we watched Epic Movie yestreen. of particular interest to Erin, but the tv ads when it was in theatres looked funny: I was all for killing the evening with it. of course the ads cornered the humour available in the flick, but so it goes. I have a pretty heady tolerance for these 2-bit parodies, like Scary Movie (I've seen parts of at least 2), and so forth. EP is by no means as well crafted as the various movies by the creators of Airplane. instead, it survives with a throw it in the moat and see if anyone salutes motivation. so there's much that is stupid, lame, puerile, as well as a few hearty laughs. welladay! it begins by posing the idea that it has a plot. brief back stories parodying Snakes on the Plane, X-Men, Nacho Libre and DaVinci Code brings the 4 lead characters together. there's a disturbing outing into Willy Wonka land (despite Depp, I was in no mood to meet that film) then it's a scuffle largely with Narnia. one starts to feel the compelling sag of the originals. I mean, just a little undermining serves to send the whole mountain sliding. the cast is nameless, except for a few recognizable cameos like David Carradine and Fred Willard. some of the satire was no more than imitation. Nacho Libre looked no different from the original, and now I wonder if I really liked the original. and I've sat thru Narnia twice, but seeing it twisted a trifle, I wonder at that as well. it's rather fascinating to see these cinematic wonders without the lens of movie magic, i.e. big budget. a nice bit was the glorioso battle from Narnia. in EP, it hinges on one of our heroes finding the clicker from that Adam Sandler film from last year. he stops the evil army in its tracks then, with his family, proceeds to lay havoc on the frozen warriors. all this muddle seems potent with some sort of aesthetic intention. or it is a learning node. think of poetry as signs of the poetic. so much of the crudzoid poetry we meet daily consists of signals telling us that we are in the presence of poetry. lofty sentiments and rococco malarkey and the whole 9 yards. the appeal of crappy and/or minor movies situates in the deft insincerity in which they work. don't those Oscar-worthy movies that are cranked out yearly overflow with sweet crude quality sincerity? sincerity of the commonest manufacture. we deconstruct with the urge to discover the real thing beneath the crap. Fred Allen said something like, Hollywood is a place where you brush away the tinsel to see the real tinsel inside. our daily duty, in poetry, is something similar. we seek to eject the clunky weak contributions of imitated energy. I guess I'm saying that Epic Movie gives a view of that process.