Friday the 13th (2009) and Dragon Berry

Tonight’s Drink:

Bacardi Dragon Berry ‘Dragon Serum’

1 part Bacardi Dragon Berry Flavored Rum
1-1/2 parts Orange Juice
1-1/2 parts Cranberry

Pour ingredients over ice in a tall glass and garnish with an orange wedge.

Sounds fancypants, right? Like you’d take a pause from polishing your monocle, wave over your manservant Standish, and implore him to be a peach and bring you a Dragon Serum? Then you’d pluck a wooden nickel from behind his ear, as if by magic. You’d hold it out to him and as his eyes lit up you’d whisper “No,” close your hand around that precious coinage, and shake your head in disappointment. “Maybe next time, Standish,” you’d say as you sipped your Dragon Serum and looked out over the vast, verdant fields of your estate. “Maybe next time.” Standish would return to the kitchen and continue to plot your demise.

Tonight’s Film: Friday the 13th (2009) –”A group of young adults discover a boarded up Camp Crystal Lake, where they soon encounter Jason Voorhees and his deadly intentions.” BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HAHA! “Deadly intentions.” Yes, our poor, brain-dead teenagers encounter Jason’s deadly intentions, rather than the business end of his machete. “Trent, I daresay that lumbering fellow hold deadly intention toward us in general, and perhaps sodomite intentions toward me in particular. Fleeing might seem a good idea, but instead lets finish our cigars and dialogue with the chap.”

The Drink

Jesse’s Review: Honestly, I’m starting to worry about my powers of Dragon Berry discernment. This tastes very similar to the Dragon Berry and Sierra Mist Cranberry. I guess because it has a lot of cranberry and because I burnt off all my tastebuds in a freak curling iron accident. (I was practicing fellatio with a curling iron.)

Phil’s Review: Oh, this is really good. Really. I’d drink this on a train, I’d drink this on a plane, I’d drink it with your mom. A little sweet, so pace yourself. Don’t be mean to your stomach. Also, funny how Jesse confuses my shaft for a curling iron.

The Film

Jesse’s Review: Teenagers are fucking annoying. They are plastic hardbodies with faces so slack, eyes so dead, that they can only express themselves through hysterics. You will look at them and hate them, not for their youthful sense of invincibility or their boneheaded decisions or their non-existent personalities, but because when you look into the abyssal black of their eyes you see only nothingness. And you realize that nothingness is the future of the human race.

This would seem the conceit of Friday the 13th, a cautionary tale about a world in which teenagers are not murdered swiftly, decisively, and in increasingly brutal ways. (Although these “teenagers” are played by twenty-somethings and written, it would seem, by Mike Sacks.) The film’s most terrifying moment comes at the beginning, when the credits read, “In association with Michael Bay.” The association with Satan remains implied as we get a quick flashback summary of Jason Voorhee’s metamorphosis from boytard into hulking, silent killer — the origin of his “deadly intentions.” This sequence is largely boring and nonsensical, shot with little sense of rhythm, and as much as I hate to admit it, I longed for some Michael Bay “awesome.” Three minutes in, I sipped my Dragon Berry, already succumbing to the creeping fear that this would be a long, disappointing ride. Kind of like a theme park ride about salt manufacturing.

In short order some dispensable teens show up, and they are HORNY. It is like the honored delegation from Bonerland up in here! And if one thing inflames Jason’s deadly intentions, it’s tumescent teenage dirty parts! (Oh, and weed. Also, having an orgasm in a field of weed will probably get you murdered. Life lesson #1: If you’re going to Crystal Lake, masturbate beforehand (HA!) and leave your High Times at home.) (Whoops, also, returning to the parenthetical: don’t fuck a mannequin. Jason will probably kill you for that.) (Ah, really the only thing he won’t kill you for is looking like his mom. For that he’ll chain you in his underground lair — what?) When a couple start doing it doggie-style in a tent, Jason shows up and kills the mood. By roasting the girl in her sleeping bag.

When all the campers die in the movie’s first 15 minutes, you might think: Huh, well, movie’s over. Guess I’ll go back to organizing my Hummel figurines. NOT SO FAST, JACK. Nope, we (the People) are just getting warmed up! Soon we’re introduced to Trent, a douchey, blonde member of the upper crust whose family owns a summer house near Crystal Lake. (“Summer house” might make them sound rich, but I imagine property values have come down since the locals started finding body parts in their saunas.) Hilariously (to me), “Trent” the testosterone-fueled toolshed is played by a guy named “Travis van Winkle.” You know what? Let him use his real name in this one. You really can’t top that.

Anyway, soon enough Trent van Winklewhitebread III and his “friends” — his “girlfriend,” two indistinguishable blondes, the dude from Party Down, and a black dude and Asian dude who provide “comic” relief — run into “Clay,” who’s searching for his missing sister. You remember, from before? She got kidnapped by Jason? No? It was like five minutes ago, but six months in movie time. You don’t care? Me either.

Regardless, we know that Clay is a good, blue-collar guy because he rides a motorcycle and cares about finding his sister. Remember: people who work for a living love their families, while rich people love only their money, which they fuck every night. Clay (another perfectly evocative name) faces off against Trent in several scenes of “Intolerable Douchebag” vs. “Slightly Less Intolerable Douchebag.” Two men enter, one man leaves! Who will it be? The dude who drives escalade and wears button-down shirts or the dude who drives a motorcycle and carries a knapsack? You can tell them apart, as Phil noted, because one has brown hair and the other is blonde.

Soon enough Trent’s douchey intentions run into Jason’s deadly intentions, and people start getting murdered. Unfortunately, the murders are remarkably dull. Jason shows up in broad daylight to shoot Party Down in the head with an arrow, then stab one of the blondes with a machete. Yawn. Even if I cared about these characters, that’d be Dullsville. Our racism-spotting black guy — “What, because I’m black I can’t listen to Green Day?” Actually, because you seem to have a working nervous system you can’t listen to Green Day — gets high and begins masturbating to the Eddie Bauer catalog. Let’s linger here for a moment: he gets high and masturbates to the Eddie Bauer catalog. That’s a thing people do, right? Real people? Guess what happens to him?

I’ll let Phil pick up the “plot” summary, if necessary, but obviously the Friday the 13th movies have never much concerned themselves with plot. Suffice to say that people get killed, check, but as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that you could be doing something better with your time. Like masturbating to the Eddie Bauer catalog. Or, god forbid, calling your mother.

Phil’s Review: So, it’s been a long time since I’ve watched this, actually. I don’t remember much of the film at all. What follows is mostly made up.

Much criticism of Marcus Nispel’s films has focused on the esteemed director’s ability to masterfully manipulate the viewer, to understand his audience’s expectations and then subvert those expectations for dramatic or aesthetic effect. One notable example occurs in Pathfinder (1951) when the film’s antagonist, Jackie Brown, drops a piece of evidence through a drainage grate. For the next minute or so, Nispel cuts back and forth between Jackie trying to reach this piece of evidence and the film’s protagonist, Butterscotch, playing a tennis match. Here, Nispel plays with assumptions of film narrative: if Jackie cannot retrieve the piece of evidence, he will need to form an alternate plan in order to frame Butterscotch. But in Pathfinder, this becomes unnecessary. Despite the repeated shots of Jackie’s hand straining and failing to reach the evidence, the fact of the matter is, it just takes a really long time. He eventually retrieves the evidence without help.

Nispel critics often cite Friday the 13th as a prime example of his ability to manipulate an audience. In “Nispel, Antonioni, and the Irresponsible Audience,” Matt Baxter writes that “Nispel manipulates our desire to sympathize and identify.” Baxter speaks specifically of Friday the 13th, where the film’s heroine, Jenna, is killed unexpectedly and senselessly, and where our initial sympathies for Jenna are thwarted by her criminal behavior, our initial sympathies for Jason Voorhees are thwarted by our slow realization that he is a psychopathic murderer.

Manipulation of audience attitude and response plays a large role in documentary film, which is what Friday the 13^th is, if I remember correctly. If theorists who contend that there exists no objective lens in film are correct, we may presume that the structuring of any given documentary film fulfills a rhetorical purpose on behalf of the filmmaker/s. Nispel has not only been lauded (and criticized) as a documentary filmmaker, but he has been lauded (and criticized) as an outspoken voice of the New Left, a working-class journalist, a self-proclaimed everyman. And while Nispel’s films often take a populist stance on a particular issue, Nispel does what he can to appear unbiased. But his tactics are not lost on everyone. In “Nispel’s Dystopia,” Gerald Atkins analyzes what he calls Nispel’s “tricks”: “In constructing a movie, Nispel puts on this trait [revelation of personal experience] as much as he wears his Jason mask; it’s a sign, meant to establish a rapport with the audience by proving he’s like us.” And once Nispel establishes this rapport, this intimate connection that situates us on his side, he presents the details of his case. In the instance of Friday the 13th, Nispel’s manipulation of narrative was not hard for most to detect, as Chuck Klosterman’s condemnation reveals. For many viewers, even those who sympathize with Nispel’s cause, this manipulation of “truth” dishonors the value of the film. But what happens when the filmmaker takes a step back, refuses to comment on his subject, purports to be a fly on the wall?

In an interview with Alan Rosenthal in The New Documentary in Action, Frederick Wiseman, director of the 1968 documentary High School, claims that “it’s totally impossible to make a film with an audience in mind.” But whom, then, is High School intended for? Not long into the film, the themes of High School make themselves apparent: this is a film about the imbalance of power in American public school systems, about the contradictory messages provided the students by figures of authority, about how these contradictions could impact the post-high school lives of the students. Yet, according to Wiseman in the Rosenthal interview, the superintendent of the school enjoyed the film, believing it to be a positive portrayal of the school system, until national reviews began criticizing the school, while praising the film. Might this suggest that Wiseman did have a particular audience in mind during the making of High School?

The sequencing of events in Friday the 13th, I would argue, is a kind of subtler manipulation of audience than Wiseman’s. The power division becomes more than evident in the first minutes of the film. Jenna is told to “listen” but not to “talk.” Bree is chastised for being “individualistic.” One particular shot shows the leads sitting outside the cabin, Nispel’s angle evocative of factory labor, or even sweatshop labor, given the youth of the actors. What’s interesting about many of these exchanges is that they seem to blatantly contradict ideals of American individualism; today, high school textbooks laud the efforts of Andrew Carnegie, Rosa Parks, Ralph Waldo Emerson—individualistic voices who have shaped the social climate of America. Glimpses of this attitude in Friday the 13th—for instance, an psychopathic killer berating a girl for not standing up for herself—are soon contradicted by an image or behavior that ridicules ideas of actual individuality.

Final verdict.  Movie/drink combo,  dragon berry or dingle berry?

Jesse’s Review: Dingle berry. I don’t blame the Dragon Berry, obviously, but Friday the 13th filled me with such blinding rage at its stupidity that I forgot to drink.  (“Ooooooh, I’m so ANGRY! Wait till the INTERNET hears about THIS!”) I barely finished a single Dragon Berry.

Phil’s Review: Dingle berry. Here are some actual notes I took during the movie. “Dude finds weed and a GLOWSTICK!…and his friendo.” “Shit be happenin quick.” “What a weird cop.” “Black dude loves the race card.” “Old people are weird, says this movie.” “Redneck licks Hustler pussy while smoking weed.” “Cool sex scene…perfect nipple placement, nice ass shot.”

Sorority Row and Dragon Berry

Tonight’s Drink: Dragon Berry and pomegranate juice. We really can’t explain how that happened other than, “Hey pomegranate juice is hella cheap at Ollie’s. That ain’t no fancypants-store price! Down the gullet it goes!” Again, we got rather sloppy with the mix, meaning about three (3) shots of Dragon Berry to however much pomegranate juice looked acceptable. You’re an adult, right? Eyeball it.

Tonight’s Film: Sorority Row (2009) – “Sisters for life… and death.” So sisters in favor of death? Sisters till death? Already the questions begin! The “plot”:  “A group of sorority sisters try to cover up the death of their house-sister after a prank gone wrong, only to be stalked by a serial killer.” Pranks that end in death probably deserve a stronger condemnation than “wrong,” but who are we (OLD PEOPLE) to argue?

The Drink:

Phil’s Review: The cheap, off-brand pomegranate juice provided a thick, earthy bottom for this drink, not entirely unpleasant, though its tawdriness sat heavy on the back of the tongue. It’s like those popular green bean jelly ice milk bars from Asia—there’s a tender sweetness up front, but the coarse elements in the juice leave something sickly behind.

Jesse’s Review: I don’t drink a lot of pomegranate juice. You know why? Because I’m not a Captain of Industry. I don’t sleep on a pile of cash, secure in my mansion on the hill overlooking the peasant villagers who toil in my fields all day. I don’t read The New Yorker, and I’m not an elitist. Most of my cocktails are made with 3 parts filmy rainwater “filtered” through a pair of old pantyhose. How am I going to regularly get my hands on juice distilled from the bodies of third world children? That’s what pomegranate juice is, right? Hang on — am I thinking of soylent green? Either way, the pomegranate juice was unfamiliar to me and therefore unpleasant. I coped by adding more Dragon Berry. I may also have added some Sprite. Science just can’t say one way or the other.

The Film:

Phil’s Review: When a college prank goes horribly wrong (for no good reason) a group of college-senior sorority girls cover up their crime, only to later be terrorized by a faceless killer upon graduation. I expected a horror film about sorority girls to treat its characters cruelly, but Sorority Row did its best to surpass those expectations. Head sister Jessica is perhaps one of the most villainous non-villains I’ve seen on screen. (At least she’s not the villain; director Stewart “Taint Scum” Hendler saves that role for someone much less deserving.) Yet Jessica holds little regard for human life, nor does she display the fundamental sense of right and wrong we expect from people who are not Ted Bundy. Hendler, though, puts Jessica in as much real danger as every other sorority girl, even gives her a few cheap redemptive decisions near the end, but when she dies her gruesome death (I’m not giving anything away, am I?), it’s hard to feel much of anything for her.

The lead characters are all lazy caricatures, of course, but at least we can tell them apart. There’s the heartless bitch, the slightly less heartless bitch, the promiscuous Asian gal, the sloppy drunk who fucks her ethically-bankrupt therapist, the nerdy “shouldn’t-I-be-playing-World-of-Warcraft-with-my-boyfriend-who-works-at-Babbage’s-instead-of-pledging-Theta-Pi” chick, who for one reason or another, never seems out of place; and then there’s Cassidy, the reluctantly quiet girl with a conscience, the character Hendler asks us to please identify with, if you possibly can.

I asked myself—and Jesse—at least twelve times during the movie: “Did they fuck up the script?” It seems very likely that they did. In one early scene, as our lovely shrink-screwin’ sister munches pills in the bathroom, Dr. Perv falls victim to the killer. Upon emerging from the bathroom, Chugs (that’s what the film calls her), unwilling to play a game of “Catch Me, Rape Me,” gives up her search for the missing doc. Given a golden opportunity to exploit the suspense of the audience knowing what the character does not (dramatic irony!), the filmmakers instead decide to dispose of Chugs quickly and move onward into the rest of their threadbare plot.

Perhaps the film’s ultimate failing, though, is its revealing of the masked killer, a character so undeserving of the role that I thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it must be one final red herring. I don’t mind being surprised, but I hate being tricked, and the final fifteen minutes of Sorority Row is nothing but a slimy, lazy trick. Part of me hopes this is the work of a filmmaker who, for one reason or another, wants to play a joke on his audience, much like Hitchcock did in films like Psycho or Strangers on a Train, for as annoying as that can be, I can let it slide. In this case, however, what I see is a film that so badly wants to be clever that its utter lack of cleverness is an affront to anyone who’s watched a film as sophisticated as Dude, Where’s My Car? Fail.

Jesse’s Review: Phil has already — in the name of justice and all that is good and pure in this fallen world — eviscerated Sorority Row. I have no reason to disagree with him, so let’s talk about a different bad movie I saw recently: Jennifer’s Body.

As part of 2009′s Watch Two Megan Fox Movies In Two Days And Then Feel Dirty and Wrong activities, I watched this and Transformers 2. (In my opinion, Ms. Fox should try to find more roles written for blank-faced automatons. That’s not a slam, but rather sincere career advice. It worked for Keanu Reeves, didn’t it?) Jennifer’s Body and Sorority Row seem to both labor under the misapprehension that you can build characters entirely of teenager stereotypes. In Jennifer’s Body, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (oh, it burns just to type that!) offers the same view of high school as a vicious, seething pool of backstabbing and thinly veiled enmity.

True? “True.” High school sucks, then some people go to college, and some of them are suuuuper-bitchy, and that sucks too. Thanks, Wisdom of the Ages. You are The Secret.  This insight gets you only so far, and on its own doesn’t make for a compelling film.

Both of these films owe a debt to the far superior Heathers, which used the High School as Hell Pit as a backdrop for a story about something other than how bitchy and self-absorbed teenagers can be. (Hello, Italics button. I just met you today. Let’s hang out for like a month!) It also came out in the ’80′s, along with all those revered John Hughes films that, while relying just as much on teenager stereotypes, had some fundamental heart and soul. Did filmmakers in the eighties better understand how to make teenagers watchable — or does it just seem that way because I’m 52 years old? Are today’s teenagers soul-less ambition-bots who’d rather through a sister down the mine shaft (a metaphor, but also not a metaphor) than risk not getting ahead? Or, as Sorority Row puts it, “We’re going to spend our child-bearing years in lock-up?” (A weird nod to reproduction-as-fulfillment from a character who seems driven mostly by the desire for wealth and power.)

And but so how do we know this movie, based on 1983′s The House on Sorority Row, isn’t just about shallow, insecure and personality-less people of any age? Well, the sisters plan to put their date-rape prank video on YouTube. And say things like, “I’m updating my Facebook!” (Who says that? Doesn’t this lead to some infinite regress where your Facebook status becomes “I’m updating my Facebook!”? And then frowny face for the universe as it implodes into your solipsism?) The hero, whose name I won’t look up, uses her cell phone to track her boyfriend. And, also too: “Friend me on Facebook — I’ll totally confirm!” UGH! THIS MOVIE!

Yet for its supposedly contemporary setting — co-eds today take off their clothes and have pillow fights, right? On trampolines? And then there’s a hot tub? Oh, that doesn’t happen, ever? — Sorority Row has some pretty retrograde politics.  (Sorority Row has politics?! Headsplosion!) Chugs has sex with her shrink in order to get prescription drugs, which are the true bane of today’s (white, upper-class) youth. She does this because she is sad and hates herself. Fine. Ditto the promiscuous Asian girl, insecure despite being in an entirely different aesthetic class than her meathead boyfriend. Yes, neither of them have souls, fine. But after a while it gets difficult to separate this movie’s generally disdain for “sorority girls” from a more general misogyny. Guest Paragraph written by Jesse, Professor of Women’s Studies and Sorority Row, Oxford.  (Ask me about the clash of masculine (tire iron) and feminine (lamp) in a late-movie fight scene!)

But, you say, horror movies typically have conservative views on sex. You don’t see a lot of female empowerment in Friday The 13th. And fine, yes, we need to turn women into viscera to have a successfully formulaic co-ed splatterfest. I understand and respect your opinion and will fight to the death to defend it. But Sorority Row seems like a movie made by people who had heard of horror movies from a friend of a friend, but never actually seen one. Phil notes above the total lack of suspense-building in the shrink’s office scene, and that’s just one among many. At no point do you wonder if or when one of the main characters will die. That’s partly because you don’t care about them, but also because the movie dispenses with them in such cavalier ways. Some films can make this work — see this New York Times essay on the appeal of the Final Destination franchise, for example. But Sorority Row, unlike Final Destination, doesn’t have a supernatural out for Rube Goldberg deaths whose ingenuity impresses us even if we don’t give a shit about the characters (see also The Omen and the famous beheading by plate glass.) I’d actually hoped the film would resist the “easy” slasher answer and suggest that yes, the girl you murdered came back from the dead to pick you all off one by one. Sitting through a series of increasingly banal and offhand deaths only to find out that the [SPOILER ALERT] killer-hero murders his girlfriend’s sisters so the two of them can get ahead? Meh. More Dragon Berry, good sire.

But as the old saying goes, men sometimes have to kill the friends of the women they love, because those friends are a bad influence.

Final verdict.  Movie/drink combo,  dragon berry or dingle berry?

Phil: Dingle berry. A stronger, more-palatable drink might have allowed enjoyment of the movie on at least a purely visual level. At times, it seems, the film strives hard to resist the horror formula, but in this, as in every other aspect of Sorority Row, it fails. I would have rather gulped two shots of DB every time someone’s cell phone rang in the movie. Then, at least, I might have been drunk enough to accept the film’s turd of an ending.

Jesse: Dingle berry. Pomegranate! Sorority Row! I curse both of you. But not you, Dragon Berry. Never you. You complete me.

Fired Up! and Dragon Berry

This evening’s review almost didn’t come together, as the town had once again run dry of dragon berry — or so it seemed.  Phil and I tried two liquor stores on Saturday, only to realize the Dragon Berry Underground (DBUG) had struck first, and hard.  A bearded gentleman with crackers in his mouth mumbled that they’d been cleaned out. He was obviously shell-shocked. We took on the quest in his name.  Long story short: we got our dragon berry. And how.

Tonight’s Drink: Dragon berry and Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash. A modification of the traditional dragon berry and ginger ale (the DB&GA) combining 3 shots of dragon berry with, I don’t know, like 8 oz of Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash.

Tonight’s Film: Fired Up! (2009) – “The two most popular guys in high school decide to ditch football camp for cheerleader camp. For the girls and for the glory.” Also: “2 Guys. 300 Girls. You Do the Math.” Division? Multiplication? Zany!

The Drink:

Jesse’s review: I can already taste myself passing out.  The limited-time-only Sierra Mist ® Cranberry Splash provides a hint of holiday cheer and nicely compliments the dragon berry (DELICIOUS).  This drink reminds me what my holidays have become: a time for food, family(ish), and gettin’ tore up. You can barely taste the alcohol, and after three drinks you’ll be able to think of no reason to leave your couch.

Phil’s review: Perhaps unfairly, I’d had five or six dark n’ stormies before The Review. Nonetheless, the Dragon Berry and Cranberry Sierra Mist packed quite a punch. Subtle, light, and crisp, the cocktail reminded me of a girl-cousin I’d met only a few times growing up, one with a crazy Evangelical mother, like kill-the-fags crazy. Once, on a dare, she whispered “shit” into my ear, made me promise not to tell anyone. That’s what this tasted like: playful, naughty, cousin’s little secret.

The film:

Jesse’s review: For the first half of Fired Up! I wanted to hate this movie. The script, written by — no, “scribed by,” lets go with “scribed by” — Freedom “Isn’t Free” Jones, open on two football playas trying to talk their way into some girls’ panties. They’ve got a smooth delivery, with one (Nick or Shawn) claiming to be in love, and the other (Nick or Shawn) saying he’s unable to love. At this point, the two seem like generically attractive meatheads without the comedic timing to be really funny. So yeah, I didn’t bother learning their names.

HOWEVER. (Transition denoting a turn in the argument.) By the half hour mark or so I’d nearly finished my first dragon berry, and while the two leads never got more interesting, their relentless pursuit of goonch did get funnier.  The foul-mouthed younger sister — “You can pee on my face, just don’t tell me it’s raining” always cracks me up when delivered by a 14 year-old. Whatever, I’m on MySpace a lot — gets some classic lines, as does Professor of Cheerology at FU: “I told them in Spanish: how much clearer could I have been?”

The movie works best as a collection of often-absurd one-liners, since Fired Up! doesn’t really satirize the teen comedy genre or do anything new with it. Too many writers can easily ruin a movie, but obviously the four behind “Freedom Jones” had a good time trying to comedically outdo one another.

Also, things insulted in this movie:  The Olive Garden, NBC, Nickelback, Chumbawumba (implicitly, with douchey Dr. Rick saying, “It’s the soundtrack of my life man!”),  and the Ford Focus (“Does mediocrity deserve applause?”). In other words, I’m fully aligned with this worldview.

Phil’s review: Truffaut once said, “When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it’s just wonderful.” Fired Up! director Will Gluck certainly got the memo. Late in the movie, (SPOILER ALERT!) when head cheerleader, Carly, discovers that her boyfriend–the villainous pre-med Dr. Rick, played by David Walton–is cheating on her, we feel her pain…and we laugh. It’s painful because Carly is the film’s saving grace, the girl “too smart” to be fooled by co-protagonists Nick and Shawn. She’s attractive, witty, and sharp-tongued, and unlike our bland male leads, Carly’s transformation carries both surprise and emotional impact. Yet the moment is comedic for the same reasons. Unlike Carly, apparently under the spell of adolescent cock-and-wealth lust, the audience sees the shallowness and egocentricity in Dr. Rick. When we realize that Carly will dump The Rick, we understand that his loss is our gain; his failure delights.

Jesse is correct in noting that, after a horrific opening thirty or so minutes, Fired Up! takes a turn for the better. However, the humor is still sporadic and mediocre at best. What we do have are a few clever out-of-left-field WTF moments–Nick (or Shawn) discovers that the bracelet he put in his mouth (for what reason?) was actually a gay (male) cheerleader’s anal beads; gentle pokes at Nickelback and Croc-wearin’ folk. These little surprises aren’t belly busters, and they’re spread out over a thin and predictable plot, but if you’re a patient person with six shots of the Dragon in ya, it might be worth it.

For a movie about two teenage boys scopin’ goo, Fired Up! contains very little sex. One scene depicts underwear-clad teenagers swimming and kissing in a lake, and one girl briefly bares her breasts, but most of the film’s sexuality exists in dialogue or implication: talk of “big ass titties,” the aforementioned anal beads incident, an odd reference to adolescent water sports. Fired Up! is far from an original movie, far from a compelling movie; its saving graces are the occasional offhand zings and its slow, eventual tenderness.

Final verdict.  Movie/drink combo,  dragon berry or dingle berry?

Jesse: Dragon berry. This’ll probably prove controversial, as there’s some debate whether Fired Up! is objectively awesome. But settle in with a second dragon berry and Sierra Mist ® Cranberry Splash.com/twitter_BOOYA and take a voyage on USS Fired Up! Rocks. Ride the dragon.

Phil: Dragon berry. Though the occasional funniness of the film’s second half by no means excuses its sloppy, stumbling beginnings, Fired Up! lends itself to the fast onset of drunkenness this drink provides, when references to “sucking knob” and “fishin’ for lay-dees” become catchy quips rather than easy “gags.”

Next time: Sorority Row with dragon berry and pomegranate.