Cynical Cinema

Anyone who watches South Park knows that without Eric Cartman, this show would not be close to what it is. And now, Paramount Home Entertainment and the people behind South Park have acknowledged this fact with the new DVD set The Cult of Cartman: Revelations. A series of 12 episodes, the very best (or worst) of Eric Cartman, combined with Cartman’s philosophies of life. Philosophies like, of you are sinned against, be prepared to retaliate a thousand-fold. Which is exactly what he does in the opening episode, the truly shocking and heinous “Scott Tenorman Must Die”. This is Cartman’s most despicable (and therefore most brilliant) moment in all of South Park. Watching him lick Scott Tenorman’s tears at the end of this episode might be the freakiest, creepiest moment in TV history. Well, next to that time a drunken Joe Namath hit on Suzy Kolber on the sidelines during Monday Night Football.

Every episode here is a winner, and each one comes complete with an introduction by Cartman himself, inviting you to worship at the altar of the most despicable character in cartoon history. His wisdom is suspect, his morals are corrupt, his motives are selfish at best and heinous at worst. But boy, can this kid ever preach! Great episodes like “Awesome-O”, an episode where Cartman dresses up as a robot to put a mean practical joke over on Butters, but upon finding out that Butters has an incriminating video tape of him, he must stay in his robot costume for days on end until he can find that video. The Tourette’s episode, where Cartman pretends to have Tourette’s Syndrome so he can swear whenever he likes. Then there’s the one where he pretends to be mentally handicapped so he can win money at the Special Olympics. And, although it isn’t the most despicable moment in Cartman’s career, it is likely the most offensive: The episode where he contracts HIV through a blood transfusion, and then purposely gives it to Kyle when he laughs at him.

I am not exactly ready to worship at the altar of this horrible, horrible little boy. But I am certainly ready to watch him doing what he does, and I will indeed sign up for his fan club. The Cult Of Cartman: Revelations DVD set comes with a sticker for your bedroom wall when you pray, and an official membership card for the Eric Theodore Cartman Society. All of this is great. All of Cartman is great. Well, in the worst possible way.

A show that is actually very good is coming out on September 30th courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Now, before I go ahead and explain about the show, let me explain why I used the word “actually”. Because on the surface, this show appears to be one that will be terrible. Here’s the deal - it’s a cartoon show, produced by PBS, about PBS. I know, hearing the word “PBS” instantly puts one in the mindframe of a person who is in danger of lapsing into a coma simply from boredom. And the idea of a PBS-produced cartoon program is cringe-inducing. And further, the fact that it’s a PBS-produced program about public broadcasting seems like a double dose of snore-fest.

But. This is not the case with Click And Clack:  As The Wrench Turns. Which is, “actually”, a terrific show with clever humour and politically astute commentary. The show centres around two guys who run a call-in car repair radio show on PBS. They are loafers, they suck at their jobs, but hey - it’s PBS! I was ready to hate this. Then, in the first episode, the two brothers decide to run for president, hire a James Carville clone to work their campaign, and manage to create some really pointed social commentary. The next episode is all about outsourcing, as the radio guys outsource their jobs to India. It’s an even more biting satire, and extremely clever. While on the surface Click And Clack seems like a bad idea, it isn’t. It’s a very good idea. And picking it up is a good idea too.

Alliance Films is releasing another VeggieTales DVD on Tuesday, September 30th. Where’s God When I’m S-Scared is just another VeggieTales DVD. Nothing terribly special about it, it’s just an episode about being scared at night and God helping out somehow. Because God, you see, is bigger than whatever it is that frightens you. So there is no point in being terrified of the dark, or the night, or Julia Stiles, because God can kick all of their asses. Or, at least, that’s what I learned from this. And although VeggieTales remains a little too preachy for my liking, at least it does the “good” kind of preaching. Like, everybody is worth something, and don’t discriminate, and don’t be selfish. That sort of thing. You know, the good religion. And this particular VeggieTales DVD features the best part of the show - the songs.

A few months ago, Alliance released a DVD full of nothing but the silly songs from VeggieTales. Those remain the best part of the show, and the two little episodes on this DVD are no different. A song about Daniel being thrown to the lions is particularly entertaining, as is the bizarre song about a water buffalo. There is even a special feature episode of something called 3-2-1 Penguins, which is another animated show that appears to have nothing to do with VeggieTales at all, except that it’s kinda preachy too. That one you can skip.

Casper: Trick Or Treat is really the Casper The Friendly Ghost Classics Collection Volume One. Alliance Films is releasing the DVD Tuesday, September 30th, as a way to get some Hallowe’en stuff out to the shelves before the day comes up. While Casper must appeal to some nostalgia buffs out there, I’m not sure it holds up over time. Casper, you see, is a friendly ghost. And he lives with three other ghosts, who are irritated at Casper’s friendliness. You see, they feel that the main purpose of a ghost is to scare people. And Casper isn’t really living up to his end of the being-a-ghost bargain. Except that in reality, he is.

You see, much to Casper’s chagrin, he does scare people. Simply by being a ghost. In his Hallowe’en special, he can go around outside, and no one is scared, because it’s Hallowe’en and everyone assumes he’s dressed up as a ghost. But when they see him passing through doors and trees and so forth, they realize he’s for real, and they’re terrified. So the other three ghosts really have no reason to be upset. Whether he likes it or not, he IS scaring people, and there is actually no problem at all. While Casper: Trick Or Treat is pretty good for nostalgia, it isn’t terribly good for Hallowe’en.

Alliance Films is releasing Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special on Tuesday, September 30th. That gives you a full month to load up on Hallowe’en-themed cartoon series like Casper and Fat Albert. Like I said about Casper, I’m not entirely sure how many people are going to leap to the store to purchase Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special simply because it’s being offered around Hallowe’en time. It strikes me that it may well be a better idea to get a bunch of scary movies and go from there.

However, if you have small children who are not yet of an age where a family viewing of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is appropriate, perhaps this is the ideal product. Fat Albert’s Hallowe’en Special really does work for children. Bill Cosby managed to give this show a certain amount of charm even in the most bland episodes. The Hallowe’en Special comes with two bonus episodes, introduced by a very young Cosby himself, and they are better than the Hallowe’en one. One is about a prankster who gets his comeuppance, and one is about the silliness of superstitions. Just the kind of stuff that educates kids while entertaining them. If, you know, you’re kids appreciate Bill Cosby’s sense of humour.

Mike Myers is a comic genius. His ability to create memorable characters is limitless, and every movie franchise he touches turns to gold. The Scottish dad in So I Married an Axe Murderer. The big fat Scottish guy in Austin Powers. The fun, green, fat Scottish ogre in Shrek. OK…maybe he can only create memorable Scottish characters. And Wayne from Wayne’s World…and Dr. Evil.

Remember the second Austin Powers movie? How it was virtually scene-for-scene the same movie as the first? And the third one was just a lame follow-up, where it was one long recycled “British people have bad teeth” joke? With Shrek 3, Mike Myers proved once again that while his ideas start out great, they have very little staying power. Shrek 3 is one big long ogres like farting and they smell bad joke. We get it. He’s an ogre. It’s what they do. Justin Timberlake makes an appearance in the film as a would-be king whose relevance to the movie is questionable at best. Shrek is no longer the most interesting character, the donkey and the cat are now tiresome, and I started to wish I could watch the spinoff movie starring the gingerbread man. THAT guy is still funny.

Shrek 3 is not a case of too much of a good thing, it’s a case of too much of the same thing. Much like that Shrek song, All-Star, by that band Smashmouth, it gets pretty irritating the third time around. Although I will say this. The film looks absolutely amazing on Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray edition is being released September 23rd, Tuesday, by Paramount Home Entertainment.

Alliance Films releases the second DVD in the Unstable Fables series today, September 9th. The first one was a charming, fresh take on the three little pigs, called Three Pigs and a Baby. This one is a charming, fresh take on the tortoise and the hare, called Tortoise vs. Hare. It’s not quite as good as the first one, mostly because it’s kinda preachy for a kids’ program. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. Dozens of kids shows are preachy and irritating. I just expected better from Jim Henson studios on this one.

You see, it has been fifteen years since the tortoise and the hare had their big race. The one where the hare, miles in the lead, figured he had time to take a nap just a few yards from the finish line. And the tortoise won. The moral of this story has always been “slow and steady wins the race”. A moral that has always bugged me. Tell that to Usain Bolt. The moral should really be “fast and NOT crushingly stupid wins the race”. Now, 15 years later, the tortoise is a rich, successful lawyer and the hare is a sketchy, daredevil used-car salesman. And they are competing for the title of Worst Father In The World, as they push their respective children into an outdoor adventure survival race in order to one-up each other.

It’s still a charming and fresh take on a familiar fairy tale, there’s just too much of that cruel-father-gets-his-comeuppance stuff for my liking. But that’s a minor complaint. Despite the cheap animation, the animals are very expressive and have great characters, and the kids love it. That’s reason enough to pick up Tortoise vs. Hare today.

Paramount Home Entertainment is coming out with a movie called Chicago 10 on August 26th. It’s a very strange take on the famous Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at that convention that led to riots, arrests, and a really bizarre trial. Chicago 10 is basically a documentary about that trial, featuring archival footage of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Bobby Seale, and the rest of the people involved with the trial. Interviews with them at the time, footage of Hoffman and David Dellinger at speaking engagements, and of course footage of the demonstrations, the police response, and the riots that took place. What happened after the disturbance in 1968 was that eight people were put on trial for “crossing state lines for the purposes of inciting a riot”. The trial really was a farce, and film maker Brett Morgen wants to accentuate this by creating a cartoon representation of the trial itself.

Which means that between the archival footage and the documentary pieces, we get a re-enactment of the Chicago trial by cartoon characters. They look like the people they represent, they talk like the people they represent, and Morgen has recruited some big names to help voice these characters. Jeffrey Wright, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber and many others participated in this film. Which is impressive, and really adds punch to the courtroom scenes, which are taken directly from the transcripts of the trial itself. A trial which saw the judge order Bobby Seale, the national leader of the Black Panther Party, to be bound and gagged right in the courtroom because of his frequent outbursts. This was an absolutely crazy time in North American history, and this trial really encapsulates what was craziest about it. And this movie provides a really interesting look into that trial.

Interesting, but not as interesting as it should be. This trial and these events in Chicago in the late sixties fascinate me, and I wanted to learn everything I could. And in watching this movie, I learned an awful lot. But the style of the movie and the “artsy” nature of the animated segments don’t really help. It’s better than one of those cheesy “courtroom re-enactment” scenes from other, worse documentaries, and I frankly don’t know what I would have preferred to see in it’s place. But the style of the movie becomes overpowering, and I found myself getting distracted from the actual story by the animation. It isn’t a major fault, because this movie is still impressive and thorough, but it prevents the film from being a great one.

Season One of Transformers: Animated hits DVD today, August 19th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. It picks up right where Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out left off a few months ago. Transform and Roll Out was really the first three episodes of this series, episodes that you actually don’t get with this DVD. Five Autobots - Ratchet, Prowl, Bulkhead, Bumblebee and of course Optimus Prime - have found the AllSpark, which is some kind of big deal for Transformers, and they have stashed it safely on Earth. And they now live in Detroit. While in Detroit, they must do battle against numerous foes. Not only do evil Decepticon robots occasionally show up to attack them and snatch the AllSpark, but since their arrival on Earth, they have been enlisted several times to do battle against human comic book Supervillains as well.

Which means that although there is a story line to Season One of Transformers Animated, it is really told in just four episodes. And the other fourteen episodes are filler. Stand-alone episodes where the Transformers fight guys made entirely out of acid, and learn to play Twister. Finally, we get to the end of the season, when Megatron (the leader of the evil Decepticons) manages to trick a friendly Earth scientist into helping him rebuild his own body…ah, I won’t ruin it for anyone. But truly, there are only four episodes you need to watch. Episode 4, episode 6, episode 15 and episode 16. If you want to watch the episode about the guy who dresses up as Robin Hood and robs banks, or the one where Bumblebee stars in a WWE-style event against a human on tons of steroids, then go ahead and watch them all. Otherwise, I have just saved you seven hours.

Seven hours that you would spend, as I did, wondering how the character Prowl managed to, while growing up on the planet Cybertron, acquire ninja skills. Or how come the Decepticons are necessarily evil? The only way this appears to be determined is simply because they keep referring to themselves as evil. All we really know about them is that they hate Autobots and want to fight them. And they seem to be meaner when they fight. That’s about it. There are dozens of supporting characters who show up for one episode at a time, only to be killed off at the end of that episode, who then show up later having only been “presumed” dead. There are dozens of characters who don’t make sense. Like the “bounty hunter” transformer who shows up on Earth to collect the bounty on the head of Optimus Prime. But…how is he the only transformer in the world who knows that the Autobots are on Earth? If the Decepticons sent him to collect the bounty, why wouldn’t they just invade themselves in order to get to the AllSpark? Ah, so many questions with this show. Most of them best left unasked.

This series IS better than Transformers Cybertron, in that it makes a little more sense. A little. And it doesn’t have an opening theme song that drives through my brain like a white-hot railway spike. But this may be considered “faint praise” at best.

I am a moderate Star Wars nerd.  In the sense that I probably know more about the series than the average person, but that comes more as a result of being a film buff than anything else.  I have friends who can tell me the names of every character, including those who are not named in the movies themselves but rather in the credits only.  I am not one of those people.  I took the kids out to see the premiere of the new Star Wars:  Clone Wars, and I was amazed that they knew the names of more characters than I did.  It turns out that a lot of that comes from a video game called Lego Star Wars.  This is how they learn the Star Wars story.

I am, however, enough of a Star Wars nerd to realize that Star Wars:  Clone Wars is the title that should have been chosen for that dreadful second installment in the series, the sickeningly-named Attack of the Clones.  I really think the title of that movie actually made the whole film seem worse than it actually was.  And it was already pretty bad, (until Yoda threw down).  This new animated movie IS better, but that isn’t saying much.  This one takes place at the time of the Clone Wars (obviously), and gives the clones names and personalities.  In this case Rex is the leader of the clones who are working with Annakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Also new is Ahsoka, Annakin’s “padawan” learner.  She is basically his apprentice, following him around and learning the ways of the Jedi.  The stage is set for some character development, when Yoda mentions that Annakin has managed well with his padawan, it might be tough for him to let her go later.  But that, we can only assume, will be left for a future episode in this animated series.  Because nothing of that nature happens in this one.  In fact, almost nothing happens in this one.  It is merely an endless series of battles between droid armies and clone armies.  There are several cool battle scenes, including one that is vertical, up the side of a cliff, but after a while we want story.

Basically, the first 80 minutes of the movie are these battles, around a strange story.  Jabba The Hut’s son has been kidnapped by the evil Count Dooku.  The Jedi have been enlisted to bring the Hut kid back unharmed, but Dooku is really setting them up so that Jabba thinks it was in fact the Jedi who kidnapped his son.  At stake are a bunch of shipping lanes controlled by Jabba, lanes which could turn the balance of the battle in the favour of either the droids or the clones.  Dooku has his preferred assassin tracking the Jedi, a sinister female agent named Ventress.  She shows up a few times, then goes away, and proves to be a fairly useless character.

Finally, in the last 15 minutes of the film, the story begins.  Padme Amydala shows up - remember her?  Annakin’s lover and the future mother of Luke and Leia?  She attempts to broker a deal with Jabba through his uncle who lives in the city.  In doing so, she uncovers the massive conspiracy behind the Hut kidnapping, and the story resolves itself in fifteen minutes.  With more battles.  In the end, this is really a Star Wars movie made for kids, in that the story line is incredibly simplistic and the characters are completely two-dimensional.  (Ironic, for an animated 3D movie, eh?)  And because we, the Star Wars audience, are already so familiar with these characters (Annakin, Obi-Wan, Dooku, Jabba The Hut), we know them as more than two-dimensional already. 

So it becomes obnoxious when Annakin has no layers.  He’s not the young innocent Jedi, he isn’t the guy who’s going to turn into Darth Vader, he’s just the headstrong hero of an action movie.  That’s it.  For a story that is already so familiar to all of us, filling in the blanks between Episode II and Episode III ought to involve more than a silly story about Jabba The Hut and his gross young son.  And it really should be more than just a 95-minute battle.