Nick: So, Ben, what are you going as for Halloween?

Ben: You.

Nick: Me? What does that look like?

Ben: Well, it looks like me, but with a worse credit rating.

Nick: Ben, I refuse to believe that actions have consequences. That’s why I always eat at China Buffet.

Ben: Gross. Speaking of inter-racial relationships, our first film this month is Lakeview Terrace, the story of a young inter-racial couple that moves to Suburbia, next-door to a crazy cop played by Samuel L. Jackson, who is haunted by the memory of his wife being killed on a plane full of snakes.

Nick: Ben, I take this movie to be an allegory for how people are dealing differently with the current housing crisis: The young couple reacts by having sex in their outdoor pool; Sam Jackson reacts by becoming enraged and attempting to force them out of the neighborhood with escalating intimidation tactics; And God reacts by setting California on fire.

Ben: That’s God’s answer for everything.

Nick: This movie looks at another problem in our society: police officers. I mean, they’re everywhere, they’re armed, and they are not a big fan of my back-sass.

Ben: But, in their defense, your back-sass smells like Scotch and Dancing Tiger.

Nick: Touché. Our next film is the new Coen Brothers Oscar-follow-up Burn After Reading. Basically, what Joel Coen has done here, is make a movie about his wife, Frances McDormand, and her heroic attempt to get a boob job.

Ben: That’s romantic. McDormand works at a gym with Brad Pitt. A computer disc with cloak and dagger-seeming information is discovered in a changing room, having been left by retired CIA analyst John Malkovich, and frantic scheming ensues.

Nick: It’s nice to see that John Malkovich is still batshit crazy. Dude, his acting is to a normal person’s acting as the guy that played Wolverine’s acting is to an actual wolverine.

Ben: You said it. The best part of the movie was the two CIA guys in a room, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Whereas unchecked power is played for fright in Lakeview Terrace, here it is played for comedy.  I had unchecked power once, but then I was fired from the Guardian Angels.

Nick: Yeah, they were intolerant of your frotteurism. It’s interesting that the Coen brothers’ movies tend to alternate between tragic and comic. Kind of like my bowel movements.

Ben: Wow. Another thing I liked about this movie was Russian spies, with faces like W. H. Auden, wearing suits and smoking. That was a fun part of the Cold War.  Another fun part of the Cold War was the much smaller size ratio between our bodies and Toys ’R’ Us.

Nick: As I recall, our preschool portion of the eighties was spent writing a cartoon-review column called Ben And Nick On Twin Roll-Out Rugs. I remember that I wrote of Mickey’s Christmas Carol: “This film’s saccharin sentimentality is about as believable as the predictions of Ronald Regan’s Trickle-Down economics.  Now somebody please help me go potty.”

Ben: Potty can be a challenge to master.

Nick: Ben, for some time now Bloomington Indiana has only been famous for two people: John Mellencamp and whatever hard-bodied co-ed in a thousand-dollar gown is vomiting into the moon-roof of an idling taxi.

Ben: But recently the Herald-Times conducted an interview with Mitch Reinholt. Mitch is currently a junior studying biochemistry at Indiana University. But in his youth, two years ago, he crushed the heart of a delicate flower of a young woman, and hey, who didn’t, but, like the L.A.P.D., his was caught on film.

Nick: American Teen follows the lives of several teens’ senior year of high school in the small town of Warsaw, Indiana. There’s a “geek”, and the “popular girl”, the “jock”—also a robot and a transvestite, I think. Hannah Bailey is the “Ally Sheedy.” It comes as a shock, then, to the high school caste system, when our man Mitch falls for Hannah and they become an unlikely couple, only for him to dump her later via text message.

Ben: I would never break-up with anyone via text message, unless I was using the cell-phone signal to activate some plastic explosives.

Nick: How chivalrous.

Ben: In Mitch’s defense, compared to the sadism and machinations of other teens at his school, this is pretty tame. I only bring it up because she was such a sweet character and if she’s reading this, or if Mitch would pass it along, I want to say that you should never give up on your dreams and though you might not be able to tell from our publicity photo, I am sporting a fully operational platter of manitalia.

Nick: Take it to Craigslist already; gross. More than anything, watching this movie felt illegal. I mean, we all agree that it would be creepy to stand across the street from a high school with binoculars, and that’s why I was asked to stop. But go and watch them make out on the big screen and suddenly my binoculars are giving me a headache.

Ben: I think this movie is the next logical step in America’s collective mental disorder that I’m going to go ahead and call “mefamous.” Symptoms include oversized novelty sunglasses and a zealous sense of well-being that, truthfully, no one deserves. It started with Myspace but in the future every greasy tweener will have her own Biography on A&E.

Nick: I disagree. There were sequences in this movie I found incredible poignant. And by poignant I mean horrifying. The saddest thing that I have ever seen was when Megan, the “popular girl,” got revenge on another girl, Erica, by e-mailing a topless photo of her to the whole school. She cries more than you did at this year’s BET Awards.

Ben: Hey, I was moved by Rihanna. Anyway, I don’t see what the big deal is. When I was in high school my sweetheart sent me a risqué photo that I’ve kept with me always.

Nick: Dude, are you carrying a wallet-sized nude minor?

Ben: No. I had it made into a key chain. I once took it out at the courthouse metal detector and a cadre of peace officers sticky foam gunned me to the ceiling.

Nick: No justice.

Ben: No peace.

Beer For My Pants

Ben: Well, fans, it’s September again. So nobody wake up Billie Joe Armstrong.

Nick: Unless he’s blocking a fire exit.

Ben: Here’s the movie-criticism baton, Sir. Run with it.

Nick: Hey, this is a bowl of peanut shells. Ben, Tropic Thunder is not only the title of our first film this month, it’s also the nickname that was given to me by my proctologist.

Ben: I’d ask him to see a diploma.

Nick: Tropic Thunder is about a group of actors, most notably, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey Jr., who go to Vietnam to shoot a war movie, but end up lost in the jungle, at the mercy of a marauding horde of mentally handicapped people, who scour the underbrush, feeding on babies.

Ben: Understandably, this has caused an outrage among groups that advocate for the mentally retarded, such as The Special Olympics and Jon Heder’s mom.

Nick: Much has been made of the movie’s frequent use of the word “retard”, which is becoming less and less of an acceptable term. It’s a fact of history that the words “cretin”, “moron”, and “idiot”, all used to be technical terms in use by scientists.

Ben: But then they fell out of favor, presumably after being weaponized by third graders.

Nick: Another controversial element was Robert Downey Jr.’s character, who spends the whole movie as a black man, complete with skin-tone augmentation and a different voice.

Ben: A real-life contract dispute erupted on set, causing actor Jack Black to quit the movie mid-production. So for most of the film, Jack Black is actually being portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.

Nick: In Jack Black face.

Ben: Or next film is House Bunny, which is all about a hot yet ditsy Playboy bunny, who is asked to leave the mansion after turning 27. Homeless, she becomes the “house mother” for a college sorority (the Zetas) that is comprised of the least popular girls on campus.

Nick: What follows is mostly a grand exercise in the old movie cliché of putting a physically hot person in dumpy clothes and glasses, then giving that person a makeover, and then declaring that they’ve now discovered their “inner beauty”.

Ben: At first the girls focus exclusively on the physical side of their appeal. But by the end, they’ve discovered it takes a combination of physical and mental beauty to be complete. Still, throughout the film I got the sensation that somewhere a field trip from the Gender Studies Department was committing synchronized Hari Kari.

Nick: But the big story from this movie is that Tom Hanks has figured out how to reproduce himself asexually. The new Tom Hanks is called Colin Hanks, and is the second in a series that establishes God’s new covenant with man, to provide a Tom Hanks for each new generation until the return of Jesus.

Ben: Wow. I didn’t realize that God collaborates with Happy Madison.

Nick: Well, there’s no earthly reason for Adam Sandler’s success.

Ben:  Next we watched Beer for my Horses starring country music star and foreign policy adviser Toby Keith. The plot feels like a remake of The Andy Griffith Show with Mr. Keith as Andy and blue-collar comedian Rodney Carrington as Barney Fife.

Nick: Only in this version Aunt Bee is played by Ted Nugent and Otis the lovable drunk is replaced with a Mexican drug lord’s brother. The brother seems to be doing a bad Tony Montana impression, which is a weird thing for a real Mexican to do.

Ben: After our heroes capture his brother, the kingpin retaliates by kidnapping Toby Keith’s love interest: a cross-dressing Robert Downey Jr.

Nick: But when the gang has to travel to Mexico to exchange the prisoner for the girl, well that’s when my Klonopin really kicked in.

Ben: Though beyond just watching a movie, Nick, we really took a cinematic journey into a scary and secretive subculture: white people.

Nick: We learned that white people are angry and love hats.

Ben: And we can say that objectively because we’re multicultural: Our grandmother has dissociative identity disorder, and several of her personalities are ridiculous racial stereotypes.

Nick: Also we learned that Whitey’s knowledge of geography can best be summed up by Mr. Keith’s stirring lyric in his country classic “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (Angry American)”: “A sucker punch came from somewhere in the back.” He goes on to tell off the Iraqis who blew up the world-trade center.

Ben: My hat’s gonna put a boot up somebody’s ass!

Nick: Ben? No!

Ben: “Somewhere in the Back” hates our in-the-front-ness! A chicken in every pot.A boot in every ass. It’s the American way!

Nick: Beer for My Horses was also co-written by Mr. Carrington, who penned the song “Show Them to Me” as well as hundreds of other comedy-country songs about flashing your boobs. When he performs these songs in concert, of course, the inevitable happens and it made me wish that we had something like that.

Ben: I’ve already been encouraging people to do a Kegel whenever they shake your hand.

Nick: Well that would explain the faces that they’ve been making.

Ben: Next we journeyed into an even more disturbing and secretive subculture: women.

Nick: If you’ve ever waited for a loved one to come out of a dangerous surgery, then you know what it’s like to sit through Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.

Ben: The first thing I remember was an usher making an announcement that the movie would age us like the presidency.

Nick: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is about four women in their early twenties meeting men with different accents…and then crying or something.

Ben: Despite the lagging pace I felt that it was a bold choice to cast all four lead roles with a cross-dressing Robert Downey Jr.

Nick: As a symbol of their friendship they all take turns wearing the same pair of jeans.

Ben: Fun fact: that’s how AIDS started.

Ben: Oh my God, Nick, did you just hear an eerie supernatural noise?

Nick: No. Is this a trick to get at my Butterfinger BBs?

Ben: Our first movie this month, fans, is The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Nick: That’s true. So you’re right to believe it.

Ben: No, I mean that’s the name of the movie.

Nick: John Woo’s on first?

Ben: Agents Mulder and Scully are once again on the trail of something spooky. An FBI agent has gone missing, and body parts are being discovered in a frozen lake. Their only lead is a psychic priest (played by comedian Billy Connolly) who has been convicted of molesting 37 altar boys.

Nick: As a tie-in with another Billy Connolly appearance, after he molests 37 altar boys, the police ask him what he calls himself, and he says, “The Aristocrats!”

Ben: Overall, I was disappointed. Now, I didn’t watch the TV show, but I thought that The X-Files was about aliens and Big Foot teaming up to kill Dracula.

Nick: No, you’re thinking of The Bible.

Ben: The surprise at the end is [SPOILER ALERT] a kidnapper is killing his female victims by removing their whole bodies below the neck, and then transplanting them onto the not-dead head of his same-sex husband.

Ben: As our creepy uncle used to say, “Somebody’s got to be on bottom.”

Nick: Wait… We didn’t have an uncle…

Ben: After watching the X-Files movie, we still had some unanswered metaphysical questions, so we rented a porno movie. So, for the first time (and probably the last time), we give you: Ben & Nick in the Porno Aisle!

Nick: Ben, when you push through those swinging saloon doors in the back of the video store, you know that it’s time for a shootout at the I’m Not Okay Corral.

Ben: In keeping with the supernatural themes suggested by The X-Files we decided to rent My Ass Is Haunted, a touching story of one woman and her ass, which, you know, is haunted.

Nick: Can we say “ass”?

Ben: Probably not.

Nick: The plot starts off directly enough, when a women in a white leather dress shows up at a “doctor’s office” wearing no underwear. The “doctor” is a hot blond wearing a pink leather nurse’s outfit. Quoth the patient, “This might sound crazy, but I think my ass is haunted.” Quoth the doctor, “Madam, I have a cure.”

Ben: The doctor decides that the patient needs to be handcuffed to a cabinet, and then proffers, “The first step to getting better is a spanking.” Coincidentally, that is also the first sentence of Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing.

Nick: The next 50 minutes involve the doctor trying to coax the ghosts out of the patient’s lower GI with a variety of sex toys. It soon becomes apparent that several parts of the doctor are also naughtily, naughtily haunted.

Ben: Then the haunting story is forgotten and the scene switches to a woman dressed in white, being given the business by a Paris Hilton-looking lady, wearing a foxy devil costume. Due to a recent near-death experience, I can attest to the fact that this is actually a faithful portrayal of Satan.

Nick: The final scene takes place in a “convent” that bears a remarkable resemblance to a house in Los Angeles. There, two nuns do some things with crucifixes that constitute what is probably history’s most accidental reference to The Exorcist.

Ben: So, overall, this is the movie to see, if you’re a religious person, and you’re worried that your usual pornography just isn’t offensive enough to Jesus.

Ben: Word. Next we saw Mamma Mia!, which is Italian for “Yo’ Mamma!”

Nick: Mamma Mia is the film adaptation of the wildly successful musical of the same name. It is also an example of a “jukebox musical” which is the polite term for when the writer is too lazy or drunk to write any original songs and just throws in whatever’s on the radio. Either that or someone is suing Billy Joel for alimony. That’s a popular sub-genre of the genre.

Ben: I’m trying to imagine a person who loves everything about musicals except the music part.

Nick: I guess that would make them just a big fan of homosexual dance fighting.
Ben: I mean I love the Ghostbusters theme song but that doesn’t mean I think they should make a movie about it!

Nick: And Catherine Johnson, who wrote both the book for the musical and the screenplay for the film, didn’t even come up with the tortured story that strings the songs together; she just dusted off the plot of some old 1960’s slapstick bedroom farce and stuck ABBA songs all up in it. By my count, there are more than four thousand ABBA songs in this movie.

Ben: Well in full disclosure, when I can’t think of interesting things to say about a movie, I’ll quote the lyrics from the Us3 song “Cantaloop”.

Nick: Really?

Ben: Remember when I said that Sophie’s Choice was “Biddly-biddly-bop… Funky funky?”

Nick: No. According to my research, the band ABBA consisted of two married couples. This is probably due to “Stockholm Syndrome,” a defense mechanism whereby any Swedish person will immediately fall in love with anyone who tries to rob them. Band member Anni-frid Lyngstad fell for band member Bjorn Ulvaeus while he was stabbing her at an ATM and Benny Andersson was married to Agnetha Faltskog by a ship’s captain in the front seat of the speeding Volvo she had just car-jacked from him.

Ben: Of course, the big film this month was The Dark Knight. This thing has made more money then there is money. On its opening weekend it made three repeating.
Nick: Director Christopher Nolan, who in 2005’s Batman Begins embraced realism after director Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin had turned the franchise into a Rio di Janeiro-style clusterfuck, is now grittier than ever.

Ben: If Heath Ledger’s Joker’s eloquent diatribes about the beauty of chaos doesn’t inspire another school shooting, then there is just no motivating these kids.

Nick: As we were leaving the theater I heard a little girl say: “I don’t like Batman anymore, mommy!” and I felt ashamed. Who are we to take something that used to be for children and twist it for our own entertainment? Are we going to start re-writing children’s books for adults? How about: Charlotte’s Web of Lies; James and the Giant Peach-Sized Anal Polyp; And oh, I found Waldo!…sleeping with my wife!

Ben: Man, that is jam-to-the-bam boogie-woogie bam slam!

Nick: Goodnight, kids!

]]> http://cultureweek.com/?feed=rss2&p=234 http://cultureweek.com/?p=191 http://cultureweek.com/?p=191#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:10:22 +0000 Ben and Nick Moore http://cultureweek.com/?p=191 Ben and Nick Moore]]> Episode 14: A Hulka Hulka Sexy Lovin’ Happenings

Nick: Rise and Shine, campers!

Ben: Yes, summer has sprung again here at Ben & Nick In The Aisle! So, fans, clean up your tents, convene in the mess hall, and let’s go show those rich kids at Camp Mohawk what movie reviewing is all about!

Nick: Ben.

Ben: Yes, Nick.

Nick: It just doesn’t matter.

Ben: You’re probably right. In other news, it was two-hundred and thirty-two years ago this month, that America was born. President Bush plans to celebrate in November with a fireworks display in Iran.

Nick: That sounds apoca-tastic! I think that our forefathers would be proud to see that their experiment in limited government has recently landed on Mars.

Ben: The other day I visited Ben Franklin’s grave, Nick, and his body was audibly rotating. But my theory is that his corpse was having a dream about teenagers.

Nick: He was really into them. Our first movie this month is a classic tale: Boy meets Girl; Girl irradiates Boy; Boy becomes the Incredible Hulk.

Ben: The Incredible Hulk is the latest in the trend started by Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man of wimpy actors playing superheroes.

Nick: That Spider-Man series was a license to print money.

Ben: Sure it was. And the trend continues. Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man now. In The Incredible Hulk, the evil super-tough military commando is played by Tim Roth. I’m waiting for a remake of Predator starring Conor Oberst.

Nick: I don’t know who directed this movie—

Ben: Louis Leterrier.

Nick: And history may never know. But somehow he got Liv Tyler, Ed Norton, and William Hurt to act poorly.

Ben: If Louis Leterrier were a superhero, he would be a cross between Manimal and Mansquito. He’d be called Man-Man, and his super power would be bad direction.

Nick: At one point, Liv Tyler was on top of Ed Norton, trying to talk him down from losing the grip on his Hulk handle. But I don’t know if that’s a good way to stop someone from Hulking-out. If she were on top of me, my manhood would put on purple pants and punch a cop car.

Ben: Our next movie was Sex and the City, which, on the plus side, had great acting. On the minus side, it was Sex and the City.

Nick: In the time it took to watch this movie, I could have had sex with a whole city.

Ben: I was so bored that I actually did have sex with several women in our row. Somewhere around the movie’s half-way mark, they all went into labor.

Nick: Hey, congratulations! If you didn’t know, readers, this movie is a sequel to Sex and the City the TV show, which was all about four unmarried ladies in New York City dealing with relationships and talking about sex all the time.

Ben: The redhead shows her cans.

Nick: Oh, you’re such a Samantha!

Ben: For me, the most dramatic part of this movie was trying to not be seen while arriving and departing.

Nick: Yes, in order to avoid being recognized, and thereby doing damage to our highly manly reputations, before leaving the theater we donned drag.

Ben: We sure did. The costume store was out of everything except for Sexy French Maid. So we both exited the theater dressed as that.

Nick: Manliness maintained!

Ben: Next we saw The Happening. It was so disappointing that we started writing our own screenplay in the middle of the movie, about us watching the movie:

INT. BATHROOM. M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN enters frame and smiles at himself in the mirror. He points at his reflection, makes a little gun with his hand.

M. NIGHT

(to himself)

Trick-Ending Guy!

M. NIGHT exits frame and enters shower. CAMERA PANS SLOWLY to reveal M. NIGHT crying and soaping his chest.

CUT TO: INT. OFFICE of STUDIO EXECUTIVE.

EXEC.

Word on the street is you’ve had it. You’re washed up! Finished!

M NIGHT

Abba-da-Abba-da-Abba-da!

EXEC gets so mad he starts strangling the potted plant in the corner.

M NIGHT

Hey, leave that plant alone! Hey wait. Environmentalism is huge right now. What about a movie where all the plants in the world start fighting back by emitting some kind of poison gas that causes people to kill themselves?

EXEC

Could the gas cause people to have break-dance battles?

M NIGHT

No. And the lead should be a science teacher.

EXEC

I see Mark Wahlberg.

M NIGHT

No one would buy that.

EXEC

Jargon! Just have a really tense scene where everyone is saying: “Marky Mark, Marky Mark, figure out what to do.” And he mutters to himself, “observation, hypothesis, experimentation…” And they say, “Come on Marky Mark, people are dying!” And he’ll say, “Let me think! I’m using science! [muttering] hypothesis, experimentation….” And then just throw in a famous M Night twist!

M NIGHT

I don’t wanna twist anymore!

M NIGHT starts crying.

EXEC

Okay, okay. The twist is: there is no twist. We’ll call it The Happening and then nothing happens! Just shots of wind and trees!

M NIGHT and EXEC stand up and hug. CUT TO: M NIGHT and EXEC holding hands, sitting on skateboards, zooming downhill. In each’s free hand is a wad of cash. CLOSE UP ON M NIGHT’s gleeful face.

M NIGHT

I’m coasting!

CUT TO: INT. MOVIE THEATRE. BEN and NICK are sitting, starring, horrified. ZOOM IN EXTREME CLOSE UP on NICK’s EYEBALL. DISSOLVE to GIANT FETUS FLOATING OVER EARTH. GIANT FETUS BLOWS VINCENT GALLO. END.

Nick: Powerful stuff.

Ben: To complete the downer double feature, we saw The Love Guru. It appears Mike Myers has also lost it. Even the appearance of every famous comedian and Jessica Alba couldn’t save what was essentially a string of jokes about wiener and poo.

Nick: And not the lovable characters from the series of British children’s books Wiener and Poo.

Ben: See, it’s funny when we do it.

Nick: Also, I want to admit to America that I can’t tell the difference between Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel.

Ben: I think it was Tolstoy who said, “All pretty people look alike, but all unpretty people find their own way to look like Edward James Olmos.”

Nick: I once had a waitress at the Waffle House who looked like Edward James Olmos.

Ben: See? Good for her! Own that Olmos!

Ben: Hey, Nick, come and look at the fort I just made out of Lincoln Logs!

Nick: I’ve already seen it, Ben. And destroyed it!

Ben: What? Why would you do that?

Nick: Because, Ben, it’s time once again for Summer Blockbusters!

Ben: But those weren’t blocks. They were logs.

Nick: Hey, if you can’t stand the action, stay out of the Megaplex!

Ben: My diary will be hearing about this.

Nick: But before we get to the Summer Blockbuster reviews, I’m told that we have a celebrity guest. Who is that, Ben?

Ben: It’s a surprise. Why don’t you do your Video Review first.

Nick: Okay, well, as it happens, this month I rented the new Woody Allen movie Cassandra’s Dream. Fans of Match Point will enjoy Cassandra’s Dream, because once again the Woodman has made a drama about British people and murder.

Ben: The main characters are two British brothers, who are played by Colin Farrell who is actually Irish, and Ewan McGregor, who is secretly Mexican.

Nick: Yes. And they buy a boat, and then they plan a murder or something. There was a Philip Glass soundtrack I think, unless my brain naturally produces Philip Glass music as a chemical reaction to boredom. When a shockingly explicit sex scene started, featuring the 26-year-old English beauty Haley Atwell, shot from the first-person, I realized I was asleep and dreaming.

Ben: So it sucked bollocks?

Nick: Watching Woody Allen do drama is like watching Michael Jordan play baseball. There is this tendency for characters to just describe themselves to each other very artificially. For example,

Character One: I’m so desirous of Lucy! Probably she represents Lady Luck for me, an ideal I’ve been pursuing through gambling and risk-taking, ever since the vicissitudes of fate were ingrained in me by the fact that I was adopted.

Character Two: Your cavalier attitude is in stark contrast to my routineness! Our friendship is a study in opposites. Remember when you were married to my wife, before I was? That is ironic, considering the polarity of our personalities!

Ben: Sounds like the Woodman dropped a clanger! That’s the dog’s dinner!

Nick: Yes, it’s very annoying. Characters prattling off their backstroies is a subset of something I call “Stuck In A Room” which is anytime characters talk for a reason unrelated to their main goal. I notice it in plays a lot.

Ben: Yeah, characters in plays shouldn’t do that. They should be all like, “Give me the Glengarry leads! Or I’ll knife you with my penis!”

Nick: Yeah. So, who’s our celebrity interviewee?

Ben: Oh, it’s Woody Allen.

Nick: What?!

Woody Allen: Hello, it’s an honor to be here, Ben and Nick. I’m Woody Allen.

Nick: Mr. Allen, I take back exactly forty percent of the things I said about your movie.

Woody Allen: Being here is such an existential experience for me, Moore Brothers. You know, I’ve always thought that sex is a lot like food. Because both involve me standing alone in a closet and choking.

Ben: Oh, Woody, you’ve still got it.

Woody Allen: Schopenhauer once said of Hegel “the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times.” To which Hegel promptly responded by dying of cholera.

Nick: Oh, this has been fun, Woody Allen. Thanks for stopping by.

Woody Allen: Thanks for having me, Ben and Nick.

Ben: Now, about those blockbusters…

Nick: I noticed that every movie this summer is about superheroes. Also, you were hiding under your seat.

Ben: The sheer sonic relentlessness of those previews made me long for some real human drama: I wanted Joey Lauren Adams to run in and scream: “I’m not your whore!” or somebody to at least have the courage to drink themselves to death.

Nick: Which brings us to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That’s right, folks, they made a movie of your favorite new scratch-off! And it seems to me, Ben, that after inventing the whole genre of solving-needlessly-complicated-riddles-and-finding-secret-ancient-passages-that-were-for-some-reason-built-to-explode-after-being-used-once-and-then-how-did-the-people-who-built-it-even-get-back-in-after-building-it-and-why-even-hide-important-stuff-like-a-Holy-Grail-or-Gold-City-anyway-it-would-be-like-if-Hugh-Hefner-was-hanging-out-at-the-Playboy-mansion-and-he-was-suddenly-like-we-should-f-ing-hide-this-place-under-a-riddle-cave—

Ben: So that genre.

Nick: I forget what I was saying.

Ben: I thought this movie felt less like a new Indiana Jones film and more like the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular at Disney World. As we were leaving, I half expected someone to try and sell us a group photo of the audience screaming with a cheesy falling boulder super-imposed over us.

Nick: By comparison, Iron Man was hip and fun, but paced so as to not sate you on the action. Also I noticed your date left before the movie started.

Nick: Hey, a woman can do anything a man can do, including strip to the waist and fistfight me in the men’s room. Loser pays for the movie. It’s how we was raised!

Ben: No it isn’t. Anyway, you should always insist on paying because it’s an excellent metric: the amount of resistance the lady puts up to you paying is the exact amount of resistance that she’ll put up later when you try and touch her “KFC Snacker.”

Nick: Ben!

Ben: Assuming, of course, that after a romantic movie date you, too, like to take your lady to try the new things at Kentucky Fried Chicken and then always eat yours too fast and grab for hers.

Nick: Okay.

Ben: And as we all know, this too is an excellent metric, because the amount of resistance she puts up to that matches exactly the amount of resistance you’ll get later when you both “ride the fudge phlebotomist down at T.G.I. BuckFuddies.”

Nick: Is that an outlandishly named appetizer at your favorite theme restaurant?

Ben: No.

Nick: So, in conclusion, it took Hollywood five hours and 800 million dollars just to bore us, but then after the movie we went home and listened to Todd Barry’s new album, From Heaven, which was 50 minutes and better than sex.

Ben: And ten times as long!

Nick: So, please do tune in next month, when we’ll be reviewing Cocoon 3: Sex And The City.

Ben: These grannies are sassy!

]]> http://cultureweek.com/?feed=rss2&p=190 http://cultureweek.com/?p=157 http://cultureweek.com/?p=157#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 21:20:33 +0000 Ben and Nick Moore http://cultureweek.com/?p=157 Ben and Nick Moore ]]> Episode 12: Expelled: A Descent Into The Ruins Of Ben Stein’s Dignity

Nick: Ben, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a year now that we’ve been sitting in this gaudy movie theater set, having our conversations transcribed by a jury-rigged Speak & Spell.

Ben: Someone’s been publishing these?

Nick: As always, Ben, your finger is firmly on the pulse. The pulse of a light socket.

Ben: Well, Readers, I think I speak for both of us when I say, “Thank you for reading all of these columns, and for never leaving a comment at Cultureweek.com.”

Nick: Yeah. I mean, I don’t have all day to sit around and receive brief praise.

Ben: Me neither. Our first film this month was supposed to be Ben Stein’s controversial pro-Creationism documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. We were unable to see it though, since, as seems to happen every few months, Kerasotes Theatres decided not to honor our free movie privileges.

Nick: But at least they were very official about it. The Cashier got the Shift Manager. The Shift Manager got the General Manager. The General Manager got Area Manager Mike Reinhardt. And then Area Manager Mike Reinhardt sent white-light energy to Deepak Chopra.

Ben: They run a tight ship. As I understand it, Nick, Expelled is a documentary about Ben Stein blowing the lid off of a conspiracy perpetrated by “Big Science” to exclude Creationists from questioning the Theory of Evolution, or “Darwinism”, as Ben Stein likes to call it.

Nick: Also, I’ve read that the movie paints the Nazis as fans of Darwin.

Ben: The latter being an example of a fallacious argument known as Reductio Ad Hitlerum. For example: Hitler committed suicide; Virginia Woolf committed suicide; therefore, Virginia Woolf invaded Poland. All of this is an insult to the proud German heritage of Area Manager Mike Reinhardt.

Nick: I was very disappointed that we missed this movie, Ben, because I know what it’s like to have one’s scientific theories repressed by the establishment. I used to be a substitute teacher, but I was unceremoniously terminated as soon as Big Science found out that I was teaching the kids about my exciting new theory of New Jersey-ism.

Ben: I don’t think I’ve heard of that exciting new theory.

Nick: Basically, my theory states that the entire universe was manufactured at a factory in New Jersey.

Ben: Uh-huh.

Nick: I arrived at this theory by comparing objects all over the universe to objects manufactured in New Jersey. The similarities are remarkable.

Ben: Here you are, remarking.

Nick: It came to me one day when I was visiting a factory in Maryland. The products manufactured there showed obvious signs of design. But then, of course, so did the workers doing the designing! So who designed those designers?

Ben: A factory in New Jersey?

Nick: Exactly.

Ben: But Nick, isn’t it true that by explaining complexity and intelligence in terms of something that is already complex and intelligent you haven’t explained anything?

Nick: It’s very simple, Ben: All causes go back to the Big Bang, right? Well, what caused the Big Bang? Clearly, the theory that it WASN’T a factory in New Jersey is in big trouble here.

Ben: Okay. But then what caused the factory in New Jersey?

Nick: Ahhh. New Jersey exists outside of time.

Ben: What does that mean?

Nick: It means that I have a laminated back-stage pass from seminary college that allows me to talk out of my butt.

Ben: Next we got on the Intertubes to watch the latest in pirated theatrical releases. We settled on The Ruins, since I love nature, and Nick is a big fan of things that are ruined.

Nick: The Ruins is about two hot chicks and their boyfriends following a German guy into the jungle in South America to look for the German guy’s lost brother. They also bring some random Greek dude. I knew right away that the Greek dude was going to die first, because he was totally unnecessary, and also he was dressed as a crewman from the starship Enterprise.

Ben: The group discovers a spooky ancient temple, and becomes trapped on top of it, by some deadly natives. Then all hell breaks loose. And I mean the kind of hell that involves plants eating you.

Nick: Ben, the last time I was involved in a camping trip that went this badly, one of the camp counselors was Ernest, and the other was Ned Beatty.

Ben: It was hard sometimes to tell what was going on in some of the more dimly-lit scenes. But I guess that’s less a critique of the movie, and more of a critique of today’s bootleggers.

Nick: Towards the end of the film, I thought to myself, “Hey, is that Jena Malone?” It turns out that it was Jena Malone. Fans of cinema may know her as the love interest of Donnie Darko, who (SPOILER ALERT) got run over by a car driven by a guy wearing a bunny suit.

Ben: I actually tried out for that part, Nick. But they decided to go with a real car.

Nick: Ben, I believe you’ve got this month’s installment of Ben & Nick In The Video Aisle!

Ben: As you know, Nick, the sixteen-year-old who tutors me in algebra won’t let me pay him in cigarettes. But nothing impresses the little guy more than watching me rent an R-rated movie. Well, this week I decided to really wow him and rent an NC-17.

Nick: We should say for the record you don’t show him these films.

Ben: Well, it wouldn’t matter, Nick, as he can’t see a thing out of his Bon Jovi hairdo; his skin-tight jeans render him immobile; and his studded belt is so conductive it somehow creates lightning around DVD players.

Nick: Is it just me, or do all teenagers look like Han Solo? Kids nowadays.

Ben: So anyway, I’d already rented Showgirls enough times to get the free t-shirt, so that only left a new release: Descent.

Nick: How was it?

Ben: Well, there are many ways to celebrate feminism, Nick. But watching Rosario Dawson elaborately revenge rape some dude isn’t one of them.

Nick: Elaborately?

Ben: Everything but the Ewoks, dude. As a public service, I’m never going to return this. Please send donations to Cultureweek to aid in my on-going struggle/late fees.

Nick: For my part, I’ve asked Ms. Dawson to resign in disgrace from the team of imaginary people who visit me in the shower.

Ben: That’s pretty extreme, Nick. Won’t you be lonely?

Nick: No. I’ve still got the Ewoks.

]]> http://cultureweek.com/?feed=rss2&p=157 http://cultureweek.com/?p=132 http://cultureweek.com/?p=132#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:03:50 +0000 Ben and Nick Moore http://cultureweek.com/?p=132 Ben and Nick Moore]]> Episode # 11: The Reaper Virus Is A Person, Too
Nick: Well, hi there! Can we see your tickets, please? You theater-hopping scum! ‘Cause it’s time again for Ben & Nick. And we’re all up-in-your-aisle, momma!

Ben: Yes, and here we are in the month of April, Nick, when the inevitable “showers” are destined, by an act of Congress, to produce “May flowers.”

Nick: You know, Ben, I once had a secretary named May Flowers. And we met in the shower.

Ben: Nick, I’ll believe that you employed a secretary as soon as we elect a hobo mayor.

Nick: I didn’t say that I “employed” her. Rimshot! Our first film this month is a computerized animation based on a book by Dr. Seuss: Horton Hears A Who! In it, an elephant (voiced by Jim Carrey) notices a speck of dust traveling through the air and catches it on the head of a clover. After hearing voices from the speck, he becomes convinced that a miniature civilization inhabited by tiny people exists within the speck. It turns out that he’s right. This tiny town is called Whoville, and it has a mayor (voiced by Steve Carell) whose son is very emo.

Ben: The villain is a kangaroo (voiced by Carol Burnett), who is homeschooling her joey by not letting him out of her pouch. She doesn’t believe Horton about the speck, since he is the only one who can hear the voices, and so she wants to destroy his clover to prove her point. Clearly, this is all a big allegory for abortion, as evidenced by the scientific fact that elephants can hear fetuses talking.

Nick: The kangaroo is fond of saying “If you can’t see, hear, or feel it, it doesn’t exist.” By demonizing this view, the movie is tacitly endorsing the opposite philosophy, namely, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Or, as my college philosophy professor used to say, “If unicorns don’t exist, then why don’t they just show up and say so?” His generally shoddy theories about evidence probably explain why he always smelled like vodka.

Ben: Our next film was called The Other Boleyn Girl, all about Anne Boleyn (played by Natalie Portman) and her sister Mary (played by Scarlett Johansson), competing for the affections of King Henry the Eighth of England. We must confess that we saw very little of this film, since, after about four scenes of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson talking in English accents, giggling, and touching each other, we decided to spend the next hour and a half in separate bathrooms.

Nick: I don’t want to go into details, Ben, but at one point, I lit a candle in the shape of Joycelyn Elders.

Ben: Is that what the kids are calling it? Finally, we saw two films that each in very different ways celebrates the good times that can be had through violence. The first was an offering from across the pond called Doomsday. In it, pulchritudinous Brit Rhona Mitra plays a year 2035 government operative named Eden, attempting to find a cure for a disease that is threatening to destroy England. She does this by taking her team inside the walls of Scotland, which has been quarantined by the government, and until recently, was thought to be rendered unpopulated by the aforementioned virus.

Nick: Once the military unit is inside the quarantined area, however, it becomes rudely apparent that Scotland is actually still very-much populated. And the natives are dressed like rejects from the Thunderdome, and intent on killing any intruders. What’s left of Eden’s team is taken into the rabble’s custody, who, it turns out, like to eat their prisoners.

Ben: Barbarians.

Nick. But, in their defense, they cook them first. And use plates.

Ben: That’s a little less bad. I can’t say enough good things about Rhona Mitra, Nick. I thought her acting was guileless, and she was definitely easy on the eyes. Though in a fight, she was extremely hard on all other organs. Just unstoppable. She was like Jason Bourne with a vagina. What would you call that?

Nick: Ben Affleck.

Ben: Our next film is called Drillbit Taylor, who, if you think about it, should have been the director of Full Metal Jacket.

Nick: I don’t get it. This film was written by comedy genius Seth Rogen. It was also written by someone called Kristofor Brown, who, it would seem, is about as good at collaborating with Seth Rogen as he is at spelling his own name.

Ben: Ouch. Superbad it wasn’t. But Owen Wilson was unavoidably lovable as a transient con man hired by two high school freshmen to act as their body guard against a pair of persistent bullies. As in Superbad, one of the protagonists is a chubby, curly-headed vulgarian, and presumably an alter ego for Seth Rogen.

Nick: In this movie Owen Wilson gets punched in the nose a lot. I found this to be ironic, since Owen Wilson’s nose already looked like a pile of wood.

Ben: Real nice, Nick. Speaking of slamming wood, I’ve always had a thing for Leslie Mann. She plays an English teacher at the boys’ school, and becomes Drillbit’s love interest once he starts posing as a substitute teacher there. She is also the real-life wife of long-time Seth Rogan collaborator Judd Apatow.

Nick: So it was decently funny. But it did strike me as a little weird that the whole thing was basically a buildup to the main characters finding the courage to solve their problems with violence.

Ben: How would you have movie heroes solve their problems then?

Nick: Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think that movie heroes should solve their problems by doing it to Ingrid Bergman, putting her on a plane with her husband, and then walking off into the fog with Claude Rains.

Ben: Well, sure, that works sometimes.

Ben: Well, hello readers, and welcome to the month of March, a burgeoning time, when a young man’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of March Madness. Personally, I can’t wait for the first day of Spring.

Nick: I think those were Caesar’s last words.

Ben: We kicked off this month of fecundity with a movie about teenagers: Charlie Bartlett, a film which features a smorgasbord of young people I’ve never heard of, and Robert Downey Jr.

Nick: The director decided to have Robert Downey Jr. play the school principal as an alcoholic, due to a deal with the whiskey company, whereby they would give Downey all the free whiskey he wanted, if he agreed to stop breaking into their warehouse. That is, according to a Wikipedia entry that I just wrote.

Ben: I would like to take this opportunity to publicly dispute the neutrality of that article, Nick. Sir, your neutrality makes Fox News look like Switzerland.

Nick: Charlie Bartlett follows the adventures of an enterprising youth who is transferred from a private school to a public one, and soon realizes that the best way to make friends, and avoid beatings from a mowhawked classmate, is to start selling ecstasy out of the boys’ bathroom. Eventually, he begins “doctor shopping”, so as to acquire a panoply of medications, and thereby turn his ecstasy dealing into a full-fledge psychiatric service for teenagers, still run out of the boys’ bathroom.

Ben: I noticed a few literary references at beginning of the film, Nick. It opens with Charlie’s expulsion from a private school, which put me in mind of the The Catcher in the Rye. Next he befriends a childlike giant named “Len”: clearly a reference to Of Mice and Men. Later on there’s a scene in which he prances around in his underwear and sports movie-star sunglasses: an obvious reference to William Shakespeare’s Risky Business.

Nick: After Charlie Bartlett ended, we snuck into Persepolis, which is an animated feature about life in Iran, post-1979, under Sharia, or Islamic Law. Granted we missed most of the plot, but the general impression that I got about life in Iran is that people like to party there as much as they do here, the only difference being that, there, every once in a while a bunch of guys that look like Castro will burst in with machine guns and sentence everybody to whipping.

Ben: There’s a drinking game in there somewhere. Charlie Bartlett and Persepolis, taken together, demonstrate a real contrast of types of government. On the one hand, Iran chooses to demand that its citizens are black-and-white and animated in the style of The Critic, whereas in America, teenagers are allowed to practice medicine without a license.

Nick: If film criticism is a cake, Ben, then you just jumped out of it in a bikini.

Ben: Our editor suggested that we do some video picks this month, but we got confused, and ended up watching a movie about video stores: Be Kind Rewind, starring Jack Black. This was a science fiction film of sorts, in the sense that it takes place in an alternate universe in which video stores still rent VHS.

Nick: The plot starts rolling when Jack Black, having become radioactive during a subterfuge at the local power plant, accidentally erases all of the tapes in his friend’s father’s video store. He and his friend (played by Mos Def) must then film themselves reenacting all of these Hollywood movies, thereby restoring the video collection, before the store’s owner (played by Danny Glover) returns from a short sabbatical.

Ben: Nick, I know what it’s like to have to re-create an entire video collection after accidentally erasing it. The same thing happened to me when I worked at Porn World.

Nick: If I had to re-create a bunch of movies from the 80s and 90s, I would definitely wait for Danny Glover to get back.

Ben: Eventually, Black and Def become famous for their re-creations of the classic films. And Bob’s your uncle, until Sigourney Weaver, as a federal copyright enforcer, shows up to put an end to all the good-natured plagiarism.

Ben: I think that this movie brings up the extreme importance of copyright laws in our society, Nick. I know what it’s like to have one’s copyrights violated. One time somebody stole all of my ideas, and now I don’t have anything to think about.

Nick: You should sell your autobiography’s movie rights to Nickelodeon. Our first Video Pick this month, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a newly-released Oscar-nomination magnet called Michael Clayton. It stars George Clooney as a “fixer” for a corporate law firm, called in when one of their lawyers freaks out during a deposition and appears to be having a semi-psychotic crisis of conscience.

Ben: At stake is a lucrative legal case in which George Clooney’s law firm is attempting to defend U-North, a chemical company, against a class-action law suit involving poisonous pollution on their part.

Nick: I think it’s just great that a giant corporation like The Warner Brothers can spend millions of dollars to attack the misdeeds of a giant corporation like U-North.

Ben: Actually, I think that U-North is a fictitious company.

Nick: Really? That was a waste of money.

Ben: Our final Video Pick, everybody, is a trip into the patrician history of merry old England. And your time machine is Cate Blanchett! Hop on in for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. This film tells some of the story of Elizabeth the First, who was a Protestant Queen in the 16^th century, right around the time that Shakespeare was writing Risky Business. In this movie, Elizabeth has got her cousin Mary Queen of Scots locked up in a belfry, I guess for being Catholic. Meanwhile the Catholic king of Spain has got it in for Elizabeth, I guess for being Protestant. On top of everything else, Elizabeth is kept busy mustering up sexual tension with maritime picaro Sir Walter Raleigh.

Nick: Of course one can flirt, but you can’t get busy with The Virgin Queen.

Ben: Oh, no. That would ruin the whole shtick.

]]> http://cultureweek.com/?feed=rss2&p=129 http://cultureweek.com/?p=90 http://cultureweek.com/?p=90#comments Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:20:43 +0000 Ben and Nick Moore http://cultureweek.com/?p=90 Episode 9: At the sound of the atonement
–or-
One missed Oscar ball

Ben: Hello. You may be wondering why we’re wearing these snazzy bowties.

Nick: In order to bring women’s fantasies to life?

Ben: No. Put a shirt on. It’s because it’s Academy Awards time here at Ben & Nick in the aisle! So don’t be surprised, reader, if this month’s column is draped in a veneer of classiness.

Nick: I sold my shirt to buy the bowtie.

Ben: This awards show has a first name, and it’s O-S-C-A-R. But before getting around to reviewing one of last year’s Oscar-nominated films, we decided to see a movie that an inside source assured us is a shoo-in to be nominated next year. Unfortunately, we ended up seeing One Missed Call, because our inside source was recently given a transorbital lobotomy by Michael J. Fox.

Nick: One Missed Call is the only movie I’ve ever seen get a 0% on rottentomatoes.com. Technically, that’s saying that if this movie were a tomato, it would actually be a potato disguised as a tomato, that had traveled back in time and killed its father.

Ben: The premise of the movie is that Shannyn Sossamon’s friends start dying, but, despite what one would assume, they are not being destroyed by her hotness. Instead a spooky force is traveling through cell phones, causing people to receive voicemails from the future, containing the audio of their own violent deaths. Upon dying, the victims are so surprised that they spit up a Ben Wa ball. I’ve heard that actually can happen if you insert them on an empty stomach.

Nick: I think that those were supposed to be hard candies. Next we saw Atonement, a beautiful meditation on the tragedy of a mistake that cannot be undone. This movie is up for multiple Oscars, including “Best Adapted Screenplay,” “Best Art Direction,” and “Best Sex Scene in a Library.”

Ben: The movie starts out in 1935, as some well-to-do hot lady is interacting heatedly with her family’s housekeeper’s son. Meanwhile her thirteen-year-old sister is observing them. At first there are funny misunderstandings, and I found myself wishing that the housekeeper’s son had been played by Larry David. Then the misunderstandings turn tragic, war breaks out, and the deadly caprice of fate ends up preventing two hot young people from screwing as many times as they otherwise might have.

Nick: I think I’m going to cry.

Ben: This movie also joins The Great Outdoors in portraying young redheaded identical twins as creepy. What is so creepy about young redheaded identical twins, Hollywood? It just so happens that some twins grow up, dye their hair, suppress their magic powers, and write movie reviews!

Nick: Yeah! What? Oh, yeah. I predict that this movie will win for “Best Costumes,” because Keira Knightley was almost always fully clothed, despite my strongly-worded letter to the producers.

Ben: I don’t know. Whenever I see Keira Knightley at an awards show, I find myself wishing she were wearing more clothes. I mean, talk about a Dead Man’s Chest!

Nick: I hate you.

Ben: Now comes the part of Nick & Ben’s Oscar Blowout when we tell how the Oscar statuette is made.

Nick: Ben, we’ve received many fan letters from elementary schools, all threatening suicide if we don’t skip this.

Ben: I don’t care. Each Oscar is made out of gold-plated britannium, and stands 13 and a half inches tall and weighs 8 and a half pounds. The figure of a gold man, holding a sword and standing on a reel of film, is meticulously ground into shape by two rotating blood diamonds.

Nick: It’s also a little known fact, Ben, that the statuette is available in two formats: “Original”, or “Jack Rabbit”, which offers “two-pronged stimulation”.

Ben: It’s all very exciting, Nick. Now I’m going to show you a touching slide show I’ve prepared of all the actors that I wish had died this year. It will be set against a touching orchestral arrangement of “I’m An A**hole,” by Denis Leary.

Nick: Wow. This is beautiful, Ben. Hey, look, it’s Rob Schneider. Clearly his failure to die this year has shaken our nation to its core.

Ben: And, now, Nick, it’s time for me to try and stump you with this year’s Oscar Trivia Quiz. Readers, play along at home! Nick, can you tell me who has won the most Oscars? Here is a big clue: He’s dead. And frozen.

Nick: Rudy Giuliani?

Ben: No, Walt Disney! He received 26 Academy Awards, all awarded posthumously, for an episode of the All New Mickey Mouse Club, with a 13-year-old Christina Aguilera, entitled “Annette Poons A Cello”.

Nick: Wow.

Ben: Trivia Question #2. True or False: The show must go on.

Nick: Well, if you’re talking about the Academy Awards, it’s more like, “The show must go long!” Schnoogins.

Ben: The answer is “False”. The Academy Awards have been delayed three times: in ’38 because of an LA flood; in ’68 for MLK’s funeral; and again in 1981, so that Jodie Foster could marry that guy who shot Reagan.

Nick: Love always finds a way. Did you know, Ben, that Holly Hunter won an Oscar (for The Piano in 1993) for a role that involved no speaking? Also, Hal Mohr won “Best Cinematography” (for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935), by write-in vote, without ever being nominated. Similarly, Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated three times, without ever acting.

Ben: Snaps. The only movie rated X that has ever won an Oscar is Midnight Cowboy, which, interestingly was released in 1969. I have no idea why Midnight Cowboy was rated X, but if I ever got an erection while watching that movie, I would use it to slit my own throat.

Nick: You never see X-rated movies getting Oscars anymore. Also, I was hoping to see more nominations for Mr. Woodcock and Balls of Fury.

Ben: Well, Nick, do you have any Oscar predictions that our more destitute fans might use to gamble their way out of poverty?

Nick: Everyone who wins an award for acting will be some kind of transformer.

Ben: You heard it here first.

Nick: My name is Nick Moore. I am the last man alive on Earth. I have produced this month’s issue of Cultureweek alone, utilizing only a 1984 version of PageMaker and The Big Little Book of Playboy Party Jokes. If you are reading this, I will be at the RealDoll factory in New York City. According to their website, since 1996 they have been using Hollywood special effects to produce the most realistic love dolls in the world. If there is a sock on the factory door, don’t come in. It won’t be an easy journey, mainly because, if the movie I Am Legend is to be believed, the second people leave, tigers start running around Times Square.

Ben: Yeah, I guess at the New York Zoo, the cages are made of people holding hands.

Nick: I know, right?

(pause)

Nick: Ben! You’re alive!

Ben: Dude, everybody’s fine. We’ve just been avoiding you all week because at the Cultureweek Christmas Party you said that you “loved Mel Gibson’s assessment of Jews”.

Nick: No. I said I loved Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth!

Ben: The first movie we saw was National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The movie is basically about Nicholas Cage and his team of plucky historians visiting fun tourist locations, finding and solving some riddle, and getting one step closer to treasure—in this case the fabled City of Gold.

Nick: Apparently, we are supposed to believe that a lot of historical figures found out about the City of Gold but whenever they decided to tell someone else about it they did so with a riddle.

Aztec One: So, hey, I got invited to the pot luck at that new Gold City we built. Where is that again?

Aztec Two: At the place of the rainless sky where the noble bird flies.

Aztec One: Is there an apartment number on that, Mysterioso?

Aztec Two: Just look for a guy wearing a red and white striped shirt.

Aztec Two: I hate you.

Ben: The next film we saw was Juno—a coming of age story about a 16-year-old girl who is impregnated by Michael Sera. This comes as a big shock to all of us who thought that Michael Sera was a 16-year-old girl.

Nick: But Ellen Page, the actress who plays Juno, is actually a 20-year-old Canadian. So cancel the chemical castration you were planning, fellas; those unrelenting fantasies are as wholesome as preemptive war!

Ben: Anything you might be thinking about the Coppertone sunscreen girl, however, is still very very illegal.

Nick: The tender mood of adolescence is captured beautifully by the soundtrack and its inclusion of several songs by anti-folkie Kimya Dawson and her band The Moldy Peaches. The Moldy Peaches are so anti, in fact, that they made the bold marketing choice of releasing their one and only album on September 11, 2001.

Ben: I always feel sorry for people whose birthday was on September 11^th—though our parents often refer to “the tragic events of your conception.”

Nick: Sounds like it was an inside job.

Ben: Please shut up.

Nick: Next we saw Charlie Wilson’s War, which is all about Tom Hanks, as the titular Congressman Charlie Wilson, trying to team up with CIA man Phillip Seymour Hoffman to secretly funnel government funds to anti-Soviet guerillas in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. If you remember your history, Ben, the Soviet Union at that time had invaded Afghanistan and was trying to take it over. Also, historically speaking, Julia Roberts was a rich lady who wanted Tom Hanks to send weapons and training to the Afghan rebels. If this movie is any guide, there was a lot of good acting in history.

Ben: But all this Afghan rebel-assisting had to be done on the double-D.L. because, as grandpa used to say, when a Cold War turns hot, everybody’s beer gets skunky.

Nick: Politically, Grandpa was as pink as Grandma’s bald spot.

Ben: The movie’s script was penned by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. He’s great at writing government wonks frantically strategizing. He’s also written scripts about comedy writers and sports casters, who always have a tendency to banter exactly like government wonks frantically strategizing.

Nick: I hear you, Ben. But the man’s dialogue really is musical. For my money, Aaron Sorkin is the David Mamet of Aaron Sorkins.

Ben: Wow, Nick. I think I finally understand why, when teacher passed out the math tests, you ate yours.

Nick: It tasted like my future dying.

Ben: Speaking of dying, Nick, we next saw Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem. Apparently this is the second time that the Aliens and the Predator have squared off on the big screen. The big winners of that first contest were obviously me and Nick, because we didn’t watch it.

Nick: It was a real culture shock, Ben, going from Sorkin’s script to this sci-fi turkey, which was clearly written by a robot virgin. If the dialogue had been any more wooden, it would have been inside my underwear while I got a lap dance from Shakira.

Ben: I thought that it was often hard to tell who was who, when Predator was wresting an Alien, because Aliens are dark, slick, reptilian humanoids, and Predator is a dark, slick, reptilian humanoid.

Ben: I think the difference is that the Predator has dreadlocks. And he supports Dennis Kucinich.

Nick: Among other deadly gadgets, the Predator has all these vials of blue stuff that seems to disintegrate whatever he pours it on, but, somehow, it doesn’t disintegrate anything else. Apparently alien chemicals just know what you meant.

Ben: Really, in this movie, Nick, the Predator is just the Orkin Man. Except, unlike a large majority of Orkin Men working today, he kills humans and peels off their skin.

Nick: See, that’s why I use Terminix.

Ben: Then there are all these other generic characters: the misunderstood troublemaker, the high school princess, her cocky blond boyfriend, etc. Really, the movie is all about them trying to defeat the Aliens, and now that I think about it, the Predator isn’t that important in the final outcome as far as I can tell.

Nick: Dude, stop hating on the Predator.

Ben: I’m sorry.

Nick: The Predator may be invisible, but he still has feelings.