MOVIE COMMENT CATCH-ALL THREAD

[Brian Fowler]

We're on opposite sides in a sectarian war.

 

I wonder if it depends on which of the two original series you liked the most...like, that determines which remake you hate the most.

 

Are there actually people out there that think F13 is a better series than Nightmare?

 

Because, really, there is no legacy to fuck up with Friday the 13th.  They are bad movies (keep in mind, I own them all and love them like strange, deformed children) with virtually no redeemable qualities outside of exploitation elements.  Some of the Nightmare movies are actually legitimately good films, and even the worse ones are world's better than pretty much all of the Friday films.

[Curt McGirt]

I guess I join the sectarian war with this post: I always liked Friday better. Freddy's great but the humor is terrible. I actually prefer the braindead nature of the Friday films. Maybe it's just sleazier...

 

Couldn't sit through the remake past the pre-credit sequence though. The Nightmare one, I gave a half-hearted attempt, but just switched the channel.

[Newb82]

Can we agree that the NIGHTMARE, FRIDAY, & (original) HALLOWEEN series all hit their low point at part 5?

[Brian Fowler]

They all hit A low point at 5, but I don't think I'd call any of them the worst film in the franchise.

 

Freddy's Dead is worse than Dream Child.  Jason Goes to Hell is worse than A New Beginning.  Revenge of Michael Myers is probably the most frustratingly bad of the Halloween films, but it is a better movie in a vacuum than Curse of Michael Myers or Resurrection.

[Newb82]

Only one of those I agree with is JGTH and HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION.

FREDDY'S DEAD at least has some funny moments ("the maps says we're fucked!") and an interesting idea (Springwood being decimated by Freddy and him being powerful enough to change reality) even if they were wasted because Tallalay is a John Waters deciple.

CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS did not have the Keystone Cops or piss away the ending of the previous film like V did (even though, IMO, the ending is the best part of V), plus even if you don't hate Tina (I go back and forth) the "link" between Jamie & Michael sucks.

I like CURSE despite some obvious flaws (like a spike sticking out of a wall for the sole purpose of MM driving the nurse's head into) until the ending stretch, which was fucked because Donald Pleasance died.

[piranesi]

 

We're on opposite sides in a sectarian war.

 

I wonder if it depends on which of the two original series you liked the most...like, that determines which remake you hate the most.

 

Are there actually people out there that think F13 is a better series than Nightmare?

 

Because, really, there is no legacy to fuck up with Friday the 13th.  They are bad movies (keep in mind, I own them all and love them like strange, deformed children) with virtually no redeemable qualities outside of exploitation elements.  Some of the Nightmare movies are actually legitimately good films, and even the worse ones are world's better than pretty much all of the Friday films.

 

 

I have greater love in my heart for Friday.  Maybe because I was really young when it started and there was a mystique about it.  It was forbidden and terrifying to me for years before I actually saw one.  Maybe because Nightmare 1-5 are almost never on cable, so I just haven't seen them enough to get all trivia-nerd about them.

 

But I think it's just the simple purity of camp and the woods as scary places and how, regardless of the other qualities, all of the first six Fridays get that part right.  They luxuriate in the environment, and give you lots of slow panning shots across the treeline and creepy wooden buildings with giant crawlspaces.

 

Nothing is more important to me in horror than "space" and how well a film uses it to make you feel tense.  That's one thing I hated about the remake...there was so much super closeup, shaky stuff and the spaces just looked like the spaces in the Texas Chainsaw remakes, and a bunch of others.  It was generic.

 

That may also be where Nightmare loses some tiny thing for me.  It succeeds really well, like SCREAM would later, in making the suburbs creepy at times...but the main "spaces" are sort of abstract dreamscapes and factories and somehow a big giant surreal factory is actually less creepy to me than a simple silent forest...with a guy out there in it somewhere...with a bag over his head...

[piranesi]

A PIRANHA blast for you.  Blah, Blah..The original PIRANHA... Joe Dante, history, legacy...Every time I look up one of these PIRANHA people, I find pure Hollywood magic.  

And so I give you a third installment of AWESOME ACTORS BURIED IN THE CAST OF PIRANHA:
 AMY HOLDEN JONES

The whole reason I grabbed my laptop and started googling people while watching PIRANHA was because of a striking-looking woman who shows up in an early scene in a tiny uncredited part.  She does nothing but hand someone some keys at a Hertz Rent-a-car desk.  That's it.  But she does it with style and elegance and a face that is waaaaaaaaay to exotic and intense looking for such a throwaway role.  So I had to know if she was "somebody."  Here she is in her only scene in PIRANHA:  
Hi there, sad Hertz lady. James Taylor makes me feel lonely too.
If she even has a line at all, then it's something like "Here are your keys." or "Would you like to purchase the insurance?" or "Our O.J. Simpson guarantee means you're always in good hands!"

She looks like Juliana Margoulis playing the part of a 70s Italian horror film actress or something.  Her name, it turns out, is Amy Holden Jones, and this is her only acting role.  I've mainly been writing up people with close to 300 or so...so what gives?  Well, what gives and why this triggered an entire series of ridiculous posts about PIRANHA is that Amy Holden Jones' career behind the camera is 100 percent madness.

In 1975, at the age of twenty (so, what a college sophomore?) she made a student film called A WEEKEND HOME and submitted it to AFI's student competition.  One of the people on the panel was Martin Scorsese.  She won and Scorsese liked the movie so much that he offered her a job as his personal assistant on a little movie he was making the next year called TAXI DRIVER.  Remember now, this isn't lovable grandpa Scorsese with the thick glasses and aw shucks attitude making HUGO:

Not this guy:

No, this 20-year-old coed was now sitting next to coked-out madman "Have you ever seen what a .44 Magnum will do to a woman's pussy?" Scorsese:
This Fuckin' guy:  

Three years later Scorsese hired her to edit his whacked-out documentary AMERICAN BOY: A PROFILE OF STEVEN PRINCE which is a super messed up movie about a pretty messed up dude.

So, from film school to the set of one of the most important movies ever made.  It was there that she met two people that would become very important to her life an career.  Michael Chapman, the Director of Photography on this and later on RAGING BULL (and, like, 50 other pretty huge movies) who would become her husband, and Roger Corman, her future producer.

This leads to her connection to PIRANHA.  Corman, it seems, suggested that Joe Dante hire her to edit the infamous HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, which some of you know from the Corman doc. MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED! was a movie made as a bet between Dante and Corman that J.D. could make the cheapest movie ever made.  As a movie that was strung together out of a lot of found footage mixed in with new stuff to connect it all together, it must have been a blast and a chore to edit.  Thus in one year she worked on TWO of the most important films ever made (and now I need to rewatch MACHETE MAIDENS to see if she shows up in any of the footage.

It was through Corman that she also got her start writing and directing.  She would eventually write the screenplays to the following movies (just the highlights):
MYSTIC PIZZA
BEETHOVEN (with "the dog and Charles Grodin," not "the guy and Gary Oldman"...she would also seriously cash in on all the sequels with one of those "characters by" credits)
INDECENT PROPOSAL
THE RELIC
 She wrote this to happen:

This is from THE RELIC, not BEETHOVEN.

For Corman she also wrote and directed LOVE LETTERS, a "thriller"(? maybe) apparently starring Jamie Lee Curtis that I have never heard of.

Amy directing  Jamie Lee:

and here directing Halle Berry in something called THE RICH MAN'S WIFE

Does ANYONE remember this?  Or know why behind them Jonathan Hodgman is playing Colonel Sanders?

So in the directing we're not talking quality necessarily here, just weirdness.  And it gets weirder.  For you horror/slasher fans, she is a huge part of one of the bigger successes (and debacles) in the genre, being picked by Corman to direct what was supposed to be feminist author Rita Mae Brown's scathing deconstruction of slasher films, which ended up being the insanely bad THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE.  Some of you probably already know that once Corman (and our fair Amy) got hold of Brown's script, Roger decided it was too smarky and tranformed it into a pretty deadpan and incredibly dull straight-up slasher with all of the sarcasm and parody removed (the last vestige of the feminist critique being the killer's use of an oversized drill to kill his female victims...

 

that's what a penis does, people, it drills things and ruins lives!.

Amy on set and covered in stage blood:
Apparently the working title was SLEEPLESS NIGHT...slasher trivia and cheap-ass production t-shirts!

 

She made this happen:

Her Corman-esque cynicism and grindhouse attitude are well summed up in some nice interview quotes (as one of the few female directors in horror, she's given lots of interviews):

 

“Roger Corman taught me a very valuable lesson. He said you could make a movie about just about anything as long as it had a hook to hang the advertising on.”

 

and on SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE:

"Slumber Party Massacre was shot exactly as it came out of the typewriter, in twenty fun-packed days.  The crew was young and incredibly hardworking.  the cast was cheap and willing to take their clothes off.  What more could a young writer-director ask?  Several months later we previewed in the tackiest theater on Hollywood Boulevard.  The place was packed with half-drunk teenagers and homeless people who walked in off the street - our target audience."

 

and on being a woman behind the camera in Hollywood:

"One door closes, you have to pry open a window and crawl through.  You just have to keep finding a way." 

I think I might be in love with this woman.

 

SPM was a massive financial success (for Roger Corman and nobody else, of course) and still holds a place in the hearts of horror-con types even though it's really dreadfully dull.

Awesomely she is still active, having a new show coming out this Fall on ABC called THE BLACK BOX (which sounds proper creepy) that she is writing and producing, and an insane twitter account in which she writes things like:

Amy Holden Jones ‏@aholdenj 20 Feb
 This year American Idol has the worst hair ever.

Amy Holden Jones ‏@aholdenj 24 Feb
 Is it me or was that opening by Seth McFarland interminable?

Amy Holden Jones ‏@aholdenj 16 Jan
 I feel like a muppet. I would like to be Miss Piggy but I fear I'm The Count.

 

Today, she's a bonafide Hollywood-crazy diva who takes mad selfies in elevators
 
 
 and trolls people on the internet like a boss.

Amy Holden Jones ‏@aholdenj 3 Oct
   Jim Lehrer needs to grow a pair.

 

Never. Ever. Stop. Being. Bizarre, Amy Holden Jones.  And FUCK YOU, JIM LEHRER! You scroteless withered chump.

[Swift]

piranesi, I forgot to mention the other day that when I looked up Keenan Wynn's IMDB the other day, I found out that his son went on to write the screenplay for The Longest Yard, among other things - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0944003/

 

Also, you need to examine the career of Evil Ed from Fright Night - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0313267/

[piranesi]

piranesi, I forgot to mention the other day that when I looked up Keenan Wynn's IMDB the other day, I found out that his son went on to write the screenplay for The Longest Yard, among other things - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0944003/

 

Also, you need to examine the career of Evil Ed from Fright Night - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0313267/

 

Sweet.  Holy shit, he also directed a movie with his dad in it along with Clu MOTHERFUCKING GULAGER!!!

 

I just watched the MST3K of PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR and was pleased to see that they gave Keenan his props, yelling out "Hey, It's Keenan Ivory Wynn!" and quoting one of his lines from DR. STRANGELOVE. 

 

I like this little tidbit from Keenan's dad Ed Wynn's Wiki page:

 

 

eventually adapted his middle name "Edwin" into his new stage name, "Ed Wynn", to save his family the embarrassment of having a lowly comedian as a relative.

 

Because Ed Wynn's dad was a high-falutin hat salesman...so, you know, the shame.

 

Unfortunately, I think there are too many parts of Evil Ed's career that are not safe to Gif on this board.

[caley]

You know, while watching 'Conan the Barbarian' and 'Conan the Destroyer' in the past year, at no point during either viewing did I think "This is good, but it would be so much better if they added a kid doing martial arts", so of course once I'm finally able to track down Red Sonja it has exactly that.  Brigitte Nielsen is just a terrible, terrible actress, but she looks the part so well I'm willing to overlook that, and Arnold is back and there's an evil lesbian queen with a mask and...Ernie Reyes Jr...oh...oh man.  Every single scene with him is just so annoying.  Also, if you were to construct a killing machine and send it after people you want dead, why would you make it roar?  Bah!  Disappointing.  I might put this even below the recent Conan reboot.

[piranesi]

  Also, if you were to construct a killing machine and send it after people you want dead, why would you make it roar?

 

So, clearly you meant to type "why wouldn't you make it roar?"  So, I thought I'd just throw that up here so no one thinks you're out of you rmind.

[caley]

 

  Also, if you were to construct a killing machine and send it after people you want dead, why would you make it roar?

 

So, clearly you meant to type "why wouldn't you make it roar?"  So, I thought I'd just throw that up here so no one thinks you're out of you rmind.

 

It just seems like a lot of unnecessary work.  I guess it wasn't so much the roaring, as it was the screaming sound it made when it had its "eyes" plucked out.  Why would you design a machine to scream when it's in trouble?! 

[piranesi]

That last part does betray a certain lack of confidence.  Like, what do you say when your killing machine asks you "Why did you design me to feel pain and fear death?"

 

and at best maybe you'd be like, "Look, I like you Icthyan murderbot, but why should you get off the hook?"

 

"Fine, but why did you program me to wish I was an architect?  You know I can't ever be an architect!  I HATE YOU!"

[Swift]

Watched Flight earlier. Beforehand, all I knew was that Denzel Washington saves a bunch of people on a plane and it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, so I was expecting a sugar-coated feel good epic. The very first scene opens with a full frontal nude chick and Washington's character snorting a line of coke. So I was dead wrong. Pretty good movie, some ridiculous moments in the script, but Denzel Washington was on top form here.

 

One thing that was incredibly goofy was Zemeckis' on the nose music choices.

 

• A heroin junkie is trying to stay clean, but her needle falls out of a box tempting her - Under The Bridge starts playing
• She shoots up - I didn't recognise the song, but I found the music and the scene reminiscent of the Perfect Day scene in Trainspotting. Turns out it was a cover of Sweet Jane by the Velvet Underground.
• John Goodman's drug dealer character shows up - "Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste"
• Washington's character pours all his booze down the sink - "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone"
• Washington is provided with coke by his associates to wake up from his drunken state - With A Little Help From My Friends

I also think I can go a lifetime without hearing Gimme Shelter in a film again.

[piranesi]

Watched Flight earlier. Beforehand, all I knew was that Denzel Washington saves a bunch of people on a plane and it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, so I was expecting a sugar-coated feel good epic. The very first scene opens with a full frontal nude chick and Washington's character snorting a line of coke. So I was dead wrong. Pretty good movie, some ridiculous moments in the script, but Denzel Washington was on top form here.

 

One thing that was incredibly goofy was Zemeckis' on the nose music choices.

 

• A heroin junkie is trying to stay clean, but her needle falls out of a box tempting her - Under The Bridge starts playing
• She shoots up - I didn't recognise the song, but I found the music and the scene reminiscent of the Perfect Day scene in Trainspotting. Turns out it was a cover of Sweet Jane by the Velvet Underground.
• John Goodman's drug dealer character shows up - "Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste"
• Washington's character pours all his booze down the sink - "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone"
• Washington is provided with coke by his associates to wake up from his drunken state - With A Little Help From My Friends

I also think I can go a lifetime without hearing Gimme Shelter in a film again.

 

I hate when directors or whoever actually have enough money to buy the most obvious choices.  When musical cues are that, sort of, standard I guess, I always feel cheated...like I could have thought of that.  My fucking dad could have thought of that.

[Victator]

Why? Why was I programmed to feel pain?!?

[piranesi]

dammit.

[Jingus]

Back to the previous discussion: 

 

 

We're on opposite sides in a sectarian war.

 

I wonder if it depends on which of the two original series you liked the most...like, that determines which remake you hate the most.

 

Are there actually people out there that think F13 is a better series than Nightmare?

 

Because, really, there is no legacy to fuck up with Friday the 13th.  They are bad movies (keep in mind, I own them all and love them like strange, deformed children) with virtually no redeemable qualities outside of exploitation elements.  Some of the Nightmare movies are actually legitimately good films, and even the worse ones are world's better than pretty much all of the Friday films.

 

Fowler's pretty much stating my attitude here.  I LOVE the F13 movies, but most of them as only the guiltiest of pleasures.  The only ones I'd even defend as "good" from the original series are part 6, maybe part 4, and Freddy vs Jason (which is still easily my favorite film from both franchises, by a huge damn margin).  Meanwhile, Nightmare is an objectively better series by every possible artistic measure... but I'm just not that attached to it.  Enough to own 'em all, but not enough to really treasure them.  

 

I was reading a shallow book about the history of horror films, and it made me wonder: is there a single guy in all of cinema who has been more influential to the horror genre than Wes Craven?  He completely revolutionized the genre on THREE separate occasions, each time basically single-handedly inventing a new subgenre (the rape-revenge flick, the "supernatural monster as a slasher villain" style, and the snarky mean-spirited overrated deconstruction).  I can't think of anyone else who's had that much effect on this part of the industry; even John Carpenter and George Romero's legacy are essentially limited to a single piece of the puzzle.  You pretty much have to leap up to Hitchcock to find anyone even remotely comparable to Craven in terms of leaving horror completely different than they found it.  

 

As for the remakes: 

 

-I actually liked Friday the 13th, surprisingly enough.  I thought it fixed a LOT of the original movies' worst flaws, mostly having to do with the general amateurishness of the whole production (but especially the acting and dialogue, which were usually horrid).  I thought the obsession with weed was a bit odd and the fake-out ending was weak, it was way too obvious that Jason wasn't really dead from the way he "died", but all in all I thought it was a decent combo remake of the first three movies.  

 

-A Nightmare On Elm Street lost points primarily because this version of Freddy is shittier than the original in every way I can think of.  Jackie Earle Haley is too short, his body language isn't menacing, his voice is all wrong (why didn't he at least do the Rorschach voice?), his makeup is vastly inferior to the old version, and where the hell is his thumb claw and why do the other four strike giant electrical sparks off everything?  I understand why they cast the guy, I also thought he was perfect after his roles in Little Children and Watchmen, but what looks good on paper doesn't always work in execution.  The remake's cast was a tad better than the original, Rooney Mara is a much better overall actress than Heather Langenkamp, but she felt miscast and clearly wasn't giving it 100%.  I also didn't like the changes they made to his backstory, the entire "these teenagers were his victims when they were really little" subplot made negative sense.  Considering the advances in CGI technology over the past few years, it's pretty damn disappointing that almost every one of the nightmares was just teleporting the victims to the same old dirty factory (even Freddy vs Jason did MUCH more with digitally-enhanced nightmares than this).  The remake certainly didn't have any creepifying surreal moments like the stretchy arms or the tongued phone.  And finally, it would've helped somewhat if they hadn't COMPLETELY copied the first film's plot so slavishly, there's so much stuff you can do with Freddy and they were content to just do a lukewarm retread of shit we've already seen done before and done better.  Even several of the specific kills and scenes were cases of "this is the EXACT same bit from the original movie, except executed much more lamely".  

 

 

I hate when directors or whoever actually have enough money to buy the most obvious choices.  When musical cues are that, sort of, standard I guess, I always feel cheated...like I could have thought of that.  My fucking dad could have thought of that.

 

 

Yeah, that's usually a pet peeve of mine.  Especially in those moments that're supposed to be funny, like a cheesy oldie being played over brutal violence for a horrific/comedic effect.  The weirdest thing is that sometimes the obvious choice can work; for example, I just saw Christine for the first time.  Every song the car's radio plays is the most thunderingly uncreative choice possible, but somehow John Carpenter (who's always been great with his use of music) made it genuinely effective.  

[piranesi]

 

I hate when directors or whoever actually have enough money to buy the most obvious choices.  When musical cues are that, sort of, standard I guess, I always feel cheated...like I could have thought of that.  My fucking dad could have thought of that.

 

 

Yeah, that's usually a pet peeve of mine.  Especially in those moments that're supposed to be funny, like a cheesy oldie being played over brutal violence for a horrific/comedic effect.  The weirdest thing is that sometimes the obvious choice can work; for example, I just saw Christine for the first time.  Every song the car's radio plays is the most thunderingly uncreative choice possible, but somehow John Carpenter (who's always been great with his use of music) made it genuinely effective.  

 

Now those I thought were great.  Those songs were Christine's equivalent of Freddie's winking to the camera.  It was like her little joke with us, and it was great how the actual people never got it.

 

I remember I complained about WATCHMEN using all the most obvious musical cues until some smart ass "reader" had to point out that most of them were in the original books.  Dammit.

 

Thinking of CHRISTINE.  What I hated was the explanation they gave.  I really wish they had gone with the car actually being a demon, a female demon, who just wanted to bond with a human and drive.  It makes it so much more emotionally wrenching and makes Arnie less of a fool. 

 

Like, if you go that way, it really is every one else's fault.  All Christine wants to do is drive...and live in harmony with a driver.  And all Arnie wants to do is drive her.  They could have been utterly blissful.  The two of them could have been perfectly happy just driving the backroads forever.  But all these busybodies had to get in the way because Arnie was becoming abnormal or whatever...he wasn't following society's plan for him.  It becomes a great metaphor for, like, outcasts or alternative lifestyles or something or stifling social mores or something.

 

Instead they went with a guy using the car to...do something...be immortal...it was just some asshole guy who deliberately inhabited the car...like with a spell or something?  how boring.

[Curt McGirt]

I probably like The Dream Child more than any other Nightmare aside from the first and New Nightmare. And Freddy vs. Jason if that counts... saw it four times at the theater.

[Jingus]

Instead they went with a guy using the car to...do something...be immortal...it was just some asshole guy who deliberately inhabited the car...like with a spell or something?  how boring.

Was that in the just the novel, or also the movie?  I don't remember that part from the film, they never really explained the monster beyond "it's a haunted car with a jealous streak and a bad temper, just deal with it".  

 

I dunno if the car is a completely sympathetic monster, considering how flimsy some of its motivations are for killing people.  Like the first victim, the guy in the factory: yeah, it's a dick move to ash on the seat of a car which isn't yours, but that doesn't warrant an execution.  (And how did the car kill him, anyway?  He didn't have a scratch on him.)  But yes, the body count would've been much lower if everyone had just left Arnie and Christine alone.  Sometimes Stephen King's stories work on nightmare logic, that sort of "everybody fucking hates YOU and not even for any clear reason" paranoid atmosphere.  

 

And btw: seriously, what kind of goddamned homicidal lunatics were the local assholes in King's hometown?  WAY too many of his stories are filled with ludicrously cruel antagonists, sickeningly sadistic bullies and uber-smothering authority figures which are more like parodies of real-world everyday villains than realistic portraits of the same.  The entire world seems to be trying SO hard to no-lube-assfuck his protagonists that at times it gets really frustrating and feels overly contrived.  

[Newb82]

He's said he based Derry on Bangor, Maine, which I believe is his hometown.

[piranesi]

 

Instead they went with a guy using the car to...do something...be immortal...it was just some asshole guy who deliberately inhabited the car...like with a spell or something?  how boring.

Was that in the just the novel, or also the movie?  I don't remember that part from the film, they never really explained the monster beyond "it's a haunted car with a jealous streak and a bad temper, just deal with it".  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh yeah.  The movie has that prelude scene that shows the car being posessed as soon as it's built.  I forgot about that.  It's the book reveal that sucks.  In the book, the first owner put his own spirit into the car.  The movie just leaves it ambiguous.  That's actually better and lets the jealousy angle work.

[caley]

Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Due Date, Old School) is one of those guys who you imagine buys 'Now That's What I Call Music 27' while in line at a gas station and that is his only musical purchase of the entire year.  It's not that he uses necessarily bad music but it's all really, really popular/overused music: Kanye West ('Stronger', 'Cant Tell Me Nothin'); Black Eyed Peas (Imma Be); Curtis Mayfield (Pusher Man); Flo Rida (Right Round); Phil Collins (In the Air Tonight); Pink Floyd (Hey You); Neil Young (Old Man).  He apparently never listens to the actual songs, and only goes for said artists' most famous, notable songs.

[BNosanchuk]

Movie 43: trailer looked pretty good to me, but I knew it bombed HARD in theaters. I laughed and enjoyed seeing some of those actors do some of the weird gross stuff, but I really don't know what that was supposed to be. I apparently got the "alternative" version because at no point did Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Common, Will Saso, nor Seth McFarlane show up.

 

Everyone was pretty funny enough, but they tried too hard for the gross out humor that only KIDS really go for. Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Kieran Culkin, Bosworth, Jack McBrayer, Aasif Mandvi were all pretty funny. I enjoyed the little reunions of Justin Long and John Hodgman in the "Super Hero Speed Dating" story, as well as McLovin and Chloë Grace Moretz in their story. Terrence Howard was also great in his scene.