u/Borgisium

Ten times. I’ve seen this ten times. Let me explain. 

The film is an icon in the horrendous animated Christmas movie cannon. And it deserves that place. Let me explain the plot completely from memory. 

Santa Claus was once a pirate who stole toys and his brother Dingle regularly tried to one-up him. After getting frozen in ice, Santa and Dingle wind up in the North Pole where a bunch of elves are waiting for a savior. Santa becomes Santa and Dingle becomes a mooch. Then Dingle tries to take control of the elves, first through a botched, cheated game of elf bowling, then by blowing up Santa’s toy shop. The elves go on strike and through hypnotism are made slaves of Dingle on the island of Fiji. Santa takes back the elves through a successful game of elf bowling and Christmas is saved. 

One thing that’s interesting is the writer of the film is Martin Olson. Olson is a comedy writer who wrote jokes for Penn and Teller, convinced Stephen Hillenberg to adapt “the Intertidal Zone” into “Spongebob”, and has written on a variety of cartoons like “Phineas and Ferb”, “Rocko’s Modern Life”, and “The Twisted Tales of Fritz the Cat”. He’s also an actor who appeared as the chief of the International Justice League of Super Acquaintances (a subsidiary of Viacom) and as Hunsen Abadear from “Adventure Time” where his real-life daughter Olivia Olson played his on-screen daughter Marcelene. 

The film also has some good voices behind it. You’ve got Tom Kenny (Spongebob, Ice King) as Dingle and the Hip-Hoppin elf Wrapple (it’s as bad as Mudflap and Skids), you’ve got Jill Talley (Karen the Computer Wife) as Santa’s wife Grizelda and Dingle’s femme fatale Veronica, and the late, great Looney Tunes voice actor Joe Alaskey as Santa (Santa Maria Clausewitz Kringle). Tom Kenny had nothing but nice things to say about the making of the film, even saying that he recorded his lines in a rundown apartment building in a sketchy neighborhood of LA. 

I think the reason I and many others come back is because of the out of pocket things which happen in the film. One of the first things Santa says is, “Who pooped in the peanut barrel?” There are also forgettable songs, except one where Dingle sings about the wonders of slavery. There are also jokes referencing body shots, a scene where a mob-penguin says “ay boss look I can do your mom”, Dingle says the line “keep that hot strudel in your pants” to a horny Santa, Veronica won’t let Dingle date her without “medical records”, an Easter Island statue gawks at a seductive “fire spirit” and says “awesome booty”, and when the elves wake up from hypnotism, one says “huh, how come my underwear’s on backwards”. This humor makes the film flipflop between being so-bad-it’s good, genuinely bad, and somewhat funny, that it’s a fascinating watch. 

The film also features a glowing orb which basically does anything the story needs it to do. It can melt ice, rebuild a toyshop, and any inconvenience is due to it “being on the blink again”. 

Please watch this one for X-mas or any time of year. Your family may abandon you, but you will have an experience like no other. In the words of that Easter Island head “This is like a chick flick, but instead of smokin’ babes dude, it’s a munchkin and a fat guy.” I know it’s not Christmas, so treat it as an early Xmas present.

Fun fact, according to a promotional video made for investors, there was going to be a sequel set around Halloween. That never happened. They also said the film had “franchise potential”.

Sales Promo:

https://youtu.be/TzZ40xIG2qg?si=vbYDmIeQITb2NMPw

Slavery Song:

https://youtu.be/8wEZeUuoxZ0?si=q9-2ueP6lLw\_zEJQ

I first saw this back when I had the Mubi streaming service. Every day Mubi would recommend a certain film and I appreciated it given that I was able to watch a variety of interesting, lesser seen films. This was one of them. 

The film is from the underrated director Michael M Bilandic. The story is about a New York photographer named Nate (Keith Pouson) who gets the opportunity to take photos of a rap group in rural Delaware. As he depicts their lives of debauchery, the opportunity to display the photos he has taken runs counter to one of the member’s requests. 

What I love about this film is the characters. They are all well-rounded and fascinating. Nate as a protagonist is interesting and naive, and isn’t above criticism. The film uses a lot of slow motion and it’s very well executed. 

Spoilers ahead because I want to talk about the ending and why it’s interesting. >!At the end, Nate finally gets a gallery show, but the rap group finds out about it and crashes the party, spray painting all the photos. Just when Nate thinks his career is over, he finds out from the gallery owner that all of the photos were sold, and the highest was for the one with the message “Nate is a homo”. It’s such an interesting ending, because no one exactly gets what they want. Nate gets a successful show, but he’s publicly humiliated. The rap group tries to ruin his career, and while they humiliate him, they provide him with publicity he could never get. I reached out to Bilandic about this ending. My interpretation was that it represented the futility of kinds of protest as they would wind up being commodified. Bilandic had never thought of it that way, he was more interested in exploring unhappy endings where someone gets what they want but not exactly.!<

Overall I would highly recommend this film. It’s a unique and chaotic look at both rural New England and the New York art scene. 

“The Camp of Saints” is a notoriously racist novel. Written by French writer Jean Raspail, the book imagines a scenario where ships carrying refugees come to Europe, and slowly but surely destroy it. They start to overpopulate us. And because society is overpermissive and accepting, Western civilization is doomed. Despite how ludicrous the plot is, the book has gone on to inspire a following predominantly by white supremacists who think the book was somehow “prophetic”. I think the reason it has deeper roots is because the book was written by an established French author. If the book was written by your Uncle Joe on a Gateway computer from 1999, no one would care. The book is a dark vision of the world from the perspective a racist. A world where everyone who is darker-skinned and speaks a different language is coming to destroy your way of life and keep your children from having a future. 

So last night I watched “The Angry Birds Movie”. I’ll admit that the opening was a little much so before we continue I want to let you know that I don’t think the movie was referencing the book. I don’t think the film was trying to be racist and I don’t know if it’s worth seriously critiquing the film over it. If anything it’s more like a funny coincidence that a movie based on a mobile game I played when I was ten superficially reminded me of a racist book. The only similarities are that a bunch of pigs on boats come to an island of birds, and because the birds are so friendly they slowly start to crowd the island and eventually take away the bird’s eggs. I joke but the hero of the book is Red, because he’s a “racist” who immediately doesn’t trust the pigs.

The film is the story of Red (Jason Sudeikis) a bird who is often justifiably pissed off, is forced into anger management with Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride). There’s also Terrance, we’ll get to him shortly. Meanwhile a bunch of pigs led by Leonard (Bill Hader) take advantage of the bird’s friendliness and decide to steal their eggs. 

This movie is bad, so let’s get into it. There are some good things about it. The climax which replicates the game is fun and energetic. Peter Dinklage is funny as Mighty Eagle, and he’s basically become a meme at this point. I have no idea why but the character of Terrence is the funniest character in the film. He doesn’t speak, we never know why he was put in anger management, and despite not saying a single word, he’s voiced by Sean Penn. And somehow every scene with Terrence is great. The other actors are good too, except for one. 

The weak link in the film is Jason Sudeikis. Even if Red is a relatable character, Sudeikis doesn’t make him charming or funny enough to watch. I don’t know if this is true but it feels like the crew thought, let Sudeikis say stuff, he’ll bring the funny. He’s got the occasional funny line but he doesn’t deliver to his full potential. 

There’s also the music. The music is in the camp of, “let’s choose a song which telegraphs to the audience what’s going on right now” in the vein of “Suicide Squad”. There’s a scene where Red is wandering around alone as an outcast for being an angry bird, and they play “Behind Blue Eyes” by the Who, known for the lyric “No one knows what it’s like, to be the bad guy.” Actually I lied, it’s the Limp Bizkit version. THERE IS NO GOD!!!

It’s like a more competent Illumination film, which means it’s still bad. Skip this one if you can, unless you want to see Terrence which is valid. 

Do you remember Drexel the Dream Hemsley? Everyone remembers Drexel. The man was the undisputed king of Rock and Roll. His influence is legendary and undisputed, and his songs are immortal. 

So for context, the movie that I’m talking about is about Elvis. Elvis had a twin brother named Jesse Garson who died stillborn. The film imagines a scenario where Elvis’ twin brother survived, and after being unknowingly separated from birth, would wind up shadowing his brother as an Elvis impersonator with a heavy emphasis on the Christian faith. Of course they couldn’t use the name Elvis, so throughout the film there is this man who looks like Elvis, sings like Elvis, stars in movies similar to what Elvis was in, and he’s played by Elvis impersonator Blake Rayne. But he’s not Elvis, he’s Drexel “The Dream” Hemsley. Which is weird given the movie at one point name drops Elvis so it begs the question of how this universe operates. 

While Drexel becomes intoxicated by stardom, his twin brother Ryan is a preacher’s kid who struggles to please his father. 

Speaking of which the film is filled with actors I’m convinced were held at gunpoint to be in. The late Ray Liotta plays Ryan’s preacher father, you’ve got Ashley Judd as Ryan’s mother, Joey Pantoliano (the Matrix) and Seth Green as Ryan’s friends. 

Overall it’s not good. The plot is bumpy, the dialogue bad, and the film overall is a drudge. And while I don’t want to trash a film for having a low budget, it looks like they were operating off of scraps and a mistaken view of what the 50s-70s looked like. I would highly recommend Brad Jones's review of the film where commenting on the age of Ryan “this is the first time I’ve seen someone caught for over-aged drinking”. 

https://youtu.be/ImXzfTUCi1g?si=0\_RbzhL\_NDIwN8u2

Hey, remember Ben Stein? He’s mostly known as a character actor due to his hilarious monotone voice and his roles in movies like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Mask” the TV show “Win Ben Stein’s Money”, he even had a funny cameo in the classic “Family Guy” episode “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein”. What I didn’t know about him was that he was also a speech-writer for Nixon and Ford, he even wrote a book called “Peacemaker” trying to reclaim Richard Nixon’s legacy. He was also the host and producer of a documentary about the “debate” around evolution. And good lord, is it bad. 

To start things off I have to say there is no “debate” around evolution. The theory of evolution is accepted by the majority of scientists in wide ranging fields. They may disagree about the nitty-gritty details, but it’s been accepted that creatures evolve over millions of years through small changes. It is a “theory” but the word “theory” can set off some alarm bells. Scientist Stephen Jay Gould put it best when he said that a “fact” is a collection of data and a “theory” is an explanation of that data. Therefore evolution is an explanation, and as explanations go, it’s been very useful and durable for explaining how species have changed. And before you say, “we haven’t observed that change within our lifetimes”, we have. Check out Trey the Explainer’s video below for some interesting cases of speciation we’ve directly observed and a video from Veritasium about one of the longest continuous experiments. 

The film is hosted by Ben Stein, with its central thesis being that the idea of Intelligent Design has been unfairly shut out of academic circles. Not only that, but evolution is also single-handledly responsible for things like eugenics, fascism, and much of the secular evils in the world. One funny thing I want to add is that one of the distribution companies, Rocky Mountain films, has a notoriously spotty history. They also distributed, Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016: Obama’s America”, the War on Christmas film “Last Ounce of Courage” featuring Fred Williamson, “The Principle” a documentary supporting Geocentrism which misled notable scientists into appearing (video below by Dan Olsen), and DJ Pooh’s last directorial work “Grow House” a weed comedy starring Malcom McDowell, Snoop Dogg, and Faizon Love. 

The film features interviews with professors and scientists who were supposedly cast out or fired because they dared to mention evolution. One is Caroline Crocker, who was supposedly fired from George Mason University for just mentioning intelligent design and she was blacklisted from getting other jobs. In reality Crocker was non-tenure, she wasn’t fired and Mason University said they had let her contract expire due to other factors (she didn’t just mention it either, she brought it up several times). And between that and the film, she found work at Northern Virginia Community College and did some post-doctoral work. There was also Guillermo Gonzales, an astrophysicist who claims he was denied tenure at Iowa State because he had excellent research the universe was intelligently designed he was denied tenure. In reality he was denied tenure because the University didn’t think he was excelling enough, wasn’t able to secure outside funding, and four out of the twelve candidates who applied didn’t make the cut so he was already in a shark tank. 

The film also gives good publicity to the Discovery Institute. The film plays a sneaky sleight of hand by painting your run of the mill creationists as being quacks, while the people at the Institute are genuinely curious scientists. In reality the Discovery Institute has regularly clashed with scientists on other issues like climate change and one of the lead members said the 2020 election was stolen. They also had their own version of Project 2025 called the Wedge Strategy, which aims to create policies to reflect right-wing Christian values. According to the book “Why Creationism Fails”, “Although its religious orientation is explicit, the long-term plan outlined in the Wedge Document also displays the Discovery Institute's political agenda very clearly. In ten years, the Wedge strategy was to be extended to ethics, politics, theology; the humanities, and the arts. The ultimate goal of the Discovery Institute is to 'overthrow' materialism and 'renew' American culture to reflect right-wing Christian values.”

The film also alleges that Darwin shaped Hitler’s thinking. The ADL put out a statement, “The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.”

Honestly there’s so much wrong with this film and I’ve just scratched the surface. I didn’t even get into the proponents of evolution feeling like they had been misled, the way the documentary frames most scientists as materialist atheists, or the Darwin quote they deliberately edited (I included it above, bold is the text cut out of the film). 

Overall I would not recommend it in the slightest. The filmmakers have put together a documentary as manipulative as “Farenheit 9/11” or “What the Bleep Do We Know” and it thankfully got trashed. 

Trey the Explainer: Rapid Evolution

https://youtu.be/NArlXzSFt2Y?si=q5xrP4vzDQdqYwWR

Veritasium: Longest Running Evolution Experiment

https://youtu.be/w4sLAQvEH-M?si=djdO6_x4clvzWveW

Dan Olsen: That Time Geocentrists Tricked a Bunch of Physicists

https://youtu.be/icwDF8wRgF4?si=1l8_B-_kcxers4bs

Despite being the majority religion in the USA, despite having prominent places in Washington, and despite the fact that Christianity will remain the dominant religion in the USA for quite some time, many Evangelicals will insist they are being persecuted. And here we find a good example of how that complex looks like. 

The film is about a pastor who is opposing a bill, which leads to the senator supporting the bill to frame him for rape and murder. The bill in question would force Christians to acknowledge they are not the one true religion. 

Ok let’s unpack that for a minute. Setting aside the fact that a bill like that could never happen due to being a clear violation of the first amendment, and the fact that it would come under attack by conservative and probably liberal Christians, the hero of the movie is someone who is more or less fighting against inter-faith harmony. You could say, “but he’s also fighting to protect his name because he’s been wrongly charged with crimes”, and you’d be right about that. It doesn’t change the fact that the protagonist is still trying to advocate for Christian supremacy. 

The cast features a motley crew of odd names. You’ve got Gretchen Carlson of “Fox and Friends” (I don’t really want to trash her given her legitimately good activism for MeToo-related legislation), Dean Stockwell (come on man!), unfunny Christian comedian Brad Stine, singer Natalie Grant, “Law and Order” alumnus and 2008 presidential candidate Fred Dalton Thomas, and Bruce Davison of “Willard” and “X-Men” as the evil senator. Unfortunately the lead protagonist, the pastor John Luther (subtle as “Last Ounce of Courage”’s Bob Revere) is played by James Remar. I say unfortunately because Remar is too damn good for this film! Remar has been in everything from “The Warriors”, “48 Hours”, “Drugstore Cowboy”, “Pineapple Express”, “Django Unchained”, and “Oppenheimer”. Also he was Dexter’s father. 

Aside from the film’s message, aside from the actors who deserve better roles (except Brad), the film is just not well-made. The action is lame, the dialogue is off (me and my friend laughed our asses off when Davison shouted “Oh STOP with the Lord!”), and as Brad Jones the CinemaSnob put it in his review, “it takes the intrigue out of intrigue plots”. The movie barely scraped $1 ½ million, and it has a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite the negative reviews, the movie did receive a tepid review from Focus on the Family who said the film “has its problems, both in terms of content and plot and even message. But its subject is a timely one, well worth putting much more thought into than most of us usually do.” Controversial opinion but I feel a moderate endorsement from an organization founded by James “Daddy’s Penis” Dobson, is more a curse, like being approved by the Dove Foundation. Funnily enough, the movie is not Dove-Approved but that’s mostly because of the violence, they otherwise praise it as a “compelling story about what one man with faith can accomplish.”

So I would say skip the movie unless you want the occasional so-bad-it’s-good-moment. I can’t watch it again because I’m sure there are men in Washington watching this film on loop. 

Edit: not long after posting this I realized I should’ve explained that name I called Dobson. James Dobson wrote that it’s good to prevent your kids from becoming homosexuals, so he advocated for a book written by conversion therapy advocate Joseph Nicolosi called Preventing Homosexuality. There’s a weird part of the book where Nicolosi says, “He [the father] can even take his son with him into the shower where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger” (120). Not that I’m against parents bathing with their kids, but that’s a weird thing to emphasize.

Before you say anything I’m already in hot water with Reddit and I didn’t want to push harder with the title.