It’s a Good Week for Green Puns

The rebirth of the Hulk movie franchise has been a wild success, the Boston Celtics have won their first NBA championship in a couple of decades, there’s plenty of potatoes in Ireland, hybrid cars are finally catching on, and somewhere, Seth Green is getting paid to play with dolls for his crappy stop-motion TV show. Basically, if you’re green, you’ve got it pretty good right now. In an effort to join in on the recent success of all things green, I’ve worn my green polo shirt to work for 17 days straight without washing it. Unfortunately, all that tactic has gotten me so far is demoted to a job as a landscaper, working with guys who don’t have their green card. Yikes.

-You Wouldn’t Like Him When He’s Eric Bana-
Since the first day production was announced on this new Hulk film reboot, the public has openly wondered why Marvel would remake a movie that was so awful the first time it came out. The answer is that now — five years removed from the original big screen, live-action Hulk modernization — Marvel finally knows how to make a movie that doesn’t suck. The X-Men franchise stopped being good about halfway through the second film of the trilogy, Daredevil was a joke, and Ghost Rider was just an excuse for Hollywood A-listers to dress Nicholas Cage up in leather chaps and write “for a good ride with a flaming guy, call Nicholas Cage” in all the studio bathrooms. But Iron Man and the new Hulk are two of the best superhero movies I’ve seen in quite some time (Iron Man is slightly better, but both are definitely worth paying theater prices for). This whole film reeks of Edward Norton’s sheer talent just overtaking the entire movie-making process and producing the best-possible product (Eddie even wrote the final draft of the script, though some pretentious WGA a-holes denied him official writing credit for it). The only thing I would change about the movie is Liv Tyler’s level of attractiveness…maybe they can fix it in the sequel.

-Gem Garnets are Red, Kevin Garnetts are Green-
Right before the start of game six of the NBA Finals, Kevin Garnett got himself fired up to win, and headbutted the goalpost — which apparently knocked the baskets into Garnett’s team’s total submission for the night as they walloped Kobe and the Lakers by almost 40 points, winning their fourth game of the best-of-seven series and becoming the 2008 NBA Champions. I’m not recommending that any of you go all Zinedine Zidane on a metal goalpost next time you want to win a pickup game of knockout with your friends, but you can’t argue with results, and that’s exactly what the Celtics got. Now I know there’s a lot of anti-Boston sentiment out there right now (especially in LA), but believe me, this is just how things needed to shake down. Since the beginning of the playoffs I’ve said that we were going to see a Lakers/Celtics finals, with the C’s coming out on top. I pride myself on being right 99.9% of the time, so naturally this had to come true. I don’t know if I believe that God really cares about sports one way or the other, but from the beginning of this season, it’s seemed like the Celtics were just predestined to win it all. And to all you Boston haters out there, think about it this way: with Boston winning the NBA Championship, we’ll only have to put up with their gloating for a week or two. But if they’d gotten to the Finals and LOST, we’d be hearing about how cursed their town is (the Red Sox falling apart, the Patriots blowing their perfect season by losing in the SuperBowl, etc.) for the next 20 years. Because if there’s one thing Boston fans (in any sport) like even more than winning, it’s whining about how they should’ve won, why their team(s) got ripped off and blah blah blah. Trust me, this outcome is going to be better for all us non-Boston sports fans in the long run.

-Flower Power-
The Happening is bad. I was going to put some sort of clever joke as the start of this paragraph to kind of ease you into things, but really, I just needed to come right out and say it. I can’t speak for the rest of America, but for me this was M. Night’s last chance to prove to me that he had any real talent or ability as a movie-maker, and he did just that. He proved that he used up all his skill in making his first two hit movies, and now he’s out of talent-juice. On the ill-advised chance that you’re going to go see this movie I won’t spoil anything for you, but let’s just leave it at this: the acting is bad, the writing is bad, the directing is bad. And unfortunately, M. Night has no one to blame but himself (the price you pay for being the sole writer/producer/director on a movie). I saw the movie for free and still felt like it was overpriced. Just like the namesake of Michael Jackson’s number one single from 1987, this movie is bad. On the upside, we have nothing but guaranteed hits on the movie horizon, so it won’t be long before we can collectively wash the taste out The Happening out of our mouths and replace it with the sweetness of Get Smart, Love Guru and Wall*E. Yum.

Well, my creativity just tanked like Kobe after the first quarter of last night’s game, so I’m gonna head out and have some fun.

Stay green,
Dustin



Separated at birth, maybe? Certainly can't deny the similarities...