In DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, Ben Stiller returns to the comedy crime scene to portray a monstrous, pumped-up fitness guru and hilarious variation of Derek Zoolander, the airheaded male model he played with pursed-lipped, vacant-eyed perfection three years (and many, many dull movies) ago. Nobody eviscerates the scary depths of male narcissism with such ferocity, and it is a huge relief to find Stiller flexing his oiled, low-comedy triceps with such vengeful glee.
His character, White Goodman, a glaring, preening product of fanatical self-improvement, wears a blow-dry mullet and a Fu Manchu mustache and favors hideous white leisure suits. Affecting the pseudomacho bark of a drill instructor, he suggests Anthony Robbins as a shrimpy, steroid-enhanced gym rat. Making a crude pass at a woman, he remains blissfully unfazed when she throws up in her mouth. "In some cultures, they only eat vomit," he chirps. "I read about it in a book."
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
Once a 279kg sack of blubber, White, when alone in his office, practices self-administered aversion therapy in which he attaches electrodes to his nipples and trains himself to resist the temptations of junk food. Before an appointment with a pretty woman, he uses an air pump to inflate his crotch into an outrageous bulge. Stiller, with a face that veers between the geeky and the handsome, and a bunched-up body that even when buffed looks strangely misshapen, skewers male vanity with the X-ray vision of someone who has writhed in its clutches.
White and the world of sneering babes and hunks that crowds his gleaming emporium, the Globo Gym, represent the Goliath that Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn), the slobby, nice guy who owns Average Joe's, a nearby low-rent gym, sets out to slay. When a pretty blond bank lawyer threatens to foreclose on Peter's gym unless he comes comes up with US$50,000 in a hurry, White itches to buy the crumbling enterprise and add it to his chain.
The absurd moneymaking scheme that Peter and his nerdy pals come up with is to compete for the US$50,000 first prize in a Las Vegas dodge ball tournament. Never mind that the Average Joes have no experience in the sport. To study it they absorb a grim 1950s instructional film in which a youthful Patches O'Houlihan (Hank Azaria), a legendary dodge ball champion, gives lessons in what he touts as "the sport of violence, exclusion and degradation."
Meanwhile, White assembles his own team, the Purple Cobras, to compete in what one gushing sports announcer describes as an event "bigger than the World Cup, the World Series and World War II combined."
Lo and behold, the aged Patches (Rip Torn) turns up in a motorized wheelchair, his aggression undiminished, to train the Average Joes. His favorite teaching tools, carried in a sack, are wrenches that he hurls full-force at the heads of his pupils to help them master the essential D's of the sport: "dip, duck, dive and dodge." Many head injuries later, the Average Joes have learned their lessons well.
DodgeBall, a promising first feature written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (his previous credits include Reebok commercials) may be a silly throwaway sports spoof, but it is consistently funny. Some of its jokes are tasteless, others envelope-pushing, and some both. The movie loses only a little of its maniacal glee by the time of the playoffs. In the first round, when the Average Joes find themselves facing a team of savagely competitive Girl Scouts, the movie glides up to another peak of daffiness. In a later round, a mix-up in uniforms forces them to prance around the court in skimpy leather and bondage gear.
The movie unapologetically roots for the uber-nerds. And what a curious crew they are. They include a pudgy Panglossian milquetoast (Stephen Root) whose blocked anger explodes in the nick of time; a chicken-chested, absent-minded ninny (Joel David Moore); and a lunatic who imagines he's a pirate. Any movie that is fonder of these losers than of their robotic would-be nemeses is OK by me.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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