G-Force, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movie about guinea pig spies (featuring Nic Cage as the voice of Speckles, the star-nosed mole) has a poster, and it’s every bit as nauseatingly pandering as you’d expect. Sunglasses on forehead? Check. Guinea pig with faux hawk? Check. Gun fingers? You betcha.

For some reason I feel compelled to articulate why I so f-cking loathe Jerry Bruckheimer to the core of my being, so here goes: it’s not just that he makes crappy movies, because a lot of people make crappy movies.  It’s that his movies are so transparently contrived, so unabashedly and efficiently formulaic; it’s like he just studies whatever godawful sh-t is making money at the time and with no sense of personal taste whatever, steals elements from each to construct a newer, slicker, stinkier piece of sh-t.  And it’s not about “hating the player,” it’s about expecting the player to have one speck of personality, one single solitary molecule of individuality. It’s his utter disdain for his audience, and not in an interesting, David Lynch sort of way either.  The subtext of everything he makes is, “Hey, you pigs like sh-t, right?  Well here’s a whole heapin’ trough full!  Git r done!”

So there it is, Bruckheimer.  You can take your millions of dollars and you can just go suck eggs while I celebrate this moral victory in my cum-stained underpants.

Tyler Perry’s movies always make an assload of cash, but one of the knocks on him is always that for someone whose films people clearly respond to, you just wish he’d put a little more care into each individual project instead of just pumping them out.  One that note, with Madea Goes to Jail currently in its third week of release, Lionsgate has already greenlit his next two projects.

First up, is “Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself,” followed by “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too.” Perry will write, direct and star in both features. Taraji P. Henson, Oscar nominated for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” also will star in “Bad,” which will begin principal photography on March 16 at the new Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. “Bad” is scheduled for nationwide release on Sept. 11.  “Why Did I Get Married?” will begin filming this year for release on April 2, 2010. [THR]

Wow, he can sure churn these out, can’t he?  It’s almost as if all his movies were the same formulaic, poorly disguised sermon with interchangeable characters and situations or something.

I… I have a confession:  I don’t get Tyler Perry movies.  This is the trailer for Madea Goes to Jail and I have no idea what the hell is going on in it.  It looks like a made-for-TV Hallmark movie about folks struggling-ta-make-ends-meet, except there’s a fish-out-of-water comedy about a cross-dressing guy in a fat suit embedded in it.  And then the cross-dressing fat suit guy starts preaching at one point, and then Dr. Phil shows up and then…  Is it just me?  Does any of this make sense to you?  It’s like a mash-up of Pursuit of Happyness and Big Momma’s House.  Reinforcing your faith and cheap laughs, together at last.

^{What’s that, you say? Wrong Tyler-Perry?}

Tyler Perry took the stand yesterday in Texas during the trial of a lawsuit brought by Donna West, who accuses Perry of lifting parts of Diary of a Mad Black Woman from her play, Fantasy of a Black Woman.  She is asking for all of Perry’s $50 million profit.

Perry insisted that his screenplay is an original work, but under questioning by West’s attorney, said he did not know whether anyone actually saw him write the script.

Oh snap!  See, this is why hipsters always write their screenplays in coffee shops.  I mean if no one sees you writing, why even bother?

West’s attorney, Aubrey “Nick” Pittman, suggested that Perry copied ideas from other movies and incorporated them into his box office hit. He asked Perry whether he had taken concepts from “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “The Color Purple,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and Martin Lawrence’s role in “Big Momma’s House.”
“I never stole anything from anybody — never,” Perry said, locking his eyes with the jury. [AP]

Ouch.  Getting compared to Big Momma’s House has to hurt.  Still, I’m pretty sure you can’t claim a copyright on the entire man-playing-a-fat woman concept. Also, The Color Purple doesn’t seem to fit the comparison. But it did have Oprah in it, so I guess I can understand the confusion.

An Officer and a Gentleman… that’s a Kenan Thompson sketch, right?

Manny Shyamalan recently spoke with SciFiwire about the possibility of Unbreakable 2, and the article was filled with the kind of quotes we expect from him.

“I’m a strange creature,” the writer/director said in a conference call with reporters last week. “When Unbreakable came out, I was like, ‘God, man I’m so excited.’ I thought [it] was like comic books. No one has really done comic books like this: reality-based comic books. I really think this is a metaphor for things that people can go crazy over.”

This is Manny 101: Manny does crazy things no one else would think of because Manny is a genius.  The things Manny does are often metaphors.  If you don’t understand, that’s probably why.

“When the reaction was mixed, it was kind of a disappointment, I was pettily hurt, and I was like, ‘God, I took so many incredible risks and things like that,’” Shyamalan said.

Sometimes I just want to innovate too much, you know?  I blame God for giving me these enormous brass balls.

“I felt really hurt, and I couldn’t bring myself to write,” he said. “It’s literally like a relationship I have with the audience [I think the "literally" means he wants to have sex with you -Ed.]. … And then, over the years, as it just grew and grew and grew, and people were like, ‘You know, I really like that. That’s actually my favorite movie, and I watch that all the time,’ and on and on. I’ll be on the street, and some kid will run across traffic with it in his backpack–he just is carrying it in his backpack–and he’ll be running [saying], ‘I can’t believe it’s you!’ Will you sign my Unbreakable DVD?’ And quoting the thing and all that stuff.” [Source]

Even though you may not have understood it because it was a work of art like no one had seen before, Unbreakable has become a cult classic.  Little kids know all the words – Manny is like The Beatles.  Bigger than the Beatles.  Bigger than Jesus.  I once quoted Unbreakable to this homeless kid in a wheelchair, and all of a sudden he started to walk and the dirt on his face was gone and his filthy rags became a Tuxedo and spats.