Das Q: My Name is Bruce (2007)

Bruce Campbell is the perfect B-Movie actor. Great chin, strong voice, co-opted by a giant rubber monster.

This movie has fun with a genre that has fun. From the moment you press play, you know this is going to be ridiculous. When the God of Bean Curd, Guan-Di, is accidently awoke in a sleepy little Anywhere town, the perfect antihero to defeat this ancient Chinese menace is none other than Bruce Campbell! Campbell helped write, produce, and direct this movie with some of his buddies in his Evil Dead days, and even has Ted Raimi in there in a couple of comic bit pieces. It’s an homage to his illustrious “career,” from the permanent trailer to the hooker with a penis. The things stardom bring, right?

There’s nothing quite like a happy ending, and “My Name is Bruce” delivers it. With extra bean curd.

B. If you need to know why this was scored this way, you’re missing the point.

Das Q: The Lovely Bones (2009)

I hate Stanley Tucci. A lot.

There. I said it. He does a fantastic job playing roles where I want nothing more than an icicle to stab him in the neck. But I digress.

If you have children, don’t see this movie. If you have daughters, remember there’s a 7-day waiting period on guns. If you have a pulse, leave after the book is found. You’ll understand what that means, and you’ll understand why I say that after you sit through the wayward sap that ensues following that moment.

I enjoyed (and by enjoyed, I mean had my emotions toyed with like a cat plays with a mouse before severing it jugular) the movie right up until the end. Peter Jackson started strong, kept the intensity on, and drove it, like a car chase scene, right off the cliff and into the slow-motion segway before the crash and explosion at the bottom of the cliff.

Fast-paced, well acted, and then launches off the cliff into the waiting sinkhole(You’ll understand that later) of melodrama.

B+. (Great effort, lacks a strong finish)

Das Q: The Boon Dock Saints 2: All Saints Day (2009)

It is with a heavy heart that I pronounce the Brothers dead. Did I just spoil that for you?

No.

Well, to be honest with you, I don’t know. Maybe they die in the end, maybe they live on in some sort of infamy. I couldn’t tell you, because about fifteen minutes into the movie, I stopped it, swore incoherently under my breath, and put the original back on. I couldn’t take the dialogue, the acting, the story.

Why?

Because there was none. The only shining star in this movie was Julie Benz, what I saw of her, fresh off her ending story arc in Dexter. She made me keep the movie on for longer than I would have normally.

Troy Duffy, you have officially made me turn off a movie. That has not happened to me before. I was so angered with what Duffy was doing to these characters, I had to cleanse my pallet and turn on the original. For me The Saints, as The Dropkick Murphys sing in “The Green Fields of France”, will “be forever nineteen.” As in 1999, the year of the original release.

It is appropriate that the song is a dirge.

Das Q: Where The Wild Things Are (2009)

I enjoyed Spike Jonze’s work on it, it just was NOT what I was expecting. The kid’s subconscious and the manifestation of all the creatures as his insecurities. Was not expecting that, and I respected Jonez (and Maurice Sendak, obviously) for going that direction. For a long while, I thought the film was meandering and pointless, but it really had a strong underlying theme of the pain of being a kid and growing up. I really had to think about it to process, and it took on a whole new meaning, albeit too late in the movie to really “like” the movie. I understood it at last, but didn’t really enjoy it.

Again, the thought I kept having as I left the theater: unexpected. Perhaps a second viewing in a year will see how it holds up.