Easter Monday

Lisa and Derek offered their usual fine brand of hospitality this weekend… Too bad the weather didn't cooperate, but still, a fine time was had by all. With one exception: looking for something amusing to watch on Friday evening pay-per-view, our unfortunate (and in retrospect shockingly ill-advised, or at best deliriously optimistic) choice was Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. I will leave it to later generations to account for the cultural forces that led to this artifact; happily, we had The Incredibles around to wash the bad taste away.

This film marks the end of whatever residual good will I had for Jack Black, stemming from his amusing début as the most irritating and contrarian of all the arrested-adolescent characters in High Fidelity. He's undeniably talented (just watch the feel-good final scene of that film), but directors as various as Peter Jackson and the Farrelly Brothers have failed equally to find a use for him that works as well as that first film. He fails in King Kong playing an obsessed, wannabe-auteur clearly meant to be a low-rent Orson Welles but lacking anything like that kind of charisma, and fails even worse in The Holiday trying to play a straight romantic lead. But both of those performances are Oscar-worthy compared to the turd that is Tenacious D. That movie is not funny even in the way that turds can be funny, no matter how hard it tries to do just that. From now on I will take a fair bit of convincing to see another Jack Black film.

On another note, I saw Grindhouse last night and until well into the second part (Death Proof), was thinking of Rose McGowan as the breakout star. About halfway through Death Proof, though, I realized I was wishing that honour on Zoë Bell instead. She's a Kiwi stuntwoman who previously doubled for Lucy Lawless and Uma Thurman, and now gets a speaking role (basically playing herself) that lets her display some amazing charm as well as bravery – spending ten minutes of screen time clinging, in emphatically non-computer-generated fashion, to the hood of a muscle car while Kurt Russell tries to knock her off it. Can't wait to see what she does next.