Don't be fooled by the image above. You may laugh, but that's not because Vince Vaughn is funny. It's because the image is funny. Indeed, the only time I will ever laugh at Vince Vaughn is when it's at his misfortune, meaning, when he's trying not to be funny, meaning, if I ever see him trip and land in a pool of alcohol-soaked mouse traps or if a meteorite crushes him to death in a horrible (horribly kickass) fireball of awesome. That will have been the only awesome thing Vince Vaughn ever did, not including Old School because I've always said that every shitty actor is entitled to at least one great movie. Tara Reid? The Big Lebowski. Mathew Broderick? Wargames. Pauly Shore? ...Bad example.

But really, how is it that so many shitty things are so damn popular? I've heard more than one person flap their gums about how fucking funny Wild Hogs is, and I'm still not convinced. Vinny boy may not be in the fucking flick, but it's so crappy it may as well, so please excuse this lengthy tangent because this is something I really need to bitch about.

I consider myself a pro at gauging my affection for a movie based entirely on the previews. First, the damn abomination loses about fifty points right off the bat for winning the-most-obvious-title-concocted-in-a-board-room award. And second, the movie isn't funny. Period. No laughter escaped my lips when I heard of it or saw the DVD on display. It has Tim Allen in it, for crying out loud. Tim Allen! He was better off fixing houses with Bob Villa. Seriously, I'd rather see my step-dad naked, swallow poison, fall down a flight of stairs and land in a cactus patch. The first five minutes of this pile of smelly monkey intestines was used as a method of torture on me and the first thing that went through my mind was how I yearned to have a root canal instead. I was seriously gazing longingly at a nearby fire poker that would have been the perfect self-eye-gouging tool, but then again I didn't have a method to destroy my sense of sound, too, so it still would have been at least as torturous as AC/DC. Think about it. Seeing Wild Hogs is worse than hearing AC/DC because it's both the audio and visual equivalent of having itching powder poured all over oneself. Of course, the only thing worse than seeing Wild Hogs would be to see AC/DC perform live because that is both the audio and visual equivalent of having vomit and itch-inducing poo gas sprayed upon oneself. I expressed it visually in the following equations:

The annoyance of Wild Hogs is greater than or equal to the annoyance of AC/DC whereas...

...the annoyance of Wild Hogs is less than or equal to the annoyance of AC/DC live.

Anyway, back to Vinny.

Here's some visual proof of his craptacular pieces of garbage.

Wedding Crashers (the third worst movie of all time behind Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Freddy Got Fingered)

Be Cool (the fourth worst movie of all time)

And seriously, the damn thing was shot in widescreen, as if its crappy director actually had something interesting to show within the peripherals aside from PG-13 strippers. Be Cool is the low point of the lives of all actors involved except for Steven Tyler because A) he's not an actor, and B), it's quite possibly (and pathetically) his high point. Vince Vaughn himself is also excluded from having this film be his low point because his high point was his birth. It's been all downhill ever since. If you laughed at either of the the above images, you should be ashamed of yourself, and yes I am arrogant enough to tell you how you should feel. (I keed! I keed!) Anyone involved in the making of any Vince Vaughn movie with the obvious exception of Old School should be shot, but not shot to kill because at least one Vince Vaughn movie that I know of also stars William H. Macy, and just as every shitty actor deserves at least one good movie, every great actor can be excused of at least one shitty movie, possibly more depending on the greatness of the actor. In the case of William H. Macy, I'm willing to forgive all association with Vince Vaughn entirely.

But what really irritates me about Be Cool is that it could have been pretty good. The thing is, when the person who wrote it saw it screened for the first time, he also saw a great many things he didn't write (according to a college instructor of mine who knows him personally). That's the problem with being the writer in the film. The writer's role is arguably the most important, and yet not only do directors fuck with the source material, so do overpaid actors and the shitty "personal writers" they hire to write jokes that supposedly fit their unique style. So exactly how unique is a joke if somebody else writes it for you, jackass? Those writers don't even get a credit! They're better off writing jokes on popsickle sticks!

But what's even worse is...

Psycho

There's an old saying that I just made up that goes, "If you can't do horror, try comedy." The 1998 remake of Psycho is one of Vaughn's earlier failed attempts at artistic expression (and the godawful Lost World: Jurassic Park before that) and he never tried that type of role again, as far as I know, or rather, as far as I care to know, because quite frankly, I don't care at all. It's a moot point. But what's the purpose of making a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake of a fucking Hitchcock movie? It's so futile. Even most of the gestures are pantomimed exactly from the 1960 original. The purpose of a remake should be self-explanatory. Remake it, but improve it. All they did was add more blood and nudity and technology that didn't exist at the time, and when you consider that the last shot of the famous shower scene took three weeks to shoot in the original because cameras then had to be focused by hand in order to do a pan (the ability to do it otherwise had yet to be invented), then it's obvious how much more impressive the first film is when Hitchcock got such excellent results from the limited resources. At least the remake of Little Shop of Horrors changed it to a musical to spicen things up a bit.

It worked for Halo.

And it doesn't end there.

Holy Christ, you gotta be fucking kidding me! Do I smell more boardroom-concocted nonsense? And could somebody please tell me why this is being advertised to me during the summer? And get this: we have a contradiction! Take a look at the only successful movie of ol' Vinnie's good friend Tim Dick aside from the Toy Story cartoons (again, every bad actor is entitled to at least one good movie, and I can't count Toy Story 2 because I've never seen it).

See the enlarged E? It's pointed in our faces as if to say, "Santa Claus is spelled with a fucking E at the end, you morons!" Well, perhaps it's not a contradiction because they're distributed by rival studios, but still. I know inconsistency is a simple thing to get my blood boiling over, but it irks me, nonetheless. In the case of Fred Claus, I refer you to my earlier statement about how previews often stir me away from a movie rather then inspire me to see it. This weekend I'm off to see zombies getting their heads blown off in Resident Evil: Extinction, so have fun being Vince Vaughn-loving zombies yourselves if you choose to partake in any more of his visual terrorism, friends. Until next time...

UPDATE (10-3-07): Okay, so perhaps Vaughn's birth wasn't his highpoint considering even I noted that Old School was the best thing he ever did, so, I'll admit that that was his high point. Also, I'm aware that the title The Santa Clause is supposed to mean clause as in, a phrase usually relating to a law or contract, but that just makes the movie even crappier because, as Krusty the Klown once said, "Puns are lazy writing."