My snarky movie summaries (Part 4)

Previously: Parts 1, 2 and 3.

Red Road
This is an Advance Party Concept film, which means the crew had to abide by a bunch of strict filmmaking rules, much like the Dogme 95 collective: 1) Keep the director away from light. 2) Don't get the director wet. And 3) Whatever you do, never ever feed the director after midnight.

Reign Over Me
Adam Sandler wears a wig that's supposed to evoke Bob Dylan. He looks more like Doctor Who #3 (ask your nerd friend).

Rocky Balboa
The next sequel should pit Rocky against Rambo a la Freddy vs. Jason. Two times the action! Two times the mumbling! It would end up being the first Rocky flick done entirely with subtitles.

Saw IV
Saw IV, patience 0.

Scary Movie 4
Leslie Nielsen's naked ass may be the first genuinely scary moment in the history of the Scary Movie franchise.

Scoop
A ghost tips Scarlett Johansson to clues about a serial killer. Why didn't that ghost warn Johansson about the suckitude of The Island?


Severance
It's a movie about that hot chick who played Susan Profitt on Wiseguy.

Shooter
Starring Dick Cheney.

Snakes on a Plane
The eagerly awaited horror flick that pits Samuel L. Jackson against a plane full of William Morris agents.

Three Times
Taiwanese art-house favorite Hou Hsiao-hsien follows three different couples, each in a different time period. In America, we call that an episode of Blind Date.

Transformers
The '80s franchise that allowed Orson Welles to conclude his career with dignity by casting him as a planet-eating lard-ass is back.

Vacancy
A look inside the mind of Jessica Simpson.

Vitus
A six-year-old piano prodigy gets no love. Not even from the ladies. They'd rather get cooties from Zack and Cody.

Volver
The title is Spanish for "to drive a boxy Swedish car."

War Dance
This documentary looks at troubled Ugandan kids who have discovered the power of dance. It's like Footloose, but with music that doesn't suck.

What Would Jesus Buy?
The Christian Broadcasting Network. So that He could take it over like Ted Nugent wanted to do with Muzak and tell Pat Robertson to shut up.

Zodiac
Decades before San Francisco was terrorized by one of Jan Wahl's giant hats, there was the Zodiac killer.

An Oakland Raider busts out the Carlton Dance

I'm not a fan of the Silver and Black, but the highlight of yesterday's Raiders/Texans game amused me: Raiders wide receiver Johnnie Lee Higgins* celebrated a touchdown by doing the illest shout-out to a sitcom I grew up watching. His choice for an end-zone dance was the hilarious Carlton Dance from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (photo by Brant Ward of the San Francisco Chronk).

Before he played Carlton, Alfonso Ribeiro was best known for his slick dance moves on Broadway and in commercials with Michael Jackson back when he was black, so it's funny that Ribeiro's most famous dance move today is a much less slick-looking move in which he had to pretend to be a less skilled dancer. The Carlton Dance is a parody of what has to be the whitest-looking dance ever. Every rhythmically challenged white person in the '80s did it, from Bruce Springsteen and Courteney Cox in the "Dancing in the Dark" video to the clubgoers at the Tech Noir in the original Terminator.

Whenever Ribeiro would bust out the Carlton Dance, everyone in the studio audience would lose their minds. Twelve years after the last time Carlton shook his ass back and forth to Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual" on NBC, that dorky dance still makes crowds lose their minds, judging from yesterday's reactions from the Raider Nation, the TV sports reporters and the blogosphere.

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* When Higgins scored another TD, he bust out what SacBee blogger Jason Jones (not the soon-to-be-ex-Daily Show correspondent) called "one of Big Daddy Kane's patented dance moves." After the game, JLH identified this second dance as the "Hooka Hooka." He also did the Humpty Dance for a TV sports reporter in the locker room. The guy's got quite an arsenal of end-zone dances. A hater said on a message board that JLH's "idiotic dances need to be penalized." Looks like Reverend Shaw wants to expand his anti-dancing crusade from Bomont to the NFL.

"Uppity" is the new "n----r"

I wish Senator Obama or his followers came up with an angrier response to that redneck asshole who called the senator and his wife "uppity" last week. As John Ridley recently said on The Huffington Post, Obama should have "hit 'em where they live."

I wonder how Mays or Mitch Gilliam would have handled Westmoreland.

Probably like that. So wrong, yet so right.

The fact that it's 2008 and a white Congressman still throws around the term "uppity"--plus McCain's use of the word "gook" and the possibility that Palin* once called Obama "Sambo"**--are just some of the many reasons why I'll never vote Republican.

* "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska" is this year's "Our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us."

** To borrow a Letterman joke, Palin comes across like the mayor of a small town that's banned dancing, so I wouldn't be surprised.

I just want to hear Girl Talk

The moment in which Girl Talk mashes up Ahmad's "Back in the Day" with Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" during "Shut the Club Down"? Too damn genius.

Likewise with Thom Yorke being edited to look like he's singing Blackstreet's "No Diggity" (during the second video, which is based on "Still Here," track 3 from Girl Talk's Feed the Animals album). I don't know who edited these music video clips together to GT's Feed the Animals tracks, but somebody get this guy an editing award.

Music: "Still Here" by Girl Talk: