Episode # 25 (January 2010)

Jennifer’s Paranormal Avatar

Ben: Happy Rocking New Year, Aisle Fans! In the coming year, may your life, as well as your aisle, be full of Ben and Nick.

Nick: I had Kinkos make up some fliers to propagate that message. But they were charging by the character, so I just made a thousand fliers that say, “Fill your A. with Ben And Nick”. Then our phone number.

Ben: Our number must be hard to dial, because a lot of these callers have been out of breath.

Nick: Speaking of debacles, Ben, neither you nor I were invited back to Times Square this year, after last year’s affair, wherein we mistakenly referred to host Dick Clark, alternately, as “Father Time”, “The Late Dick Clark”, and “Guy Lombardo”.

Ben: You know what I say: If you’ve seen one ball drop, you’ve seen the next.

Nick: So, Ben, did you kiss anybody on New Year’s?

Ben: I don’t remember. But I did wake up next to Mick Jagger. And those claymation lips from the Twizzlers commercial.

Nick: Speaking of bestiality, our first film is the sprawling 3-D fantasy spectacular Avatar, from director James Cameron. This movie tells the story of a tall thin blue lady, dressed like a Native American, and her amazing attempt to have a nip slip for three hours. This is James Cameron’s follow-up to Titanic, which told the story of Kate Winslet’s nipples, their historical implications, and how they were able to knock a hole in a boat.

Ben: That is not what that was about. Avatar, Nick, is about how in the future, we will need to steal a valuable fictitious mineral from a forest planet inhabited by hunter/gatherers with pointy ears. They will be called the Na’vi, and they will have skin that is colored in a fashionable blue-camo pattern.

Nick: Also, James Cameron has decided that it would be cute if this valuable mineral is named “unobtanium”.

Ben: That name is so damn stupid, Nick, it makes Kid Rock look like Einsteinium.

Nick: Luckily, in the future, according to this movie, we will also have the ability to mix a human’s DNA with a Na’vi DNA, to form a clone, or “avatar”, that can then be “driven” by a human, with his or her mind.

Ben: This movie advances the hurtful stereotype that identical twins can drive each other’s avatars. Nick and I, as identical twins, know that this happens to be true. But that doesn’t prevent it from being terrifically racist.

Nick: Our more erudite readers might be aware that the word “avatar” used to mean something, before it was ruined by the Internet. It originally meant “the body that a god takes, to walk among mortals”, or, “someone that is the figurative embodiment of something”. Now it means, “that picture of a cat, next to your stupid comments on Huffingtonpost”.

Ben: This movie was okay, I guess. The third hour was pretty action-packed. But the first two hours were just about our hero wandering around, sightseeing, and then he rapes a pterodactyl.

Nick: I didn’t care for this movie’s insinuation that primitive oneness with nature is superior to technology and the subjugation of nature. Eventually, all the nature in the universe will need to be disassembled and turned into parts for a giant cosmic computer. It’s all in the Bible, if you read between the lines.

Ben: Nick, it’s in-between the lines that you’re snorting off the Bible.

Nick: Come with us now, won't you, to Ben And Nick In The Video Aisle, for our next film, Paranormal Activity. This film explores the perils of heterosexuality. According to some movies I’ve seen, and some masturbatory fantasies I’ve had, heterosexuality can be complicated: A guy’s got to worry about cooties, babies, and vagina dentata.

Ben: Of course. But this movie touches on a less discussed danger: that special time in a young couple’s relationship, about three years in, when the girl tells the guy about the demon that visits her at night.

Nick: Or her “monthly visitor”, as it’s sometimes called.

Ben: I think that’s something else.

Nick: In this movie a young couples takes to videotaping themselves while they sleep, because they suspect that a poltergeist is occupying their house. But, based on the clues I saw, I began to suspect that their house was in fact being occupied by an uncreative film crew with a tiny budget.

Ben: Nothing happens in this movie, Nick. They should have called it Normal Activity.

Nick: Nothing happens, that is, until the horrifying conclusion, that, by the looks of it, may have cost the filmmakers upwards of ninety-five dollars.

Ben: Why do rank amateurs always gravitate toward horror or porn?

Nick: I don’t know, Ben, but I think, of the two, the one with the more redeeming artistic value is porn.

Ben: Speaking of horrible porn, our next film comes to us again from the video store, and is the Megan-Fox vehicle Jennifer’s Body, starring Megan Fox as Jennifer. And her body.

Nick: This film tells the story of mousey beauty Amanda Seyfried, and her heroic attempt to unearth the premise of this stupid movie. It turns out to have something to do with demons, virgin sacrifice, and high-school girls kissing.

Ben: It was like that made a movie of my life.

Nick: The first thing I noticed about this movie was that everybody spoke in slang baby-talk gibberish. I thought, damn, I haven’t heard dialogue this annoying since I watched Juno.

Ben: It turns out that this movie was indeed written by the same lady that wrote Juno, Academy-Award Winner and dumb person Diablo Cody.

Nick: She joins Al Gore, Ben, in the exclusive club of people who have won Oscars, by triumphantly overcoming the obstacle of not deserving them.

Ben: Heroes.

Nick: I did notice, though, that Jennifer’s Body nicely demonstrates a principle elucidated by David Mamet, which says that most movies would be better if you removed the first ten minutes.

Ben: Nick, I can think of two activities that I’m involved in on a daily basis that I would prefer to miss the first ten minutes of: sex and car accidents.

Nick: It sounds like you found your resolution.