Carrey is introduced as Carl Allen, a sad-sack bank-loan officer who still hasnt recovered emotionally from his divorce three years before. Although his pals try to nudge him out of his shell, Carls answer to virtually every overture that involves anything but staying home and renting DVDs is an evasive no.
A chance encounter with an old acquaintance inspires him to attend a self-help seminar, where a steely-eyed guru
preaches the power of saying yes to every opportunity -- forging a covenant with the shell-shocked Carl to adhere to this simple code.
Its an interesting gimmick, and there were a lot of zany humor you come to expect from a Carrey film. One thing that particularly caught my attention was the gut-busting scene with Carrey having to sing and play Jumper (Third Eye Blind remember?) to save a drop-dead man on the verge of commiting suicide. True, Third Eye Blind did it way better but Jim here, did it a hell lot funnier.
Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly. When a lawyer must tell the truth and wants desperately not to (even pou
nding himself over the head with a toilet seat to stop himself), it's funny. When a loan officer must say "yes" and wants to, where is the tension? The premise removes all opportunity for frustration, at which Carrey is a master, and reduces Carl to a programmed creature, who, as long as he follows instructions, lacks free will.Also during the film's muddled final act where the seams start to show. The narrative gets trapped in the usual, but inventively set-up, "break-up" subplot and Carrey is forced to claw his way out of the tired distraction. The comedy briefly comes to a dead halt as montages pass before finally being rejuvenated once again by supporting players, Carrey's ever-elastic rubber face and the sizzling romantic chemistry between Deschanel and Carrey – though the 17-year age difference between the performers is a bit creepy.
On the other hand, Yes Man has a message to it and it does take itself too seriously at times, but it's not a total throw away effort. Watching Carrey get goofy again is entertaining, and the chemistry between he and Deschanel is something special. Yes Man is not a great film, by any stretch, but if you're a Carrey fan, you'll probably enjoy Yes Man. You might even walk away saying yes a little more often.
The Otaku over the world just love to complain about live-action adaptations of beloved anime series, usually months – if not years – before they come out, determined to hate the final product regardless of what it is. It could be argued that they're not giving some of these projects a fair shake from the get-go; they're hating just to hate, swearing fealty to the original show or manga, convinced Hollywood just can't ever get it right.
Dragonball: Evolu
tion was no exception. Fans decried every scrap of material they could get their hands on, from leaked screencaps to shots of unpainted action figures to the teaser trailers, each time their derisive laughter and scorn growing louder and louder. A tiny handful of people remained cautiously optimistic, praying that 20th Century Fox had managed to distill the essence of the eternally popular, internationally beloved and downright legendary Dragon Ball story into a 90-minute action adventure that, while perhaps not adhering so closely to the exact plot and pacing of the original story, did provide a faithful and entertaining homage that might pave the way for increasingly loyal adaptations down the road.
Here's what happened instead: a bunch of talentless hacks with studio money slapped together a big steaming pile of baffling garbage that fails utterly on every possible level and will please no one at all.
The fans were right.
There's a lot wrong with Dragonball: Evolution, but the one huge thing that overrides nearly everything else is that the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster. It's clear that a metric ton of material was hacked out, but this thing would need another 30 minutes rise from “unforgivably retarded” to “only mostly retarded”. If you walked into this movie cold – with only a cursory knowledge of who Goku is or what the original story is about – your jaw will be agape at what unbelievable horsecrap is unfolding before you. They explain virtually nothing. There is little to no character motivation. Things just sort of happen – it's not difficult to keep up with (once you realize the movie has no internal logic at all and is just checking off character names and plot points) it's just that so little of it feels connected or sensible at all. Stuff happens, but who cares? Earth is basically unrecognizable and looks like the first 5 minutes or so of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the distant future circa 1992. None of the characters are compelling or interesting at all and they're all caught up in this big nonsense story that feels like it was written in crayon. It'd probably be easy to excuse this trash pile of a script by claiming that the original material was pretty zany too, but while Dragon Ball may have been silly and overblown, it wasn't insultingly stupid and senseless. You can't even use the ‘it's a live-action cartoon!’ excuse – compared to Dragonball: Evolution, your average episode of Chowder or Batman: The Brave and the Bold are shining examples of depth and meaning on par with the work of Dostoyevsky. Kids aren't dumb enough to fall for this.
In terms of production values, nothing there works either. The special effects are all Sci-Fi Original Movie-level quality, and the costume design is questionable to say the least. Hell, even the makeup sucks – Bulma has cosmetics plastered on like a whore in a Ratt video, all heavy rouge and electric blue eyeliner, her hair teased and highlighted to where she'd look much more comfortable writhing around on the hood of a 1987 TransAm than playing a “badass” genius scientist. The film's climactic moment – spoiler alert, it's the Kamehameha – i
s so outrageously goofy looking and badly executed that you will laugh out loud. It is perhaps the most enjoyable moment in the film, unintentionally so.
It's hard to blame the actors for their across-the-board mediocre performances when they're dealing with material this mind-boggling, but they can't be let off the hook either. Justin Chatwin occasionally delivers his ridiculous dialogue with some measure of quality but most of the film requires him to grimace and flex his neck muscles, which he apparently isn't quite capable of doing in a convincing way; imagine someone doing a bad job at faking "desperate, painful constipation" and you're about there. Emily Rossum spits her lines out like she just can't wait to get rid of them, and nobody can blame her for that, but she's less engaging than your average Power Rangers guest star. The guy playing Yamcha –Joon Park– is just not very good at this. His delivery is godawful, like the guy who's stuck playing the tired ‘surfer dude’ stereotype character in a Japanese roleplaying game from 1997, back when they'd hire convenience store employees and hobos from the local YMCA to do the voiceover work. Chow Yun-Fat does what he can, but even he stumbles over this stuff; the role requires him to behave like a cartoon character and it just comes across as trying way, way too hard.
In the end, it all boils down to one thing: this movie appeals to nobody. It was made for no one. People who aren't familiar with the Dragon Ball story at all will be so flabbergasted by what's happening that they will likely tell everyone they know that it's one of the worst movies they've ever seen. Fans who do know what the general story is will be furious at just how unbelievably badly they screwed this entire thing up. Kids are used to better writing than this in their weekday afternoon cartoons (although you may run into a kid who has never actually seen a movie before, and they might dig it until you show them another movie). It's a clunky, tiresome, badly executed, horribly written pile of shame that deserves no quarter.
In short, it's as bad as the fans said it would be. But hey it might be fun when you're hammered and surrounded by friends. Or suicidal, and need something to push you over the edge.
Mark Wahlberg stars as mild-mannered, high school science teacher Elliot Moore. While he's instructing his incredibly well-behaved and shockingly-science-happy class of inner city youth, he learns of some horrifying news: people in Central Park are killing themselves in exotic and gruesome ways.
He immediately grabs his wife Alma, his best pal and his pal's daughter, and heads for the first train out of NYC. Inexplicably, the train stops in Pennsylvania and our heroes are forced to depart and make thei
r way across the middle of nowhere, while all around them a mysterious, airborne force is driving people to feed their arms to lions in the zoo and lie prone on the ground while a lawnmower chews them up. And I submit, by the time this ridiculous movie ends, you'll be hoping for your own lawnmower to come rolling through your living room.
First up is Wahlberg, he's an idiot…of profound proportions. He makes consistently bad decisions (you couldn't wait like ten minutes before the wind stopped blowing to walk out and hug your stupid wife?) and tends to miss obvious solutions to his problems (hey, how about driving that nice new 4x4 pickup truck, instead of spending the night with that crazy woman?). Of course that's his character, Elliot, doing all those stupid things, but thanks to some legendarily bad acting from Wahlberg, I'm having trouble separating the two personas. Really, everything you've heard about his line delivery is true. It's as if Shyamalan shot a bunch of takes and used the absolute worst and most awkward to put in his film. Or maybe it was like that improv game where a director pauses an actor and has him perform the same scene in a different, outrageous fashion like "Now do it as a drunk sailor!" or "Now as monkey that speaks French!" but Shyamalan was shouting to Wahlberg "Now read your lines like you're a fifth-grader doing a play about dental hygiene!"
Just as painful is Deschane who is reduced to merely big blue eyes and wispiness. Alma may or not be slightly mentally retarded—heck, Elliot might be fighting a losing battle with a chromosome himself—and Deschanel does little to steer men in any kind of direction. Apparently Elliot and Alma are in the middle of a rough patch of their marriage, but the cause of the tension is so inane—and gives rise to a surreal monologue by Elliot about cough syrup—that with all the talk about evolution and survival of the fittest in the film I'm dumbfounded that these two tools weren't the first to go.
Or maybe the plants simply saw no danger in their existence and actually considered their continued survival and eventual propagation a boon to their herbal mission of neutralizing the human race. Oh wait, I just gave away a whole lot, didn't I? But of course you knew that the villains in The Happening are ill-tempered plant life and their evil cohort, the wind. F—-ing wind! So yeah, plants have decided to fight back against human beings for screwing up the planet and have started farting out neurotoxins that makes them kill themselves; a fact that somehow manages to escape the combined intellect of the world's greatest botanists, but doesn't elude two yokels that own a greenhouse in rural Pennsylvania.
The cast is terrible. From struggling to deliver the clunky dialogue, to looking unsure of what, exactly, it is they're supposed to be doing: this is beyond awful. Shyamalan's direction is totally lacking in merit. Scenes that are supposed to elicit fear are laughable; tension is notable by its absence, and, due as much to his wr
iting as his directing, the film lacks cohesion, with secondary characters dropping in and out of the story with total abandon and little purpose.
As ludicrous as the acting and story are, the most crippling component of The Happening is how lethally boring it is. The big action scenes involving characters running away from wind or talking to each other through an underground pipe. The closest the film gets to actual suspense is the very beginning, when the construction workers fall from the roof. But this is immediately followed by Mark Wahlberg opening his mouth and the onset of the nonsensical story. By the time Elliot pleads with a plastic plant to let his loved one take a leak in peace, we're through the looking glass, and the only hope for fun comes in more moments like it—bizarre setups designed to be deadly serious but only succeed in eliciting derisive laughter from the viewer. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your capacity for intellectual self-abuse—there are plenty more to come.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
Somewhere, hidden beneath all the badness, is a message about man's total obliviousness as he heads down the path of destruction. At least I think there is, I wasn't really paying attention. Whatever you expect going into The Happening, it's way dumber. I think even Al Gore would agree with me on this one.
What do you do when your alone? What do you do when no ones home? On contrast to my fellow hormone-raging male compatriots, I dont feel the need to subject myself to the female contemporaries. So whenever I'm left in a state of solitary and serenity, I write.
But why? Why do I rule out any other engaging activities (except gaming course) just to make time to compose down words on a piece of paper (or on the microsoft word/notepad)? Why do I write?
Before anything else, let us first delve into the answer of the imminently threatening question that dooms everyone who earnestly desires to harness the potent power of words.
What is a writer?
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes h
im who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper. As he writes, he can drink a softdrink or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my chair, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the literary compositions to which I have devoted my leisure times, I am most surprised by those momen
ts when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.
To become a writer, patience and toil are not enough: we must first feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life, and shut ourselves up in a room. We wish for patience and hope so that we can create a deep world in our writing. But the desire to shut oneself up in a room is what pushes us into action. The precursor of this sort of independent writer – who reads his books to his heart's content, and who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes with other's words, who, by entering into conversation with his books develops his own thoughts, and his own world – was most certainly Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who – wherever they are in the world, in the East or in the West – cut themselves off from society, and shut themselves up with their books in their room. The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.
But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable 
hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.
As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to write books like the ones I read. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of 
the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. Finito. That's all there really is to it.
If anything I just said up to this point didn't make sense to you, then just bugger off. M'kay?
It's almost become a personal joke that every time a new Will Ferrell movie comes out, I want to see it but have nothing to say afterwards. I'm not quite sure exactly why this is; I think he's a brilliant comedian, and most of the movies he's made since he became an A-lister have been consistently good. But one supposes that in the world of comedy, you really don't want to know much more than whether or not it's worth watching; spoiling the set-ups (much less the punchlines) kind of ruins the experience for readers, unless you have some 
deep or profound insights about them.
I like Will Ferrell. He makes me laugh. Lots. It's rare that I don't laugh lots when I watch a Will Ferrell movie, save for Stranger Than Fiction, which can bite me. Talledega Night? Lots of laughing. Anchorman? Uhuh. And now there's this movie. I laughed at it. Lots.
Blades of Glory is very funny, and the humor is what you'd expect from Ferrell's comedies. Did you like those other films I listed in the paragraph above? Then you're probably going to like this one. The jokes are sophomoric, but funny and occasionally hyper-bizarre, e.g. the final scene. Gross-out humor and simple parodies, which sometimes seem to be overtaking the comedy genre in Hollywood, are largely missing, save for a surprise decapitation scene. That by the way, I laughed at huge.
Though there aren't as many gut-busting laughs as I expected, Blades is in the "sports underdog" tradition, with a strong enough story to carry the movie in between jokes. There are plenty of laughs; they just come more from character interaction and the inherent absurdities of competitive figure skating's pomp and circumstance than from typical Will Ferrell gags.
Looking at this cast, even if the writing had been cribbed straight from a treatise on post-modern interpretations of Biblical dispensationalism, there's a strong likelihood this movie would have still been funny. Ferrell, Heder, Arnett, Poehler, and Jenna Fischer—an All-Star lineup and each are on their game. Heder in particular shone, changing up his usual slack-jawed comic presentation, to a straight set-up man, a fine complement to his co-star's Alpha Male routine. Arnett and Poehler (married as they are) delivered, and any time an Arrested Development alum gets work is fine by me. Jenna Fischer is, of course, awesome, so need to go into much 
more depth here. Finally, Ferrell. He's certainly got his machismo-laden idiot schtick down cold, and Chazz Michael Michaels is pretty much Ricky Bobby with long hair and form-fitting sequins, and it's inspired, but at some point, homeboy's going to have to mix it up a bit.
No matter how good the actors are, Blades of Glory would have fallen flat if they'd gotten the figure skating wrong. Fortunately, they got it right. Oh, so right. It's astonishing no one's made a comedy about figure skating before. I can't think of another sport with as much built-in comedy.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
In this era of political correctness, it would be easy to take offense to this movie's central comedic premise: that seeing two guys in spandex embracing, twirling, and lifting each other is funny. However, for a film whose main joke relies on the "ickiness" of one man touching another, it certainly celebrates the journey Michaels and MacElroy take in overcoming their hatred and hang-ups—finally giving themselves over to the intimacy of pairs skating. As a metaphor for becoming comfortable in your own skin, nothing quite beats spandex. Blades of Glory is, at heart, a buddy movie—a buddy movie where one buddy hoists the other buddy up in the air by the crotch. What can I say? That's figure skating.
Anyway, to sum up: Blades of Glory = funny.
These suckas are as cool as ice.
It's pleasing to see that Square Enix — despite having the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts mega franchises in its line-up — is still willing to go boldly into new frontiers with the release of original g
ames like The World Ends With You. This role-playing game eschews the company's tried-and-true swords-and-sorcery settings and instead transports the action to modern-day Tokyo. Although there's nary a chocobo or keyblade to be found here, The World Ends With You still incorporates some of the company's best-known trademarks and wraps plenty of innovative new gameplay around them, particularly an initially mind-bending dual-screen combat system. The result is a game that manages to feel familiar and yet strikingly new at the same time, and one that deserves to be ranked alongside Square Enix's best works.
At first glance, the game seems little more than a pastiche of all the things that have made the famed Japanese developer's RPGs massive successes in the past. Angsty teen hero with an absurdly angular haircut? Check. Complex, team-based combat system? You betcha. Detailed customization options with weapons and armor that border on the anal retentive? Fer sure. But The World Ends With You merely uses these Square Enix conventions as a launching pad for a unique experience that is both impressive in its use of the Nintendo DS's capabilities and compelling in its storytelling.
The most apparent difference from previous Square Enix games is location. The World Ends With You is set not in an imaginary kingdom, but entirely within Tokyo's fashion and shopping hub, Shibuya. Several real-world landmarks from Shibuya are re-created within the game, such as the train station, Shibuya Crossing, Hachiko's statue, Dogenzaka, and more. However, this shift to a modern setting isn't mere window dressing, given that it greatly complements the game's overall design. Developer Jupiter Corp has stuck to a character look s
imilar to that found in the Kingdom Hearts series, and though the far-out fashion seemed somewhat out of place within that game universe, here it seems entirely appropriate to the fast-paced and fashion-conscious world of trendy Tokyo.
The story itself is a little like The Matrix, and a little like Battle Royale. The game follows main character Neku Sakabara as he's forced to play The Reapers' Game, a sinister competition in which the (mostly) evil Reapers assign players, like Neku, a task every day for seven days. Fail to complete the task within the set time limit and the player is completely erased from existence. Strangely, none of the other inhabitants of busy Shibuya can see Neku or the other players, although a mysterious pin that Neku finds on his person when he first wakes up in Shibuya lets him read people's minds. What's even more disconcerting are the large groups of strange creatures now roaming the streets. Although normal people can't see these creatures — called the Noise — they can see Neku, and they're out for blood. Along the way, Neku is forced to make pacts with other characters because forming these bonds and fighting in pairs is the only way to do damage to the Noise.
There are some genuine twists in this game's intriguing story, and there is also plenty of heartfelt emotion from its teenage protagonists, which makes for some truly touching moments. The themes explored here — finding your identity, overcoming insecurity, teen angst, coping with guilt, the weight of obligation — are nothing new for a Square Enix game, but they seem somewhat more resonant and identifiable because they're coming from characters who use mobile phones, eat fast food, and who do other things that ground them in the same world we live in.
Traversing the world of Shibuya is done through the stylus and touchscreen, but battles are where it gets more complex. The game's setting might be somewhat of a departure for a Square Enix game, but the comba
t is a completely new take that uses both of the DS's screens at the same time. Neku and his partner share the same health bar, while the Noise they're fighting appear on both screens at once (although not necessarily in the same location). On the bottom screen is Neku, whom you control via different directional swipes with the stylus on the touchscreen. Neku uses objects called psych pins to attack, and each type of pin requires a specific move with the stylus to unleash its power. These moves can include rapidly tapping the screen, performing slashes across enemies, quickly scratching empty space, drawing circles with the stylus, and more. There are also some pins that require you to yell into the DS's microphone.
The presentation of The World Ends With You impresses right from the game's beginning. Graphically, the game just sparkles, and its stylized version of Shibuya pops with color and detail. Large, colorful character models w
ith speech and thought bubbles are used for the game's many cutscenes, and the battles sport some pretty effects. There are also a wide variety of strange-looking Noise that Neku and crew will run across, ranging from insane-looking kangaroos and penguins to gigantic bats. Sound is another area in which this game excels, with enough snippets of dialogue packed in to put other DS games to shame. (One of your partners yelling "There's a party in my mouth" when you give him a piece of food stands out.) Of particular note is the game's soundtrack, which is made up of an eclectic mix of J-Pop, hip-hop, and rock songs that get into your head and refuse to leave. Fitting such a large mix of music on a DS cartridge is impressive enough, but having decent songs in that mix is a luxury few games have.
Flawless presentation, gameplay depth, an engaging story, and innovation all add up to make The World Ends With You a worthy addition to the already-impressive pantheon of Square Enix works. There's very little to complain about in this package, which makes The World Ends With You a must-have for any DS owner needing an RPG fix.
Despite a few stumbles, this is one world I don't want to end.