing his boring widdle butt off in a nightclub while record company executive Fisher Stevens (a welcome sight since he's the only person I recognize so far besides Carrie Fisher, and he actually sorta knows how to act) describes him in a manner that I can readily agree with: "This guy here...he sings from his heart. I wanna throw up."

Anyway, Luke (whom Clea describes as a cross between Jeff Buckley and Elvis Costello, although Jeff Foxworthy and Lou Costello would be more apt musical comparisons) seeks to resume his aborted acquaintance with the lovely and talented (OMG!) Brier ("When are we gonna break outta the 'friend zone'?", he asks -- no, really!), but she rejects his romantic advances because she just can't seem to shake her squishy feelings for the genuine big-time rock star she's been dating. That is, the grunge relic who cheats on her with a succession of groupies and doesn't call her for months at a time. Oh, good choice, Brier.

But Clea talks some sense into her, or at least what she can manage to approximate as sense ("I don't think you fall out of love until you fall into someone else" she actually says, which I can't believe wasn't the official tagline for this movie), and they both suddenly devise a brilliant plan to create such a buzz about Luke that he will become an honest-to-goodness big-time rock star for real! And THERE'S THE SET-UP! TA-DAAAA!

Brier calls her former modeling agent, played by the unfortunate Carrie Fisher, to help out with the big Luke Falcon publicity blitz. Carrie is older and plumper than she was in her Princess Leia days (not that there's anything wrong with that), and appears to be less than ecstatic about being seen in this huge, gobbling turkey. She's probably wishing that Han Solo would swoop into the frame and lug her away. Or at least shoot her.

Well, things trudge boringly along after that--Luke's hot for some committed-relationship action, but Brier keeps vaccillatin', Luke loses his record deal, etc.--I don't want to spoil the plot for you, blah blah blah, and after some more stuff happens, there's a sickly-sweet happy ending. There's always a happy ending in these stories, right? Except for THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN, one of the worst teen comedies ever made, which, incredibly, is better than UNDISCOVERED.

That movie had a very, very sad ending, but it made me very happy since I couldn't stand Lawrence Monoson, the blubbering idiot who starred in it. But that's neither here nor there, although for some reason talking about one really bad movie inspires me to yap about all the other bad movies that have contributed to the living hell that is life on this here fab-u-licious Earth of ours.

On the technical side: the meandering camerawork seems to have been done by a near-sighted wino with ADD, because he keeps wandering around finding interest in other things besides the actors. And someone keeps screwing around with the focus, too. Is this what they call "MTV-style" cinematography? If it is, then MTV sucks. I could find three-year-old kids who could handle a camera better than this.

The editing, of course, is an entirely different thing altogether. That is, what is meant to represent editing in this film is entirely different from whatever is generally known in film circles as "editing." But what the hell--as long as the kids get their "MTV-style" fix, if indeed that's what they're looking for when they go to the movies, then here it is. Total crap, wrapped up in a badly directed, poorly edited "MTV-style" package--so EAT IT, KIDS! YUM-YUM!

Watching this filmic endeavor, I kept being reminded of another really bad movie that seared itself onto my cerebral cortex several years ago--IF EVER I SEE YOU AGAIN, the magnum opus of producer/director/writer/composer/star Joe Brooks of YOU LIGHT UP MY LIFE fame. Both movies are really, really BAD-bad, both feature sappy love stories with plenty of awful, grinning-like-a-loon, super-duper cutesy-poo bad acting and blood-curdling music, and both left me feeling as though I had just been fished out of a vat of toxic chemicals at the Axis Chemical Company. It's not often that I compare a movie to IF EVER I SEE YOU AGAIN, my personal fixation of total, gibbering cinematic horror, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. UNDISCOVERED is just as bad. It's the IF EVER I SEE YOU AGAIN of a new generation.

I should probably say something in conclusion, even though I think I've already pretty much said everything I wanted to say about this movie, so I'll end with one of those cleverly snarky movie review-type comments: "UNDISCOVERED is a movie that should REMAIN undiscovered!" (LOL!) But, to be fair, it wasn't a total loss. There was, after all, the skateboarding dog. HOLY STUPID PET TRICKS! THE DOG RIDES A SKATEBOARD! YEEE-HAAAA!!!

UNDISCOVERED -- Movie Review by Porfle

SAINT BERNARD -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 5/16/19

 

Okay, who else thought this was going to be about a big monster dog like "Cujo"?  Me too, but SAINT BERNARD (Severin Films, 2013) is so much more than that, thank goodness. The first thing we see, for example, is a raw chicken on the verge of a parachute jump from an airplane.  Things just get way weirder from there.

For those of you who have always wished for a sequel to ERASERHEAD, this may be as close as you'll ever get.  In that film, however, it's the rest of the world--the real world, so to speak--that's bizarre and surreal, and the hero, Henry, tries to make sense of it. 

Here, Bernard lives in what we know as the everyday world, but can only perceive it all through his own full-blown insanity. So his attempts to find a place in the real world and live a "normal" life become nothing more than a series of incredibly bizarre waking nightmares. (These are just my interpretations, mind you--yours may be completely different.)

We first meet him, in the only part of the movie where he actually looks happy, as a young boy who wants more than anything to be an orchestra conductor.  In the first surreal segment, which I can only deduce is a figment of Bernard's unbridled imagination, we see a wood carver fashioning a baton for the boy from a large chunk of wood, which he then wields as confidently as baseball ace Roy Hobbs swinging his "Wonderboy" bat in THE NATURAL.

Bernard has the gift of discerning musical patterns from things in everyday life--clocks ticking, water dripping--but has trouble making such orderly sense of life itself.  His grown-up self, played by Jason Dugre (SKINNED DEEP) will be no less confused, and we'll discover that he has become progressively removed from what we would consider "sanity."

This manifests itself in what must be some of the most bizarre, surreal imagery ever created for a motion picture.  Most of it springs from the fertile and clearly fervid mind of writer-producer-director Gabriel Bartalos, whose special effects expertise has graced many films such as DARKMAN, UNDERWORLD, and FROM BEYOND.  His production designer also deserves much credit for helping to create some of the most freakishly strange environments and props imaginable.

Bernard's descent into madder madness is also represented by the stark white tuxedo that he always wears. It starts out clean and pure, like Bernard's innocent, unsullied nature, and then gets progressively soiled and stained as he is forced to interact with reality on both an intellectual and tactile level.

The whole thing really gets underway when Bernard attempts a concert performance which is on a grand scale in his mind, but in actuality is nothing more than him making an ass of himself in front of a few family and friends in a near-empty concert hall. This is where we still see traces of the real world outside of Bernard's twisted perception, and how it is made utterly strange by the deep-seated insanity which has overtaken him.

At one point midway through I realized that I was looking for a story and not finding it. But in the middle of this jumble of grotesque, senseless imagery, there was a kind of story, which was the story of Bernard looking for a story in his life and not finding it.  As an aspiring musical conductor he looks for the tick-tock beat in everything which he can control and cajole with his "Wonderboy" baton.  But it is nowhere to be found.

Just like in most nightmares, nothing makes sense and that's how they are designed to torment us.  Bernard strives for stability and resolution, and either he is too insane to find such things or the world around him is too insane to offer them. The more he searches, the crazier the nightmare becomes.

Each person Bernard meets, or thinks he meets, is more incomprehensible than the last, as are the situations surrounding them.  Trying to seek help at a police station involves climbing through a trap door into a hallway that's ankle-deep in broken bottles and trying to communicate with a monstrous troll referred to as "Chief." 

Meeting his potential love interest, Miss Roadkill (Katy Sullivan), in an alleyway goes from an act of icky sexual aggression on the part of this whacked-out street harpy to sudden, extreme horror when a truck runs over her legs and turns them to bloody stumps.  The driver, who actually has no legs himself, then berates her for spoiling his driving record while hopping around emptying a large bag of table salt over her gaping wounds.

Oh, and I left out the part about the clumps of barbershop hair that have gathered and entwined themselves into stick figures stalking the streets, which for some reason come to Bernard's aid.  The disembodied head of a St. Bernard dog figures into all of this as well, which, in one amusing scene with Andy Kaufman's pal Bob Zmuda as a money-grabbing priest, sort of becomes a symbol of religious faith if one wishes to mentally pursue such things.

I won't even go into the finale--my mind is still trying to process it. It does involve Bernard's weird Uncle Jack, and a creature that's the pinnacle of the film's makeup and practical effects artistry.  One final mention of the story's continual references to wood and water. And look for Warwick Davis atop a huge pile of--you guessed it--wood.

I spent the entire running time either trying to make sense of it all, or trying to make sense of the fact that none of it made any sense. Sometimes I labored to find the symbolism in what I was seeing--I know it was there, some of the time anyway--and sometimes I just sat back and let the weirdness overtake me. Either way, I was totally engaged with SAINT BERNARD from start to finish, and felt a little more crazy and a little more sane for having watched it.


Buy it at Severin Films

Special Features:
    The Making of Saint Bernard
    Trailer

SAINT BERNARD -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

Great 3 Stooges Running Gag: "A Dog's Tail" (video)

 

A dog uses his tail...

...to motion the Stooges to come to him...

...like a human would with his finger.

(threestooges.net)

CALLING ALL CURS (1939)
SO LONG MR. CHUMPS (1941)


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

Great 3 Stooges Running Gag: "A Dog's Tail" (video)

Dog Lifts Leg in "THUNDERBALL" (United Artists, 1965): James Bond

Bond's in trouble...

Wounded, and chased by armed thugs...
...led by lovely but deadly Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi).

And as if that weren't enough...
Could that be Agent 00-K9, providing a distraction for Bond?

Oh well, they did say "Thunderball" would be Bond's wettest adventure yet.


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

Dog Lifts Leg in "THUNDERBALL" (United Artists, 1965): James Bond

Where’s Spot? And Other Stories DVD Review

Where’s Spot? And Other Stories DVD Review

By Jessica Friedman

Spot, Spot

Lovable Spot

He’s soft and cuddly, and he smiles a lot.

If there ever was a pup to cheer you up,

It’s Spot, Spot, Spot.

During my childhood, there were two television channels that ruled my life: Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. Both of these networks have changed drastically over the years, showing greater preference for reaching pre-teen markets now than for children under 10. However, in the nineties, each of these channels was famous for its outstanding programming geared specifically toward children. Of the many shows available to me as a child, one is indelibly etched in my mind as a nostalgic favorite above them all: Disney Channel’s Lunchbox. While I loved watching David the Gnome and Noozles on Nick, Lunchbox was superior to me because of its rarity. Since my spendthrift family never actually paid for the Disney Channel (or any premium channels, for that matter), I would only be able to view Lunchbox when Disney offered what was essentially a preview week of their programming to entice people to pay for subscriptions.

When I was able to watch Lunchbox, it was always such a joy to see the British imports that the program included. Aside from Curious George and Paddington Bear, Lunchbox featured Spot, a series based on the children’s books of the same name. I LOVED dogs as a child (and still do), so a show about a tan and brown dog and his very cute and British adventures appealed to me as an Anglophile and as a person obsessed with dogs. Here is a video clip of the show I remember so fondly, including the theme song that I can still sing word-for-word (the words appear at the start of this review, in case you didn’t recognize them):

As an enormous fan of Spot the puppy, I was thrilled to hear about the release on DVD of Where’s Spot? And Other Stories to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the Spot television series on BBC.

The Spot tv show was based on the interactive “lift-the-flap” children’s books written and illustrated by Eric Hill. In these simple books, Hill creates a fantastically minimalistic world for Spot and the reader; the curious puppy typically only has adventures at the park or around his house. With the success of the book series, Hill helped to create a television show featuring Spot, the puppy’s family, and his various animal friends. The 30^th Anniversary Edition DVD includes six regular episodes (“Where’s Spot?” “Spot’s Lost Bone,” “Spot at the Playground,” “Spot Goes to the Park,” “Spot Finds a Key,” “Spot Goes Splash!”) that really remind you of what it’s like to be a kid and how the smallest tasks seemed like huge adventures. In this DVD, the character of Spot is voiced by Jonathan Taylor Thomas of Home Improvement fame, so if you’re a JTT fan from back in the day, you will get a kick out of hearing him voice the adorable puppy.

The picture quality is acceptable considering the age of the series. Some of the extras seem to exhibit ghosting, but this is a minor problem and does not affect the main program. The drawing style of the Spot book series is very simple and minimalistic, usually with a white background to make the setting and characters pop, and this feature has carried over to the tv series. The sound quality is great, and the DVD boasts Dolby Digital surround sound. While the DVD sadly does not include the theme song I loved as a child, each episode on the DVD is accompanied by its own special song, which gives the series a new feel.

The DVD also features a number of fun extras, such as three bonus episodes (Spot is voiced by Haley Joel Osment of Sixth Sense fame in these episodes), Spot’s Shapes and Colors games (great games that help children learn their shapes and colors in a really fun and interactive way), and, my personal favorite, Eric Hill reads the book “Where’s Spot?” This final extra feature is so incredibly heartwarming and amusing, especially because Hill has a little Spot toy dog next to him that he is reading to the entire time. Also, Hill’s reading style reminds my husband of Christopher Lee, so we both really enjoyed the British author’s warmth and his whimsical reading of his famous children’s book.

If you are a fan of children’s cartoons, have children who love dogs and would be interested in such a cartoon series, or you are a nostalgia freak like my husband and myself, then do yourself a favor and get this DVD. It is absolutely worth it for the Eric Hill extra feature alone!

The 30^th Anniversary Edition Spot DVD is available for purchase through BBC America’s website:

Buy here

Where’s Spot? And Other Stories DVD Review