Snap Judgment: The Reckoning

I've been prepping for over a year to make this the best Snap Judgment ever. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.) Let's do this.

9 (rated PG-13, directed by Shane Acker, screenplay by Pamela Pettler, story by Acker)

So this one's apparently about a little guy made of cloth (but who still needs glasses) who wakes up from a coma just in time to stop the impending machine-made apocalypse. I know what you're thinking -- another Young Einstein already? Oh, that we should be so lucky. Sadly, Yahoo Serious's unfortunate copyright lawsuit against Yahoo! in 2000 likely means we won't be seeing his body of work stateside any time soon. Will the voice talents of Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly be enough to tide us over until the winds of forgiveness blow that incredible Australian back to our shores? It's hard to tell; most reviews say that it looks gorgeous but is thin on substance. Sounds like Friday afternoon at The Ivy, which I can walk past for free. Next!



Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself (rated PG-13, written/directed by Tyler Perry, based on his play)

Fun fact: The word "Bad" in German means "bath" or "bathe," so if you sort of semi-translate the title into German, you get Tyler Perry's I Can Bathe Myself, which I'm told the man himself is already planning for a 2053 release. He's got his mind on the future, that Tyler.


Whiteout (rated R, directed by Dominic Sena, screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Eric Hoeber and Chad Hayes & Carey Hayes, based on the graphic novel by Greg Rucka)

Ah, white-out. Boy, have I had some crazy times with that particular brand of correction fluid. Back in '81, I found a bottle of it in my parents' study and poured it all over everything I could find: furniture, books, one of those "portable" tape recorders that weighed more than a cat, and -- speaking of which -- possibly one of the cats. If only they'd had YouTube back then! I would have ridden that train straight to my own "outrageous" reality show. And -- uh oh. Bad news. The bespectacled turtle who does my proofreading has just pointed out that the movie is Whiteout, whereas the substance that blondes allegedly use on their computer screens is Wite-Out. Why, one wonders, would the filmmakers fail to capitalize on such a brilliant opportunity for synergy between scary Kate Beckinsale shower scenes and nearly 60 years of dominance in the chemical typo-negation business? Those morons left billions on the table. Billions.



Sorority Row (rated R, directed by Stewart Hendler, written by Josh Stolberg & Pete Goldfinger, based on a screenplay by Mark Rosman)

Hey, here's a great idea for a horror flick: someone makes me go see this. OH ZING! No, no, I'm just kidding. Movies like this are the bread and butter of a snap-judgmenter like myself, since it's so astonishingly easy to predict every single scene in the movie just by looking at the poster. For example, I know that at some point, one of the girls will think the killer is hiding in the closet, and she opens it, and it turns out it's just a cat. And then later on, another girl will think she's being chased down the stairs by the killer, and she turns around at the last second... and it turns out it's just the cat. In the next scene, a girl is driving home from a bar late at night, and there's no one on the road but her and this other car -- with its headlights turned off. She keeps turning onto side streets, but the car stays on her tail. Finally the car corners her in an abandoned alley and the door opens and... it was just a cat driving. And the headlights weren't on because, duh, you need opposable thumbs to turn the knob. But at the end of the movie -- IT TURNS OUT THE CAT WAS THE KILLER AFTER ALL! Holy crap, you didn't see that one coming! It's like That Darn Cat meets I Know What You Did Last Summer, or, translated into cat language, Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Can Opener.