Reviews

THE ONLY NON-SPOILER PORTION OF THIS REVIEW: Dumb and Dumber To is a fine film in its own right, filled with plenty of its own clever gags, but relies too much on throwbacks to the 1994 classic, even right down to the plotline.

*****BEGIN SPOILERY REVIEW*****

What made the original Dumb and Dumber memorable was how unique and original it was.

Sadly, Dumb and Dumber To didn't just do its own thing - at least half the jokes were call-backs to jokes from the original.

The plot itself is very similar to the original. Harry and Lloyd end up in possession of a package of some sort that they must, to whatever ends, take across the country from their hometown of Providence to its rightful owner. In the process, Lloyd hopes to meet up and hook up with the beautiful woman who left it behind.

What's in the package is also said to be of great value.

Many of the gags themselves are near carbon-copies of beats from the original as well. The entire presence of Billy in 4C here is the same as his presence in the original, the only difference being that he's 20 years older.

Lloyd has a fantasy dream sequence about getting the girl, and proving he's a badass who removes a vital organ of his enemy in the process. It ends with him realizing he's only spacing out and getting a reminder of a truck in front of him.

Hell, Seabass was either such an afterthought or so hard to crowbar into the script that they put him into an after-credits scene to parody the use of after-credits sequel teasers.

I'm not going to merely list all the call-backs - that would take too long - but my point is, I wish Dumb and Dumber To had just dared to be its own thing. The original was funny because it was the first, so it didn't have anything to call back to at all.

Dumb and Dumber To tries too hard to get by on legacy fumes when it would have been perfectly acceptable to just do completely new gags and ignore all the ones used in the first movie.

I already had Dumb and Dumber. I already had a Dumb and Dumber movie for my childhood.

I didn't need them to remake it. I would have wanted a completely fresh Dumb and Dumber for my 20s. There's so much more they could have done with it, but instead they felt like recycling the buddy-road-trip trope and everything that came with it.

Such a shame. So much wasted potential.

Some shows are destined for pop culture ubiquity; their impact is, for all purposes, eternal. Others fade from memory minutes after the credits of their premiere episodes wrap up.

Somewhere in the middle is an ugly zone for shows might fill a niche in the short run, but have no real staying power. They'll suffice for their intended purpose here and now, but down the line they'll be remembered as obnoxious timewasters if at all.

Teen Titans Go! fits snugly into that region, and the reason is simple - it's succeeded quite handily through Cartoon Network's aggressive approach to promoting it, but its humor is entirely too random.

It has an extremely scattershot approach; it can't decide what it wants to be. It wants us to like it, but suffers from a serious identity crisis, as "it" can be any of a large number of things. Consequently, each week isn't just a new episode, it's a new show altogether, so when people say, "This episode got me into the show," they'd still be perfectly justified in writing all the rest off as unwatchable trash - chances are they're not talking about the same show, let alone the same episode.

One episode wanted us to believe that Raven is moody because of her hood. That's okay, except it doesn't always work. When Cyborg wears it, his emotions immediately flatline into a brooding demeanor devoid of any other feeling, but even while _she_ wears it, she can emote quite normally like the others. The negative continuity seems like little more than a handwave to shrug off any responsibility the writers have for being consistent, and it turns out more as a nuke-the-fridge lazy strategy to write gags. Charm is traded for convenience; if a writer wants to shoehorn in a particular gag, it will happen, consequences be damned.

What the show lacks in consistency, it lacks in coherence, and in accessibility. How can one say, "I'm a fan of Raven," when Raven can be a completely different person from week to week? Are we even watching the same Raven? Are we _talking_ about the same Raven? Some weeks, she harbors a secret crush on Beast Boy, which she represses because... well, it's never actually explained. It would be perfectly fine, but some weeks we get the Raven in love with Beast Boy and sometimes not. At one point, she nearly marries him, but much later on Aqualad successfully woos her.

Beast Boy himself is another example of the show's failure to establish a consistent frame of reference for fans. Ironically, Terra is way more faithful to her comic book counterpart than to her animated 2003 counterpart, which makes her evil through and through, but nevertheless Beast Boy is in love with her anytime she rolls around, to the point that he completely overlooks Raven. Yet when Raven was being courted by Aqualad, Beast Boy went _nuts_.

That adolescence is a tumultuous time because of newfound sexual feelings is a poor excuse when it comes to this show, which could easily discard it for any other flimsy explanation next week. The characters can only be loosely identified as such; their motives and personalities fluctuate constantly between episodes.

It's clear that some episodes can be regarded as existing on different timelines, all of which run at the same time and can be used as a source of inspiration by whoever's charged with scripting this week's episode. If a writer doesn't like one timeline, no problem, he can just jump to another. If he doesn't like the timeline with the literal superhero robin, created by Robin himself out of an actual bird by mistake, he can just pretend it never happened. If he wants the timeline with the batarang that speaks and its buddy the dancing stereo that was once skewered by Robin's telescoping pole, fair game.

Trust me, those things only make _marginally_ more sense in the show than in this review. And each week is sort of like a surprise party - you never know who's going to show up or what they're going to bring with them. That sounds like fun, until you get an episode from the timeline you _don't_ like.

Which brings me to my next point - just as there's an à la carte line of things to like about the show, it's just as easy to find things to _not_ like about it. If you would prefer Raven not get together with Beast Boy, you don't have to, but brace yourself because they could share a kiss in this week's episode. Want Raven to not be into plastic ponies? Just hope they don't show up this week.

You just never know what to expect, so if you've already been exposed to elements you didn't like, why would you risk tuning in? You might not necessarily know that it's inconsistent, that the characters change from week to week, that what you don't like doesn't always show up as part of the storyline.

There's even one for the haters: The episode in which Raven's color-coded "emoticlones" appear for the first time could easily fit as a bonus feature on a DVD for the 2003 show, and it would not seem out of place whatsoever. It's as if 2003!Raven is one of the many employed during this show, but they've only ever used her once.

As a fan of the original who heard this one was terrible, would you believe the anti-hype if this were the first episode you tuned into? Ultimately, Teen Titans Go! doesn't know what it wants out of life, or what it wants people to like about itself. Its try-everything-all-at-once, everything-louder-than-everything-else style will infuriate at least as often as it delights. Perhaps having all the original cast wasn't the selling point we should have believed in; might we have been better served by a more faithful show that differed only in its choice of casting?

(To preface this, I rate entries on IMDb according to a binary system - 10 means I liked it, 1 means I didn't. Thumb up, or thumb down. I don't feel the need to mess with the numbers in-between.)

It's pretty obvious that this episode was made solely to ship-tease Tigress and Po. I actually enjoy that about it, but unfortunately it comes at the cost of the plot itself. The plot is illogical.

Let's make like Cinema Sins and talk about Junjie's plan. His plan is to manipulate Po into getting married so he has to give up kung fu, and especially being the Dragon Warrior.

There are a few ways Junjie could have done this, but none of them work. There is a massive plot hole that cannot be overcome.

First, Junjie could have somehow done away with Mu-Shi, the father of Lu-Shi & Shao, and then impersonated him to arrange the marriage with Mr. Ping. That, however, requires that he had the foresight to predict that Po would become the Dragon Warrior, which the plot does not in any way imply. Further, if he DID know this so many years in advance, why didn't he pursue some other means of taking advantage of this knowledge? Why not, say, have Po killed or something? Why go this far out of his way? And that's without the horrifying implications that Mu-Shi's children were then raised, with or without their knowledge, by an abusive evil mastermind who never truly loved them and only planned to use them as pawns in his plot, yet they seem totally unaffected by such a troubled upbringing.

The second possibility is that Mu-Shi himself arranged the marriage entirely in good faith with Mr. Ping, but then Junjie disposed of him and insinuated himself into his place. The problem here is that it's never explained how or when he did this, and certainly the two kids seem unaffected by the absence of their father - do his whereabouts not worry them, or have they ever mourned his death? Judging from the way they act, he never existed at all. And again, depending on when Junjie actually started this, it could also imply the abusive childhood I mentioned earlier.

The third possibility is that Junjie manipulated Mu-Shi into arranging this marriage and THEN impersonated him after doing away with him. This is even more problematic as it suffers from the problems of BOTH the foregoing theories.

All that being said, this episode was entertaining if nothing else. Again, it was made purely to tease fans of TiPo, but at least it still manages to deliver in that respect. Other than the gaping plot hole, this episode is just as good as any other in this fantastic series. Not all of 'em can be winners anyway, y'know?

This is one of my most hated movies. It's not some charming Christmas movie. This is cinematic filth, one of the most annoying, vulgar things put to celluloid.

The Griswold family are as unlikeable as the Manson family, and they made me laugh about as much.

Personally, my traditional holiday movie has been A Christmas Story. It's funny, it's cute, it's fun for the whole family to enjoy. It's ten thousand light years ahead of THIS dreck, and it doesn't even try to be so slimy.

If crude obvious sexual humor, dogs humping legs and stereotypes done to hell and back even by the time it was made are your version of funny, this is your movie. Clark, I hope you drown in that pool.

I only added the spoiler tag because I'm afraid IMDb might block me through some weird technicality. In any case...

I honestly fail to see how a movie that has a scene where a married woman sneaks into the men's restroom and surprises her husband's brother-in-law with rape is considered comedy. It's rape, any way you slice it. I've never found rape funny. I'm not condemning those who do - it is a fictional movie, after all - but what annoys me more is the pointed inclusion of such a scene in the movie.

LOGICAL VERSION OF THE SCENE: He comes into the bathroom. Just as she comes out of hiding and starts getting busy with him, we cut back to the dinner table they have just left. We come back once they've finished.

HOW IT REALLY HAPPENS (EVEN IN THE RATED VERSION): We get to be privy to the entire scene… oh no, you _see_ nothing, but there is absolutely nothing to this scene beyond the sex and noises. I felt my IQ drop 20 points.

This movie had the potential. Sadly, it never reaches that potential. It has a hugely creative setup and showed some of its funniest gags in the trailer, but that's about all you need to know about this movie. I'm astonished it even has any likable quality outside of the porn booth.

This movie would be okay and passable were it not for that scene. Yes, it ruined the entire movie for me. I can't even look at it anymore. When a movie stoops this low, there is nothing else to say about it.