"Zuh?" you're undoubtedly saying. Well, here's the skinny: longtime readers recall that I once "worked" for a bottom-rung film-review website. My friend Mark also wrote for the site, and both of us left with a great deal of disappointment and lessons learned. So last summer, in the midst of a Vicodin-fueled haze after my wrist surgery, I concocted the world's greatest idea (according to my drug-addled mind): we'd create our own bottom-rung film-review website. With the myriad lessons learned from our miserable experiences, we'd attempt to carve out own niche in the online world of film criticism.

Once the drugs wore off, this seemed like a terrible idea. However, a stone-cold sober Mark loved the idea and kind of forced me to see it through, by virtue of the fact that I hate disappointing other people (and consequently end up disappointing myself). While I designed the site, Mark and I hashed out what we'd write about -- what angle could we come up with to get readers who typically fall through the cracks of film sites? We came up with some ideas that may prove unsuccessful, but we're going forward out of a combination of stupidity and bravado.

We got around 10 responses, which is not particularly great, but considering we only wanted four contributors, we had a decent pool. We had four great applicants, three okay applicants, and the other three were just sort of embarrassing. One guy literally wrote, "I'm a local standup comic, and I'd like to be a film critic." That was the entire e-mail. No resume, no writing samples. But I guess beggars can't be choosers.

Meanwhile, Mark and I started watching movies, as many as possible, so we have a decent amount of content when we launch. I responded to the four great applicants with more details, heard back from only two, so we moved on to the second tier.

I didn't like this move much, because one of the applicants who didn't respond after the details graduated from Northwestern's journalism school and asked all the right questions. Also, she was a chick, and I wanted to have some diversity on the site, to avoid having to buy "SausageFest.com" back from some porn king or another. But we apparently didn't have all the right answers, so she opted out. That's fine, but that left us with a second-tier chick who had some fairly bad writing samples. Mark and I agreed, perhaps out of desperation, that we saw potential in her that, perhaps, we could help her tap into. Also, she had experience as a copywriter and a pretty big agency, so we just chalked the samples up to the fact that they came from a blog (which are not known for impeccable spelling/grammar or probing insight, as longtime readers of this blog know). The fact that she didn't bother to even polish them before sending us links didn't bowl either of us over, but we figured we should give her a chance.

I assigned her a review during our dry-run period before launch. She sent it to me last night, and it was strangely terrible. She dug deeper, as we requested, and came up with some substantive ideas, but the writing itself was garbled and incoherent. Awful sentence structure, poor word choice, stream-of-consciousness rambling. It really surprised me that she not only worked as a copywriter but had a degree in communications from a reputable university.

So, operating under the assumption that (a) she padded her resume and (b) she was possibly hot, I started Google-stalking. Luckily, she has a fairly offbeat name, making it easy to find hits for her. True to her word, she did work as a copywriter at an ad agency for a few years, but she got laid off. True to her word, she attended the college she claimed to and has a communications degree. And, true to my theory, she is pretty hot.

The conundrum kicks in at this point: I sent the review to Mark, who has no problem whatsoever with cutting her loose immediately, not using her review, and scrambling to find another interested female (Amelia declared her interest, but after the script debacle, she's a last resort). I argued that she made a few decent points and that the main flaw -- her spelling/grammar/diction issue -- is something that falls under the heading of "editor." If it gets obscene, we can have a talk about it. In fact, Mark and I split the writers in half, and we decided I should take our female reviewer and a different male reviewer. Why? Because they're both local, and Mark isn't, and (1) we suspected problems with the female and (2) we want to kiss the ass of the male (long story). E-mails, I think, can suffer from a misinterpretation of tone. We figured meeting in-person -- something I'd like to do with the staff on a semi-regular basis -- might help to gently nudge her in the right direction, rather than alienating.

"Sounds reasonable," you're saying. "Where's the conundrum?" I refer you to the part where she's hot.

See, I'm a male. I like hot women. I mainly want to bang them, but most of them are too good for me, so I settle for friendship and the vain hope that I can slide in after a bad breakup for some "sympathy." I've succeeded in this twice in my life, so I don't know why I continue to pursue it, except for the part where I'm a male and I like hot women. So I feel like, not-so-deep down, my main interest in "helping" this writer, and defending her against married Mark's quick dismissal, is that I want to bang her.

Should I side with Mark, or with my throbbing erection? It's a question for the ages, and for the moment, I vote "boner."

Without having seen the movie, I speculate that everything that's gone wrong with Five Killers can be traced to the title change: from the fairly specific (or, at least, enigmatically intriguing) Five Killers to the generic, not-at-all-compelling Killers. I say this based mainly on promos that fancy this a wacky, action-packed romance a la Date Night or Did You Hear About... God, I'm bored before I even finish the title of that piece of shit. They don't get into what the script is actually about, which is disappointing, because it's actually a funny story. I've complained a lot about the spy scripts I had to endure during the last half of 2008 and first half of 2009, but Five Killers was among the cream of the crop.

Even though I mostly liked the script (and The Spy Next Door, for that matter, although it turns out I read a different one than the script that actually got made), it got me thinking about the whole spy thing again. Much like changing from Five Killers to Killers, the fact that the overwhelming majority of the spy scripts I had to read were comedies -- even if they're good comedies -- speaks volumes about the hackery that has slowly corroded Hollywood. I think the prevailing mentality is, "Every story's been done, so there's no sense in trying to engage an increasingly aloof audience with pathos and drama in a story they've already seen." Writing a spy comedy is easier. Conventional (wrong) wisdom tells you the spy plot doesn't matter, and if it gets so hole-filled it resembles John Holmes's underwear circa 1979, you just insert a quick scene of characters trying to figure out the plot and lapping themselves. Pointing out the shortcomings of your script is way easier than fixing it.

More than that, you can hide from real emotion and suspense by undercutting anything serious with a wacky, unexpected moment. It's sort of like Hollywood is now catering to the "nervous giggle" reaction many people have to visceral moments in horror movies. Now, the audiences don't have to feel like depraved/confused monsters laughing at graphic depiction of murders, because the movie says it's okay to laugh. Maybe I'm off-based on that assumption, but I do know that inserting cheap laughs just when the characters are about to feel and/or express genuine emotions like "fear" or "manimal lust," the writers back away from it and slide in a joke. Maybe it goes back to the mentality in the previous paragraph: why bother inserting (so to speak) a genuine romantic subplot or legitimate suspense when everybody's just going to call it hackneyed and predictable? That's fucking lame, guys. Sac up and go for emotional truth, not ironic detachment.

Three years later, Spencer's settled down, all right. He runs a successful architectural design firm and lives in a McMansion development called New Ealing. Jen -- well, she's married to Spencer, but she doesn't matter as much as she should. Her main issue throughout the script is that she may be pregnant, but she isn't sure how to tell Spencer -- see, he's busy and stressed, and he's frequently chastising Jen for the amount of time she spends with her parents (who retired to New Ealing). Here's where things get weird: I was ranting about the lack of emotional truth, so here the writers try to slide in some pathos, but it feels all wrong for this story. Maybe because it's so familiar, maybe because something so leaden and serious doesn't fit the light, breezy tone, maybe both. Strangely, the writers have a much stronger, less exploited problem for Jen to overcome -- her dependence on her parents. The writers use this to allow Spencer to pick meaningless fights with Jen, and for Jen to dump exposition on people who aren't Spencer, but it never feels like a real component to her character. There's a twist ending involving the parents, which I won't reveal here, but it would allow for an interesting way for a married 20-something to break free from parents with whom she's fully enmeshed. More than that, it'd add a bit of nuance to the twist -- which is inevitable but not predictable, narrowly avoiding the bad twist category -- and give Jen a real arc instead of a cheesy conflict that's ultimately meaningless.

Back to the first act: on his birthday, while Jen eagerly plans a surprise party, Spencer receives a call from his ex-handler, Holbrook, who speaks mostly in code. Holbrook intimates that a man above their faux Blofeld may have been identified. Spencer reminds Holbrook that he's out, but he's warned to keep his guard up. When Spencer returns home to a dark, empty house, his suspicion is raised. He draws his gun, and -- surprise! It's the birthday party. Never seen that before.

So you might be wondering, "Why the fuck did you like this script, Stan?" Well, here's where it gets good: the script takes its time establishing the friends/neighbors/employees. These include: cougar Olivia, UPS man Milo, real-estate agent Don Nootbar (no, really -- this is Jen's asshole boss), the Baileys (Mac and Lily, who run a rival design firm), architect Henry, creepy construction guy Manuel, intern Yasuko, stoned delivery guy Josh, secretary Mrs. Tomlinson, and annoying next-door neighbor Jackie. This also includes Jen's parents, the Kornfelds, and her best friend, Maggie. After taking time to introduce each of these characters, Spencer is attacked by Henry the morning after his birthday. Spencer's both shocked and baffled. During a lengthy fight, Jen comes home (after an early visit to her parents). She's shocked and a little horrified. While he attempts to kick Spencer's ass, Henry dumps out the relevant exposition: he's a sleeper assassin who got the "green light" to kill Spencer today. There's a $20 million bounty on his head, and Spencer's not the only assassin looking for him. A car chase follows, as Spencer and Jen try to flee town, with Henry on their tail. During the chase, Spencer reveals everything about his past to Jen, then lures Henry to a construction site, where he crushes Henry with a bulldozer. Jen is horrified.

Spencer decides it'd be a good idea to meet up with Holbrook, but he's dead in a nearby motel room. He has one clue: five numeric codes. Spencer tries to convince Jen to leave town with him, but she refuses. She thinks they should go back and ask her father for advice. The ensuing argument causes Jen to blurt out that she may be pregnant. She's been too afraid to take a home pregnancy test. They both go to a supermarket to buy one, but both are jumpy. Spencer nearly pulls his gun on an innocent stock boy. Spencer explains that "the Leopard" is a mysterious arms dealer who likely wants Spencer dead for killing his right-hand man. Because they can't go home, Spencer takes Jen to his office (it's Saturday, so it's empty) to take the test. If you're wondering why he'd think assassins wouldn't come looking for him at his business, so am I. And, apparently, so are the assassins, one of whom (Yasuko, Spencer's intern) shows up while Jen is busy taking the test. Ironically, Manuel, the creepiest and most terrifying of his employees, turns out to be legitimate (the assassin has him tied up in a closet). It's an easy joke, but I laughed.

When Spencer realizes the numeric codes are bank account numbers, Jen realizes she can trace them through the realty office where she works -- if all the assassins settled into New Ealing, they'd have to buy property. While Jen looks through records at the real estate office, cougar Olivia and UPS man Milo show up. Both are assassins, and Spencer dispatches them with relative ease (compared to Henry and Yasuko). I was ready to be angry at the whole "bank account" development, but it turns out to be less of a plot hole than it seems. Any rational person with a vaguely criminal mind would instantly say, "Wouldn't successful assassins be smart enough to not buy property using the same bank accounts they use to receive illicit money?" Well, Jen ends up finding nothing in the real estate office. It's basically just a bland suburban location to serve another wacky fight sequence. In Olivia's pocket, Spencer finds a business card for the Baileys' design business. This arouses their suspicions -- the Baileys are way too classy for Olivia. This forces Spencer and Jen to infiltrate the Baileys' big block party, which pretty much occupies the full extent of the third act. Who is the fifth assassin? Who is the Leopard? Were the direct-deposit accounts just a red herring? Go see the movie and find out. Hopefully they didn't chuck the script completely.

You might still be wondering, "Why did you like this script, Stan? For the love of Christ, it doesn't sound funny at all." Well, that's kind of the point: the story is a straightforward thriller with jokes. Some are funny, some aren't, but overall, the script clicked with me. It doesn't tread too much on unfunny suburban satire -- the suburban setting becomes a familiar playground rather than a source for cutting-edge humor involving pink flamingos and bowling. I also appreciated the overall sense of paranoia -- in a world where literally everyone is suspect, Spencer's itchy trigger finger becomes a frequent running joke. Mainly, I'm just a sucker for stories that thrust average people into the spy world. Not talking about Spencer here -- I actually wish this story had been told more from Jen's point of view. Lose the boring pregnancy subplot and give the audience the same disorienting feelings she's having, thinking she knows her husband, realizing he's been lying (or, at least, hiding the truth) for as long as she's known him, but she's forced to adapt or else she's dead.

A much more significant problem comes from the assassins. They don't really have personalities so much as over-the-top traits. That sort of makes sense, because they're living, breathing cover stories, and as master con artist Stephen J. Cannell always says, people are less likely to suspect you of being a fraud if you're comically over-the-top. I don't know how well that plays out in the real world, but it sure seems to work for Jim Rockford and the A-Team. However, they continue to adopt their cover personalities long after their cover is blown. There are some amusing observational jokes, but they don't actually make any sense because these assassins are not their cover identities.

It occurred to me halfway through the script that this is a blown opportunity. This really sprang up through the combination of these ill-fitting jokes and the fact that Spencer dispatches four of the five assassins with relative ease. So you have five trained assassins adopting disparate cover identities to lay low in the suburbs for reasons they don't even know, to pursue a target they won't know, all with the hopes of earning an eventual $20 million payout. They're not working other jobs -- they're fully committed to waiting for this job to pay out. Humans are adaptive creatures. They get used to things pretty quickly and easily. Initially, these assassins descend on New Ealing without much concern for their fake homes or their fake jobs, but it's their real job to adapt. They have to get to know their neighbors and coworkers, they have to be good enough at their jobs to not get fired. At a certain point, they'd start to get invested, and before long, they stop being cold-blooded assassins and start being the bland suburbanites they were originally pretending to be.

This kills two birds with one stone: the fact that they've gotten soft explains why Spencer (who legitimately is soft, since he gave up the trade) has so little trouble dispatching the world's best assassins, and it also allows for the weirdly entertaining, distracted asides from assassins who seem more interested in their lawn or their clothes than meeting their objective. Maybe the writers were going for this angle at a certain point but decided to cut it in favor of pregnancy histrionics. Bad choice.

Overall, though, I liked the script enough to refer to it as a "perfect date movie" in my coverage. I'll probably live to regret that overstatement, but the script is fun enough and decent enough to warrant it, despite its flaws.

Sometimes I get busy. Longtime readers know my comically inconsistent posting routine is one of the few charms of Stan Has Issues™. I did like the habit of posting one script review a week. That was something I figured I could handle, because even if I got busy, I could write several when things were slow and post them when I anticipated getting busy. I had it all planned, on an assembly line, with spreadsheets and dates and I'll do this script for this week and that script for that week.

It all fell apart when (a) release dates for films whose scripts I'd already read professionally kept getting pushed back, (b) I had zero interest and negative motivation in reading different scripts to substitute my original picks, and (c) my planning went to shit, so I suddenly stopped preparing reviews in anticipation of getting busy, and instead posted pathetic rants about women. I'm okay with the pathetic rants. In fact, as you may have noticed from the disclaimer, I don't really consider these script reviews to be actual "content." I much prefer either ranting about general screenwriting trends or chaotic broads, idiot friends, and why nobody but me knows how to drive. I just find myself lacking the time to accomplish the feat of writing about what's going on with me. Not to sound glib, but I'm 100% serious when I say I'm too busy living life to blog about it. I know -- weird, huh?

Instead, it's time for a little Harry Brown. Let me use this script as a little pulpit for why I hate like this shit -- the tolerate it because it provides the same cheap thrills they used to get in slasher movies, and the writers do usually take the time to insert some semi-embarrassing explanation for why the "heroes" deserve the torture, effectively turning the psychotic killer into the hero.

I'll settle for a decent revenge flick, and Harry Brown's script is decent. Remember how I complained that Law-Abiding Citizen was way too stupid to have the grim pretension of serious drama, and that having a little fun with its idiocy would have improved it greatly? Harry Brown does the exact same thing, yet Young makes it work. Why is that? Is it because those crazy Brits make movies for adults instead of semi-retarded teenagers who think things like, "He was crawling through a hole in the toilet the whole time? AWESOME!!!!"? (Some of you may be thinking, "But Britain lets Guy Ritchie make movies, and his are way stupider than ours!" You're right, but even his worst movies -- yes, even Swept Away -- have that sense of goofy fun that our brooding, deadly serious yet laughably stupid action movies lack.)

If I were to pin a reason to any one element of the script, I'd choose "point of view." Gary Young keeps the action in Harry Brown closely tied to its main character. Everything is filtered through the way he sees the world, so the cartoonishly over-the-top gangs and the unabashed fear of technology all works, because it fits the way Harry views the world. On the contrary, Law-Abiding Citizen doesn't limit itself in any way, so the stupidity of its plot can't be traced to a brilliant point-of-view tactic. It might have worked if the script had been written solely from Jamie Foxx's perspective as the world's worst/stupidest prosecutor, but nope -- they went all omniscient on us.

Harry Brown owes a massive debt to Death Wish. I'm talking "Based on the screenplay/novel" massive. Aside from the London setting, its few changes to the model of the original Death Wish are, in fact, lifted from the Death Wish sequels: Harry is inspired to take action when an old friend/war buddy is murdered by a teen gang (this, I believe, was the setup to Death Wish 3, which contains a genuinely spectacular urban warfare sequence in its third act), and his military background means he doesn't need extensive weapons training courtesy of Angel from The Rockford Files (which is pretty much how all the Death Wish sequels pan out -- Bronson loses his urban left-wing pacifism in a hurry once he finds out how easy it is to be a vigilante).

These changes enhance the script, to some extent. Most people would say, "Raise the stakes -- a war buddy he hasn't seen in 50 years isn't strong enough to motivate Harry's change," but Young makes it work. Through the first act, he portrays Harry as tiring of his forced fearfulness. He's sick of having to choose alternate routes to avoid teen gangs. He's sick of his neighbors being attacked. He's sick of the general lack of respect shown to the elders. So when he, himself, is assaulted by a young punk, Harry's Marine training kicks in, and he kills the kid with his bare hands.

This sets Harry on a trajectory that, as I mentioned, follows the Death Wish model pretty rigidly: his vigilante antics escalate, arousing the suspicions of a detective (to be played by super-hot Emily Mortimer, guaranteeing it will be seen and possibly masturbated to by yours truly) who struggles with enforcing the law. She suspects Harry, but she can't exactly prove it -- and, on some level, she doesn't want to. Ignoring my embarrassing infatuation with Mortimer, I sort of appreciated Young for bringing a bit of femininity into the script with her character, DI Frampton. More than that, he tries to hit on that tricky gray area I love so much: Frampton ultimately becomes a vigilante of a different sort, investigating of her own accord when she's removed in favor of a pathetic violence task force (the kind of thing that looks good on TV but accomplishes virtually nothing). The third act escalates with a Deash Wish 3-esque gangs vs. cops riot, during which Frampton finally finds Harry. The script takes all the expected turns in the third act, but as I ranted before, it allows the audience to have that satisfying emotional release.

Just like Death Wish, it goes awry with Frampton's pursuit. She's more compelling than Vincent Gardenia, and I liked the idea of her working against her superiors' wishes, but she's not a strong antagonist. It's a combination of her secretly supporting Harry's agenda and simply never being able to find him. She does very little to impede his vigilante progress. Similarly, Young paints Noel -- the thug who killed Harry's war buddy -- as Harry's ultimate nemesis, but it's not exactly a taut game of cat and mouse. It's mainly Harry hearing Noel might show up somewhere, then arriving a few minutes after ignorant Noel left. The script could have benefited greatly from strengthening both Noel and Frampton as villains, which would give Harry more palpable opposition from both sides of the law. For instance, if Noel knows what's motivating Harry -- that he's Public Enemy #1, and Harry's killing people in pursuit of him -- he could react to that a little more rashly and violently, making it more difficult for Harry to get at him. Same deal with Frampton: make her a stronger investigator, somebody who's always on Harry's ass, just waiting for him to slip up. Also, give her several full-frontal nude scenes. Germane to the plot, of course -- changing in the police locker room, masturbating while bored on a long stakeout. Plenty of opportunities for tasteful yet explicit nudity.

Sorry, I got lost in thought for a minute. At any rate, Harry Brown is derivative but decent, and they could have done much worse than casting Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer in the lead roles. As long as the director doesn't get overbearing with the grim tone -- I'm fine with grim, but there's no purpose in getting relentless with it -- this could be an entertaining, effective thriller.

The second-funniest thing I've read in awhile: The Sneeze -- The Great Pizza Orientation Test

The funniest thing I've looked blankly at for a few seconds before realizing what I'm looking at: Special Pizza Hut Instructions

Good times!

It's difficult, though, because every six months, I have this woman throwing herself at me, desperately wishing I'd just fucking ask her out already. And she's really fucking hot. Do you realize what a rarity this is in the curmudgeonly world of Stan? Tragically, it's not as rare as you'd think, but it's always unwanted attention that leaves me feeling awkward, and the end result is hilarious alienation of the other party.

Not so with Dentist Chick, however. It's a little easier because we have an infrequent, business-oriented relationship. She can flirt with me all she wants, but eventually she has to get back to the billing and scheduling, and that's my cue to run out the door before I either demand sex or try to offer protection against memories of her abusive stepfather. Yeah, it's weird being me.

"[Dentist's] office, this is [Dentist Chick]," she said.

What the hell do I do with that? Do I go into suave ladies' man mode and drop my name right off the bat, or do I keep pretending this is strictly a formal relationship?

I opted for the latter: "I need to make an appointment to see the dentist."

I explained the symptoms, and she found an appointment that week and asked for my name.

"I, uh... It's Stan," I said sheepishly.

"Oh, hey!" she said gleefully, shedding her professional air. "How are you?"

"I'm awesome, except for this tooth."

"Oh. Right."

"Yeah. So, I'll...see you tomorrow?"

"I get off at four." (My appointment was at 5:30.)

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"Huh."

"Well, I hope you feel better."

"Yeah, thanks."

And that was pretty much it.

I went in for the appointment, and the dentist had a hard time identifying which tooth was the source of the sensitivity. X-rays showed my teeth were as good as a fucked-up set of chompers can be -- nothing glaringly diseased. He sent me to an endodontist for clarification, which was a bizarre experience in and of itself, but the end result was narrowing down the correct tooth but no root cause (no pun intended, I swear). The endodontist shrugged that I should probably ride it out. In his expert opinion, if it got better, it'd go away altogether. If it got worse, I could just as easily have a root canal in two weeks as I could that day. He seemed cranky that he couldn't identify a cause, being that this was his wheelhouse.

So I let it ride. This was three weeks ago. Last week, I took a vacation to see my sister and her adorable baby. By the time I went out there, not much had changed except I'd gotten better at avoiding cold liquids and foods, which made it seem like the sensitivity was going away. Not so, as my many forgetful cold-water tooth-brushings attested. I decided, if it wasn't gone by the time I got home, I'd call for the root canal. I dreaded the cost more than the procedure, so I really wanted to put it off if at all possible.

But I got back home, and holy fuck was it ever not going away. I called the dentist and scheduled the root canal (this time, Dentist Chick did not answer).

I went in for the root canal today, and there was Dentist Chick, eagerly greeting me like a faithful lapdog I want to have sex with.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey, Stan," she said warmly. "Come on back."

At which point confusion overpowered me. I shit you not, the four or five times I'd seen her at the dentist's office, she'd been sitting behind the big desk with all the computers and files. I'd never seen her do anything beyond reception, scheduling, and billing. Was she giving me some sort of personal touch (so to speak...?) because we went to school together? Or --

She showed me to the chair and started prepping little matchsticks with that goopy numbing agent they apply before jabbing you full of lidocaine. "I hope you like the taste of artificial raspberries," she joked. It was actually pretty funny -- she was blowing my plans not to try to sleep with her by being witty. I was still confused. Did she have training? Had she volunteered to assist because she knew me? Was this a random assignation? I NEED ANSWERS!

She gave answers. I swear to you, she talked like she was setting up exposition in the early scenes of a horribly written screenplay. She said things like (actual quote), "We used to listen to [radio station] every day when I worked in physical therapy for four years." Ladling on as much personal information as she possibly could...to what end? Just being friendly?

Eventually she said, "I told you I have a three-year-old, right?"

Now, we've been Facebook friends for awhile, but I didn't want to let on too much. Her profile itself doesn't say anything about the kid, but she has tons of pictures of him -- all of which I waded through, looking for ones of her in bikinis and hot Halloween costumes. (No, female readers, I am not a despicable alien creature. I'm just a guy.) I took a beat before saying, "No, you didn't. That's awesome!" Too much enthusiasm, Stan! Come on, break it down!

She saw my enthusiasm and raised me: "I have a recent picture of him. I just brought them to work today." Coincidence? Probably. But what about her literal sprint across the busy dental office to grab a picture to show me? I could tell the luster had sort of worn off the kid himself -- she referred to him as a "vampire" and made numerous jokes about his pallid skin and creepy teeth after I cheerfully lied about how cute he is -- so this felt like it was about her bringing me into her life. It really did feel like she wanted to jam every moment of the last 10 years into the few minutes we waited for my jaw to go numb.

Then things got even weirder. She asked me about a beloved teacher we shared in high school. I told her the last I'd heard, he and his wife retired to upstate New York (where he grew up). That had passed about 10 minutes earlier, but when the dentist returned to test the numbness, she pointedly brought up the teacher again, expressing surprise about his retirement plans, and then even-more-pointedly explained our shared past to the hilarious disinterested dentist.

What was this dance? Why did I feel like the only way to make it stop was to ask her out? Why did I spend the rest of the time plotting how to ask her out without humiliating myself as a result of the numbed-up jaw? (The end result: I need to return next week for him to fill the root canal, for some reason, but it's a boon for me. The procedure requires much less numbness, which will allow me to slide in for a quick ask-out with minimal embarrassment. That's right: the war room has planned a new campaign.) All this, despite the fact that I know the kid thing spells bad news, I know I can't do one-night stands without dragging them out for months, I know I'm not really in a good financial or emotional place to start anything resembling a relationship, and I suspect she's already invested more in this not-yet-in-existence relationship than I ever will.

What is my obsession with careening toward failure, knowing it's coming but still making that retarded headlong leap in its direction? Look at me, right here: I am stating emphatically that I know this is a disaster waiting to happen, probably the worst thing for both of us right now, yet I'm still scheming and intending to go for it. Such is the power of the penis.

One of my friends got a short story published in a little horror magazine. It's from the point of view of a little girl who's a little too sheltered and innocent to realize how fucked up her mother is. Gradually, as the story unfolds, you realize the mother is fucked up beyond all hope, and that this little girl is not a girl at all: in infancy, the mother heated a skillet until it was red-hot and burned off her "tail," an act she planned to repeat on the girl's new sister. For those who aren't into subtlety, the tail was...A PENIS.

I wish I had that a mother like that.

Is funny enough?

I'm not trying to blow your mind. I just think that's Hot Tub Time Machine's unintended central dramatic question. Because, honestly, it is funny...but it's not much more. It's filled to the brim with what I call "empty laughs." I frequently use the pilot of How I Met Your Mother as an example. I sat there and laughed my ass off for 22 minutes, and when it ended, I shrugged and said, "That wasn't very good." The characters ranged from bland (Ted) to irritatingly over-the-top (Barney), the episodic story wasn't terribly compelling, the premise seemed extremely limited (I'm amazed they've sustained it this long), and the "surprise ending" (Aunt Robin!) blew ass. Although it consistently made me laugh, it didn't really make me do much else (and not for a lack of trying). Frankly, I want more than that, even in a crappy CBS sitcom. I know I'm a creepy alien in the current culture, but I like entertainment that makes me think and feel -- not a string of cheap laughs predicated on ironic detachment and obvious pop-culture references. I don't even mind cheap laughs like that as long as they're entrenched in something with a bit of depth. Maybe I'm missing something special in How I Met Your Mother, but based on the fact that promos show they still use "suit up" (a gag that came close to getting stale before the pilot episode ended), holy shit am I glad I didn't stick with it.

Hot Tub Time Machine is a lot like that. It's one of the rare comedy scripts that's actually funny on the page, but to get back to the opening question, is that enough? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Adam and Nick come up with the ingenious plan to go to Kodiak Valley, a ski town in the mountains where they had tons of great memories from high school. For some reason, the writers attempt to ruin the script by forcing them to take Adam's college-aged nephew, Jacob, along for the trip. He's the aforementioned superfluous character. He's given nothing interesting to do and is fucking annoying from beginning to end. I guess the writers probably thought bringing a "contemporary" teen into the past would make the story more palatable to the teen audience, but that barely makes sense from a commercial standpoint and it never makes any narrative sense. They never make it believable that these three guys would want or let Jacob tag along, and they insist on giving his worthless subplot equal time with the others. Come on, guys. I've seen High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank, so I know you're better than this. Then again, I've also seen Accepted and Serendipity, so I know you're also worse than this. I guess it's a wash.

At any rate, going to Kodiak Valley makes all three of the guys even more depressed. It's a dilapidated husk of its former mid-'80s glory. The only thing worth doing is getting drunk and talking pathetically about their failed lives, and how deeply rooted their paths were in one fateful 1986 weekend. Lou cracks open some booze, which includes what he calls "Russian Red Bull," known as "Chernobly." If you guessed this mystery substance and a malfunctioning hot tub were on a collision course for wackiness, congratulations! Dumb as it is, I found it funny that spilling a black-market Soviet drink on the hot tub's working parts cause them to travel through time.

The guys wake up back in time. Although we continue to see them as middle-aged losers, their mirror reflection shows their teen selves -- with the exception of Jacob. Further proving his uselessness in this story, he's shown exactly the same, because he wasn't born in 1986. Guys, that's not clever: it's a wake-up call. EXCISE HIM. Oh shit, I forgot the movie comes out this week. It's a little late to fix that problem.

The start of the second act has the guys figuring out what happened, and it derives plenty of laughs from their feeble-minded attempts to figure out why it happened. Mostly, they rely on their knowledge of previous time-travel movies to piece together. At first, they all decide to replay the weekend exactly as it happened, to avoid any horrible "butterfly effect" scenarios. However, the instant Adam sees his old girlfriend, it occurs to him that maybe changing the weekend is the best thing for his miserable present-day life. As the guys start to encounter old wounds (like Lou running into a ski patrol flunky who once kicked his ass), they all start to think changing the past is the best solution for all their present-day problems.

This should be a great way to set up the second half of the film, but instead it's the script's fatal flaw: the moment the guys separate to pursue their own separate goals, the story loses momentum rapidly. There are many reasons for this, and unfortunately all of them are rooted in sloppy writing.

Adam's dogged pursuit of Jenny, a girlfriend he dumped in the original timeline, is funny because she reveals herself to be vapid, slutty, devious, and violent -- and Adam realizes this, but he continues to rationalize the behavior and convinces himself she really is the key to his future happiness. The writers lose focus on this when he meets April, who becomes his real love interest. This relationship is nowhere near as interesting or entertaining as Adam and Jenny. Aside from being the inimitable Craig Robinson, Nick has zero character development until too late. Following him seems meaningless until we learn, late in the second act, that his wife has been cheating on him for months, and he's upset and looking for revenge. His overreaction (which ultimately includes calling the nine-year-old version of his future wife to apologize for cheating on her) provides some good laughs, but the subplot and character don't have arcs so much as big, isosceletic bursts as the second act shifts into the third. As the script's most pathetic character, Lou's obsession with a meaningless fight is arguably the script's most entertaining yet endearing subplot. Saddling him for most of the script with superfluous Jacob hinders that, however, as does Lou's apathy when he gets his ass kicked (again) and immediately moves on to figuring out how to make himself rich in the future. Aside from all that, the script devotes far too much time and energy to two subplots that are even more superfluous than Jacob: Lou obsessively trying to have a threesome (because his present-day wife refuses), and a couple of non-time-travelers hunting Commies after they find the Chernobly cans.

All of this builds to an ending that I won't spoil, but let me just say this: it's way too upbeat. I'm not looking for a grim ending where they come back to find themselves slaves of giant half-man, half-insect overlords. Just remember Back to the Future's solidly middle-of-the-road ending: Marty's parents' lives aren't that shitty in the "original" timeline, and they aren't that great in the "alternate" timeline -- but things are very definitely better, and they're all happier. Hot Tub Time Machine goes too far, making the characters' happiness (relative to where they started) far greater than any of them deserve.

Hot Tub Time Machine is never better than when it's pondering the possibilities of time travel. It's great that it isn't just a bunch of geeks nerding out about how time travel may or may not work, but the script just dies in the second half of the second act. It never recovers, despite a few clever moments in the third act and strong comedy throughout. The characters are saddled with too many goals and too little jeopardy. It disappointed me because so many clever ideas and funny jokes are wasted in this subpar script. That fact disappointed me when I started seeing trailers and promos: great cast, okay script, but holy fuck does this look like a turkey. I'm astounded by how fucking awful the trailers are. I know they're misleading by design, and let's be honest: has there ever been a comedy trailer that's actually funny? I know people often say things like, "All the funny scenes were in the trailer," but come on. Comedy trailers are all wacky record scratches and elderly people making dick and shit jokes. If you've ever laughed at a comedy trailer, you need to kill yourself. (Exception: if you, without ever doing anything more than smiling, look at the cast and the alleged premise and think, "That could be good, even though nothing in this trailer comes close to being funny," you're still okay in my book.)

Just like Hot Tub Time Machine, I've lost focus on what matters. Bottom line: I can't figure out what the hell went wrong here, but a script with a lot of potential ends up with a shoulder shrug and a "weak consider" (the coward's "pass" -- pro-tip from the sausage factory: never pass on a script with major stars attached, even if it's dire) from yours truly. The opening question was not rhetorical: unless your goal is to make bland, forgettable crap (*cough*Seth MacFarlane*cough*), funny alone is not enough. A screenplay is always funnier when it's firing on all cylinders. Once the story is solid, the characters are compelling, and the themes are clear but not heavy-handed, that's when you go back and start punching up the jokes. (And, let's be clear, if you have all your authorial ducks in a row but the shit ain't funny, you still have a problem.) Unless you'd rather make Good Luck Chuck than The Apartment.

Has it been almost a month? Jeez, my combo of laziness and apathy sure make the time fly. Here's the problem with February: with the exception of Dread and most of Frozen, I didn't get paid to read any of those scripts. Not a single one. And honestly, I just couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to read the copies of The Wolfman, Shutter Island, and A Couple of Dicks (a.k.a. Cop Out) that I've had sitting on my hard drive for months, specifically for last month. I just said, "Fuck it." When I can't muster up the enthusiasm to want to see these movies, imagine how hard it is to get me the scripts when you aren't waving a check in my face. And even that bites me in the ass. (Yeah, I just finished doing my taxes -- I always forget what a shit-ton I end up having to pay because I'm technically "self-employed" and, therefore, my pay isn't taxed until I get my 1099-MISC, fill out all those stupid forms, and shout obscenities when I see the amount I owe.)

I'll be honest: March probably won't fare much better. The majority of scripts I planned to review got delayed. Hot Tub Time Machine is the lone exception, so those of you who are into these reviews can look forward to that in a few weeks. I also read a script that's a lot like Brooklyn's Finest, but it's not Brooklyn's Finest, so maybe I'll toss that up for shits and giggles. Otherwise, I'll either be dusting off odds 'n' ends like I am today, or I'll actually produce real content. By that, I mean I'll do my Andy Rooney schtick about current Hollywood conventions that I don't like. I'll probably also talk a little more about masturbation and/or why my friends are all idiots.

Anyway, enough of my bullshit... Let's enjoy a review of a script you'll probably never read, which in no way resembles the film it turned into!

Remember the basic setup to Action? (Hint: not to alienate you, gentle reader, more than usual, but if you don't know what I'm talking about, and you're interested in screenwriting, something in your life has gone awry.) Dorky nobody writer suddenly finds himself approaching the A list simply because one of the biggest producers in Hollywood confuses him for an established writer? I had a similar situation crop up about a year ago, when I received the screenplay for Joe Ballarini's The Spy Next Door. I thought little of receiving it, because I'd been deluged with not just spy scripts but wacky, In-Laws-esque spy comedies. But something weird happened. As I often do, I Googled information about the movie shortly after finishing the coverage and disocvered, to my surprise, that Jackie Chan had signed on to star.

"Huh," I thought. "He doesn't seem like a very good fit for either of the main characters." I prepared to dismiss it, assuming they'd done some rewrites to adjust the role to Chan (after all, the draft I read was dated 2002 -- a lot of development may have happened since then), when I noticed something even odder: the plot described Chan as a spy who agrees to babysit his next-door neighbor's kids.

"The fuck?" I thought. This description had virtually nothing to do with the script I'd read, other than the title. More than that, the IMDb didn't credit Ballarini at all (nor, would I eventually learn, did the film itself) -- in fact, the only reference I could find was a USC alumni magazine interview with Ballarini in which he briefly mentions selling the script. I don't have a clue if this script went through such a long, arduous development process that it bears no resemblance to its source, or if two completely different scripts just happened to have the same title. It made me wonder if my bosses had simply requested the wrong script from the wrong people -- and that's still a possibility. I don't know all the details, and I don't have much interest in researching it.

So what's this mystery script about? It starts with the straightforward story of British lothario/superspy Ian Sterling (would it shock you to learn he looks and acts a great deal like James Bond?) going undercover as a suburbanite. He moves in next door to Roy Banner, a bored accountant and family man who's looking for a little adventure. Ian moves in next door to the Banners with his "wife" (another spy) Moira, but he instantly rubs Roy the wrong way. Suspicious (and a little jealous) of the too-suave, too-debonair Ian, Roy pays careful attention during an awkward welcoming dinner thrown by Roy's cheerful wife, Ellie. Roy notices Ian wearing a shoulder-holstered gun and Moira's precision and apparent enthusiasm for vegetable chopping. He does some digging at work and finds neither of them have filed income taxes, ever, despite their claims of living in the U.S. for 15 years. The pieces don't add up, and Roy's not smart enough to suspect what's going on.

When a noise from next door awakens him, Roy sneaks out of his house and follows Ian, who's taking his dog out for a midnight stroll. When the dog starts spewing fire, Ian is forced to incapacitate Roy and bring him into the fold: he and Moira are spies, their handler is a genetically engineered 10-year-old (posing as their son), and the dog is a surveillance robot. After having groused about Ian's incompetence in assimilating to the suburban lifestyle, Wolfgang takes this opportunity to pair up Roy and Ian. Roy can teach Ian to be a regular guy, so as not to blow his cover. This turn of events -- the cleverest in the entire script -- lasts for approximately half a scene. Really, pairing them up has little to do with a wacky odd couple scenario and has everything to do with bringing Roy in as an official partner. He wants adventure? Well, he's got it.

From here on out, the plot grows exceptionally convoluted: Roy has to balance his normal work and home life with secret spy adventures. See, Ian and his pals have traced a Blofeld-like master spy to the neighborhood, and it turns out the place has been a hotbed of master-criminal activity for years, unbeknownst to the Banners. All of this is a little bit like the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons, minus the hammock jokes and hilarious theme song. Ultimately, Roy outs the master spy as Jerry, his longtime friend and coworker. Jerry has a death ray, and both sides fight with the help of spy gadgets (most prominently, a set of sentient Pokémon-like stuffed animals and some robotic pink flamingos). Between this is a second act that layers on one weird, unnecessary plot twist after another, until the final showdown at the local lodge hall.

As you may have noticed, the script derives most of the comedy by combining clichés of suburbia (many of them -- pink flamingos, lodge meetings, Howard Johnson's, Tupperware parties -- dated when The Flintstones satirized them 40 years ago) with spy-movie clichés. It also seems as if Ballarini has made his plot as outlandish and complicated as possible for comic effect, but all of this stuff has been done better elsewhere (including in some of those other spy scripts I read that haven't come out yet).

On a related note, it's sort of interesting to note how quickly the pop-culture landscape changes: it wasn't long ago that The Ricki Lake Show and Pokémon were cutting-edge, topical references. Think about that the next time you're working on a script that attempts to mine laughs from topical references: will they hold up? Let's say you sell the script tomorrow -- best case scenario, the movie won't be released for 2-3 years. I bet you're regretting that Sylar joke, aren't you, comedy writers visiting from March of 2007? It's never easy to tell whether or not a topical joke or reference will hold up, so here's my advice: just don't do it. I think that might be why so many kitschy '80s references are "in" now: if it's 20 years old and the cultural zeitgeist still remembers New Edition, that's a safe reference. Well, that and the fact that most of the retards running Hollywood now came of age in the '80s, so they laugh like hyenas any time someone says, "Pass the Dutchie on the lefthand side."

I think I might be getting off topic.

The Spy Next Door is not a bad script. It's also not an exceptional script, but it has a decent enough concept. That's the thing I can't figure out: if this is the same Spy Next Door that morphed into the Jackie Chan movie, then why did they buy it? I can understand buying a script for its concept and then gutting everything except the concept -- but with this, it seems like the gutted everything but the title, and the title isn't particularly strong.

The main flaw with the script is that Ballarini tries too hard to make the plot funny, without spending much time on making the characters funny. We pretty much have two bland straight men in a wacky, over-the-top plot. The first act gives us the Cliff's Notes on who they are, but who they are doesn't seem to matter as much as where they are and why they're there. Did that make any sense? Let me put it another way: nothing about either of them matters except that one is an exciting James Bond and the other is a bored suburbanite looking for adventure. This only matters because of the wacky "spies in suburbia" plot. It tries to pass itself off as an odd-couple story, but the "couple" is pretty evenly matched, in terms of temperament and intellect -- they just happen to have different areas of expertise. The script doesn't even mine this for comic potential.

This became my biggest issue with the script: I know I've never seen talking dolls come to life and attempt to kill spies, but that doesn't mean I want to, and the weirdness of developments such as that do little to mask the fact that this is a straightforward spy comedy in an unusual setting. It's just not as interesting or as sharp as it could be, and that infuriated me because Ballarini presents a golden opportunity for a much more interesting story that hasn't been overdone: the story of a suave British spy/playboy/gadabout who simply cannot blend in to American life, but (for reasons it's not my job to make up) it's crucial to his mission to do so. Enter Roy, the world's most average guy -- a guy who wants a little adventure and is kind of irritated to learn he's only needed because he's so boring. Just try to imagine Sean Connery circa 1964 trying to blend in to the modern suburbs; the mental picture is funnier than anything in this script, so it's a big disappointment that the "Roy teaches Ian how to act like a suburbanite" development goes nowhere -- in fact, most of the second act focuses on Ian teaching Roy how to act like a spy, not the other way around.

Similarly, Roy's loosely defined "arc" seems to follow this trajectory: he resents his family, who prevent him from going on the adventures he seeks. Over the course of the story, he learns two things: (1) once he gets a taste of adventure, he decides it's not for him, and (2) when his family is inevitably placed in danger in the third act, he realizes how important they actually are to him. This is solid, conceptually, but Ballarini never really digs into it. He's too busy focusing on how wacky and complicated the story is to take a step back and show how the characters feel about the plot developments. I'd rather go one step further and eliminate 60-70% of the plot twists in favor of more natural, character-focused comedy as Ian struggles to assimilate and Roy sees a pathetic reflection of himself in this man who's so resistant to transforming into a lazy, bourgeois bore.

See, there's a lot under the surface of The Spy Next Door, but there are too many distractions for it to go in a truly satisfying, unique direction. This may be why it went from a flawed but not awful depiction of a superspy and an everyman...to a story about Jackie Chan babysitting a bunch of annoyingly precocious kids and surprising pets while spies invade the premises. Development's a funny process: sometimes, it can greatly improve a script (have you actually sat down and read Chinatown? Very different from the movie, and not in a good way...), but sometimes, executives just head in the absolute wrong direction.