By Asher Hancock:
This article provides accurate reviews of movie titles, with no correlation to the actual movies or plots themselves. This is just one of many articles to appear in the book that will be written about me after I die, adequately titled Musings of a Madman On Death Row, The Asher Hancock Story. The book will hopefully be written by Ernest Hemingway--assuming that he stops being dead--or Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor for the OJ Simpson case.
This is Spinal Tap
My first impression is that this movie is about a guy, maybe a chiropractor or something, who goes around killing villains vigilante style just by giving them a gentle tap on a specific pressure point in the spine. First of all, the first two words of the title, “this is,” are totally unnecessary. This shows me that the film is probably going to have a lot of extra scenes that don’t add to the movie. There’s only so much that can be done with the concept here so I feel like there's a lot of stalling. If this concept is meant to be serious, it is likely to end up making people laugh at the movie, not with it. I’m honestly intrigued by this, but the title should just be “Spinal Tap,” or “Spine Tapper.”
Rating: 4/10
Pulp Fiction
I don’t drink anything that has pulp in it, so I am a little biased on this matter, but if the pulp is only fictional as the title suggests then this movie might really have something to offer. Is the pulp fake, or was there even any pulp to begin with? Is it a Stranger Than Fiction type situation where a glass of orange juice realizes that it is the protagonist in a book after it starts hearing the author’s voice in its head? Is it a documentary that takes a cold hard look at the beverage pulp industry and how it is filled with chemicals that allow the government to control our minds? If the movie has any of these plots, then it must really suck and I intend never to watch it. Due to the fact that this movie is from Quentin Tarantino, the guy who made a movie about a bunch of dogs in a reservoir, I am not inclined to waste my time on this. This is Spinal Tap would definitely be a better watch.
Rating: 8/10
You may be wondering why I said the first sounds better than the second even though the second has a higher rating. So am I.
A Clockwork Orange
First pulp, now orange? Hollywood’s obsession with starting their morning with a little bit of OJ (not Simpson, but that applies to him too) is a little disheartening. I’m more of a coffee with a splash of vodka man myself. The first thing I notice is the consistency of this title. A clock is round and an orange is round so when you put that together they are both round. My second first impression is that this movie is a 12 hour shot of an orange with clock hands on it that has been engineered to function as a clock. My reason for thinking it is 12 hours is that 12 hours tends to be the time it takes for clock hands to make a full circle, unless you are living in Amish country. My instinct is that this would be boring, but after pondering it, I am now of the opinion that this would be a thought provoking statement on the correlation between eating fruit and time-zones. Much better than the first two movies.
Rating: 17/17.01
The Devil Wears Prada
Off the top of my head, if I were to outline the plot of this movie solely based off the title and without even looking anywhere else at all, it would be this:
In New York, the simple and naive just-graduated-in-Journalism Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is hired to work as the second assistant of the powerful and sophisticated Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the ruthless and merciless executive of the Runway fashion magazine. Andrea dreams to become a journalist and faces the opportunity as a temporary professional challenge. The first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt) advises Andrea about the behavior and preferences of their cruel boss, and the stylist Nigel (Stanley Tucci) helps Andrea to dress more adequately for the environment. Andrea changes her attitude and behavior, affecting her private life and the relationship with her boyfriend Nate (Adrien Grenier), her family and friends. In the end, Andrea learns that life is made of choices.
The casting choices are just that of who I would imagine to play these roles. Any parallels with the real movie just show my skill at analyzing titles. I think this plot is simple and a little boring.
Rating: 1/10 or 2/20 depending on the day
Silence of the Lambs
I was just thinking the other day about how much I wish lambs would just take the hint and shut up. This title has so much potential just in the fact that lambs are notoriously loud creatures and it is mind boggling how somebody might be able to silence them. Now that I think about it, the only way that could be silenced is by being slaughtered. The film opens with drone shots of lambs frolicking on colorful plains, cuts after 5 seconds to black and white footage of the slaughterhouse, dramatic opera music playing as the lambs one by one are forced into the ring with one another for a battle to the death, as I imagine happens in slaughterhouses. They are given their weapon of choice (the protagonist of the film choosing Arctic nunchucks, of course) and the losing lamb is effectively silenced by means of death while the lamb that comes out on top lives to see another battle. If that’s not what the movie is about then that’s what it should be. I’m coming up with some brilliant ideas. I hope someone is writing this stuff down.
Rating: Between 3 and 12 but it can’t be 7 and it can be 2 or 13.
The Breakfast Club
3 words: The Breakfast Club. This could be about two things. It could be about a discotheque that makes the controversial decision to only be open for breakfast hours and all of the craziness that would inevitably ensue. It could also be a comedy about the formation of a club of ragtag high school students, perhaps during detention, in which they discuss breakfast but never actually eat it and the hilarity that would inevitably ensue. I really hope there’s a court stenographer somewhere taking this down, because I am on a genre-crossing rampage of movies with guaranteed Rotten Tomato Scores of 95% and up. Also, just as a side note, my rating for this one will solely be based upon how much I like my own ideas and also the idea of wrapping a golf club in bacon.
Rating: 25 out of 12
Groundhog Day
I haven’t seen The Purge but I’m already drawing similarities between the two movies. My perception of The Purge is that it is about a day of the year where laws cease to exist and people can go around doing whatever they want with no consequences. Groundhog Day is clearly basically the same thing, but instead, for one day a year groundhogs and humans switch places in society. This means that a groundhog becomes president, and that all groundhogs stare at their phones to the point of feeling an emptiness deeper in their soul than any hole they’ve ever lived in. Speaking of holes, in Groundhog Day, humans would then dig holes with their hands and burrow up in them looking for grub such as insects and snails. Whenever a groundhog came out into the yard to see a human running around, they would immediately grab a baseball bat and chase the human back into its hole. In my mind, this is in a documentary format, as I’ve heard of this happening in Switzerland. I can’t imagine that it’s of very high quality because the groundhogs would have to be the ones filming on the day itself since the roles are reversed. All the testimonials would be groundhogs and they can’t talk so I don’t see how that would work. This premise is both genius, disturbing, and highly problematic all at once.
Rating: ?