Today

Emmett continues to fight some kind of illness--now with blothcy rash and fever!--and I continue to need sleep.

And thus, we will spend today and tomorrow watching The Iron Giant, Toy Story 2, and The Jungle Book, all checked out from I Luv Video.

Sansho the Bailiff

On the other hand, we watched Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff recently and were pretty much blown away. At least I know I was. I know it wouldn't impress some people out there, but if Shana and I could improvise a story as good as this one, we would be very happy. Kept me continually guessing as to where the plot was going to go, and the scene at the end is really powerful. I'm still trying to figure out why it's named after Sansho, and also what the film might have been saying to post-War Japanese audiences.

Stalag 17

Lacey and I watched Stalag 17 over the past couple of nights. It's about 60% a good movie. The stuff with William Holden and the mystery in the barracks is really compelling. Nice riveting stuff, and the resolution of who's really the stoolie is well done. But the broad overacting in the comedy bits is really really insufferable and almost ruins the film. I much prefer the "subtle" comedy in Hogan's Heroes, which obviously copped a lot from Stalag. That's not all that flattering of a comparison.

The finalists

Okay folks, this was hard to narrow down. You are all a bunch of sick weirdoes and I love it. As you may have seen, it was also hard to come up with the right awful chemistry factorial that ensures that the group overall has poor chemistry, but also that any possible combination of actors in two person scenes also is doomed to have zero chemistry. So before I announce the finalists, I'd like to offer up some combinations of actors that were out there that have a glimmer of plausibility to them, which therefore took the entry out of the finals:

Cedric the Entertainer & The Rock

Darlene Cates and Crispin Glover

al pacino and christopher walken

Kathy Bates & Al Pacino

Wil Wheaton and Kathy Griffin

Robin Williams and Dane Cook

R Lee Ermey and Robert DeNiro

OJ Simpson and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gary Oldman and Clint Howard

Reginald VelJohnson and Emmanuel Lewis
the above entry also included Prince--I hereby announce a movie chemistry doctrine--Prince is the universal solvent. He has enough enigmatic charm to spare that he could be combined with anyone. This doesn't mitigate the fact that he's a lousy actor.

Bronson Pinchot and Sinbad and John Stamos (I wouldn't see this movie, but I could see these three in some kind of 80's nostalgia picture)

This entire entry was so perverse and filled with enough non-actors that I had to rule it out. But I like Seth's moxie.

Seth said...
John Amaechi
Tim Hardaway
Michael Richards
Ant (LCS comedian)

These are of course subjective calls, but so's the contest. The objective part comes in this portion, namely the voting on these 7 finalists. As you will soon see, I many of these entries were relatively subtle, with actors that seem like they might go together (a la Wild Hogs) but the more you think about them, the more wrong the combinations seem. Vote early and often through the end of the Oscars this Sunday. The winner will be announced Monday morning. Also, please note that only entries 2, 5, and 7 participated in the addendum. If none of these entries wins, the highest vote tally among these three will win a movie concession from me.

Here they are:


1. Spencer said...
Bebe Neuwirth
Carrot Top
Kirk Cameron (post-Left Behind)
Ice T


2. shannon said...
Gilbert Gottfried (February 28, 1955)
Forest Whitaker (July 15, 1961)
Billy Bob Thornton (August 4, 1955)
George Lopez (April 23, 1961)

Shannon's fifth entry was Cate Blanchett, whom I think is a least plausible with both Forest Whitaker and Billy Bob Thorton, but the fifth entry doesn't disqualify her initial quartet.


3. Lee said...
Michael Richards
Denzel Washington
Andie MacDowell
Wayne Gretzkie


4. soibois said...
Jeff Foxworthy
Jet Li
Monica Belluci
Charlie Murphy


5. Rennie Harlin's Bitch said...
James Spader
Mike Meyers
Flavor Flav
Val Kilmer

my "5th" man is a woman: Eva Mendez...so long as she's 100% in the same mouth-breather mode she worked so well in 2 Fast 2 Furious.


6. Dano said...
Joel Grey
Tracey Morgan
Tony Jaa
Sandy Duncan


7. Chad said...
Steve Guttenberg
Kenneth Branagh
Spike Lee
Mark Harmon

5th:
Dolph Lundgren

Update: Please vote in the comments.

Wild Hogs

So Lacey and I the other night were watching network TV, not something we do very often and we caught an ad for Wild Hogs, a movie neither of us knew existed until that very moment. It seems, at first blush, to be a project answering a road trip time killer to come up with a movie featuring four actors with the least potential for having any chemistry between them, both in individual scenes and collectively. John Travolta? William H. Macy? Tim Allen? And Martin Lawrence? This is a dare, right?

So here's my challenge: who can come up with a foursome of living actors all roughly the same generation (Martin Lawrence is the outlier here, of course, in more ways than one) that is less plausible as a group of friends than this?

Update: This is now officially a contest. Entries will be taken until midnight this Thursday. I will convene a panel of experts to weigh in on the entries, and I will buy the winner a ticket to a movie of their choice.