Ben And Nick In The Aisle!

Episode # 30 (June / July 2010)

2010-07-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

The Toy Captain Of My Soul In Revolt

Nick: Ben, did you feel that ground tremor at the end of June?

Ben: No. What?

Nick: That was everybody jumping off of the soccer bandwagon.

Ben: Le snaps!

Nick: And we should thank Joe from Top Ten Video for sending in that joke. Keep reading, Joe!

Ben: If any other readers would like a joke featured in a B & N in the A, simply write your joke on a three-by-five index card, take a Polaroid of your junk, and then mail it all to Santa Claus.

Nick: Speaking of junk, I’ve been so hot and sweaty lately that, ironically, my testicles have been the ones wearing the snorkel!

Ben: Our first film this month is Toy Story 3: the third of this Pixar computer-animated series of movies, about a group of toys belonging to a particular kid, taking place in a world where toys can talk and locomote when no humans are around, but play dead whenever they’re being handled.

Nick: Sounds like my ex-wife. (rim-shot)

Ben: Please put down the high hat. This movie opens inside of a fantasy that a child is imagining, in which Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head have just hijacked a train in the Old West. This is clearly a racist comment on the criminality of the Irish.

Nick: Then a bunch of stuff happens, thankfully, at our theater, not in “3-D”. I’ve come up with something, Ben; I’m calling it “4-D”; it’ll be huge: Everyone that wants 3-D glasses is given them, and then is dosed with a Twilight Flip, equipped with glow sticks, and locked on the roof. Then the rest of us make a black-and-white silent film, about them dying from dehydration.

Ben: That’s so spectacular, it’s Scott-Bakular! What I didn’t understand is why this film is all about an 18-year-old trying to part with his toys. When we were eighteen, Nick, we were already living on our own, I had a girlfriend, and the only toys I couldn’t part with were the ones that my lady friend had lost inside of my colon.

Nick: Well, 1998 was a different time. You had to worry about Slobodan Milošević, bird flu, the Backstreet Boys.

Ben: Due to a misunderstanding, the gang of toys in this movie gets donated to a day care, that’s under the political control of a pink stuffed bear, who sounds like Uncle Remus.

Nick: The stuffed pink bear seems at first to be a benevolent ruler, but then is revealed to be a collectivist dictator, who rules with an iron paw. Later, the Barbie Doll comments that power should derive from the consent of the governed, as opposed to coercive tyranny. But I wonder how Barbie would respond to my rebuttal that democracy is a tyranny of the majority.

Ben: I’m sure that’s covered in Cars 2.

Nick: Parts of this movie seemed intentionally to be nightmare fuel for children. There is this creepy damaged baby, and a shrieking monkey with cymbals. I kept waiting for the toy infant to murder Aunt Maggie.

Ben: Aunt Maggie got what she deserved. Nick, there are toy romances: Barbie and Ken finally meet; and cow girl discovers Buzz Lightyear’s Spanish mode. The last time I saw this much plastic in the mood for love, I was watching that one movie where Meg Ryan gets naked.

Nick: Blah, blah, blah, Woody!

Ben: Well said.

Nick: Oh my God, Ben! There are suddenly pictures of Matt Damon everywhere! We must be in the video aisle!

Ben: Or in your bedroom.

Nick: Our first video this month somehow manages to not star Matt Damon. It’s a brilliant schizophrenic comedy, starring Michael Cera (and Michael Cera!), called Youth In Revolt.

Ben: Written and directed by Matt Damon.

Nick: Michael Cera’s character is Nick Twist, a misunderstood youngster, as brainy and wimpy as, well, Michael Cera. To get the girl of his dreams, he goes all Tyler Durden, and invents a French badboy version of himself from whom he imagines he is receiving advise.

Ben: Eventually they hatch a plain to reunite the parents of Hayley Mills.

Nick: This movie was great. It was funny, and quirky, and I liked the poetic, melodramatic dialogue. It was like somebody finally combined a hipster’s sense of strangeness with a sense of humor and an actual plot.

Ben: It’s like they took the script for Napoleon Dynamite, erased it, and then replaced it with a movie that doesn’t completely suck.

Nick: Ben, I don’t approve of the word “script” being used to describe anything having to do with Napoleon Dynamite. Unless a doctor is filling a drug script, to have the man-and-wife team that directed that monstrosity chemically sterilized.

Ben: My favorite thing about Youth In Revolt was the father of Michael Cera’s love interest: another masterful performance by the late M. Emmet Walsh!

Nick: Ben, he’s clearly still alive.

Ben: He clearly isn’t. But my sources tell me that the late M. Emmet Walsh has already signed-on for the sequel!

Nick: Well, it’s good that he’s keeping busy.

Ben: Dead is the new 75.

Nick: Our next video is a Matt Damon movie, because that’s what the dead cat we were swinging around the video store happen to hit.

Ben: It tells the story of Nelson Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, in the 90s, trying to be the first black president of South Africa. This invites comparisons to Barack Obama.

Nick: Because they were both born in Africa.

Ben: Please shut up. This movie is called Invictus, because that was Nelson Mandela’s favorite poem by Shel Silverstein.

Nick: I prefer “Never Bite A Married Woman On The Thigh”.

Ben: Anyway, Mandela unites the emotions of the newly desegregated country, by rallying them around their national rugby team, as it competes in the World Cup. Matt Damon, holding very still, plays the world cup.

Nick: Rugby seems like a cool foreign sport. Maybe soccer is too, once you get into it.

Ben: Nick, do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of billions of soccer fans applauding your open-mindedness.

Nick: I don’t hear anything. These applause are boring.

Ben: Well, they can’t use their hands.

Episode # 29 (May 2010)

2010-05-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

The Economy: A Complicated Legion of Iron Zombies

Nick: Ben, the economy is in the toilet—

Ben: I’d like to disagree in advance with whatever you’re about to say.

Nick: Government and business are jointly responsible: the government is at fault for dropping bags of worthless money out of a helicopter; and business is responsible for rolling around in it like Demi Moore in a hairy fat suit.

Ben: Fat-cat bastards!

Nick: Now everybody is buried in debt, and working at the wrong jobs. But Nobel-prize-winning economists have a solution: if everybody just goes deeper into debt, then we can all keep our unproductive jobs.

Ben: Problem solved! But many of our readers have been writing in, saying things like, the kids miss you, and I’m leaving you for your brother.

Nick: Ben, these letters are all addressed to jail. But I’m sure that what our readers really want is advice on how to cut down on their movie expenses, while the economy is recovering, getting worse, recovering, and then killing us all.

Ben: So we give you, Ben And Nick’s Movie-Money-Saving Tip # 1: This one’s called the “Continental”. Take a love-interest to a French movie, but insist on paying Dutch! Then, when the plotless French realism lulls your date into deep sleep, use a Swiss Army knife to harvest her organs.

Nick: That sounds sexy, but I bet it isn’t.

Ben: I wrote a lot of other money-saving tips, but while using the phonebook to find an inexpensive place to make copies, I accidentally hired a high-class hooker to pee on them.

Nick: I guess you could say, on multiple levels, this mix-up involved yellow pages.

Ben: Nick, you’re fired. Our first movie this month tells the story of one man’s obsessive-compulsive fight against wrinkled clothes. It’s called Iron Man 2: Iron Harder.

Nick: No it isn’t. When Iron Man 2 opens, Ben, we see that Robert Downy Jr. has used his flying metal suit, with patented Blasty-Hands Technology, to make the world safe for world peace. He prances around being rich and proud of himself, and generally telling Congress to suck it.

Ben: Then an evil Russian physicist has the bright idea of actually trying to kill Robert Downey when he isn’t wearing the damn suit. This bad guy has the physique and countenance of Mickey Rourke. Also, according to my research, the actor who plays him shares a Social Security number with Mickey Rourke.

Nick: I think you mean Hulk Hogan. The Hulkster has figured out how to make the glowing chest-orb thingy that powers the Iron Man suit, and uses it to make his own suit, which features whip-extensions on the arms, that surge with destructive blue energy.

Ben: Don Cheadle plays Iron Man’s sidekick, wearing a silver version of the suit, with a gun on it. I thought it was a poor use of 4th-wall breaking, when Cheadle, after blowing away a row of bad guys with his Gatling gun, looks right into the camera, and says, “Welcome to the Hotel Rwanda… Bitch.”

Nick: Scarlett Johansson, with hair as scarlet as her name, cartwheels about in form-fitting leather, dispatching bad guys. I’d like to say that I don’t find Scarlett Johansson believable as an acrobatic kicker of ass. I find her physique better suited to more sultry, less athletic things, such as flirting with Bill Murray, and lounging around inside of my spank bank.

Ben: I liked seeing Downey Jr., at the climax of the picture, using his talking British computer, and its virtual-reality science graphs, to figure out the physics that would unlock the mystery at hand. Along with a similarly pensive climax in Sherlock Holmes, I’d say that Robert Downey Jr. is doing for problem solving, what Jackass 2 did for taking a shit into a dollhouse.

Nick: Ben, please join me now, In The Video Aisle, for a film called Legion. This video expounds on a topic that is chicken soup to everybody’s soul: angels. Except, here’s the twist, when you’re touched by these angels, they bite out your Adam’s apple.

Ben: This movie uses overly dramatic camera angles and overly portentous acting, to tell the story of Dennis Quaid, and some other characters, attempting to defend his bar in the middle of nowhere, from an onslaught of invading zombies, which are actually people possessed by angels. Whereas, in real life, as we all learned in health class, zombies are caused by letting a zombie bite you, without wearing a condom.

Nick: Speaking of things caught off of a toilet seat, the angel Michael shows up, to defend a pregnant girl.

Ben: Because her baby will grow up to be John Connor. Or something.

Nick: Here’s what I don’t get: If you know that the army of zombies was sent by God to destroy the world, shouldn’t you just let yourselves get killed? I mean what is your exit strategy at that point? Fight off the zombies, and then die of old age in a country that has no extradition treaty with Heaven?

Ben: I believe that’s true of Las Vegas. Our final film this month is another selection from The Video Aisle, and it’s a septuagenarian snore-fest called It’s Complicated. It’s hard to say, because I was sleeping, but I think that this movie is about Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, and Meryl Streep, taking their teeth out and having a three-way. Nick, the last time I saw a threesome this old, I was worshiping the Hindu Trinity.

Nick: Nancy Meyer, this movie’s writer and director, manages to tell the story without making me root for anyone, or wonder what will happen next, or enjoy the wooden dialogue. Apparently she wrote some movies in the 80s that I remember being funny (Private Benjamin, Irreconcilable Differences), but it appears that when the Berlin Wall fell, it landed on her talent.

Ben: In Soviet Union, The Office’s John Krasinski watches you!

Nick: Finally, we should say, Gentle Reader, if you are in the Bloomington, Indiana area, look for a paper version of Ben And Nick In The Aisle, outside of the Waffle House, or Tracks music store, as well as at other locations.

Ben: Make a hat out of it. Or just use it to wrap up a roast.

Nick: That’s what she said.

Episode # 28 (April 2010)

2010-04-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

How To Hurt Your Bad Machine

Ben: Readers, as of this writing, Bloomington has just concluded a fund drive for the police department known as The Little 500.

Nick: The streets are strewn with beer cans, and sombreros full of broken glass.

Ben: Little Five is a city-wide party, which is thrown yearly at Indiana University, in lovely Bloomington, Indiana. It commemorates an historical event that occurred in the 1970s, during which a houseful of five-hundred college students, with only the aid of limitless booze and ridiculously powerful stereo equipment, managed to do nothing all weekend.

Nick: But at least they did it on the sidewalk.

Ben: The average Little Five partier is a 19-year-old college student, who enters an alcohol-fuelled black-out some time on the Monday preceding Little Five Weekend, only to awake again that following Sunday, lying on top of a speaker, balls deep inside his own tweeter.

Nick: That happened to me once, Ben. Unfortunately, in the harsh light of day, I realized it was a woofer.

Ben: And also, I think there’s a bike race.

Nick: I’ve heard talk of that. This bike race was made famous in the 1979 Oscar-winning film Breaking Away. What people liked about that movie is that the working-class children of limestone-quarry workers were racing against the snooty college kids, who were more privileged. The poor kids, since their parents were stonecutters, called their racing team “the cutters”.

Ben: It turns out, in real life, only students are eligible to compete. So, the team that historically 4-peated this year, which calls itself “the cutters”, and is comprised of four IU students, obviously didn’t understand the point of that movie.

Nick: They clearly have not attended my two-part lecture on the Quaid Brothers: Part One: Feeling Randy, and Part Two: Dennis Anyone?

Ben: Your research is harshing everybody’s mellow. Nick, we start this month out in the Video Aisle, with Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans.

Nick: I enjoy your abuse of the colon.

Ben: That’s what she said. Nick, this film stars Nicholas Cage as a cop, who is both very bad, and very much a lieutenant. He is promoted to lieutenant after being injured in an attempt to free a prisoner trapped in his cell by rising water, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He is promoted to being bad, after the back pain from said injury leads him to start snorting everything that isn’t Bisquick.

Nick: There is a brutal multiple murder in a low-income New Orleans neighborhood, and Lieutenant Nose Candy is on the case. He is actually surprisingly good at being a detective. He’s like The Thin Man. Except instead having a wise-cracking wife played by Myrna Loy, he pimps for a hooker played by Eva Mendes. And he drink martinis by smoking crack.

Ben: It is often almost comical how strung-out on drugs, and flagrantly illegal the Bad Lieutenant behaves.

Nick: He reminds me of me, when I’m making my living. Except, instead of being tweaked-out on coke, I’m just hungover. And instead of solving murders, I shoplift at the Dollar Tree.

Ben: Werner Herzog pulls some arty moves, by allowing us to see Nick Cage’s hallucinations, which usually take the form of various reptiles, shot through distorting lenses, over wacky music.

Nick: I also thought that it was a trademark Herzog touch, when, at the end of the film, Bad Lieutenant gets eaten by a bear.

Ben: That didn’t happen. Our final film In The Video Aisle this month, is the winner of the recently awarded Best Picture Oscar for 2009. It’s called The Hurt Locker, and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, has historically become the first female director ever to be eligible for Oscar repossession.

Nick: She has my vote, Ben. This movie is about a bomb squad in the Iraqi War in 2004. As students of history know, prior to 2003, Saddam Hussein, the vicious dictator of Iraq, had been fast as work, like an evil Santa Claus, hurriedly assembling improvised explosive devices (or IEDs), in preparation for the day, when he, like an evil Adolph Hitler, would bring them all over to America to, you know, end our freedoms.

Ben: That’s right, Nick. Luckily, George Bush, Jr., thinking on his feet, quickly invaded Iraq, allowed bomb squads to canvass the country, and disarm these IED’s, preventing us from having to, you know, “fight them over here”.

Nick: The hero of The Hurt Locker, a Sergeant William James, shares the name of the philosopher William James, who was a metaphysical Pragmatist. This is ironic, since that reference doesn't work for me.

Ben: The movie is basically just a series of episodes of the bomb squad, under the at-times recklessly brave direction of Sgt. James, disarming various bombs. I thought the movie made a good point about soldiers engaging in war primarily for the thrill of it.

Nick: I disagree. I think this movie makes the point that war is awesome, it won’t kill the hero, and that disarming IEDs is more fun then boring things like hanging out with one’s family.

Ben: Which isn’t necessarily true. I know my wife can leave behind some pretty deadly bombs after Taco Night.

Nick: Ben, you’re not married. The first theatrical release we saw this month was called Hot Tub Time Machine, and it proves the age-old adage, “It’s never too late for John Cusack to have girl trouble in the 80s”.

Ben: A ski-lodge hot tub Quantum-Leaps four friends back to a vacation they had in 1986. At first they attempt to preserve the future, by preserving the past, and inevitably fail with extremely comic results. This movie experience featured a lot of binge drinking and female nudity. But that may have just been in my theater.

Nick: Then we saw How To Train Your Dragon. This was a cross between Avatar and Brokeback Mountain, except the avatars were all dragons, and all the sex scenes between the boy and his dragon only occurred inside of comments that I was whispering under my breath.

Ben: I’ve said it before, finding animals cute is a form of emotional bestiality.

Nick: I don’t think you’ve ever said that.

Ben: I wrote it in my Hello Kitty notebook.

Episode # 27 (March 2010)

2010-03-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

Alice Time-Travels To Suicide Island

Ben: Well, Nick, it’s March again, when a young man’s fancy springs his clock at a loved one.

Nick: I also suspect that St. Patrick’s Day has recently occurred, based on the evidence that I’ve been experiencing green vomit.

Ben: And everyone is simply mad for brackets! I assume that this has something to do with literary citations. Or else Quantum Mechanics.

Nick: I thought that it had to do with Fantasy Football. Which, as I understand it, is a sport that involves getting together with all of your imaginary friends and then being disappointed.

Ben: Our first film this month, Shutter Island, is a dark, taut, psychological thriller, that’s fun for the whole family –except, possibly, women and children.

Nick: It involves Leonard DiCaprio, and Mark Ruffalo, decked out in fedoras and trench coats, as U. S. Marshalls in the 1950s, who go to an insane asylum on an island, to investigate the escaping of a female patient. The name of said island is “Shutter Island”, and it generally exudes gothic creepiness.

Ben: However they do make a mean hot dog, covered in onions, and smothered in all-meat chili.

Nick: I think that’s “Coney Island”. Ben, this movie was well-written and directed and everything, but I have a bone to poke it with.

Ben: I think you mean, pick—

Nick: This movie was a blatant rip-off of a play that I wrote years ago, and that has already been produced several times inside my imagination. The name of my play is Flutter Island, and it stars a giant butterfly.

Ben: Sounds manlier than Leonardo DiCaprio.

Nick: [Spoiler Alert] The butterfly gets lobotomized.

Ben: Still manlier. The problem you’re describing here, Nick, plagues many a creative person toiling in obscurity: when someone famous has an idea that you’ve already had, it will still forever be remember as the-famous-person’s first.

Nick: Another one: I had the idea for Star Wars bed sheets. Then, years later, George Lucas has the same idea for a movie.

Ben: Our next film, Alice In Wonderland, is full of the gloomy extravagance that can only be the work of Tim Burton. It is a retelling of all the Alice In Wonderland books put together. Alice falls down the rabbit hole, meets a smoking caterpillar, blah, blah, blah. Then she drinks tea with Willy Wonka.

Nick: This movie follows in the grand tradition of Avatar, by being mostly plotless, costing a zillion dollars, and being shown in 3-D.

Ben: Nick, if I wanted to see something that cost a zillion dollars, had no plot, and was in 3-D, then I would just go to the optometrist, and then look at the world.

Nick: This film’s blend of live-action and animation renders most of its stars unrecognizable. For example, Helena Bonham Carter, as the Queen of Hearts, is made to have a really big noggin, which kind of makes her look like Madeline Kahn.

Ben: According to the Wikipedia, Miss Carter has been “domestic partners” with Tim Burton since 2001. I guess we all dealt with 9-11 in our own way. By “domestic partners” I assume that means that they got together and built houses.

Nick: Then that reminds me of the time that I was domestic partners with Jimmy Carter.

Ben: Readers, I hope that you’ve had the good sense to pawn your TV and DVD player, in order to pay your late fees at the video store. Because it’s time again for Ben And Nick In the Video Aisle! My pick this month is a piece of soft-core edutainment called The Suicide Girls Guide To Living.

Nick: Out of a profound respect for women, we would normally have never rented pornography, but this one came highly recommended by a misogynistic pervert.

Ben: This video was put out by suicidegirls.com, which is a website that features pictorials of women whose look could best be described as “punk-rock”, “indie-rock”, “goth-rock”, and “Fraggle-Rock”.

Nick: Suicidegirls.com is looking to dispel the stereotype that beauty consists of young women with perfect bodies that may or may not have dyed hair, tattoos, and body piercings, and instead wants to suggest that beauty can also consist of young women with perfect bodies that necessarily have dyed hair, tattoos, and body piercings.

Ben: Damn it, Nick, these women didn’t asked to be born with tattoos!

Nick: The video is structured as a series of vignettes, in each of which, a featured Suicide Girl demonstrates the steps to mastering a specific skill, such as rolling a joint, or winning a pillow fight. Because, you know, most people, when in-over-their-heads in a technical situation, desire the advice of a model.

Ben: Of course this purported tip-giving is all a veiled excuse for the models, God bless them, to pose seductively and undress, all to the tunes of indie rock music.

Nick: I much prefer this other sexy how-to video that I saw once, which taught naked young women how to do a reverse Heimlich maneuver, in order to dislodge a penis.

Ben: Okay, that was just pornography.

Nick: My video pick this month is a love story between Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams called The Time Traveler’s Wife. Their relationship is complicated, because Eric Bana has a genetic disorder that causes him to diasappear at random and travel through time.

Ben: I’ve noticed that everything that used to be supernatural is now blamed on genes, like zombies, vampires, and being gay.

Nick: If you’re like me, when alone with a new Rachel McAdams movie, you have, before the trailers have even ended, removed your pants.

Ben: Okay.

Nick: But, readers!, I would not advise it in this case, as this movie stubbornly refuses to stop showing you Eric Bana’s ass.

Ben: By the time it finally shows us Rachel McAdams ass, it’s like they’re just mocking us.

Nick: I thought it was funny, how the other characters kept referring to the time-traveling Bana as looking older or younger, when all the makeup department could be bothered to do was put various degrees of white or black in his hair.

Ben: I would recommend that this movie win the 2009 Razzie for Worst Makeup. But I’m pretty sure they already gave that to Amy Winehouse.

Nick: I’m reminded of the relationship that I just lost to time-traveling, Ben.

Ben: Oh?

Nick: We just couldn’t adjust to Daylight Savings.

Episode # 26 (February 2010)

2010-02-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

Julia Hearts Sherlock... And Oscar!

Nick: Hello, I’m Steve Martin.

Ben: And I’m Alec Baldwin.

Nick: And I’m Whoopi Goldberg!

Ben: Well, Whoopi for you, Nick. Readers, either we’ve each got an Oscar in our pockets right now, or else it really is a pleasure just to be nominated!

Nick: Ben, I believe it was Jesus “Cougar” Christ who once said, “The Oscar stands erect, long after the thrill of handling it’s gone.”

Ben: We’ve got quite an Oscar Blowout planned for Aisle fans this month: Billy Crystal and Lady Gaga will be stopping by later to sing a medley about this year’s nominees!

Nick: There are ten nominees for Best Picture this year, Ben! What a cheap stunt this is! Humphrey Bogart never would have stood for it. I mean, he never would have leaned against something and smoked for it.

Ben: Actually, all throughout the thirties there were ten nominees for Best Picture, right up to and including 1943, the year that Casablanca won! Nick, your pretence of knowledge about the life of Humphrey Bogart is a self-aggrandizing sham.

Nick: …the stuff that dreams are made of.

Ben: Oh, no, Nick! I’m getting word in my Bluetooth that there’s trouble with our blowout musical medley! Apparently Lady Gaga and Billy Crystal have been mugged and sexually assaulted by Lady Gaga’s outfit, which then fled into space after transforming into a Deceptacon!

Nick: A Deceptacon! You mean you no longer want to have sex with it when you see it up close?

Ben: No, that’s not what I meant.

Nick: This isn’t my war! Luckily, Ben, I’m coming to you live right now from the red carpet! Where I’m about to ask fashion-related questions to young up-and-comer Gabourey Sidibe, from this year’s multi-nominated film Precious: Based On The Novel “Push” By Sapphire.

Ben: Coincidentally, I have a line of beer snuggies coming out, that are based on Sapphire’s book The Colors Of The Rainbow. But, I can plainly see from here, Nick, that you are actually standing on our Welcome mat, and talking to our mailman Bill.

Nick: Damn mail. Nothing but Bills.

Ben: But, putting the glitz and glamour of Oscars aside, if you can bear it, reader, please grab our Goobers, won’t you, and meet us in the Video Aisle!

Nick: Our video rental this month has earned Meryl Streep a pending Best-Actress Oscar Nomination, for play a giggling, gawky, red-haired gormandizer, who taught America how to cook.

Ben: Ronald McDonald?

Nick: No, you jackass! It’s Julia Child! This film alternates between two stories: one is the story of Julia Child learning to cook in France in the 1950s, and then writing her famous French cookbook for Americans; the second is the story of a blogger named Julie, in 2002, trying to cook her way through the whole giant cookbook, in a year, while blogging about it.

Ben: Blogger Julie is played by Amy Adams, who, according to my research, is not Isla Fischer.

Nick: That’s counterintuitive. Previously Adams and Streep appeared together as nuns in the movie Doubt. That film was about a priest who may or may not have diddled a kid. Whereas, Julie and Julia features a lot of Julia Child nailing Stanley Tucci.

Ben: Talk about Child pornography!

Nick: You’re fired! This film really hit home for Ben and I, since the Julie character is trying to find fulfillment in life through blogging, having just turned 30 --which me and Ben just did a few days ago!

Ben: Technically we are bloggers. Though we have about as many followers as D. B. Cooper.

Nick: Our next film, Crazy Heart, has earned both Best-Actor and Best-Supporting-Actress nominations for Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhall, respectively. Bridges plays a drunken country singer who spends the whole movie lying around with his shirt open. Gyllenhall plays an aspiring reporter, who lays around next to him and, every once in a while, starts bawling.

Ben: Yeah, this movie is total Oscar bait. If this movie wins an Oscar, I expect Chris Hansen to show up and ask the Academy just what it thinks it is doing here, with these wine coolers and this box of condoms.

Nick: There are extensive presentations of the movie’s original country music songs that are pretty rocking. I would say that these presentations slowed down the pace of the movie., but, luckily, it’s impossible to slow down a pace that is already flatlining.

Ben: By the end of the film [SPOILER ALERT] Bridges has sobered up, and written what he considers to be his best song ever, inspired by Gyllenhall.

Nick: However, sadly, [SPOILER ALERT] his thing with Gyllenhall doesn’t work out.

Ben: There is a poignant scene at the end where Bridges sees Gyllenhall after their breakup, and gives her his song money, telling her that there would be no song without her.

Nick: No one knows this, Ben, but I just finished a novel that I’ve been writing, inspired by a recent real-life unrequited love. I’m calling it The Beautiful Girl That Didn’t Love Me. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful.

Ben: So, after all is said and done, Nick, do you feel grateful to that girl, for inspiring this masterpiece?

Nick: No, not really. I could have written an equally heartbreakingly beautiful novel called The Hot Chick That Won’t Stop Screwing Me.

Ben: You’re a complicated man.

Nick: Speaking of complicated men, Ben, our next movie stars no other than Sherlock Holmes! It’s called Sherlock Holmes. History tells us that he was a detective in England in the 19^th Century, who solved crimes while shooting cocaine and not having sex. He was created by God, after God got drunk and watched a lot of House.

Ben: That was an Elementary deduction, Nick: Elementary school.

Nick: This film, unlike the Basil Rathbone movies in the forties, was more true to the original Holmes: for example, there are fights, Watson isn’t an idiot, and there is no deer-stalking cap. Also, the historical Irene Adler was actually Rachael McAdams. Because she travels through time, handing out boners like Halloween candy.

Ben: So, Nick, is Avatar going to win the Best Picture Award at the Oscars on March 7^th?

Nick: Ben, listen to me—

Ben: I’m all ears, Bobo.

Nick: At this point, not giving the Oscar to Avatar would be like not buying a Christmas present for your boss.

Episode # 25 (January 2010)

2010-01-18T00:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Episode # 24 (December 2009)

2009-12-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

An Apocalyptic Christmas Where No One Has Gone Before At Twilight

Ben: Why, Nick, I see that you’ve built a snowman. But I think that you put the carrot in the wrong place.

Nick: But my heart is in the right place, Ben! Because it’s that time of the year again, when Ben and Nick In The Aisle celebrates Christmas!

Ben: Christmas, for fans that don’t know, is the time of the year that Christians celebrate an event that occurred two-thousand-and-nine years ago in ancient Bethlehem, when a stop-motion animated Bing Crosby, aided only by Charlie Brown, prevented the Grinch from Stealing Christmas.

Nick: In honor of that holy occasion, Ben and I, though you can’t really tell in print, are talking like Boris Karloff.

Ben: There are three words that describe you, Nick: Stink; Stank; Stunk!

Nick: But speaking of Jesus, since his birthday is coming up, we’ve reviewed three Christmas Movies this month, that feature Jesus’ three favorite things: werewolves, spaceships, and the end of the world.

Ben: First we take you to Ben And Nick In The Video Aisle, with our Christmas Video Of The Month: Star Trek (2009). This reimagined prequel retells Star Trek so breathtakingly that I nearly rebooted in my pants.

Nick: This J. J. Abrams visual effects spectacular, tells the story of younger versions of Spock and Kirk, as they pursue their separate childhoods, then finally meet. At first they are rivals, but their acrimony soon turns to friendship, when they find themselves having cowboy sex in a tent.

Ben: That doesn’t happen.

Nick: Gradually young versions of all your favorite original Star Trek characters are introduced. Kirk has a thing for a young Ohura, and ends up accidentally getting busy with Ohura’s roommate, who has red hair and green skin.

Ben: So she is either an alien, or else just extremely Irish.

Nick: There’s a Romulan bad guy named Nero, who is armed with a globe of “red matter”, which appears to be a hot sauce so spicy, that when you shoot it into space it creates a black hole.

Ben: This explains the gravitational pull that I feel toward Buffalo Wild Wings.

Nick: It turns out that Nero came from the future, and wants to kill Spock for something that he will do later. All this time traveling eventually leads to [SPOILER ALERT] young Spock meeting an older version of himself, played by Leonard Nimoy!

Ben: I hope science is working on this technology; it’s my only hope for a threesome.

Nick: Or, for that matter, a twosome. Next we saw another Christmas movie: The Twilight Saga: New Moon. This movie explores a classic Christmas theme: the fragile peace that exists between werewolves and vampires.

Ben: It’s fun to have fun with territorial disputes between werewolves and vampires, Nick, but this film is only using that as an allegory for the heart-breaking real-life violence between Fraggles and Doozers.

Nick: Freud famously admitted at the end of his career that the biggest question that he couldn’t figure out was, what do women want? It turns out that they want to be fought over by monsters.

Ben: This, the second of the Twilight movies, based on the successful series of novels, represents yet another installment in our illustrious series: Sequels To Movies That We Haven’t Seen. But apparently these things are all about two teenage virgins, one a girl and one a vampire, that are in love. The guy wants to suck on the girl, but he can’t. Also he wants to drink her blood.

Nick: At first I wasn’t into it. I thought that the pace was plodding, the dialogue was as eloquent as a tweener’s Facebook, and for the really emotional parts, the soundtrack sounded like it was being done by the guy that scores General Hospital.

Ben: But then we got into it.

Nick: For one, I could watch Kristen Stewart have facial expressions for the rest of my life.

Ben: Dude, I think she’s like seventeen.

Nick: Really? I hope the police aren’t reading this.

Ben: Also, I find Kristen Stewart annoying in interviews. She’s always darting her eyes around and touching her face like she’s in a commercial for headache medicine.

Nick: Whatever. Then a bunch of shirtless underwear models in jean shorts turn into werewolves. Um, our final movie this month, appropriately, is all about the end of the world. It’s called 2012.

Ben: It asks a question that is on all of our minds: If I and everyone I know were to die in a world-wide natural catastrophe in the year 2012, will John Cusack be okay?

Nick: In this movie, Woody Harrelson plays a manic hippy who's always ranting about conspiracies.

Ben: So he plays himself. In this film the Sackman, and his two kids and baby-momma, are always just barely escaping, in cars and planes, from ground fissures, floods, fires, and collapsing urban infrastructure.

Nick: All this grand-scale destruction, of things both man-made and natural, is really amazing and fun to behold on the big screen. What all three of our movies this month taught me is that computer effects finally don’t suck anymore.

Ben: It was bound to happen eventually. It turns out, in the movie, that the government, just in case the Earth is ever befallen by awesome computers effects, has a secret plan that would evacuate all top politician, billionaires, and Lady Gaga.

Nick: Ben, I was able to suspend my disbelief about the likelihood that every possible natural disaster could occur at once, but this movie lost me when it used Danny Glover to portray America as having a black president.

Ben: You should watch the news more. Speaking of Mel Gibson, as most people know, this is all in accordance with a prediction from the ancient Mayans, who apparently predicted that the world would end in the year 2012.

Nick: And, if I’m remembering it correctly, according to the hit Mel Gibson movie Apocalypto, the ancient Mayans helped the Jews kill Jesus.

Ben: Merry Christmas, Everybody!

Episode # 23 (November 2009)

2009-11-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

This Is Where The Wild Capitalists Are…Murdered!

Nick: Ben, let’s talk turkey.

Ben: Is it time to renegotiate our contracts again? I demand that I retain all of the movie rights to my review of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra!

Nick: It sounds like you’re set for life, Ben. But I was referring to the fact that this episode we are celebrating Thanksgiving!

Ben: Or as God likes to call it, “Thanks Taking”.

Nick: So we’re planning to roast up a cinematic turkey, stuff it inside a duck stuffed inside a chicken, all of which will then be placed inside the Weiner Mobile and launched into The Sun.

Ben: This year I’m thankful for four things, I call them The Fantastic Four: my family, my friends, The Thing (by which I mean, my penis), and Jessica Alba.

Nick: Our first film this month celebrates a hot new trend among celebrities: dying. Now, I am not a scientist, so I don’t know why all of these celebrities are dying, but I think that it might be The Rapture.

Ben: This Is It is a concert film, but it is constructed from filmed rehearsals of a tour that Michael Jackson was on the verge of beginning when he died, earlier this year.

Nick: It’s since been discovered that, at the time of his death, Michael Jackson was on everything but skates. However, in the movie Michael Jackson is at the top of his game physically, and still a total badass on stage. So it turns out that drugs are good for you.

Ben: If you can avoid dying.

Nick: Yeah, but that caveat applies to everything. Our next movie this month was Where The Wild Things Are. I cried during this movie. But I always cry when I can’t stop yawning.

Ben: Watching Where The Wild Things Are is like being at a really boring party, where nothing happens, except everyone at the party is a member of the band from Showbiz Pizza.

Nick: This movie tells the story of a boy dressed like a wolf, who, after having a fight with his mom and his sister, sails to an island to hang out with The Banana Splits.

Ben: The boy then becomes the King of the Island, by telling the Wild Things that he possesses a “Sadness Shield” that can “keep out all of the sadness”.

Nick: Alert readers will recall that this is exactly what led to the election of Barack Obama.

Ben: Okay, simmer down there, Ron Paul.

Nick: Then nothing happens, then more nothing happens, and then they build a fort, and then more nothing happens.

Ben: If Michael Jackson’s doctor had just shown him this movie, then he would have slept like a baby.

Nick: But you’ve got to hand it to them, Ben, the filmmakers did capture the essence of childhood, in that, as I recall, childhood was soul-crushingly dull.

Ben: I can’t believe that Roger Ebert gave this movie three stars. Especially since me and the Rog have always seen eye-to-eye on the concept of chocolate cake.

Nick: Next we watched the most horrifying film ever to not be presented by Tyler Perry: Halloween II. This is the Rob-Zombie-directed sequel to his 2007 remake of the classic horror film of the same name. It's pretty much what you would expect: some dude in a rubber mask stabs many, many people to death.

Ben: The message: if you are going to stab many people to death, wear a rubber mask. This protects against blood-born pathogens such as Mr. Hyde and Body Snatcher Invasion. Also herpes.

Nick: At the big Halloween part at the end of the movie there was a ghoulish stand-up comedian which made me realize the potential out there for Halloween-themed stand-up comedy:

Frankenstein's monster is here, everyone. There haven't been this many different body parts in one person since Paris Hilton's birthday party!

Dracula is here with The Brides of Dracula. Drac, you are an old guy with three girlfriends: you are the Hugh Hefner of Transylvania. And I'm not saying he's on Viagra but just now I went in to hug him and I almost got stabbed in the heart with a piece of wood!

Ben: You realize, Nick, those aren't real monsters and you're just roasting a group of crying trick-or-treaters in costumes that you’ve been holding hostage since Halloween.

Nick: Speaking of Halloween costumes, Ben, I can't help but notice that you are wearing a barrel held over your torso by suspenders.

Ben: Yes, Nick, the economy has gotten so bad that I've had to start buying whisky in bulk. This is how they sell it at Sam's Club.

Nick: So, you're wearing a barrel full of whiskey. Isn't that dangerous?

Ben: Only at fraternity parties. The other night some guy tried to tap my ass!

Nick: And so it is in these hard economic times that Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story couldn't be more relevant. The basic thesis of the film is that capitalism, as a system, is ultimately harmful to society and anti-democratic.

Ben: And to silence anyone who might accuse him of having a simple-minded, even fairy-tale-like view of the free market, Michael Moore brings in economics expert Wallace Shawn. Seriously.

Nick: Really, Michael, you're going to have derivatives explained to me by a guy who couldn't even figure out which cup the poison was in? Inconceivable!

Ben: Also, the title is never quite explained.

Nick: I thought it was supposed to mean that capitalism does to America what two people who love each other very much do to one another on their wedding night.

Ben: Yeah, capitalism, stop acting like you're going to tenderly feed me cake, only to moosh it in my face!

Nick: Ben, I must say here that as a devout Libertarian, I believe that government intervention is what caused the market to collapse.

Ben: Yes, and as a devout Branch Davidian, I believe that government intervention is what caused David Koresh to be on fire.

Nick: This calls for a drink.

Ben: Hey, get your Silly Straw out of my bunghole!

Episode # 22 (October 2009)

2009-09-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

The State Of Sorority Beer In Hell

Ben: Welcome, Ben and Nick In The Aisle! fans, to our new self-published format, which will be available every month, in a compost heap or paper mache paste near you!

Nick: I realize now that there is a fine line between self-publishing and littering.

Ben: Our lawyers have advised us against both. Nick, as you may be barely perceiving through that hangover that you call your five senses, we are currently broadcasting live from Shady’s Massage Parlor and Movie Rental Emporium. At Shady’s every RomCom has a happy ending!

Nick: Boy, it’s getting spooky in here!

Ben: Hey, man, he who smelt it dealt it.

Nick: No, I mean, the Month of October is finally upon us, a month so pagan and decadent, that even the leaves are like, “suck it, I’m out of here”.

Ben: October 31st, many readers may know, is Halloween and also Reformation Day. This day celebrates an event in 1517, in Wittenberg Germany, when Martin Luther dressed up like the St. Pauli Girl and nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral. Then he knocked on the door and asked for candy.

Nick: The Snickers of time is packed with the peanuts of history.

Ben: Our first film this month is about sorority girls getting murdered, which sounds hilarious, but it’s actually a horror movie. It’s called Sorority Row.

Nick: This gritty docudrama takes us deep inside the workings of a sorority house, which, as I’ve long suspected, turns out to involve vigorous bare-bottomed pillow fights.

Ben: The plot gets going when six of the senior sisters decide to play a trick on a guy named Garrett, who had previously cheated on one of them (the one named Megan). They make it look like Garrett has accidentally killed Megan, in an apparent roofies-related incident that they encouraged him into.

Nick: A dab’ll do ya, on the roofies.

Ben: The sisters drive the guy out to an abandoned mine, or something, to ostensibly get rid of Megan’s body, while Megan continues to pretend to be dead. However, this good-natured exercise in mental terrorism goes badly off the rails, when Garrett, who seems to think that part of getting rid of a dead body involves removing the lug nuts, plunges a tire iron into Megan’s heart.

Nick: Thus proving the age-old adage, “The hardest part of pretending to be dead is stopping your heart.”

Ben: Then the movie cuts to 18 months later, and the sorority girls start getting killed by a cloaked figure, who wields a weaponized tire iron, blah, blah, blah. Because he knows what they did last summer. And then Jason’s mom builds a Star Gate on an Indian burial ground.

Nick: Your brain has become a collage. Our next movie was a charming romp for the whole family, called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. It tells the story of a guy named Tucker, who says hateful things to women and then has sex with them.

Ben: He is joined by one of his friends, Drew, who, in sharp contrast with Tucker, says hateful things to women, but then doesn’t have sex with them. They both go on a road trip with a third friend, Dan, who is getting married soon, and so must be taken to a strip club for one last chance to look at naked ladies, and then, you know, say hateful things to them.

Nick: But this does bring up a valid point about flirting: it usually takes the form of insults.

Ben: Which is why, when I’m counting my fan mail, I include parking tickets.

Nick: Wikipedia tells me, Ben, that this movie was protested at some of the screenings, due to the fact that it glorifies drunk people having sex. According to the demonstrators, an intoxicated person cannot consent to sex, therefore the movie is portraying rape.

Ben: This leads directly to the startling conclusion, Nick, that as we speak, scores of drunk men and women are simultaneously raping each other.

Nick: Two rapes don’t make a right.

Ben: Speaking of violated vulvas, our next movie is about bad things happening to Ben Affleck.

Nick: That’s right, this month’s Ben And Nick In The Video Aisle selection is a taut and flashy thriller call State of Play. The female lead in this movie is so hot, she literally looks exactly like Rachael McAdams.

Ben: That’s because she is Rachael McAdams.

Nick: The plot involves Congressman Ben Affleck—

Ben: Pshaw.

Nick: --who is leading an investigation into a corporation called PointCorp, a war contractor, when his lead researcher, whom he is boffing, dies under mysterious circumstances. For help he turns to a disheveled hotshot reporter played by Russell Crowe.

Ben: Russell Crowe has connections everywhere. He’s sort of the Danny Ocean of Carl Bersteins.

Nick: Basically, this movie teaches us the lesson that just because you’re cheating on your wife doesn’t mean that you can’t redeem yourself by demonizing corporations for making money.

Ben: I disagree, Nick. If we trusted our security to organizations motivated by profit, what would that lead to?

Nick: Efficiency?

Ben: Nick, we can’t give people guns, the authority to kill, and a monopoly on the market to do so.

Nick: Unless they’re employed directly by the government.

Ben: Yeah, then it’s perfectly fine. Also, you’re forgetting, of course, that at the end of the movie there’s a twist. Which contradicts 100% of what you’re saying.

Nick: Well, it contradicts 100% of what I’m saying, a little.

Ben: My favorite part of the movie was the ending credits, during which we follow the journey of a bundle of newspapers being assembled in the factory, from printing press to final distribution.

Nick: Somewhere the ghost of Mister Rogers is changing his shoes and singing. In Hell.

Ben: Oh, and Jason Bateman was great in this movie. To this day, I am seething with hatred for the idiots among our population that didn’t give Arrested Development the viewing attention it deserved.

Nick: What’s that?

Ben: Arrested Development.

Nick: Never heard of it.

Episode # 21 (June 2009)

2009-09-28T08:02:00.000-07:00

Ghosts Of Girlfriends Murdered By Sabertooth

Ben: Readers, as of this writing, Little Five Weekend has recently ended. I don’t remember what happened, but as your doctors, we recommend a glass of buttermilk and an abortion pill.

Nick: Little Five was a nail biter, Ben. I lost a thousand dollars when Musket Man pulled ahead of Chocolate Candy.

Ben: No, no, I think you’re thinking of the thing with the horses.

Nick: The Middle Ages?

Ben: Yes. … The Middle Ages. With the ending of Little Five, Readers, everyone is cramming for finals, finally cramming, and Nick is eating himself to death.

Nick: I forget what my major is, Ben, but I think it’s Communism.

Ben: Our advice is, if you don’t know a fill-in-the-blank question, then write-in “Patriarchy”. Then fill-in your bubbles in the shape of a penis.

Nick: Speaking of sexism, our first film, this outing, was a steaming pile of rom-com called Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past. In it Matthew McConaughey is a profligate philanderer who has come to his little brother’s wedding, specifically to talk him out of marriage. According to Matty McHay-Hay, love is a trick and a sham.

Ben: However, Math-coo McCooCaChoo’s plan hits a snag when, while trying to bag some bridesmaids, he starts getting visited by, well, ghosts of girlfriends past. Obviously, this is all a redo of Charles Dickens’s snowy oldie A Christmas Carol, which any historian will tell you, was technically the first after-school special.

Nick: I would have rather seen a film called Ghosts Of Movies Past, where an angel visits McConaughey and shows him an alternative reality wherein cancer has been cured, and all wars have ended, simply because he never made The Wedding Planner or Failure To Launch.

Ben: I would call that film Dr. Dumb Love: Or How I Learned To Give Up And Stop Collaborating With Kate Hudson.

Nick: We have empirical proof that this movie isn’t funny: Nobody laughed at it. The only laughs that I heard were earned by Michael Douglas, who played McLayMe’s seduction-guru uncle, who teaches a young McConehead the ways of the player, while driving a Convertible Cadillac that he refers to as the “stabbin’ wagon”.

Ben: I’ve started calling my car the “Intercourse Prius”.

Nick: Michael Douglas has the look and especially sunglasses of infamous playboy and movie producer Robert Evans. The producers on this movie actually saved a lot of money on special effects, since several weeks before shooting all of his scenes as a ghost, Michael Douglas actually died.

Ben: Senselessly cut down, just shy of his 400th Birthday.

Nick: I think that the Michael Douglas character, even though he represents the wrong point of view, has some interesting things to say about women being attracted to personality, whereas men are more attracted to looks. Do you agree with that, Ben?

Ben: Nick, if you are asking the women of this fair city to choose between my looks and my personality, then you are giving them a Sophie’s Choice.

Nick: You’re right. Our next movie was actually a lot funnier than Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. It was X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Ben: This movie [SPOILER ALERT] tells the classic tale of boy meets girl, girl pretends to get murdered, boy wrestles with Liev Schreiber.

Nick: It starts off with a montage of Wolverine and his brother Sabertooth, who both have “mutant healing factor” which enables them to heal from anything and never age, as they are seen fighting in every major American war, and kicking ass.

Ben: Then they’re recruited to join a special squad of mutants for the government, blah, blah, blah. You know, Nick, I would have enjoyed this movie a lot more if it hadn’t been for what was obviously a paid product placement for having your skeleton bonded with adamantium.

Nick: Ben, movies are a business. What I liked about this movie was all of the surprise appearances by other superheroes. I’m pretty sure I saw Captain America missing a bus under the opening credits.

Ben: And then naked Wonder Woman was all like, “Was Superman just here?” And the Invisible Man said, “I don’t know, but my ass sure is sore.”

Nick: I thought that the guy that played Gambit seemed kind of wimpy. Really, Hugh Jackman isn’t the toughest guy in the world either. What’s next? A bunch of Scorsese movies starring Leo DiCaprio?

Ben: Ironically Nick, you’ve demonstrated a lot of foresight, by destroying your memory with booze.

Nick: What was I just saying?

Ben: The plot is mainly about Wolverine trying to kill his brother Sabertooth, to avenge the death of his lady friend. But then it turns out [SPOILERS LIKE A PORSCHE] that Sabertooth didn’t really kill her. Then it turns out that she was just pretending all along to be his lover. Then Wolverine wakes up in the shower in 1986 with Bobby Ewing.

Nick: I thought the movie was pretty okay, but the reviews have been brutal. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone writes, “This movie made me so sick of Professor X, that I am now publicly advocating violence against the handicapped.”

Ben: Word. And Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times writes, “After seeing this movie, it is my sincere hope the Hugh Jackman does not repeat his victory as People’s Sexiest Man Alive. It’s not that I don’t think he’s sexy. I just want him to die.”

Nick: Strong words from The Rog. Well, please join us next month when, as a tribute to Wolverine’s “adamantium”, we will have a musical performance from Adam Ant, plus some guy named Ian.

Ben: That joke was really weird.

Nick: You know, Ben, if months were years, our column would be old enough to drink now.

Ben: I’ll drink to that.

Episode # 20 (March 2009)

2009-09-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

Jason Jonas: The Legend Of Kate Winslet’s Butt

Ben: Hey, our editor just called and asked why we’re not in her Inbox yet.

Nick: Will the sexual harassment never end? Call her and say that we’re almost done.

Ben: Yeah, but we just started.

Nick: Ben, comedy is like dairy products: The farther past its deadline, the funnier.

Ben: For our first movie this month, Nick, we finally got around to watching The Reader, for which Kate Winslet finally won an Oscar. She’s always been fond of nudity, but for this film she really loads up the nudity gun, and opens fire at the mall. Uh, metaphorically.

Nick: Since I live in a city with electricity, Ben, and I have eyes, I’ve seen Kate Winslet’s boobs a lot. And I have to say, I think they looked bigger in the sinking-boat movie.

Ben: That’s probably why they called that movie Titanic. Maybe that’s what Dad was talking about when he used to get drunk in our treehouse, and start mumbling that women “age like a birthday cake in the rain”.

Nick: Really though, I think that this movie is a parable about being careless about whom one has sex with. Because sure, it’s fun to be a 15-year-old banging Kate Winslet, but before you know it, she turns out to be a Nazi. It’s just not worth it.

Ben: In my experience, that happens 100% of the time. I’m reminded of Last Tango In Paris, in which anonymous sex lead to [spoiler alert] Marlon Brando dying, and that chick with the big bush getting elevated cholesterol.

Nick: Yeah, most people, when they block their arteries with butter, they do it the long way.

Ben: Our next movie, Nick, is Friday the 13th, which is sort of a remake of all the other Jason movies at once.

Nick: I think it’s safe to say, Ben, that what Jaws did for swimming, the Jason movies did for getting murdered with a machete.

Ben: Yeah, it’s going to be weeks before I can do that again. The new Jason movie starts with a bunch of kids camping in the woods, and having sex. As we learned in Cub Scouts, having sex in the woods is a pretty good way to invite a Jason attack.

Nick: Those kids are killed by Jason, then we meet a new group of kids, who, having not seen the movie that they’re currently in, think it would be a good idea to go to the woods and have a bunch of sex.

Ben: There’s a cocky blond guy, another cocky blond guy, an Asian guy, a black guy, and a few hot white chicks.

Nick: The Asian guy must have been improvising, because his “witty” banter is the only one that doesn’t sound like it was being written by a beaten-to-death Speak & Spell.

Ben: Unlike the original Friday The 13th, this movie has some semblance of a plot, as the brother of one of the earlier victims is among the second group, searching for his sister. However this film lacks the original’s badass, incessant use of Killer Point-Of-View camera work, which it pioneered among horror movies. Ever since I saw that first film, Nick, I’ve been having all of my experiences from the First Person.

Nick: That takes balls. Our next film, Ben, really tested our commitment to movie reviewing. It was a mindblowing visual odyssey, entitled, appropriately, The Jonas Brothers 3D Concert Experience. How was your Jonas experience, Ben?

Ben: I would have rather been swallowed by a whale.

Nick: Old Testament reference? Everybody drink! I was not familiar with the Jonas Brothers, and Ben pretended not to be. That is, until we saw this film, which intersplices a live concert with the brothers being engulfed by hysterical female fans, A Hard Day’s Night style.

Ben: The 3D glasses not only made objects in the movie seem to float beyond the screen, but they also hide one’s identity from the embarrassment of being seen at this movie.

Nick: There are three Jonas Brothers: Joe, who I call “Risky Business” Jonas; Nick, who I call “Colin Hanks” Jonas; and, Kevin, who I call “The Other Colin Hanks” Jonas.

Ben: At one point in the concert someone name Demi Lovato shows up, to add a feminine touch to this festival of underage sex symbols. When Taylor Swift showed up, it looked like the brothers were singing a love song to their babysitter.

Nick: Dude, Taylor Swift is like 19.

Ben: Really? Well, she set off my appropriate-dar.

Nick: Then, when the 15-year-old girls sitting all around us were worked into a near frenzy, Joe Jonas brings out this guitar-shaped cannon connected to a hose, and sprays down the concert audience with what appeared to be pressurized sperm.

Ben: Their songs ranged from somewhat rocking to unplugged sentimental.

Nick: Ben, I’ve had chiropractic adjustments that were less poppy.

Ben: Finally, we saw Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. And it’s fitting that in this movie’s title “The Legend of Chun Li” comes out of a colon; because it was total shit. Chun Li’s dad gets kidnapped by gangster businessman M. Bison, blah, blah, blah. At one point she’s wandering around in Bangkok, and her narration is all like, “At that point I went through a lot of important and interesting emotional changes.” Oh, really? Maybe you should make a movie about it!

Nick: Every time I thought about walking out, American Pie’s Chris Klein would show up as badboy cop Charlie Nash. His performance was crapulicious. He swaggers around like a lobotomized Keanu Reeves, and says stuff like, “You don’t want to buy a ticket to this dance, Lady,” and “Nash out!”

Ben: I predict that at next year’s Golden Raspberry Awards, Chris Klein will tie with Ben Bernanke.

Nick: Topical. Chun Li is prepared for her inevitable battle with M. Bison by a guru named Gen, who teaches her how to generate and throw a pink ball of energy.

Ben: A lot of women never learn how to do that.

Nick: It takes patience.

Episode # 19 (February 2009)

2009-09-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

Wrestling With The Curious Case Of Your Hitler/Milk Mustache

Ben: The first movie we watched was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which despite what the title might seem to imply, is not about an animate Teddy Bear who stimulates your clitoris.

Nick: Wow. We are not encouraging Teddy Ruxpin abuse.

Ben: The film is about a man, played by Brad Pitt, who ages backward. He spends his childhood in a nursing home in New Orleans in the early part of the 20th century, becomes a sailor, and just around the time he starts looking all Brad-Pitty, everyone he knows dies of old age. Nothing else really happens, except the standard, protracted, 100-Years-of-Solitude-style love story. In this case, Mr. Button spends his time at sea pining for a ballerina played by Kate Blanchett.

Nick: When Button first meets the love of his life he is an old man and she is a little girl, proving that before the Internet, pedophilia was classy, even magical.

Ben: Yeah, but it just didn’t have fun with the premise the way other movies about time have. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray keeps getting better at the same day. In Memento, the lead character is trying to solve a murder. Here the lead character just sort of wanders through history like Forest Gump, but without all the hilarious mental retardation.

Nick: Ben, the screenplay was based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who became famous for writing The Great Gatsby and then disappearing into such an alcoholic stupor that to this day his corpse is still pissing itself.

Ben: Nick, you know how in the twenty-first century the really hip heterosexuals dress like gay men from the 1970s?

Nick: Sadly, yes.

Ben: Well it turns out that there was one group who was actually persecuted for doing that: ironically, gay men in the 1970s.

Nick: Milk, our next film, is a biopic, chronicling the life of Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist who, in 1977, became the first openly gay man to be elected to public office.

Ben: Not to be confused with Mr. Peanut, the first openly gay food spokesperson.

Nick: A lot is made of Milk’s assassination, but it seems that Dan White, the assassin and a fellow City Supervisor, might have just gone crazy when he lost his job.

Ben: He was probably crazy in the first place. I mean have you seen our City Council? At least on member video conferences in from a holding cell at Guantanamo Bay. Also rampant diaper fetishism.

Nick: Famously, at Dan White’s trial the defense argued that their client was severely depressed due to low blood sugar. This became know as “The Twinkie Defense.” And it worked!

Ben: My god, was there no “Chocodile Cross-Examination?!”

Nick: You know, Ben, Milk made me think that it’s time we agitated for our own particular minority group.

Ben: Hanna Montana fans in their 20s?

Nick: No. Twins. We could commit some horrible crime and then argue that society’s demeaning portrayals of Identical Americans drove us temporarily insane.

Ben and Nick: The “Twinkie Defense!”

Ben: Our next film is a continuation of the theme of homosexuals overcoming great odds: Tom Cruise trying to kill Hitler.

Nick: Valkyrie is the true story of an attempt by members of the Nazi party’s own inner-circle to off history’s most unfunny Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Tom Cruise stars as a German Colonel who, due to a serious battlefield injury, wears an eyepatch and is missing most of his right arm. This clearly symbolizes 1940s Germany’s “short-sightedness” and also its inability to make itself happy just before bed.

Ben: I looked into it and apparently there were seventeen documented attempts on Hitler’s life, many with big bombs, and though innocent people and weiner dogs were getting blown up right and left, Hitler always miraculously escaped.

Nick: I assume by miraculous you don’t mean actual miracles.

Ben: There’s no other explanation. Nick, when you looked back and there was only one set of footprints in the sand: that was Jesus carrying Hitler.

Nick: Well, I felt that the movie’s suspense was limited because the filmmakers, predictably, refused to kill Hitler. I mean, take some creative license. Just imagine it: you’re two hours into this kind of boring, very serious World War II movie, the plot to kill Hitler just failed.

(CUT TO: HITLER standing in front of a large picture window at the top of a government building. He hick-ups, then turns around)

HITLER: I have ze hick-ups!

(HITLER hick-ups again, this time sucking his mustache clean off and into his windpipe. He starts choking.)

HIMMLER: Ze Fuhrer is choking on his mustache! For God’s sake, do something, Herr Doctor Heimlich!

(CUT TO: An old man scribbling wildly at a table covered in papers.)

DR. HEIMLICH (frantic): It’s not ready yet!

HIMMLER: Just do it!

(DR. HEIMLICH picks up HITLER by his ankles and swings him around in a circle, then out the window, shattering it. Long pause.)

HIMMLER: It wasn’t ready yet!

(CUT to HITLER’S BODY splayed and broken on the ground below. His arms and legs are twisted to resemble a swastika. CLOSE UP: In his left pocket is a jar of peanut butter, in his right an oversized chocolate bar with a gob of peanut butter on it. VOICE OVER: “And so the world would have to wait for the delicious taste of chocolate and peanut butter!”)

Ben: Now that’s how you end your docu-drama!

Nick: Mind fuck, your table’s ready!

Ben: Next we watched The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke makes his much-ballyhooed comeback as an over-the-hill professional wrestler who is in love with a stripper with a heart of gold, played by Marisa Tomei.

Nick: There are a lot of scenes of Marisa Tomei dancing around topless, which is now the screensaver on the inside of my eyelids.

Ben: Well, that’s what we’re fighting for, boys. Now go out there and kill Hitler!

Episode # 18 (November 2008)

2009-09-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

Choking On The Infinite Pretzel For Jesus

Ben: Hey the President of the Hip-Hop Congress is still passed out on our couch.

Nick: Well, wake the president up!

Ben: Before we get started, I wonder how this month’s column will effect Joe the Plumber? He’s already gone through enough with Barack Obama wanting to raise his taxes.

Nick: Well, Senator Obama would raise Joe’s taxes by three percent if he made over 250,000 dollars.

Ben: There’s no way he makes that.

Nick: Not even close. But Joe wants to make that much. Therefore Barack Obama is doing something far worse: he’s taxing Joe the Plummer’s dreams.

Ben: You mean?

Nick: Yes. Barack Obama is Freddy Krueger and the souls of our children give him strength.

Ben: That’s appropriate because Jason Voorhees was the original hockey mom.

Nick: Happy Halloween, voters!

Ben: Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist is about a young woman and Michael Cera who wander around New York City until Michael Cera gives her her first orgasm by staring at her head.

Nick: I heard that that just happened between takes and then the director was like, “Oh my god, tell me you got that!” and then the government surrounded the house with saran wrap and came in in space suits like E.T.

Ben: In the movie, Michael Cera also has three gay friends who drive around in a van together. At one point they take Kat Dennings, the love interest, into the van, give her a new bra to wear, and fix her up so that Cera will like her. I have to ask when we as a society decided that gay men were in charge of straight women?

Nick: I worked at Starbucks for eight hours with four girls and a gay guy who was grabbin’ boobs like he was rock climbing.

Ben: In Ms. Dennings, we also have what may be the first of a new phenomenon: starlets who youtube.

Nick: Yeah. In the film Ms. Dennings is beautiful and yet self-conscious is a way that only makes her more beautiful. She is able to represent the perfect girl in that most tender moment when you were young and falling in love. But after watching just one of her Youtube vlogs, I was as sick of her as if we had been dating for twelve years. If video killed the radio star, then Youtube killed my boner.

Ben: Can you imagine if we had access to the vlogs of great figures from history? Drunk Gandhi eating a cheeseburger? Say it ain’t so, G-man!

Nick: Before we do the next review I need to finish my on-line shopping. What kind of comforter do you think I should buy?

Ben: Oh, get down!

Nick: Next we watched Religulous, which was about Bill Maher going around and confronting religious people with the ridiculousness of their beliefs.

Ben: They say that there are no atheist in foxholes.

Nick: Also popular in foxholes: a relaxed stance on crapping your pants. But I don’t want to go to that lock-in either.

Ben: The eventual conclusion Mr. Maher comes to is that now that man has the ability to annihilate himself, maybe it would be a good idea to just not think that’s such a good idea. Refusal to accept the inevitability of death is the only reason for any religion. But what feels false about the movie is that that is precisely where Bill himself refuses to take the plunge.

Nick: Yeah, he just keeps saying things like he “believes in doubt,” and “he doesn’t know.” They should call this movie Agno-sticky. Why isn’t anyone proud to be an atheist anymore except for us and a very drunk Christopher Hitchens?

Ben: The truth won’t set you free but goes well with scotch.

Nick: Speaking of which, why is my goldfish in your cocktail?

Ben: I thought that aquarium was for mixing.

Nick: Hey, this isn’t a safe place for you Mister Wiggles!

Ben: You realize it’s a cheddar cheese goldfish, right?

Nick: Stop asking questions.

Ben: Next we watched Choke, which is about a sexaholic, played by Sam Rockwell, who purposefully chokes on food in fancy restaurants. The people who save him by giving him the Heimlich maneuver end up feeling responsible for him and invariably send him money.

Nick: You know, I used to pull a similar scam where I would electrocute myself in public restrooms and act like I was Quantum Leaping.

Ben: It’s an adaptation of the book by Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote Fight Club. The movie was adapted for the screen and directed by Clark Gregg, who also stars. Mr. Gregg leaves a lot of stuff out from the book, I would assume to make room for his character, which he completely made up.

Nick: This wouldn’t be so bad except that his character is a mud-covered hillbilly who ends every scene by looking into the camera, crossing his eyes, and saying: “Choke on that!”

Ben: I think it happens like fifty times. It gets harder every time I look at it.

Nick: The last movie we watched was W., written and directed by Oliver Stone.

Ben: Nick, more than anything, I felt like this movie was just going through the paces to create the few moments that went into the trailer, because the movie sucks but the trailer was amazing.

Nick: To give you an idea of how easy this is we have cut together a trailer from this month’s column.

Announcer: This Fall.

(The Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony plays)

Beethoven: La La La La.

Announcer: Excitement.

Ben: Get Down!

La La La La

Announcer: Intrigue.

Nick: Well, wake the president up!

La la la la laaa lala.

Nick: This isn’t a safe place for you…!

…Stop asking questions!

La la la la la la lala

Announcer: And love.

Ben: It gets harder every time I look at it.

(Cut to a picture of the Statue of Liberty)

Announcer: That’s what she said.

Episode # 17 (October 2008)

2009-09-25T15:38:00.000-07:00

Burn After Peeing

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.

Episode # 16 (September 2008)

2009-09-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Episode # 15 (August 2008)

2009-09-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Momma’s Dark Sex Files

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. 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. 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!

Episode # 14 (July 2008)

2009-09-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

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!

Episode # 13 (June 2008)

2009-09-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

Indiana Jones and Cassandra’s Iron Skull

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 Hayley 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.

Ben: 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!

Episode # 12 (May 2008)

2009-09-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Episode # 11 (April 2008)

2009-09-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Episode # 10 (March 2008)

2009-09-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

A Kind And Golden Polis

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 16th 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.

Episode # 9 (February 2008)

2009-09-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

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 Asshole,” 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.

Episode # 8 (January 2008)

2009-09-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

Charlie Wilson Vs. Pregnant Aliens 2: Requiem Of Secrets

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 11th—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.

Episode # 7 (December 2007)

2009-09-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

It’s A Misty Christmas Without Cholera Stool

Ben: Well merry jingle bells, everybody, and welcome to December!

Nick: Is it snowing in here, or has Ben’s Head & Shoulders quit the war?

Ben: Either the temperature is falling, Nick, or else the holes in my heart have been plugged with brass nipples.

Nick: We start off our big Holidays episode, folks, with a duo of films that double-feature the smoldering Spaniard Javier Bardem.

Ben: I loved him in The Princess Bride.

Nick: That was Mandy Patinkin.

Ben: Oh.

Nick: This Holiday double-feature offers something for the whole family. For grandpa, No Country For Old Men, the new Coen Brothers’ movie, has Javier portraying death incarnate, and old people love dying.

Ben: But then there’s something for the youngsters too, Nick: Love In The Time of Cholera, an adaptation of the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez has Javier playing the consummate lover, treating the viewer to a lot of bosom baring. And babies love second base.

Nick: They sure do, Ben. No Country For Old Men is an adaptation of a novel by Cormac McCarthy. In the film, Josh Brolin finds a suitcase full of two million dollars at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. He decides to make off with the money, prompting the mysterious Javier Bardem character to go on the hunt for him. Along the way, Javier kills more people than cigarettes, and causes more needless suffering than anti-smoking laws.

Nick: I hate to say it, partner, but I’m going to have to break with the unanimous ball cupping that this movie has received from the critics. I think that the story was masterfully precise for most of the film, but that it really peters out at the end.

Ben: Oh. Snaps.

Nick: The last time I was this disappointed by a third act, I was playing duck duck goose at the morgue.

Ben: Wow.

Nick: And why was Tommy Lee Jones’ character even in the movie? He was about as pivotal as Jiminy Cricket.

Ben: Okay, try to calm down. Next we saw Love In The Time of Cholera. It was all about Javier Bardem, around the turn of the 20th century, falling so much in love with Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s character (and who wouldn’t?) as a child, that he spends the next 53 years waiting for her husband to die. However, the only way to pass the time without going crazy is to have sex with over six-hundred beautiful women.

Nick: I forget; did it work?

Ben: I think it works by definition.

Nick: Good point. I have a similar campaign going until they bring back Quantum Leap.

Ben: Nick, I interpret this movie as a prequel to No Country For Old Men.

Nick: How the hell do you do that?

Ben: You see, Nick, the reason that Javier is so blood thirsty in 1980 (when the Coen Brothers’ movie takes place) is because he’s pissed off about falling in love, growing old, and dying in the time of cholera.

Nick: That doesn’t make any sense.

Ben: Well things only get cloudier from here, Nick. Because our next film promises high humidity and low watchability. I’m referring, of course, to The Mist. This movie, based on Stephen King’s latest potboiler, follows a certain group of town residents, who are all trapped in a convenience store which has become surrounded by a opaque and foreboding “mist”.

Nick: I think the deadly cloud of mist is Stephen King’s brain farting.

Ben: That explains why it’s full of monsters.

Nick: The movie starts out with at least ten solid minutes of really clunky exposition. Then the mist shows up and some lady delivers a teary speech about her kids with all the subtlety of Tammy Faye Baker. At this point God decides to punish the script and actors by sending a killer octopus.

Ben: From an evolutionary standpoint, Nick, it makes no sense that creatures from another dimension would want to eat us. That’s as likely as space aliens coming to earth and screwing Geena Davis.

Nick: That sounds entertaining. Eventually, Ben, a religious nut in the group starts converting people, which leads to a violent confrontation with the other faction of survivors. The religious lady is so clownishly demonized in the movie that it actually made me want to convert back to whatever religion it is that I quit.

Ben: We were raised as Wiccan lesbians.

Nick: That’s right. Our final film this month is about Vince Vaughn saving Christmas: a little touch of holiday cheer called Fred Claus. Vaughn plays the titular character, Santa’s older brother. The movie begins with young Santa doing all these things that seem odd to his family, but that the audience understands as future Christmas traditions. This has led me to understand that all the weird stuff Ben does is really just him starting a holiday.

Ben: On The Porch In My Underwear Day.

Nick: Flash forward, and Vaughn is an adult estranged from his brother. Attempting to solicit a monetary loan from St. Nick, Vaughn agrees to come to the North Pole and assist in this year’s Christmas preparations. But wouldn’t you just know it: Kevin Spacey shows up, as a hard-nosed efficiency expert, determined to shut down Santa’s workshop on any possible pretext!

Ben: This is probably a good time to tell you, Nick, that right now we’re being evaluated by an efficiency expert on this month’s column.

Nick: What? This is an outrage! And we’re still one joke behind our quota with only fifty words to go!

Ben: Don’t worry, I’ve got one right here. Oh, no. The joke’s gone missing! And I just threw out my back! You’ve got to finish the column, Nick.

Nick: But I can’t fly reindeer!

Ben: What? Just tell a joke.

Nick: Oh. Um… Rachel Weisz uses her beautiful real British accent in this movie, to play a meter maid who is Vaughn’s girlfriend. I haven’t been so happy to see an American accent disappear since Jerry Lewis retired.

Ben: We saved Christmas!

Episode # 6 (November 2007)

2009-09-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

The Butt The Limited Observer Saw

Nick: Well, it’s been a real roller-coaster of a week here at Ben & Nick In The Aisle!

Ben: I know what you mean, Nick. And I believe that it was Helen Keller who said, “God never farts without opening a window.”

Nick: Exactly.

Ben: I mean, one minute Natalie Portman is naked in slow motion, and the next, that Jigsaw person is torturing people for Meryl Streep!

Nick: I think you’ve become unstuck in time again. Our first movie this month is a new Wes Anderson offering entitled The Darjeeling Limited, starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman as three guys on a train. Or something.

Ben: But the real story here, fans, is the Wes Anderson short film that precedes the main feature, and acts as a prelude to it. It’s called The Hotel Chevalier and it’s all about Jason Schwartzman in a hotel room in Paris. The plot starts when Schwartzman is visited by Natalie Portman’s naked butt. The butt shares tender moments with Schwartzman, and is voiced by Jim Carrey.

Nick: Now, we can’t really review The Darjeeling Limited, because after seeing The Hotel Chevalier we ran out of the theater, broke open some champagne, and dressed up like sailors.

Ben: It’s morning in America.

Nick: Unfortunately, Ben, the next double-feature we saw wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the one that God gave to Natalie Portman.

Ben: No, sir. Next we watched Rendition, which is about Meryl Streep as a CIA supervisor who’s all about torture, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who reacts to torture by brooding and smoking a hooka. Also in the movie were Peter Sarsgaard and Reese Witherspoon, proving conclusively that this movie’s casting agent is all about double vowels.

Nick: Weird.

Ben: The catalyst for this movie’s various plot lines is a suicide bombing at a town square in South Africa, which results in Reese Witherspoon’s Egyptian husband getting picked up by Homeland Security and tortured, while Gyllenhaal is required to watch, as a CIA observer.

Nick: I think the movie delivers an important message: Don’t let a Gyllenhaal help you torture.

Ben: Unless it’s Maggie Gyllenhaal, and all bondage is voluntary.

Nick: Word.

Ben: For me the movie’s message was: torturing people just makes new terrorists. Unfortunately, the only way to get the names of the new terrorists is with more torture.

Nick: I think that we should remove our troops from every country in world.

Ben: Okay, simmer down there, Ron Paul. We followed-up this thoughtful examination of the consequences of torture in the real world, with a less thoughtful examination of its fake-world consequences: Saw 4.

Nick: This movie is completely incomprehensible unless you remember everything about Saw 3. Unfortunately, I had all my memories of Saw 3 erased with hypnotherapy.

Ben: As everybody knows: Saw movies are all about people waking-up to find themselves chained to some Rube-Goldbergian torture device, which offers them a choice between death and some ghastly self-imposed mutilation. The designer of these devices, named Jigsaw, is driven by the idea that he’s dispensing justice to the guilty, and usually designs the “punishment” accordingly.

Nick: I was inspired by the whole Saw thing to start hooking-up trick-or-treaters to this device I designed, that forces them to decide between sparing their friend’s life or receiving a Reese’s Big Cup.

Ben: I’d pick the Big Cup.

Nick: My basement looks like an abattoir covered in wrappers.

Ben: I guess in the last movie Jigsaw died, and this movie starts with his naked corpse on an autopsy table, thereby treating the viewer to Jigsaw’s dead gray wiener. This, I suppose, would be arousing to a necrophiliac, such as Ted Bundy or Elizabeth Dole.

Nick: A clue is found in Jigsaw’s stomach that leads the police to believe that, to use technical language, “it’s on.” Jigsaw’s accomplices are apparently carrying-on his shtick. They kidnap a police officer’s wife, forcing him to participate in a series of Jigsaw-esque scenarios to find her.

Ben: Some FBI dude comes in with his Latina partner to take over the case from the police. The interrogation scenes between FBI dude and Jigsaw’s ex-wife would be a symphony, if bad acting were an orchestra.

Nick: Histrionic acting is to the Saw franchise, as lead-based paint is to Chinese toys. By which I mean, both should be shut down by the government.

Ben: Then a bunch of stuff happens, and there’s a big twist at the end. And just in case you didn’t get the point of it all, a flashback sequence recaps the whole fucking movie.

Nick: By contrast, the twist at the end of Rendition, I thought, was very effective, but you’d have to be drunk or the Bush Administration not to see it coming.

Ben: I guess, in summation, we could say that the CIA is somewhat less brutal than Jigsaw the serial killer.

Nick: Or at least less creative.

Episode # 5 (October 2007)

2009-09-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yuma Zombie Now, Dane

Nick: Hey, Ben. To get our readers excited, I’ll bring you up with a big showbiz intro. Lee Bollinger-style!

Ben: I don’t know who that is.

Nick: Go stand behind that curtain. Ready?

Ben: Let’s do it!

Nick: Ladies and gentlemen, this man’s refusal to read subtitles is either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. Sir, will you cease this outrage?

Ben: Dude?

Nick: My question is this: how can you continue to secretly funnel money to Goobers, when your denial of support to all other candies is destabilizing the fledgling concession stand economy? Would you have Sour-Patch children wiped off the map, simply because they come from the wrong patch?

Sir, your continued refusal to adhere even to the criticism standard of Peter Travers –in defiance of agreements that you have made with me and that guy with the sideways tie we work for– threatens to engulf the world in the kind of shitty journalism not fit to be hung in faux-Cannes frawns and stuck on a Vincent Gallo movie.

Ben: This has been building up for some time, huh?

Nick: Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express their need for me to hold for their applause.

Ben: While you were writing that introduction, Nick, I saw Good Luck Chuck starring Dane Cook’s mouth and Jessica Alba’s ass. I’d heard it was going to be romantic so I pulled that old stunt from the movie Diner, with the hole in the bottom of the pop-corn tub.

Nick: Did that surprise your date?

Ben: Enough buttery topping and you don’t need a date, Nick, or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher!

Nick: If loneliness were a dunk in a slam-dunk competition in 1994, then you’d be the between-the-legs “East Bay Funk Dunk.”

Ben: But I would like to use this public forum to call for a moratorium on hating Dane Cook. As you know, Nick, you and I are both accomplished stand-ups who can be seen performing locally.

Nick: I see us all the time.

Ben: And I’ve noticed that bashing Dane Cook has become a cottage industry and I think it makes us all look petty.

Nick: Where’s your wig, Chris Crocker?

Ben: And also I think that people should stop beating Jodie Foster within an inch of her life ‘cause then we’ll all just have to sit through The Brave One again.

Nick: I’d say her beating was about a 6. For those of you keeping score on the celebrity beating scale: a one is a meet-cute bump into Hugh Grant and 10 will either turn you into Batman or make your movie start going backward.

Ben: In Monica Bellucci’s specific case, her movie probably wasn’t the only thing that got backed up!

Nick: If you don’t stop it, I’m going to hit you over the head with my collectible replica Star Trek gun!

Ben: Don’t phaser me, bro!

Nick: Okay. Perhaps instead, you’d have me turn in my phaser for a blazin’ six-guns!

Ben: Well, if those are my choices, I think I’ll take the phasing. But there were no such things in the Ol’ West, Partner! –which is the setting for our next film: 3:10 to Yuma! We saw it at 7:45! And we were nowhere near Yuma!

Nick: Well, that’s the magic of stories, Ben. You know: their fakeness.

Ben: This film begins when Christian Bale has his barn burned down. And, speaking of “burning one down”, Russell Crowe next robs a wagon which is being pulled by a motorcycle driven by Peter Fonda.

Nick: Worse still, I spotted a steer that was wearing a digital watch.

Ben: That’s sloppy movie making.

Nick: Crowe is captured, and Bale is hired to transport him in shackles to the train station. This involves a considerable journey on horseback. But, wait! Crowe’s gang is in hot pursuit, and determined to rescue their leader!

Ben: Sounds boring.

Nick: Much has been made of an alleged homoerotic subtext, in regards to Ben Foster (who plays the second in command of the bandits), and his undying devotion to Russell Crowe’s character. I think I’ve spotted the germ of this theory.

Ben: The gay germ?

Nick: I think it’s based on mishearing a line. At one point, Ben Foster shoots a bunch of guys on horseback and then declares, “I hate posses.”

Ben: Oh, I see.

Nick: Some critics just misheard him.

Ben: Have you been in a posse lately, Nick?

Nick: Are you kidding? Smell my spurs!

Ben: Wow. Assuming that we’re still broadcasting, let’s move on to our next film, which is Resident Evil 3: Live Free Or Die In An Evil Residence. Or something. It’s the sequel to a bunch of Resident Evil movies that we haven’t seen. It seemed to provide a lot of answers. But I have no ideas what the questions were.

Nick: But it did deliver on the good-looking people killing and being killed by zombies tip. It delivered it like a mailman powered by Wheaties and blow.

Ben: Sort of like a post-apocalyptic episode of The Real World.

Nick: There was also a holographic English girl, who acts as the avatar for a super computer. Whereas there is nothing creepy about being English, or being a child, this movie proves that being English and a child at the same time is very creepy.

Ben: Kids, there is plenty of time to be English when you’re older.

Nick: You know, Ben, I think that if Milla Jovovich had showed up at the end of 3:10 To Yuma and started killing zombies, it would have been more believable than what actually happened.

Ben: Yeah, that ending blew. I’ve heard more realistic conclusions muttered by the Mad Hatter.

Nick: But, I do love watching Peter Fonda act.

Ben: Yeah, you are very fonda’ him!

Nick: …

Ben: I’m sorry.

Episode # 4 (September 2007)

2009-08-31T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Superbad Bacon Ultimatum

Nick: Well, rise and shine, Campers! It’s time to report to the movie tent, for a last-minute summer romance with Camp “Counselors” Nick & Ben!

Ben: I think you mean “Ben & Nick”.

Nick: Damn, Gina, why you got to be so alphabetical?

Ben: Today’s episode is called “The Superbad Bacon Ultimatum”. What’s the super-baddest ultimatum you can imagine, Nick? Once a Nazi told me that I had to watch Sophie’s Choice with him. Or he’d kill me.

Nick: Well, call me old-fashioned, Ben, but I think that all of the really superbad ultimatums involve getting laid in jail.

Ben: Nice. On a more seasonal note, Nick, did you know that September comes from the Latin word “septimus”, meaning “seventh”? The Romans named it that, because it’s the seventh month.

Nick: No it isn’t.

Ben: Well I guess that concludes our educational portion. … Forever.

Nick: You’re like Mr. Wizard. But without knowledge.

Ben: Let’s get on to our first film, Nick: The Bourne Ultimatum!

Nick: In honor of The Bourne Ultimatum, Ben, I drove here backwards.

Ben: There was a lot of backwards driving in this movie. Also, there was driving backwards off of things. Watched in reverse, it’d be The Dukes Of Hazard.

Nick: Ben, I haven’t seen a rear end receive that much damage since I was in Amsterdam.

Ben: Okay, shut up. The Bourne Ultimatum, Nick, joins 28 Weeks Later as part of our award-winning series: Reviews Of Sequels To Movies-That-We-Haven’t-Seen. This third Bourne movie is all about Jason Bourne, played by Little Matty Damon, who’s been programmed by the government to be a killing machine.

Nick: Also, all memories of his former life are gone. I mean, he remembers less than Alberto Gonzales. Now he’s sick of being a killing machine, and he wants to find out who made him a killing machine. Ironically, it was Johnny 5.

Ben: I have no idea what movie you were watching. Personally, I think this movie delivered pretty much what I expected: car chasing, gun shooting, savage beatdowns, Julia Stiles.

Nick: Oh, yes, Julia Stiles. Julia Stiles, Ben, looking deep into my soul as if awaiting a confession. A confession that she’s knows she’s going to get.

Ben: I see. You probably want to stare into space for a second. Readers, our next film is a comedy masterpiece called Superbad. If the people who write movie jackets are listening, please quote me as saying that Superbad was “super-rad”. Also I watched it while drinking a super Tab.

Nick: Super Tab is so delicious it’ll damage your chromosomes!

Ben: Seriously, audience, send us free Tab.

Nick: Superbad, Ben, was all about three high school friends, on the cusp of graduation, questing to acquire alcohol, so as to ply their love interests with it at the big party, and thereby lose their pesky virginities.

Ben: It sort of reminded me of our own high school experience, Nick, if you take out the booze and ladies and replace them with board games.

Nick: So many chutes… So many ladders…

Ben: The other fun thing about the movie is two policeman characters played by Seth Rogan (who, God love him, wrote the film) and Bill Hader, who appears to have stolen our secret comedy recipe, Nick.

Nick: What is our secret comedy recipe?

Ben: Two parts laughs, and five parts handsome.

Nick: Oh yeah! I’m tellin’ Judge Judy!

Ben: How litigious of you. The cop characters in Superbad nicely demonstrate the comedy principle of A Thing And Its Opposite. A comedy premise can be devised by combining a thing and its conceptual opposite. Like, a cow that milks people or a dehydrated-ice-cream store in New Orleans.

Nick: Wow. The cop characters in this movie embody that principle by being cops, yet demonstrating a disregard for the law at every opportunity.

Ben: I haven’t seen disregard for protocol from a law enforcement officer like that since we Karaoked “Cop Killer” with John Ashcroft.

Nick: And he was sober.

Ben: Next we watched the new Kevin Bacon film, which immediately had us longing for his lighter work, like that one about pedophilia.

Nick: It’s called Death Sentence, and apparently the rest of that sentence is: “…is no fun to watch.” Mr. Bacon plays an average businessman with a happy little family. The film starts with a home movie montage of them laughing and having birthdays so already I was like, somebody machete somebody already. Sheesh!

Ben: Kevin Bacon’s son is macheted in a gas station by a gang of street toughs. His wife (Kelly Preston) breaks down and cries in the hospital waiting room. Then Kevin stabs his son’s killer and breaks down and cries in the shower. When the gang kills his wife and puts his son in a coma, Kevin goes to his son’s bedside, breaks down, and cries. This would all be very emotional but I noticed that whenever people broke down and cried they played the Footloose theme song.

Nick: No, that was me. I brought a boombox.

Ben: But then he’s all like, “You better watch your eyes for flying grease, evildoers, ‘cause now you’re cookin’ with Bacon!”

Nick: And speaking of the evil gang members, I didn’t care for the way that this movie portrayed bald white guys. I mean sure a lot of them are bouncers or pirates but what about the bald white guys who have helped society, like Professor Xavier, Michael Stipe, or my [expletive deleted]?

Ben: Wow. And by now everyone’s heard of the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” where you try to link someone to the actor Kevin Bacon in less than six moves and then that number of moves is said to be that person’s “Bacon Number.” For instance I have a “Bacon Number” of 2 because as a child I was on The Bozo the Clown Show and Kevin Bacon has an irrational fear of clowns. What’s your “Bacon Number”?

Nick: I’m Muslim.

Ben: Okay.

Episode # 3 (August 2007)

2009-08-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

I Now Pronounce Your Uterus Haunted

Nick: Well, hi there, fans! How did you find us here!?

Ben: I don’t know about you, Nick, but I just came here to checkout my horoscope.

Nick: I’m hiding from bill collectors.

Ben: And the dog catcher.

Nick: But while we’re here, Ben, let’s review some movies!

Ben: Okay.

Nick: Sicko’s been in the news lately.

Ben: You mean Wacko Jacko? Is he up to his tricks!

Nick: No, the movie Sicko.

Ben: So, do you thing we oughta socialize health care, Nick? I don’t see why the hell not.

Nick: Let me answer you by way of a fun piece of trivia, Ben.

Ben: Okay.

Nick: Not a lot of people know this: but, the Soviet Union collapsed because people couldn’t stand all the awesome health care they were receiving.

Ben: All right, simmer down, there, Ron Paul.

Nick: You know Ben, I’m surprised that you showed up for this week’s column. Ever since you got the Internet in your room, the only proof I’ve had of your existence is a flicker of light from under your door, and something that sounds like a dolphin playing Simon.

Ben: That was all for science, Nick. And the children. What movies did we see this month?

Nick: Well, Ben, we stopped by the monolithic movie box to see Knocked Up, which is Judd Apatow’s writing/directing follow-up to 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, which is Adam Sandler’s follow-up to about 400 movies that are so unfunny they could make Al Qaeda surrender. This double feature, Ben, was clearly all about relationships, and emotions, and babies, and us sneaking out of Chuck & Larry to go see Transformers.

Ben: Nick, If our forefathers had foreseen the movies of Adam Sandler, I’m pretty sure they would have rethought the First Amendment.

Nick: I certainly hope so, Ben. If you ask me, the difference between comedy-in-general and Adam Sandler’s comedy, is like the difference between eating turkey sandwiches at Grandma’s house, and eating Grandma sandwiches in Turkish prison.

Ben: Knocked Up was good though. It charmingly told the story of a slacker named Ben (played by Seth Roger), who has a one-night stand with a gorgeous entertainment journalist named Alison (played by Katherine Heigl). And, before you know it, Alison is “up the duff”, “in the pudding club”, and “wearing her apron strings a little high”.

Nick: What the F are you talking about?

Ben: She’s pregnant.

Nick: Oh yeah.

Ben: The cuteness and the hot sex aside, though, this movies teaches the youth of America a valuable life lesson: if you’re a sloppy slacker, a super hot women will still go home with you from the bar, if buy her a beer, and act coquettishly self-deprecating.

Nick: I don’t know. I think I disagree.

Ben: Really, Nick? What do you do to get a hot woman in a bar to go home with you?

Nick: Well, what I do, Ben, is I pay a guy to dress up like a cop and ask the lady to move her car. Then I murder him.

Ben: Well, everybody’s different.

Nick: Now Ben, you went missing when we were supposed to see Harry Potter. That hurt my feelings a little bit.

Ben: Sorry, but I had to find out the spoilers from the new Potter book so I could drive by and yell them at playgrounds.

Nick: Kids gotta learn. But in an uncharacteristic act of journalism you actually left town.

Ben: Yes, though sadly what I’d heard was a magical gathering of “wizards” turned out to be a bunch of racists meeting in the woods.

Nick: And I bet racial intolerance up-close is not nearly as sexy as Madonna made it look in her video for “Like a Prayer.”

Ben: I thought my goose was cooked when I nervously blurted out, “Hey, who here likes The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?”

Nick: How ever did you escape their clutches –aside from being Caucasianier than vanilla purgatory?

Ben: Well, as luck would have it, they were an ultra-reformed wing of their organization that only went after white guys with dreadlocks.

Nick: I think that we can all agree on that. So, while you were gone, I just found those illicit photos of the book online. Spoiler Alert: at the end, Jar-Jar Binks comes in and beats everyone to death with his [expletive deleted].

Ben: I’m glad you brought up the Internet, Nick, ‘cause it turns out, not only can you catch a glimpse of more “mommy doors” than a maternity ward, but the World Wide Wow will actually give you things for free.

Nick: Yes, so, strictly for journalistic purposes, we decided to see if we could watch the new movie 1408 on-line for free. And you know, except for the Japanese subtitles and occasional bathroom break for the cameraman, our favorite pirate site delivered a film experience that was almost VHS quality!

Ben: Plus, while the movie loaded, we were able to watch just the torture scene from Goya’s Ghost on Youtube. It’s a good scene, if you’re into Natalie Portman being strappadoed naked and dubbed into Italian: a very specific fetish that it turns out, surprisingly, we don’t have.

Nick: 1408 is basically about a hotel room that messes with Jon Cusack and the audience for two hours. It’s sort of like Home Alone where Johnny is the robbers and McCully Culkin is the tortured souls of the horribly murdered. Those who saw Home Alone 3 will have no trouble picturing this.

Ben: You know, it never occurred to me before how all horror movies are about personal regret: in this movie Cusack’s character is grieving for his deceased daughter; the priest from The Exorcist felt he’d abandoned his ailing mother; and I bet that dude in The Shining sure wished he hadn’t gotten it on with a guy in a beaver suit.

Nick: The ending was startling. Spoiler Alert: at the end the walls in our apartment started bleeding and the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences materialized and told us to stop stealing.

Episode # 2 (July 2007)

2009-08-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

Mr. Nancy Goes To The Ocean

Nick: Well, hello, Movie Fans! Stop it, already, with your bit torrents and your stag films, and come meet us in a darkened theater, Pee-Wee Herman!

Ben: These kids, today.

Nick: The Internet is not your girlfriend.

Ben: Here, here.

Nick: Well, Ben, according to a whisper campaign emanating from the Vice President’s Office, you’ve got a review of Ocean’s 13 for us.

Ben: I’m not ready to talk about it, yet. You go first.

Nick: Okay, well, Ben, you know, sometimes here on Ben & Nick in the Aisle we watch these movies so you, the readers, won’t have to.

Ben: Uh-huh.

Nick: We started off this week’s research with a Mr. Brooks / Nancy Drew double-feature.

Ben: Collectively, it was cute and horrific. Like the Queen Mum naked.

Nick: Mr. Brooks, starring Kevin Costner, is basically about a bunch of people getting shot in the face. It has an interesting premise: Ben, you know how when one is addicted to doing something, one hallucinates that William Hurt is appearing to him, and telling him to do it?

Ben: Sure. For example, William Hurt appears to me, and tells me to send people fruitbaskets.

Nick: Sure. But in this movie, Kevin Costner’s William Hurt convinces him to do serial killings. He struggles with his “addiction” to killing, but to no avail. Things get complicated when Dane Cook takes photographs linking Costner to a murder, and uses said photos to blackmail Costner into taking him along on the next killing. He’s like an aspiring killer, Dane Cook.

Ben: To hear you explain it, it sounds like a good movie.

Nick: Oh, but it isn’t, Ben. I believe it was Aristotle who once said, “Movies should be about someone trying to accomplish something; I hate you, Kevin Costner.”

Ben: You felt the plot was disorganized?

Nick: Yeah. Demi Moore is trying to catch Costner. Costner is trying to deal with Dane Cook. Then Costner starts suspecting that his daughter is a killer too. I mean, pick a plot, movie, and ask her to dance.

Ben: Word.

Nick: After sitting through the people-getting-shot-in-the-head festival that was Mr. Brooks, Nancy Drew was an interesting change of pace.

Ben: We saw Nancy Drew at 9:30pm on a Friday. So basically it was just me and Nick hanging out with the female half of the Freshman Class at Bloomington North. There was a lot of giggling and screaming. And when I fell asleep, they put my bra in the freezer.

Nick: Serves you right for flirting with everybody’s boyfriends.

Ben: Nancy Drew was about a precocious 15-year-old cutie-pie, who can drive a car for some reason. Her and her Dad move into a spooky new house, which had formerly been occupied by a famous movie actress, until she mysteriously disappeared. A bunch of stuff happens and eventually Nancy Drew is looking for a missing will.

Nick: Unfortunately, that was the only thing this movie had in common with Roger Rabbit.

Ben: But then Benny The Cab shows up.

Nick: Oh, yeah. What saved this movie for me was Nancy Drew’s 12-year-old sidekick, Corky. He was this chubby kid in a leather jacket. Clumsy and wisecracking, he was sort of like the Joe Pesci to Nancy Drew’s Gibson & Glover. Corky was played by Josh Flitter, who imdb.com tells me was in Big Momma’s House 2.

Ben: I wouldn’t watch Big Momma’s House 2, if it were being projected onto the inside of Winona Ryder’s womanhood.

Nick: Are you acting like this because one of our censors just broke up with you?

Ben: Shut up. What’s next?

Nick: Well, you know Ben, I think that there must’ve been a horrible accident at sea.

Ben: Why’s that?

Nick: ‘Cause our next film is a dreamboat fulla hunks and man meat!

Ben: You mean Ocean’s 13? Isn’t Don Cheadle just the most? Gawd!

Nick: And this sassy 3-quel delivered enough new twists and creamy visual glitz to keep the franchise fresh and vibrant. Also, toward the end of the movie, you actually managed to get shot while dressed as Abraham Lincoln. What was up with that, Bro?

Ben: It was the perfect plan, Nick: first my tiny Asian friend would contort himself into a box of Milk Duds. Once he’d infiltrated the theatre’s concession stand, he’d emerge dressed as an usher and create a diversion by filing a frivolous sexual harassment lawsuit. Meanwhile, I would have climbed through that little window by the projector and rigged it so that, as the movie played, it would unspool into a slit in my gentleman’s novelty stovepipe hat as I sat in the back row.

Nick: You mean?

Ben: Yes: I was going to steal Oceans 13.

Nick: I must have been in the bathroom for a lot of this.

Ben: Ah, but there was a suspenseful snag, Nick. You see my tiny Asian friend couldn’t make it, so we had to stuff his roommate, who’s very tall and redheaded, into a giant cardboard box marked “Red Hots”.

Nick: You mean that guy that looks like Conan O’Brien?

Ben: Yes. But while the assistant manager argued with the delivery man, Conan, due to his awkward positioning, was unable to take his scheduled Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, and threw a Paris-Hilton-level hissy and popped out of his box, six gun a-blazin’, just as I was running through the lobby wearing my gentleman’s novelty beard disguise.

Nick: Why did he have a gun, for God’s sake?!

Ben: It’s his right as an American, Nick. Then he yelled “sic semper tyrannis” and jumped off the concession stand, breaking his leg. But don’t worry fans; I assure you that the part of my anatomy that was blown clean off was freakishly supernumerary, if you know what I mean, guy-I-shower-next-to-at-the-Y. Wink.

Nick: Gross out. Also, Ben, for fans of D.I.Y. cinema, we should recommend renting Hautian’s 13, a movie about the guy in Terre Haute with the most teeth.

Ben: Well, until next time, this is Ben and Nick saying, “Hey, that’s not Eddie Izzard; that’s my wife!”

Nick: Also, I would like to again not mention concession stand worker Brian P.

Ben: Gawd.

Episode # 1 (June 2007)

2009-08-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

Georgia Ate My Mind

Nick: Well, first off, Ben, I think we should welcome everybody to our new movie “review” column.

Ben: “Review”? Why the scare quotes, “brother”?

Nick: Well, “partner”, I use the scare quotes, because this movie review column will be like nothing Bloomington has ever seen!

Ben: Packed with laughs and unprofessionalism!

Nick: You said it, Ben. We’re going to be like a cross between Bob and Tom and Roger Ebert, but without the mustaches, or the salivary gland cancer.

Ben: Wow.

Nick: Not that that’s anything to make light of, Ben.

Ben: No it isn’t, Nick. Moustaches destroy families. Why don’t you tell our readers what movies we saw this week. I bet they’re expecting us to review Pirates 3.

Nick: As well we might have, Ben, if we were reviewers. But since we’re “reviewers”, we decided to catch a 28 Weeks Later/Georgia Rule double feature.

Ben: It was pain-tastic!

Nick: Why don’t you give the nice people your review of the zombie movie 28 Weeks Later, Ben, since your favorite shot is a Bloody Brain, and you used to date Rob Zombie.

Ben: Oh, like you haven’t, Nick. 28 Weeks Later, Nick, definitely comes through on its title, because the events in the movie actually do take place 28 weeks after a date 28 weeks previous. So right off the bat, they’ve gained my trust.
Now, neither me or Nick had seen 28 Days Later, but apparently it was about zombies destroying London. The sequel takes place after everybody in London is dead, and all the zombies have supposedly/maybe died of starvation.
So, in comes the American Military to oversee the reconstruction of London. What we’re looking at, then, is American soldiers occupying a major city, and treating its citizenry like captives for their own protection. The “safe zone” in the heart of London is actually referred to as “The Green Zone”. What do you think that this movie might be a metaphor for, Nick?

Nick: My issues with Mom?

Ben: No! What? Why would it be—Shut up.

Nick: Sorry.

Ben: Then when the zombie virus starts spreading again, there’s a scene wherein American snipers are forced to start shooting every member of a stampeding crowd, because they’ve lost the ability to tell who is a zombie and who is an innocent civilian. This is obviously another heavy-handed comment on the Iraq War, done with the help of digital composer Jean Lapointe –a Frenchman!

Nick: I will not have critiques of our destructive, elective wars digitally enhanced by a Frenchman!

Ben: I know you won’t, Nick! This movie’s Anti-Americanism hits an all-time high, when, after the end credits are done rolling, there is a four-minute Youtube clip of Donald Rumsfeld incoherently drunk in a hotel bathroom, trying to eat a hamburger.

Nick: Retirement’s not been kind to him, Ben. But, in the movie’s defense, he does look a lot like a zombie.

Ben: That’s no excuse.

Nick: I have to say: I think you really missed the boat on this one, Rog.

Ben: Oh?

Nick: This movies was spank-tascular. The teenager sister was played by a girl who’s actual name is Imogen Poots. And, Ben, she’s pooted her way right into my heart. She was wrong hot. I haven’t seen a 17-year-old that good-looking since I walked into the wrong bathroom at Indiana Beach.

Ben: Okay, Nick. Now I told the censors that we were going to behave.

Nick: Her face is like a laser beam made out of virgins.

Ben: Okay, shut up, dude. Put Imogen Poots out of your mind, if you can bear it, and give the good readers your review of Georgia Rule.

Nick: It Georgia Sucked.

Ben: Can you be more specific?

Nick: Okay. Georgia Rule is about the three female generations of a single family getting to know each other, and their feelings, and stuff. The grandmother, mother, and daughter are played, respectively, by Jane “Communism” Fonda, Felicity “Bill Macy” Huffman, and Lindsay “Fully Loaded” Lohan. In the movie, Lohan plays an out-of-control sexpot who eventually learns some life lessons, which I read as the actress’s attempt to apologize to America’s collective id.

Ben: Interesting.

Nick: At first, I found the dialogue to be snappy yet lame –sort of like David Mamet mixed with Oprah.

Ben: Weird.

Nick: But as I dipped harder and harder into my Early Times traveler pint, I started to kind of like it. At first, though, I was confused, because I though that we were watching the zombie movie second, so I couldn’t figured out why the zombie was serving everybody oatmeal instead of killing them. But it turns out, that was Jane Fonda.

Ben: Uh-huh.

Nick: The movie begins when Lohan’s character is sent by her mother (Huffman) to live in a quaint little burg with her crotchety ol’ grandmother (Fonda). Oh, you better believe that Lohan’s big-city recalcitrance comes into conflict with Fonda’s authoritarian Grandmothering! Does it ever!
My favorite part was when Lindsay takes off her underwear, during a scene where she is hitting on a hunky country boy, while they’re both fishing out on the lake. I’d like to make a joke about this, but I promised the censors I wouldn’t.

Ben: Try some artful wording.

Nick: Um… yatta yatta yatta –no underwear—yatta yatta yatta–“the man in the boat”.

Ben: That was very funny.

Nick: Thank you. This might negatively effect my street cred, Ben, but I’d have to say that, between the zombie movie and the chick flick, I think I preferred the chick flick.

Ben: Oh my God, Nick, did you just hear that snapping noise?

Nick: No. What was it?

Ben: I think it was the sound of your unit turning inside out.

Nick: Ha, ha. The thing is, in the zombie movie, the conflict of most scenes was based on action (avoiding physical danger), whereas, in George Rule, the conflict of each scene was based on drama (psychological disagreements between characters). I guess I find the latter more engaging.

Ben: Do you hear a sucking noise now?

Nick: No.

Ben: I think it’s coming from your inside-out unit.

Nick: Okay, okay. I think we’ve dropped enough science on our fans for one month.

Ben: Okay, everybody. Watch this space next month, for a free refill of hot movie-critiquing action! Until then, this is Ben—

Nick: And Nick!

Ben: –Saying, “Life is like a movie, and credits are like a funeral.”

Nick: Good one. Oh, Ben, I told concession stand worker Brian P. that I’d mention him in the article.

Ben: You’d probably better not.

Nick: Okay.