118 Minutes Of The Stinkeye

Ah, the holidays. What would they be without bad, cheap movies? I guess they would be pretty much the same, but without the bad movies that are cheap.

What movies did I have to choose from on Thanksgiving Eve at the Lagrange?

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - NO.

The Dark Knight - I already saw this (twice!)

Eagle Eye - Yeehaw!



I knew very little about this movie. I had a vague idea that it was like Enemy of the State, a Tony Scott movie I had improbably given a good review when I saw it at the Davis nearly a decade ago.

It stars the iridescent Che Le Boof as slacker copy store worker Jerry Shaw, who gets involved in a ridiculous plot to do something-or-other.

Oh, I'm going to be giving away a spoiler soon, so stop reading if you still want to see this turkey (get it? Thanksgiving? Turkey? Get it? Huh? Huh?). Jerry is manipulated in a very particular and annoying way, by a seemingly omniscient antagonist. This antagonist communicates with Jerry mostly via his cellphone, but also uses any random electronic device that's handy. It can make a screen read "Jump, Jerry Shaw!". It can make all the cellphones in Jerry Shaw's vicinity broadcast "There's Jerry Shaw!". It can hijack digital bus marquees to display "This bus will not take you to the mall, Jerry Shaw!" Jerry can't make a fucking move without being spotted and fucked with.

Oh, there's a woman in this movie, too. She is also fucked with in a similar manner to Jerry Shaw. She has an annoying, befreckled son that is on a train to play his stupid trumpet in Washington, D.C., and the antagonist threatens to derail the kiddie's train if she doesn't cooperate.

Wow, derailing a train -- that sounds implausible, doesn't it? Wait, there's more. There are other people that are also being fucked with. One of them is a guy who is forced to meet Jerry and the mother in the middle of the desert. The environment is very similar to the final showdown in Se7en -- basically a barren dry area among high tension power lines. So, the guy doesn't do what he's supposed to do, so the antagonist overloads the precise power lines near the guy so the cables fall down and electrocute him. Yes, that's what happens.

How could a human be so devious, so cunning, so in control of the fate of Jerry Shaw and That Mother? What if.... it was a COMPUTER?!!!!

Yes, it's a government supercomputer that is engineering the assassination of the president and his cabinet. Why? Please don't ask. Just know that it somehow involves Michael Chiklis. That should be enough for you.

So, this supercomputer (whose voice is a woman, so you wouldn't get confused that the HAL 9000 was being ripped off) is pushing all these human beings into different actions in order to kill all those executive branch guys.

That Mother and her Befreckled Son figure prominently in the plot, as the mother is given a necklace made of an incredibly powerful explosive that looks like a diamond (yes, I am serious), while her son has his trumpet modified without his knowledge to contain a sonic mechanism that acts as the trigger to the diamond explosive necklace (yes, I am still being serious).

Now, I don't know much about computers and any artificial intelligence they may have, but I feel relatively comfortable in saying that making a mother explode by the trumpeting of her son is a pretty goddamned dickish thing to do.

Oh, before I forget, Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson are in this crap factory. Thornton plays a really old government investigator or something that apparently cannot delegate ANY part of his investigation to anyone else. Dawson is a poorly-acted excuse for an FBI agent, that actually manages to disable the supercomputer by stabbing it in a globe.

That's what I tell the various people who ask me about problems with their computer -- "Just stab it in the globe!"