Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dude, Where's My Car?

Theme: Ashtray - Screeching Weasel

C'est magnifique.

It's obvious the makers of 2000's perfect time capsule Dude, Where's My Car? set out to make the dumbest movie of all time not just of the week, but of all time. The fact that almost any given movie released after, say, 2012 surpasses it in crayon chewage should scarcely be allowed to detract from their then-seemingly-epochal achievement. Ashton Kutcher (TV's Punk'd!) and Seann William Scott (The Dukes of Hazzard) star as Jesse and Chester (or vice versa), two stoner layabouts one solitary IQ point above the maximum threshold for mandatory helmet allocation or admittance to a Zack Snyder flick.

"MmmDUHHHRrr" - these dudes.

Waking one day after a blurry and forgotten night of excitement, intrigue and illicit substances, our MENSA benchwarmers find that, let's say, Jesse's car is missing, prompting him to utter the titular phrase, to which, let's say, Chester replies "where's your car, dude?" This exchange goes on for a few minutes, and it ain't the last.

Pictures you can hear, exhibit A.

The rest of the movie ostensibly concerns itself with our intrepid breakfast eaters trying to unravel the mystery of what wild and whacky goings-on transpired during their unremembered night of rampage, but nothing like a coherent timeline with causal linkages between beats ever materialises, no doubt to your immeasurable consternation. At some point, we and they learn, they got tattoos, stumbled across a sci-fi quest for the mysterious continuum transfunctioner, and let's say Jesse got it on with Kristy Swanson's character, cleverly named Kristy Boner, which the especially observant viewer may notice is a colloquial term for an hardon.

She doesn't wear this all movie, which I feel was an oversight.

This leads to a series of run-ins with our Swan Swan's bf, who is an hilariously one-dimensional bully with the memorable catchphrase "stoner bashin' time", whom Kristy cannot stand but is dating for some reason. The reason is that she can leave him at the end of the movie. This sort of writing by reverse-engineering is so characteristic of Hollywood slop that it works wonderfully as parody, and so the writers cannot help but undermine their aspiration to be dumb, because the whole film works that way: as a satire of actual movie conventions it's more over the target than Scream, Airplane! or the like. The continuum transfunctioner is a parody of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin, Kristy Boner is a parody of on-the-nose symbolic naming in pretentious scripts, her OTT bad jock boyfriend a parody of The Karate Kid, and Jesse and Chester themselves a parody of stoner buddy duos like Bill and Ted, Jay and Silent Bob, and Merry and Pippin.

I can't believe that hack Jackson omitted their SoCal accents and van with Frank Frazetta's Silver Warrior painted on the side. Respect the source material, fatass!

But we need not even bother to appreciate Dude for this inadvertent (or, perhaps, semi-advertent) hidden depth; for Dude reveals the secret wisdom that dumb humour will always make us actually laugh more than smart humour. Time and again in life I've cracked myself up to the point of tears looking at random people and imagining just going up to them and going "MnnNHUURRRRr".

The retard was me all along.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Higher Learning!

Aight, listen up you filthy crackkkers. This week's greatest movie of all time of the week is by a Black director (it's about time). John Singleton's magnum opus, Higher Learning, stars Foreman from House as Will Smith, a young college freshman who butts heads with his bowtie conservative surrogate father figure Uncle Phil (Laurence Fishburne, Cherry 2000, Dream Warriors).

"WRONG, Will, the answer was in fact lupus" - Laurence Fishburne

Meanwhile, a wise and prescient campus raype subplot results in Kristy Swanson (The Chase, The Phantom) making out with Jennifer Connelly (Dark City, The Hot Spot), as though such a pretext were remotely needed.

"Um, John, what's my motivation for this scene?"
"Yours?"

In a fit of 90s rap typecasting, the movie also stars Ice Cube (the "Bye Felicia" gif) as himself, and Busta Rhymes as Soyjak:

"wHITE peephole on MY campus? I'm going insaaaane aaaaagh" - Busta Rhymes

Worse still, Will must contend with that perennial college campus menace: the local neo-nazi frat.

Your campus had one of these, right?

Naturally, these inconspicuous ne'er-do-wells fly safely under the radar of the racially profiling campus security, because I see bald wHITE guys in Doc Martens hanging around colleges all the time, looking to recruit shy autistic guys (those freaks need to be watched closely at all times). Naturally, these evil ethnats start an unprovoked race war against the noble, oppressed Black ethnats, culminating in a mass shooting. No spoiler warning necessary; we all know wHITE peephole just do that.

"Now hold your horses there, Patravious", you might object, wHITEly. You might go on to note that real-life instances of racial violence are far more likely to be Black-on-wHITE than wHITE-on-Black, recalling RACISTLY such cases as the Southport mass stabbing and the Waukesha Christmas parade car massacre. You might further note that all the real-life rape cultures turned out to be in overwhelmingly l*ft-wing environments like Hollywood, the BBC and the public school system, among homosexual priests, in minority-wHITE prisons, in South Asian immigrant communities in Bri'ain, and in m*ssad pedo blackmail rings, while all the hyped-up college campus cases turned out to be bullshit.

But here's the thing, wHITE DEVIL: you only know all that because you've been paying attention and learning, when what you should have been doing is unlearning. For today's kino has a righteous message so subtle I missed it the first time:

"'Ignorance is strength' - George Orville" - John Singleton

Pulping in the 90s: The Shadow and The Phantom!

Article theme: Original Sin - Taylor Dayne

When Alex Baldwin isn't fatally shooting crewmembers on set, he sometimes acts in movies.

Alec nooo

The Shadow

One such movie was the 1994 Shadow, in which Baldwin plays another asshole who shoots people, except, unlike in real life, a Tibetan monk known as the Tulku bullies him out of his asshole ways and into a life of 1930s proto-superheroism. Baldwin, hitherto an evil opium kingpin based somewhere around the Hindu Kush, insists he doesn't want redemption, but the Tulku tells him tough shit, and that's that, apparently.

Evil Baldwin's creepy Fu Manchu nails crack me up. It's like if he became an African warlord and wore a giant plate through his lip.

The Tulku has a magic flying dagger that makes faces at you in between trying to stab you. IDK if CGI this vintage is nostalgic yet, but look at it. It's so silly.

Though I'll spend much of the remaining runtime missing Evil Baldwin, Good Baldwin is a passable substitute, especially when they let him improv:

I kinda want to splice this into his Glengarry Glen Ross scene but I'm far too lazy, so just...picture it.

Now based in New York City at its art deco height, Good Baldwin has mastered the nebulous powers of the Shadow (1994), which is just as well, because an evil villain (John Lone) is about to wake up from an ornate sarcophagus, claiming to be the last descendent of Genghis Khan. This is an odd claim because it's widely believed ol' Genghis crushed so much puss that .5% of the entire Earth is descended from him, but maybe Lil' Khan believed his ancestor's claim that he was just playing naked Twister with four hundred ladies when he walked into the old man's yurt aged four wanting a glass of airag and a bedtime story.

Lil' Khan knows how to make an entrance.

Rather than make NYC the seat of his Lil'khanate, Lil' Khan plans to blow it to high Tengri with a magic-meets-science Frankenstein nuke. I have no idea what he intended to do next, but did the Mongols ever really think that far ahead? I'd love to crack wise about the lack of foresight that leads a world-spanning empire to fragment and be absorbed into Islam but, well, I'm British, so, uh...nevermind. Fortunately Lil' Khan is as entertaining a villain as he isn't practical, amusing himself doing things like mind-controlling the guy from the diner in Mulholland Drive to do a header off a skyscraper for bagging on his steppe chic ensemble.

Bet that homeless bum behind the Winkies doesn't seem so bad now, huh Winkies guy?

Sadly our hero puts a stop to his malarkey in flamboyant fashion. For some reason the Shadow wears a mask that only covers his mouth, but grows a longer nose so that his Baldwin form can't be identified by nose size. IDK how many trvely dedicated hardcore Shadow fans were frequenting the cinema in 1994, but I think they'd have gotten away with giving him a proper mask instead, because it's weird watching a movie wondering how the protagonist's Pinocchio powers work. Does he read CNN headlines every time he transforms?

Wearing my mask like this daily from 2020-22 to troll Fauci goblins. Not all heroes wear capes (but I do).

The Phantom

But The Shadow wasn't the only 1930s pulpkino to drop in the 90s, and NO, The Rocketeer isn't the other one. The Rocketeer is based on a pretender comic strip from the 80s and is boomer truth regime bootlicking ASS. The other one is 1996's purple-bodysuitkino The Phantom (1996).

Sadly, he doesn't yell "slam evil!" when he punches people. Missed opportunity, honestly.

Billy Zane (Twin Peaks) plays the titular hero who, despite his ominous-sounding name, is an entirely amiable bro void of the mandatory angst that makes most heroes such a bore. He lives in the jungles of Madeupistan but gets caught up in Treat Williams' (Deep Rising) evil scheme to unite three magical skulls that, when placed together, unlock the incredible power of welding:

"What a treat!" - Treat.

Even when trained on a person, this hilariously underwhelming superweapon is only about as useful as a handgun, maybe moreso if it doesn't require ammunition, but Treat Williams is so pleased with himself when he gets it, he reminds me of Béla Lugosi at the end of Chandu the Magician. Other villains include Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Showdown in Little Tokyo) as a pirate, Ritchie from The Sopranos as a gangster, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the ambiguously gay nympho leader of an all-chick squad of pilots who turns face in the end, which sounds suspiciously like Pussy Galore from Goldfinger, but apparently she was a real character in the OG comic strips so IDK who ripped off whom. Kristy Swanson (The Chase) rounds out the cast as Zane's love interest, who is apparently unable to see through his proto-Clark-Kentian disguise:

"Hmmm...nope, could be anyone" - Kristy Swanson.

Just like The Shadow, The Phantom is a good-natured time-killer with fun setpieces and period detail, but apparently most of the scenes developing the Swanson/Zane romance were cut, and you can feel their absence. Swanson's bonding scenes with Charlie Sheen in The Chase were a charm showcase that would elevate the characters' dynamic here. Hilariously, more definition is lavished upon the dynamic between Swanson and Zeta-Jones:

The great debate!!!

So, which is better? The Shadow, but I prefer The Phantom. But whichever you prefer, it's nice to know there were such sovlful tributes to the old-school pulp heroes released within at least my lifetime. Have a great week and don't forget to lock the door before you slam your evil.

Hey now.

Breaking in the new girl

 

bitches love man splaining