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The Elite (I) (2001)
The best thing on TV... at 2:30 in the morning... if you don't count infomercials and C-SPAN.
13 February 2004
This review contains a conjecture about the ending of "The Elite," which occurred after I fell asleep. If you're some sort of freak who plans on watching this movie and doesn't want the ending sort of ruined, then don't read my review. And I sympathize with your pathetic life. :(

If only Terry Cunningham could direct the real world, too: everybody would have cool bulletproof gadgets and the morning news anchor would tell us stories of creamy-skinned twenty-somethings foiling the plans of less-than-ambitious terrorists. "The Elite" doesn't really give us the backstory of the villains, but I have to assume that nothing less than being picked last for dodgeball every single day at their terrorist training camp could give these people the brilliant idea of hijacking a video game conference. Maybe they couldn't find, say, an unsecured petting zoo or lemonade stand to attack, or maybe they thought that pimply, wheezy nerds make good hostages. Or maybe they're just not very good terrorists, evidenced by their outright inability to kill the titular protagonists trying to thwart them.

And speaking of the good guys, apparently in Terry Cunningham-land, "elite" means "marginally competent." Let's see who makes up this super-amazing team: We have a guy named Joel playing a guy named Joel. And there's a guy named Jason playing a guy named Jason. He's distinguished by the misogynistic jokes he makes in front of Lena, who is, surprisingly enough, not played by a woman named Lena. (As an aside, in Terry Cunningham-land, you don't laugh at jokes; instead, you merely question whether they were supposed to be funny.) Lena's main purpose in life is putting up with Jason as horny male viewers masturbate while she's on-screen. There's also the twins Keith and Derek who play the twins Keith and Derek, sharing some bizarre each-other fetish that even Freud would find a bit perplexing.

They're lead by Steven Williams, and when I say "They're lead by Steven Williams," I mean that they spend an inordinate amount of time looking at video screens showing Williams' disembodied head reading from the script. Special mention must be made of Williams' prodigious ability to project a single facial expression; even though we were already aware of his facial expression from his work in "The X-Files" and, let's say, the cinematic masterpiece "Bloodfist VII," we were never really sure what exactly that expression was. Now we know: it's the look of someone spending ninety minutes dumbfounded by the grating morons he's working with, questioning why he's the only cast member who isn't a blonde male bimbo and whether Scandinavia was having a sale on GQ models who should've just kept their mouths shut and never tried the delicate craft of acting.

So, for the casual viewer, if it isn't obvious that the team of hotties will ultimately defeat the terrorists in a battle slightly more exciting than the conflict between Tilex and mold, then you are probably a cast member of "The Elite." Personally, I fell asleep before the end, so if you're worried about the future of video game conventions, you'll have to waste your own life watching this movie. Maybe Cunningham will shock everybody by having his antagonists capture the good guys and drive them all insane by locking them in a room and forcing them to listen for days on end to Jason trying to get into Lena's pants. I don't know. But given that the terrorists could probably be defeated by an old man wielding a refrigerator magnet, I wouldn't bet on it.
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1/10
There's hope yet for all you dateless guys!
20 October 2002
The following is more of a summary of the movie than a review:

In "What To Do On A Date," Nick, a lovesick dork who sounds perpetually constipated, wants to go on a date with Kay, whose status as a member of the fairer sex is confirmed when she needs Nick's manly help to nail a paper elephant to a rafter. Nick calls up Kay, and asks her if she wants to go see a movie on Friday night. But Kay knows that in the darkness of the movie theater, Nick might put his arm around her shoulder or hold her hand, and that would cause their swell little fifties white suburban world to implode, so she rejects him. Fortunately, our flustered hero has some help from his smooth best friend Jeff and a fifty-year-old's Authoritative Disembodied Voice, who clearly knows what all the teenagers are into. They suggest all sorts of sanitized dating ideas for Nick and Kay, most of which involve doing things in a group so the teens can frustrate themselves trying to suppress their hormonal urges. Nick and Kay talk about various dull, non-sexual dating scenarios and Nick discovers a great pick-up line in the process: "Say, you like to do lots of things, don't ya?" Nick asks Kay if she'd like to go for a bike ride or a weenie roast or a bowling party or a baseball game or a taffy pull next Friday, and here we reach the climax of the movie: will Kay go on a second date with Nick, or will she dump him for somebody who's not such a loser, or will she spend Friday night listening to the Authoritative Disembodied Voice tell her about the importance of home economics? Will Nick continue to have a bland and asexual relationship with Kay, or will he find true friendship and companionship with Jeff, or will he become celibate and devote his life to nailing paper elephants into rafters?

But still, the fact that a socially inept loser like Nick can get a girl to go to the community center to set up a garage sale on a first date should give the rest of us hope.
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Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001)
Can we please get Chuck Norris a new facial expression?
28 July 2001
Seriously, this guy has the same self-satisfied countenance whether he's being coy with his wife or committing acts of police brutality on what have to be the world's most stereotypical criminals, whether he's at a big ol' Texas barbeque or watching the state execute a mentally retarded prisoner convicted despite the flimsy evidence against him.

Not that this is the worst flaw of the show. That honor would probably go to the way it patronizes women, children, the elderly, crime victims, members of any non-Caucasian ethnic group, and anybody else who doesn't routinely commit acts of gratuitous violence. Frankly, I'm getting so sick of Norris's holier-than-thou attitude that I want him to get run over by an ice cream truck or die in a horrible cow tipping accident to wipe that smug expression off his face.

The really sad part of "Walker" is that it's creator Paul Haggis's only show to really have any sort of life. While "Due South" lasted only three years and "EZ Streets" lasted only three episodes, this dumb brute of a show keeps on living in syndication. It's just another example of the symbiosis between network television and pure junk.
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