Shark-Bite Movie Review: Hancock -- A Few 40 ouncers short of a party

In Bangkok, we get the kind of movies that Ignatius Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” used to relish going to see – the kind that were so terrible they would provide him with ample material, for the mocking running commentaries ("A negation of all human qualities") he enjoyed loudly voicing while watching them in public.

It’s an oft-heard refrain here – particularly oft-heard if you’re in conversation with this writer after his editor kindly reminds him deadline IS TOMORROW – that 90 percent of the Hollywood films that are released in Bangkok are pure crapole, but the truth of that statement doesn’t lessen with repetition. And here I’m not talking about the output from that Thai comedy troupe who turns every third film made in this country into a mess of whoopee-cushion-like sound effects and different takes on the “why transvestites are hilarious” theme, but rather the stuff that’s put out so studios can make back the millions they spent financing a movie that will be remarkable in 25 years only for how infrequently it is the subject of any remarks (and they also need to distribute internationally so stars like Will Smith can flirt with cute reporters while on international promotional tours).

That Hollywood blockbusters need to recoup the third-world debt-like sums that it costs to make them explains why when looking at what movie to check out at my local theater in eastern Bangkok, my very best option was a film like “Hancock” – which I would otherwise have only seen while trapped on an airplane* or if I were incarcerated and this was all that was being shown on movie night.

[*Editor's note: For our list of the Top 10 Actors Guaranteed to Ruin your Transatlantic Flight, click here]

The premise for the movie is promising and has some great satirical potential. Hancock does what Superman does, but whereas Superman is free to zip around skies that seem to have been cleared specifically for him, Hancock kills birds in mid-air collisions and has to dodge planes. What’s more, unlike Clark Kent – a character with the piercing depth of a carp – Hancock is a brooder, he hangs around in cheap bars, and when one woman remarks that she can smell booze on his breath, gets pissed off, “That’s because I’ve been drinking, bitch!” After the movie’s opening act, you get the mistaken impression that the whole film might be about a superhero with the disposition and bonhomie of a morning after Charles Bukowski.

We meet Hancock as he’s sleeping off a hangover on a park bench. Bullets bounce off him, he survives having a mack truck dumped on his head, but his superpowers do not extend to hangovers – cheap whiskey, it would appear, is this man’s kryptonite.

When Hancock stops a gang of street toughs from shooting up the freeway, he’s not troubled by hero-worship. If you’re a taxpayer forced to foot the bill to have a bad guys’ car removed from the spire of the Capital Records building, you might be less than appreciative of Hancock’s efforts. Later, he rescues a man whose car is stuck in the path of an oncoming train. He does this by slamming his fist into the oncoming train and causing a wreck. Rather than being applauded for saving the life of a stranger, he’s heckled: “Why didn’t you carry the car up and away rather than stopping the train with your fist?”, he’s asked.

Jason Bateman plays Ray Embry, the guy he rescues from the oncoming train. To pay Hancock back for saving his life, Embry offers him the only thing he can – unsolicited PR advice. He suggests that the first step towards Hancock improving his image would be to answer the countless subpoenas out there for him and actually serve some time in jail once he’s convicted. Hancock does this and the filmmakers get some comedic mileage out of a jail sequence – the prisoners, all of whom Hancock put there, are still inexplicably of the impression that they could take him in a square-go and attempt to bully him in the tradition of welcomes given to all new prison arrivals. He makes them pay for it by using one man’s head and another man’s anus in a way that is probably funny to 14-year-olds, but anatomically hard to believe.

After “Juno”, a deserving entrant in the blog/book “Stuff White People Like”, Jason Bateman it would appear is the face of the white liberal whose heart is bleeding so profusely it no longer circulates anything to important arteries. He has a Woodstock poster in his house and basically he makes Al Gore look like the kind of guy who would pee in or otherwise foul the town water supply. Aside from one scene in which he takes an unexpected and highly welcome swipe at Bono, Ray Embry is a grating weenie. At one point in the movie, Hancock helps a giddily drunk – this guy doesn’t get drunk, he gets squiffy – Embry to his bedroom and after that it seems like Hancock might make a move on Bateman’s wife Mary, played by Charlize Theron. This scene was one of the few in recent memory in which I can actually recall wishing a cuckolding on a character in a film.

The film’s second half springs out of the tensions between Hancock and Mary, and, while it did have the element of surprise on its side, this was tempered by the fact that it this major plot turn was ludicrous, arbitrary and that it came at a point when I had long ago stopped caring about how this film was going to resolve itself.

What we’re left with is a good performance from Will Smith, he makes a good mean-whiskey drunk and that's no small compliment, and some fun goofs on the superhero genre – the best of these being Hancock’s attempt to save the life of a beached whale by flinging it back into the ocean... just his luck that a sailboat would be there to meet it at the landing point. Mostly though, it’s a movie with no concerted focus, one that starts out as fun satire and quickly degenerates into the very kind of film it was making fun of in the first place.

Vincent Ngo is credited with the screenplay and apparently it's been “in development” for the past 10 years. When the film came out, Ngo kept out of the spotlight, saying only that his Hancock money would be used to finance a school in Vietnam. The original script was given the unfortunate title, “Tonight He Comes”, (insert your filthy joke here and swap them with your friends) and reportedly was completely different from what went up on screen. Collider.com tells us though that this was not the case of Hollywood stomping a great artistic vision; their hilarious review of Ngo’s original script ran with the headline, “Original Hancock Script Approximately 9 Billion Times Worse than Hacky Studio Rewrite”.

What we're left with then is a film that was never that good. A fun idea and a solid premise that may have been turned into something satirical from start to finish, but one that's used up in the first half hour of the film. One imagines that Ignatius, him of the sensitive heart-valve, wouldn't have made it through this one.

Click here for a review of a movie that got the drunk superhero idea right.

Getting Pie-Eyed on Pizza Flavored Beer and Other Strange Brews

Recently we covered booze-flavored toothpaste, just the thing for those looking to spruce up in the morning by brushing their teeth with something that will give them an instant and sickening reminder of the 11 highballs from the night prior. More common is the trend towards making alcohol-related products taste like something else – hence the rise of alcopops and various other beverages that are commonly ordered by girl drink drunks.

Beer manufacturers are doing this by adding ingredients to their brews to excite the Budweiser-deadened tastebuds of your average guzzler, and, in some cases, to test their gag reflexes. Pizza-flavored beer seems like the type of unorthodox brew that would do the latter, as, up until this point, the only pizza-flavored beer familiar to the recreational boozer has been the end of the night palette clearing, known in some circles as “bending and sending” or more commonly blowing biscuits.

However, according to this review from the Fairfield County Weekly, Tom Seefurth’s Mamma Mia Pizza Beer is actually quite quaffable, if not actually the most authentic-tasting beer. While the brewers do include oregano, basil, tomato and garlic in the mix, it isn’t exactly a slice of pie crammed into a beer bottle. According to the reviewer, “…it resembled the taste of pizza-flavored Combos or Pringles… rather artificial, kind of like the Baco-Bits of the alcohol world.” The reviewer, a Shark Guy in spirit, scoffed at the pizza beer’s low alcohol content (4.5 percent) and said that he’d “just as soon knock back a beer-flavored beer.”

For those looking to explore the world of flavored beer, here is a quick look at what’s on offer. We take no responsibility for sickened stomachs. (Editor’s Note: The first one is not meant for humans, but like those sad stories of senior citizens on fixed budgets being left to dine on the Alpo, there is nothing to stop you from trying it out for yourself).

Steak-flavored beer for dogs: Who among us hasn’t emptied out the odd pint into Rover’s bowl just to see what would happen when he got a little tipsy? One of our favorite tales in the animals section of our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark (and other true tales of drunken debauchery), concerned a footman of the Queen of England who was fired for putting whiskey in the water bowls of the royal corgis. (They have since straightened out incidentally). The beer we’re talking about here though, the Dutch Kwispelbier - "tail-wagging beer" is non-alcoholic, and tastes like beef. The beer has recently gone on sale in the UK and is being imported from Holland. According to the distributors of the canine brew, while little Fido may not end up as hammered as his owners, he’ll at least be drinking in solidarity with them: "It means pets are even more a part of family life as they can enjoy a beer, too."

Beer and Milk Makes Bilk: According to the good folks over at PETA, beer is actually better for you (not to mention poor ole’ Bessie the cow) than milk. “Beer in moderation is good for you, while even one glass of milk supports animal abuse and harms your health,” says a PETA spokesperson. But for those of us not quite ready to throw dairy out the door and embrace the joys of soy, the good news is that the salutary effects of both milk and beer can be found in one ingeniously named Japanese product: Bilk. The brewer, dealing with an oversupply of milk due to lower consumption in Japan, decided to use surplus to create a beer that is 30% milk. According to Reuters, “apart from a slight milky scent looks and tastes like ordinary beer”. Currently, Bilk is available only in the region where it’s produced, Hokkaido, and by mail order. The manufacturer said that further distribution would depend on how the initial beer fared in local markets, and we’re guessing the lack of reports following on from its introduction last year tell us pretty much all we need to know about how that went.

Champagne Beer: Champagne tastes? Beer budget? Willing to drink anything we suggest? Well boy do we have the beer for you. The Krait Prestige Champagne Lager, the US named for the UK Cobra Beer, claims to be the world’s first champagne lager and the only lager to be refermented in the bottle, a process usually reserved for Trappist ales (drinking Trappist ales, incidentally, is the best thing about being a Trappist monk). The bottle is made to look like a champagne bottle, and offers a combination of the two products inside (throwing into complete chaos standard rules such as "beer after wine, you'll do just fine"). Whether such a mix would appeal to you depends on whether you enjoy champagne. If you are of a mind with the journalist Christopher Hitchens who once said, “The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics” then this may not be the product for you.

Chocolate Donut Beer: Brewed by Shenandoah Brewery in Alexandria Virginia, which, we shit thou not, offers a major discount for law-enforcement officials (the discount doesn’t specifically apply to the donut beer, but still…) comes the Chocolate Donut Beer. This begging-for-a-Homer-Simpson-reference beer is in league with pizza beer in terms of giving you something to drink to remind you of the unhealthy things that you like to eat. The beer overwhelmingly positive feedback on Beer Advocate, including an A+ rating from a guy who said it smelled “Like you just opened a pack of those cheap waxy corner store chocolate gem donuts”.

Help Wanted: $14 / Hour Boozehound

Everyone has a dream job, whether it's stuffing envelopes in the comfort of your own bathrobe, or walking dogs for the elderly in the hopes that advancing senility will result in an inheritance accidentally willed your way.

For the drinking set, the definition of a dream job is simply one whose rigors can be forgotten as soon as they've skipped off two hours early for a 'dentist appointment' that involves convening at the billiard hall happy hour.

For the seasoned boozer, whose grocery bills are regularly eclipsed by liquor store hauls, scouring want ads for new employment is daunting, especially as emergency savings are pissed away buying rounds for the lady who tap dances on the bar.

A Winsor, England man, posted a gig that is by any tippler's definition, a dream job, and one that, like the forklift guy in the warehouse who spins around in circles, involves drinking on the job (and not the kind of 'get paid to drink' gig that requires a CAT scan or your ability to memorize conversational Spanish scrutinized behind a two-way mirror).

The job poster, who recently put his father in an assisted living home and was concerned that pops was too far removed from his mates, put the notice up in the local job office, seeking a twice-weekly drinking buddy for the old timer, to the tune of $14/ hour, plus "expenses". If these expenses include buying a round for everyone in the bar because you can't believe your good fortune, we'd be willing to submit our CVs and regale the old cacker with tales from our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery. We'd only ask for a pub with a nice big fireplace, two woolen sweaters and pipes to be smoked during our readings.

According to the son, who is likely going to be left out of the will by pawning the old codger off on some neighborhood rummy, his 88-year old pa is "a very intelligent man with a physics and math degree." At least it won't be that much of a challenge calculating how much to leave in the tip jar.

Drunk teen and his massive bar tab! He's got it 'made in Japan'

Getting a fake ID from that guy who will, once you've drunk yourself stupid in various lenient bars, supply you with a bogus highschool diploma, is a common rite of passage for many young keeners.

More often than not these sorts of identification cards could not pass muster anywhere other than the All-blind and Half-smart Society's annual barbecue and booze-up, but the teens, long having exhausted the liquor cabinet of mom's secret stash of Baby Duck (for all our foreign readers, the worst plonk in the Great White North, unfit to scour sink basins in the southwestern part of France), go for it anyhow.

In Japan recently, a 16-year-old raised the bar (and nearly bankrupted one) for under-aged drunken antics the world over when he sauntered into a Tokyo hostess club in the guise of a rich young playboy and began whooping it up in grand style.

The teen, who the manager later said ordered drinks and spoke with hostesses as a man experienced in such matters would, and was presumably not asked for identification because of that (the minimum drinking age in Japan is 20, and rumoured to be lower if you're not a fussy drinker), sat down with the hostesses and over the course of the evening managed to order an astonishing 60 glasses of whiskey, beer and cocktails, along with two bottles of Dom Perignon Champagne.

A lover of the high life, the youngster had apparently not read the chapter in the con-man's handbook that says when you are in the midst of a deception, it is best to blend in with the crowd and not draw attention to yourself. It's unlikely that he could have made himself more conspicious given his heavy bar tab --- 370,000 yen (US$3,490) by night's end (!) -- and the fact that he repeatedly picked up the microphone to serenade the various karaoke lovelies with some jukebox faves.

Alas, all good things must come to an end (and how much better could they get than a night of high-end booze-up on the arm in some den of ill repute?) and end they did when the teen was presented with the bill. Rather than creating a distraction by, say, requesting some Kenny Chesney and then making a break for it, the teen stuck around until the bill arrived and once it did he announced that he had no money.

Staff kept him there until police arrived, and we, find it a bit disconcerting that the coolest person we can think of at this moment is a 16-year-old kid.(Full story here)