All right, Jesus didn't say that, I did. That's not the point.
I have not quit yet! Standing a mere 10 paces out from the starting blocks in this marathon of bad movies I've embarked upon, I can respond to questions of my impending early exit with an enthusiastic "Not yet!"
I watched Meet the Spartans. The Fiance watched Meet the Spartans. I laughed a handful of times, she laughed a handful of times, but I'll get to that in a minute.
This movie gave me -for the first time since my dramatic declaration last week- a realistic view on just how much of this metaphorical marathon will be uphill. The answer; all of it.
We watched the "Pit of Death" edition which the fiance clocked at an hour and 9 minutes (according to the blu-ray player... yes, we watched this on blu-ray). This creates two questions in my mind; first, I'm assuming that it's the "Pit of Death" edition because it has some kind of extra footage or something, how much extra footage could there possibly be in an hour and 9 minutes? Oddly, this is a harder question to answer than one would think. IMDb lists run-times of 86 and 84 minutes for Argentina and the UK respectively. I couldn't find a US run-time on IMdb, though netflix lists it at 89 minutes (I'm assuming we skipped 20 minutes of previews and credits). An hour and 9 minutes of actual movie is sparing (I choose my words carefully), which brings the second question; is the short run-time of this movie a sign that there might be some glint of self-awareness in the film's creators? Or is it just a sign of abject laziness? It's certainly not the former. A case could be made that this was not a result of laziness, that this is just the best that Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg can do. Based on the evidence from the "unrated" version, I could entertain that argument, but the number of times this movie showed any comic wit leaves no room for argument that there was any sort of "comic timing" involved in it's length (or, really anything else). Which leaves us at; Lazy or just really bad at what they do? I'm going with (c) "All of the above."
I did say earlier that there were a "handful" of times that The Fiance and I laughed. The aforementioned laughs? I can arrive at two; Leonidas (played by Sean Maquire, who also played the title character on Comedy Central's "Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire", and Jason Begley on Growing Pains) swore a few times that if the Spartans made the Persians attack through this narrow valley that "their numbers won't count for shit!". Side note- Kevin Sorbo (Hercules in the late 90's television series... um, Hercules) also had a supporting role in this movie. Two main actors with histories in "fantasy warrior" television series... hmmm.
The second chuckle; the entire existence of Ken Davitian (his IMDb photo is priceless- and inset
in this paragraph) . Ken Davatian played Xerxes, who's character was pretty consistently left out of crude, unfunny, jokes -save the his introduction which involves a nipple-ring tearing/staple gun incident... not funny. Anyway, Davatian's been around, the only role I could identify (and it was identified for us by the movie itself) was Borat, but he's at least not so much in your face obnoxious, which is saying something for this particular movie.Bonus chuckle: The scene with the oracle was mildly (and I stress mildly before I imply that any part of this movie was funny) funny. Also, the Spartan's skipping to battle. That's it.
This was essentially a feature length version of Hans Moleman's "Football in the Groin" padded with poor attempts at homophobia and "hot chicks", and dated-before-they-were-put-on-film pop culture references. The Fiance said it well (I'm paraphrasing); "You know a movie's bad when the 'hot women' aren't even that hot... I mean, how hard is it to get actual hot women, there's a lot of them."
That's why I'm marrying her.
Next movie: Marci X
I do this for science.
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