Stargate

Stargate (1994)
Dir. by Roland Emmerich

Starring Kurt Russell, James Spader and Jaye Davidson

[content warning: Orientalism, transphobia, white savior narratives, depression, suicide, child death]

Plot:

Egyptologist and conspiracy-theorist Daniel Jackson is hired by the government to translate a series of hieroglyphs on a stone unearthed in Giza in the 20s.  When he succeeds, he learns that they are the code to activate a portal to the other side of the universe.  Traveling with a team of soldiers to investigate the destination planet, Jackson becomes entangled in a revolution by the humans living on that planet against their alien overlords, who have taken the guises of the Egyptian deities.

Nostalgia:

I’m almost positive that I saw this movie in the theaters.  I don’t actually remember having done so, but it’s exactly the sort of movie I would have gone to see. If it wasn’t in the theaters, I certainly saw it on Pay-Per-View the next year.  We taped it off of TV, and the Extended Cut DVD is one of the first I can remember buying when I was in college and got my first DVD player.  I had several friends who were obsessed with the TV show at the time, but I never really watched it while it was airing.  Saw the first couple of seasons on DVD about a decade ago now, and that’s about it.

Review:

How the hell did this movie start a franchise that’s lasted for 25 years?  There’s been three TV shows, two direct-to-DVD movies, and a web series, all stemming from this action B-movie from the guys who brought you Geostorm and The Day After Tomorrow.  What did this movie had that so many other mid-90s movies didn’t?

I think what it had going for it, more than anything else, was its setting and design.  This movie came out in 1994, at a time when CG was beginning to take over the film world.  Sci-fi movies were big, and there hadn’t been a big, traditional fantasy movie since NeverEnding Story II in 1990, four years earlier.  While this isn’t, strictly speaking, a fantasy movie, the ancient Egyptian trappings give it much more of a time-traveling fantasy feel than most of the other sci-fi movies of the time.  It was something different and unexpected. 

It also helps that the movie has two strong leads.  An almost unrecognizably young James Spader, of The Blacklist fame, plays Daniel Jackson as a nerdy scientist who’s incredibly competent in his field, but is completely out of his depth in most other situations.  As a very nerdy kid myself, who’d later be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I saw a lot of myself in Jackson, and immediately emphasized with him.  Despite his social awkwardness, Spader manages to imbue Jackson with some of the quirky humor that he would later bring to Alan Shore on Boston Legal. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, Jackson, in an attempt to communicate to the planet’s citizens that the disgusting-looking food they’ve given him tastes like chicken, flaps his arms up and down and makes clucking noises repeatedly.  Everyone – slave and Earth soldier alike – just stares at him.  It’s equal parts endearing and cringe-inducing, but goes a long way to making Jackson an actual person instead of a character defined by his job or role in the film.

The same can be said for Kurt Russell as Col. O’Neil.  The role could have just been played as a hard-ass military commander, and that’s what he seems to be for the first couple of scenes.  However, he’s introduced in a depressive state, with his son having recently died in an accidental shooting.  As the movies goes on, Russell brings in not only the sadness that one might expect with such a background, but also the anger.  His Russell is bitter and self-destructive, but not in a way that he’s willing to take down the rest of his men with him.  While I enjoyed Richard Dean Anderson in the role in what I saw of the TV series, I think that his portrayal is barely the same character as what we see in the movie, rounding off all of the sharp edges of his personality and making him a more lighthearted individual.  It works for the show, but I don’t think it would have for the movie.

Now, the setting does bring up legitimate concerns about Orientalism. The movie essentially revolves around the (already existing at the time) conspiracy theory that all of the great works of ancient Egypt were completed with alien assistance.  Because, of course, a culture from that part of the world wouldn’t have been able to do it on their own.  No, the pyramids were just landing docks for alien spacecraft, and all of Egyptian culture is based on lies and manipulation.  And it takes the arrival of the strong, Western military power to free the backwards, tribal slaves from their oppressors *eyeroll* (though, in the movie’s defense, they were deliberately kept in that state by the aliens.  The script wisely incorporates two millennia of linguistic drift and doesn’t have them speaking an existing dialect, and you could posit that there would have been a corresponding 2000-year tech increase if not for alien intervention).

So yeah, the cultural politics of Stargate aren’t great.  Also complicating matters is the casting of Jaye Davidson as the villain Ra. He had just come off of his debut performance as a transgender woman in the movie The Crying Game, a performance for which he’d received a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  His role here is obviously playing up that association, deliberately going for a very young, androgynous look for the utterly evil alien.  That this movie came out the same year as Ace Ventura, a movie also inspired by The Crying Game for its negative portrayal of a transgender woman, makes me convinced that the filmmakers were going for the same thing.  It seems to have actually been enough to get Jaye Davidson to quit acting altogether after this movie.

  

Fortunately for the franchise, from what I remember the TV show’s more complicated mythology manages to help alleviate this problem somewhat, though there are definitely individual episodes that are still cringe-worthy in an early TNG way (I’m looking at you, “Emancipation”).  I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, especially if you’re sensitive to Orientalism or white savior narratives. I still enjoyed the movie, however, despite its more obvious flaws, though that enjoyment has drifted more into the “guilty pleasure” status over the years. 

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-One thing I definitely can’t fault the movie for is its score. I really like David Arnold’s music, especially the main title theme, which they’d use for the TV series as well.

-My roommate in college was from Colorado Springs, which is where the real complex that the Stargate team is fictionally located in resides.  He always got great amusement from the fact that in real-life there’s a zoo sitting on top of the mountain the Stargate’s inside of.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Robert Picardo and John Glover

[content warning: potential transphobia, sexual assault]

Plot:

Several years, after the original Gremlins movie, Gizmo the Mogwai’s elderly caretaker dies and his shop is bulldozed to make way for a fancy commercial center. Taken to Clamp Tower in Manhattan by a research scientist, he is freed by his friend Daniel Peltzer, who is now working as an artist in the building. When an accident causes a new group of gremlins to be created, Daniel must try to convince his skeptical bosses that a horde of chaotic creatures is about to descend upon the highly automated “smart building.”

Nostalgia:

This is yet another of my family’s seemingly endless collection of movies taped off of basic cable during the early 90s. We only had this one, not the original, so I never ended up seeing it until much after this one, and was positively shocked at its very different tone. I do really like the original, and appreciate its status as a classic horror-comedy, but if pressed I’d have to say that I actually enjoy this one more.

Review:

This…is a very weird movie. Now, I’ve watched some weird movies for this blog so far. I’ve seen giant worms with tentacle tongues, 3000-year-old Chinese sorcerers, suburban serial killers and kung fu disco dancing street thugs. But this might be the most deliberately strange movie I’ve seen in a long time. And I still kind of love it for that.

The original Gremlins was a horror/comedy which expertly balanced both sides of the equation, and still has some genuinely frightening scenes. This movie, on the other hand, seems almost intended as a rickroll of the audiences who went into it expecting something like the first film (and in fact, it kinda was. More on that later). About 45 minutes into the movie, it takes an abrupt left turn and abandons all pretenses at being a horror film. Instead, it becomes, essentially, a live action cartoon, getting more and more ridiculous and over-the-top with every passing minute. While in the original the gremlins were actually quite dangerous, and were a threat to the lives of everyone in the town, here they instead seem to be displaced residents of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Toontown. If left to their own devices, they’d cause just as much havoc against each other as they would against any of the humans. This feeling is reinforced by the opening of the film, where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck interrupt the credits to argue about who gets to sit on top of the 60th anniversary Warner Bros. logo. It sets the tone for the sheer wackiness that is about to ensue over the course of the film. 

Most of the chaos in the film can be laid at the feet of Christopher Lee’s character, a genetic researcher whose lab seems to be a subdivision of Acme Enterprises. Here, the gremlins go through a series of transformations that ups their variety a hundredfold over the first film, where there was little to differentiate the various individuals. Thanks to the lab’s experiments, we end up with gremlins that are bat-hybrids, part vegetable, made of electricity and, most memorably, one who is intelligent and erudite, like Marvel’s Beast, with the voice of Tony Randall. Even the new version of the original film’s villain, Spike, goes through a transformation, becoming what is essentially a D&D drider in the only real scary scene in the movie.

Once the movie passes the halfway point, many of the human characters disappear for long stretches of time, as the narrative stops to just allow the gremlins to run amok. Nowhere is this more evident than the famous fourth-wall breaking sequence. When originally projected in theaters (on film, of course – this was way before the era of digital projection), the movie suddenly stopped, as if the film had become jammed, and then tore visually on-screen. Before any audience member would have time to get up and complain, however, the shadows of two gremlins in the projection booth appeared, making increasingly elaborate shadow puppets in the light of the projector. The movie then moves to the lobby of the theater itself, where a parent is complaining to the manager about the film’s content. He sends an usher into the theater, who gets Hulk Hogan to stand up from the audience and intimidate the gremlins into restarting the movie. It’s up there with Ferris Bueller’s monologues for me in terms of fourth-wall-breaking stunts, and is the ultimate distillation of what Joe Dante was trying to do with the movie.

That being, of course, fucking with both the audience and studio’s expectations. He had initially been extremely resistant to the idea of doing a sequel to the original Gremlins, as he thought that it had a satisfying ending that didn’t justify a sequel. After trying and failing to get it up and running on their own, the studio went back to Dante and offered him triple the budget of the first film and complete creative control over the direction of the project. Still not wanting to make a sequel, but also not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, Dante instead decided to make a satire of the original movie, and of overblown Hollywood sequels in general. While I personally believe that he succeeded wildly, critics and audiences were much more split over the movie, and it ultimately lost money. 

This is an incredibly silly, over-the-top movie, even more so than I remember it being. However, it’s also a very refreshing departure from most Hollywood sequels, and I really enjoyed it.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-The movie was originally intended to have a much more villainous Ronald Clamp, which is why he’s portrayed as a combination of Ted Turner and Donald Trump. However, they found that John Glover’s performance was just so likeable that they rewrote the script to turn him into a more sympathetic character.

-When the movie was released on VHS, they replaced the fourth-wall breaking with a different scene involving the gremlins turning off the VCR and channel surfing until John Wayne scares them off. This was the version that I grew up watching, and I didn’t see the Hulk Hogan version until it was finally released on DVD. I now prefer the original, though.

-One of the transformations that I didn’t mention above is where one of the gremlins drinks a formula that makes them explicitly female, with long hair, pouty lips and noticeable breasts. While it’s never clear if the gremlins had any sexual dimorphism prior to this (they reproduce through parthenogenesis, after all), what is clear is that this trans gremlin seems to be uninterested in participating in any of the anarchy. She’s more interested in a romantic pursuit of Robert Picardo’s character, and becomes the only gremlin to survive the movie because of it. While the character is ultimately played for laughs, the laughs never come at the expense of the transition itself. Once she’s female, the movie just accepts that fact, and the humor seems to be more focused on Picardo’s character’s reactions to being romanced by a two-foot-tall lizard creature. While I don’t feel the need to knock the movie for trans representation in this instance, I do have to fault it for its use of sexual assault (specifically Gremlin-on-human) for humor. Yes, Picardo decides to go along with it in the end, but I detected a lot of overtones of Stockholm Syndrome involved.

-I now understand the gremlin repeating “Is it safe?” while he has Danny strapped to a dentist chair, a joke that always eluded me when I watched this in the 90s.

If Looks Could Kill

If Looks Could Kill (1991)
Dir. by William Dear

Starring Richard Grieco, Roger Rees and Gabrielle Anwar

[content warning: sexism, transphobia]

Plot:

Teenage slacker Michael Corbin is given a surprise on graduation day when his diploma is withheld due to an incomplete grade in French. In order to get the credit he needs to graduate, he has to accompany his French teacher on a summer trip to France. Unfortunately, he is mistaken at the airport for an American secret agent traveling under the same name, and is co-opted by MI6 into assisting with a dangerous mission. At first he goes along with it, enamored of the fast cars and spy gadgets, until he learns that being a spy might actually have real-life stakes.

Nostalgia:

I have literally zero memory of when I first saw this. I’m pretty sure it had to be a VHS rental, though we’d eventually own a copy ourselves. I grew up watching the James Bond movies, so a James Bond parody starring a teenager definitely appealed to teenage me. I actually wasn’t able to track down a DVD copy of the movie, so I eventually resorted to pulling out that old pan-and-scan VHS tape from a box in the basement and watched it on my parents’ VCR.

Review:

This film is basically White Cishet Power Trip Fantasy: The Movie. It starts with a premise that’s essentially someone’s fanfiction come to life: a teenager is mistaken for a secret agent and given access to all of the cool spy gadgets from the Bond films. And for about two thirds of the running time, Corbin behaves exactly how you’d expect a horny, straight Hollywood teenager to act in such a situation. He goofs around, acts like he knows what he’s doing, fails to take anything seriously, and survives mainly on sheer luck.

For example, Corbin engages in an action movie car chase without ever once realizing that he’s being pursued. He’s trying to lower the windshield so he can hit on the woman in a convertible driving next to him, and starts flipping switches randomly. These switches deploy the Bond car defenses, eventually blowing up the car that’s been chasing him – something he only notices once the explosion occurs. Even after that, he seems to be more upset that he blew out his tires and let the girl get away than at any property destruction or death he may have just caused. 

Now, this is a problem that I could most certainly ignore while watching the movie as a teenager. But looking back at it as an adult, I was pretty constantly annoyed by Corbin’s attitude about pretty much everything for over an hour of the movie. It’s only when the movie actually finally gets to the villain’s chateau, and he faces up to the seriousness of his situation, that I found myself enjoying the character at all. The movie stops trying to be a frat house comedy with spy trappings at this point, and actually turns into a decent Bond movie pastiche, complete with one-liners, great set piece fights, and gadget-induced escapes. Unfortunately, the movie is only 88 minutes long, so you have to wade through almost two thirds of the film before getting to any of the good stuff.

In addition to my problems with the Corbin character and the way he’s written, there’s also a whole lot of fairly crass sex humor. For example, there’s an extended joke about Corbin being seduced by the evil femme fatale agent (named Areola Canasta!), who’s attempting to kill him with a scorpion in bed. He doesn’t want to have sex without a condom, and spends what feels like five minutes trying to open a heavily-fortified tube of “Combat Condoms” in the bathroom. Meanwhile, the agent is stung by her own scorpion, and is writhing around on the bed moaning – sounds that Corbin mistakes for an orgasm. There’s also a fairly glaring transphobic joke involving a pair of X-ray glasses that I definitely don’t remember from the last time I watched this. 

Fortunately, the movie gets redeemed somewhat by its villains. Roger Rees, whom I mostly remember from playing the Sheriff in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood parody, is much more serious here as Augustus Steranko, the Bond villain whose plan basically amounts to…creating the Euro. But he lends a much needed gravitas to the movie, as an antidote to Corbin’s attitude. And Linda Hunt is just delightful as the henchwoman who wears a gold whip around her neck like a choker, and really really likes killing people for Steranko. I also found myself enjoying Robin Barlett’s performance as the French teacher, whose main defining characteristics at the start of the movie are hating Corbin and having unfortunate taste in headwear. She gets mistaken for a Cold War mercenary by both MI6 and the CIA (really, neither organization comes off as competent in the least), and embraces the persona by the end of the film, packing an Uzi and wearing ripped clothing as a headband, Rambo-style.

So yeah, this was nowhere near as good as I remember it being. If only the rest of the movie had been like the final 20 minutes, I might have enjoyed the rewatch a lot more. It probably deserves to be as obscure and hard to find as it is now.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C

Stray Thoughts:

-The British agent who gets killed in the movie’s version of the Bond cold open is Roger Daltrey, lead singer for The Who. I guess he really needed the extra paycheck that year.

-Corbin is supposed to be from Detroit. I’m pretty sure that every student on that class trip to France was white (or at least, I don’t remember seeing any students of color). I’ve lived in the Detroit area for almost 30 years, and unless his school was in Grosse Pointe that casting is flat-out wrong.

-This movie’s so obscure now that I couldn’t even find any good screenshots to include.

Spaceballs

Spaceballs (1987)
Dir. by Mel Brooks

Starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, Daphe Zuniga and Rick Moranis

[content warning: description of racist/transphobic jokes] 

Plot:

Down-on-his-luck space captain Lone Starr and his co-pilot Barf, in need of quick cash to pay off a debt to the gangster Pizza the Hutt, take a job to rescue Princess Vespa of Druidia from the ridiculous forces of the Spaceballs, who plan to steal all of the air from the planet to replenish their own depleted natural resources (Everybody got that?).

Nostalgia:

This was the first Mel Brooks movie I ever saw. I was obsessed with Star Wars from an early age, watching our VHS tape so much that it wore out and had to be replaced. So of course I’d watch any movie related to it, even a parody. It’s still the Brooks movie that I’ve seen the most times, even if I acknowledge that it’s “lesser” Brooks.

Review:

I find that comedy, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on your age when you first see it. There’s a ton of comedies that I grew up watching and still have soft spots for to this day, that I freely recognize are terrible movies objectively. I still enjoy rewatching them anyway, even though I can easily see the flaws now as an adult. Now, that doesn’t mean that I think Spaceballs is a terrible movie. In fact, I think it’s the best movie that Mel Brooks made post-1974. But I think that the sweet spot for this movie is right around the early teens, which is probably around the time that I saw it for the first time.

Brooks’s movies have a reputation for being crass and vulgar parodies, a reputation that largely stems from his earlier 70s output and the reactions that it prompted from audiences and critics. Spaceballs, while it still contains many similar sorts of jokes, benefits a bit from ten years of societal progression in terms of what was permissible to be shown onscreen. Granted, that door does swing both way, as there’s several jokes that wouldn’t fly in the 2010s, particularly some sexist ones and one particularly notable gag involving a pre-fame Dave Chappelle literally “combing” the desert with an afro pick.

Questionable jokes aside (and really, what Mel Brooks movie doesn’t have questionable jokes, dating back to “Springtime for Hitler”?), there are a couple really good, inventive comedy sequences here. Foremost among these is a sequence where the villains can’t locate Lone Starr, and decide to cheat by renting the video of Spaceballs and fast-forwarding to see the next scene. You end up with an incredibly confused Dark Helmut and Colonel Sandurz staring at a TV screen that is exactly synced up to their own point in the movie, as the images on-screen perfectly mirror their actions.

This movie breaks the fourth wall so hard it practically lives on the couch next to you. In addition to the aforementioned gag, there’s also multiple references to the movie’s merchandising, from Dark Helmut’s action figures of the cast to Yogurt’s assurances that he’ll be back in the sequel. There’s also another wonderful gag in which, immediately following a big action stunt, the Spaceballs accidentally capture the cast’s stunt doubles instead of the real heroes. (However, the stunt doubles in question feature a cigar-smoking, Hitler-mustache-wearing male stunt double wearing Princess Vespa’s dress. While I read the joke as more of a commentary on Hollywood’s use of stunt doubles that look nothing like the actor they’re doubling, the joke does come off as slightly transphobic these days.) And in the final climactic “lightsaber” duel, Dark Helmut accidentally kills one of the sound technicians recording the audio, blaming it on Lone Starr (Mel Brooks must have loved this gag, as he reused it in Robin Hood: Men in Tights).

So yeah, while I can acknowledge that nothing in Spaceballs ever reaches the heights of Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, I can’t really be super objective about the movie either. It was my first Mel Brooks movie, and it will always have a special place in my heart.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-Ironically, for a movie that was so focused on mining Star Wars’s ubiquitous marketing for jokes, Spaceballs had no actual merchandising of its own. It was a condition that George Lucas stipulated in return for allowing Brooks to make a parody of the trilogy.

-I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this. Dozens, at least. But it wasn’t until recently, maybe 1-2 years ago, that I finally realized that the Spaceball officer that arrests the stunt doubles is ubiquitous “Hey, it’s that guy!” character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, of Groundhog Day fame, in one of his first screen roles.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

Dir. by Tom Shadyac

Starring Jim Carrey, Courtney Cox, Tone Loc and Sean Young

[tw: extensive talk about transphobia]

Plot:

When the Miami Dolphins football team’s mascot, a live dolphin named Snowflake, goes missing on the eve of the Super Bowl, the team hires a highly eccentric private eye and “pet detective” named Ace Ventura to locate it.  In the process, he discovers a conspiracy bent on destroying the team.

Nostalgia:

This movie came out when I was in sixth grade, and for the next three years its poster hung in the entrance to the boy’s locker room at my middle school.  For all I know it’s still hanging there now.  I’m sure I didn’t see the actual movie until at least a year later, when it was on video, but it couldn’t have been much after that.  Multiple quotes from it were quite popular among my friend group for several years afterwards. 

Review:

Jim Carrey was around for quite a while before he became a household name, spending most of the 1980s bouncing around Hollywood in bit parts and supporting roles before being cast in In Living Color in 1990.  However, he suddenly appeared in the American moviegoing consciousness fully formed in 1994 with not one but three huge hit films back-to-back-to-back: Ace Ventura in February, The Mask in July and Dumb and Dumber in December.  This trio managed to send Carrey and his particular brand of hyperkinetic physical humor straight to the top of Hollywood’s biggest earner charts for several years afterwards, and he remained one of the biggest box office comedians for most of the 1990s.

Most of the humor in this film comes from Carrey’s extreme physical, and especially facial, gyrations, as well as a strong streak of potty humor (the most notable of which being a fairly extended gag where Carrey quite literally talks out of his own butt).  It’s a far cry from what critics term “sophisticated repartee”, but I do have to admit that quite a lot of it still works for me even twenty years later.  Pretty much everyone else in the movie is forced into the thankless task of being a series of straight men and women for Carrey to bounce his shtick off of.  Very few of them seem to be quite in on the joke, however, as if Carrey had wandered onto the set of another movie and no one had the heart to tell him to get out.  Still, it doesn’t matter that much, as Carrey devours every scene he’s in and goes back for seconds, and there’s not many scenes that he’s not in.

While I find a lot of Carrey’s performance to still be genuinely funny even after all this time, there are several things that definitely took me out of the movie and marked it as very much a product of its time.  Most notably, the entire ending of the movie.  It really doesn’t hold up.  Like, at all.

In fact, it’s kind of a disaster.

For those of you who’ve never seen it, or haven’t seen it in a really long time, here’s the main problem: the film’s villain is a transgender woman.  Who is implied to have transitioned specifically to enact a revenge scheme against those whom she mistakenly perceived as having wronged her.  And who is publicly stripped to her underwear and outed in front of the entire police department.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s an extended five-minute sequence where Ace violently scrubs his mouth, burns his clothing and cries in the shower after he realizes that he’d kissed her?  And that every single one of those cops does the same during the climax?

Yeah, I think you can see the problem here.

Yes, I get that the whole thing is a lengthy parody of The Crying Game, which had just come out the previous year to great acclaim and Oscar nominations.  No, that doesn’t make it alright to a modern audience.  I remembered the movie well enough to know it was coming, but I was still surprised at just how much of a bad taste the whole thing left in my mouth.  If this wasn’t a nostalgic movie for me (if, say, I’d have been watching it for the first time, like I did with Krull last week), I’d probably have turned it off.  Now, I’m a cis male, so I don’t really have the experience or background to talk about negative portrayals of transgender individuals in any sort of nuanced way.  But if this had come out today, I don’t think there’s any way it would have been the number one movie in America for four weeks without a massive backlash against it.  Just look at the backlash against Ready Player One this past weekend [ed: review originally published in March].  For all I know, there actually was one at the time, but transgender rights issues weren’t in the forefront of the media in the mid-90s in the way that they are today, so I’ve never heard about one.

When the positioning of fruit is the most subtle the movie gets…uh oh

So yeah, I enjoyed about three-quarters of my rewatch, before the movie went down in flames.  I may do more Jim Carrey as I continue with this project, but I doubt I’m going to watch this one again for quite a while.

Nostalgia: B+

Rewatch: D+ (B- for the first 70 minutes, F for the final 15)

Stray Thoughts:

-Roger Ebert, in his negative review of the film, stated that "Carrey plays Ace as if he's being clocked on an Energy-O-Meter, and paid by the calories expended.”  I can’t really say that he’s wrong.

-In addition to the transphobia, there’s also quite a bit of homophobic and ableist humor, especially at the expense of the mentally ill.  Again, par for the course for 90s comedies, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

-A couple of months ago they announced plans to do a remake of Ace Ventura.  I really hope it’s a new concept or a passing-the-torch movie and not a straight-up remake of this plot.