Little Nicky: Laws of Hell

If you're not familiar with Little Nicky, here's the low-down: The mentally-challenged son of the devil goes to New York to capture his brothers to bring peace back to both Earth and Hell. Personally, I think it'd have been funnier if his name was Little Luci (you know, as in Lucifer), but if I had the good ideas I'd be in Hollywood making movies like Little Luci.

At first glance, this movie doesn't have a whole lot to think about, let alone overthink about, but a closer examination reveals a fairly complex set of laws governing Heaven, Hell, and Earth.

We begin the movie with Jon Lovitz doing what Jon Lovitz does best, being creepy and peeping at a woman undressing. Tragedy strikes as Jon Lovitz dies and ends up stumbling out of the portal to Hell. He's greeted by Kevin Nealon and given his punishment, which is to be comically raped for eternity. Remember, rape is always funny if it's a guy. This is pretty straightforward, if you're a bad person and you die, you get an appropriate punishment. While I wouldn't exactly say peeping is equal to eternal rape, this IS Hell we're talking about.

We're then introduced to the ruling family of Hell, with the ruler of Hell about to announce his successor. The audience is lead to believe that all three sons would make terrible rulers. Two of them are incredibly sadistic and evil, and the third (Nicky) is dumb as a brick. The devil comes to the conclusion that the only good choice for successor is himself. This raises an interesting fact about this Hell. It's not about being evil as possible (as one might think), but rather being fair, wise enough to judge the souls, and just sadistic enough to enforce those punishments.

The two brothers, enraged at this turn of events, decide to go to Earth and basically cause as much trouble as possible for everyone. They run through the portal which instantly seals it up, preventing new souls from entering Hell. This slowly weakens and kills the devil, so it's important that someone goes up to Earth to round them up and bring them back.

The implication here is that it seems ridiculously easy to destroy hell. All an entreprenuring demon, or possibly a damned soul, would have to do is run through the portal and hide out a little bit. It's shown in the movie that there's no real way of tracking the escapees. It's only because their escapades are blatant that Nicky is able to find them. Being that hell is aeons old (it's mentioned that the current devil has been reigning for 10,000 years), it's remarkable no one has tried it yet. Seems like the first thing you'd want to do is escape, and with only one Kevin Nealon guarding the entrance, it'd be pretty easy to do. I guess the denizens of hell are more law-abiding than they're given credit for.

As the movie unfolds and the population of New York effectively becomes a horde of sin and evil (with pretty minimal provocation), my one question is this, "What is heaven doing during all of this?" Heaven is shown to be a very real thing, and yet intervention on heaven's part is completely absent. I would think that the forcible corruption of a metropolitan area by hell would be more than enough reason to come down and protect the flock. This leads to only one conclusion: Heaven doesn't care.

Heaven definitely has an exclusive country club-like atmosphere and it seems that God (I would assume) is perfectly happy keeping it that way. If a bunch of miscreants are going to go sin themselves into hell, just let them. More cloud space to park the new BMW hybrid he just bought.

So, to live in the world of Little Nicky is to live in a world with a fragile hell and an apathetic heaven. A world were minor infractions are met with brutal consuquences, and demons are always vying for your soul. There's no angels to combat them, heaven would just as well not have you.

It's a bleak world out there. Good thing we have a retarded Adam Sandler to protect and guide us.

Zel-kun out.

Twilight: A Profile on Edward Cullen

So, uh... Twilight. Huh... I guess that's what I'm writing about now. This entry isn't about whether or not it's a good movie, because I'll piss off exactly one half of the internet if I pick a side, this is about trying to understand the mind of Edward Cullen.

The source material I'm pulling from here is the first movie, so if any of what I'm saying is elaborated upon in books and other movies, feel free to mention in the comments.

So, if you were to sum up Mr. Cullen in one word, it would be 'brooding.' The man is drowning in so much angst I'm surprised he doesn't spend the movie writing crappy poetry. Vampires in media have a long, well-established history of brooding, but it's generally a pretty good and obvious reason.

Some are mad about never seeing the sun again, which doesn't apply here because in this universe they don't combust. Others were once devout but can't reconcile the fact that they are now unholy abominations, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Others feel overwhelming guilt on having to murder innocent people just to keep living, which again is a fate Edward has avoided, being as he and his family can live just fine off of wild game.

So why? Well, all signs point to that he lost something. Something intangible, and he's on a futile quest to reclaim it. It's evidenced by nearly every action in the movie.

First off, he goes to high school, an activity he appears to utterly hate. Why would he go at all? His family lives in a secluded house in the woods, he could just stay there and no one would even know he existed. He could wander the world experiencing all it had to offer, and given the massive way the world has changed since he was born, there's no way he'd have grown bored of it yet. But with the world at his fingertips, he goes to high school, why?

Well, it definitely isn't for the education, he's graduated more than enough times to learn everything high school has to offer. It isn't because he's trying to find a friend, he would have accomplished that by now. So why high school? Well, it's a good way to immerse yourself in a society without being noticed too much. There's no boss, the schoolwork would be child's play, and if you keep a low profile, you're just "that weird kid." Why would you want to immerse yourself? Because you want to learn something from the humans, because they have an undestanding of something that you don't.

So what is it? He doesn't have emotions. Sure, he has instincts, and obviously lust. But what about empathy, morality, dreams, or goals? He doesn't have any of that. Sure, he knows killing is wrong because that's what his family teaches him, but does he really understand why? If he did he would have some sort of attachment to humans, which might allow him to actually understand and even interact with them.

This doesn't seem to be a vampire thing. Look at Edward's 'father.' He's a successful doctor at the hospital, that isn't something you become without some social skills including people management and bedside manner.

So we come back to his fascniation with Bella. And using this information it makes perfect sense. For whatever reason, he can't see into her mind. This means that of all the humans who confuse him with their humanity, he can understand her even less, which is initially infuriating. It explains why he felt the need to storm out of class all emo-style and disappear for a few days to brood.

For reasons I might explore sometime in the future, Bella takes the time to understand Edward. She's fascinated by him and continues to persue him. Once he realizes that a human is taking the time to delve into his being, much like he's been trying to do to humans, he attempts to open up, because maybe this is his chance to understand the mystery of humanity.

So, yeah, I guess when you really think about it, the plot of the movie actually makes sense.

Who would have guessed?

Zel-kun out.

Kate & Leopold: Elevators in Time

This isn't that big of a movie. But as far as romantic comedies go, it's entertaining enough. Basically, a time-travelling Wolverine falls in love with Meg Ryan. If you're afraid of me spoiling things, maybe you should stop reading, because I'm going to spoil the heck out of this one.

Whenever you throw time-travelling into a plot, there's always going to be severe complications. The problem is that it's incredibly complicated and has hundreds of rules associated with it. Also, no one can agree on what all the rules are. Then you throw into the mix that many writers decide to throw something different in there for flair. This isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. At its best, you'll have an interesting story that you can debate about with your friends. At its worst, you'll have a ridiculous story you'll still have lots of fun debating with your friends. Really, for the discerning overthinker, it's a win-win situation.

So, basically is begins with a guy named Stuart, who appears to be an amateur scientist who figured out exactly how wormholes work, where they go, and how to predict them.

Stuart does what any scientist would do and leaps through a wormhole he predicted without telling anyone. He then proceeds to take pictures and look incredibly conspicuous. He then attracts the attention of Leopold, who chases him back through the return wormhole.

What follows is one of the most confusing bits of time travel logic. You see, Leopold invented the elevator, so when he goes to the future, all the elevators stop working. Now, they don't disappear, or suddenly never existed. They're there, they just stop working. Obviously he's the god of elevators.

While baffling from a time-travel standpoint, it's also baffling from a writing standpoint. Why? Supposedly it's motive for Leopold to return, but they could have made up a hundred simpler plotpoints that would make a lot more sense. Maybe once he left some douchebag inherited his family fortune and stole credit for his inventions? Maybe the history books say Leopold presumably drowned in a river after getting seriously drunk, and his family was shamed into obscurity? Or if we want to get all science-fictiony, we can say the universe will eat itself if Leopold doesn't return to his rightful place in history.

But, this isn't about pointing out an oddity of time-travel. We're going to assume that in the laws of this universe, that's the way it works. If you invent something then travel through time, your inventions stop working, I'm down with that now. Just hope Nikola Tesla never falls into one of those wormholes.

So, being as the modern elevator is significantly more advanced than the first elevator, we can assume that this law not only applies to the original creation, but to all the advances and refinements that use the basic concept. So every elevator thing in the world suddenly broke. So how many people in the world were in critical condition on a gurnee in a hospital elevator being raced to treatment? Well they're dead.

Police officers riding up elevators to quell violent disturbances in tall buildings? Guess those people are going to be waiting for the law.

Miners hundreds of feet underground trying to get to the surface? Yeah, they'll be there awhile.

Did the time travel elevator clause affect pneumatic or hydralic lifts? That pretty much grinds most industrial processes to a hault.

So at the end of the movie when Leopold returns home and everything spontaneously starts working again, how do people explain it? 'The Great Elevator Outage?' We would have been so crippled by it we would assign think tanks of people to figure out why it happened and prevent it from happening again. I'm going to assume that 'Time-travelling Inventor' probably won't be the first thing they guess. So we're going to have some very bright minds tied up with a problem that hopefully will never happen again.

So, in the end, Leopold jumps back into the wormhole and everybody is happy again. But the Stuart the scientist notices that in the pictures he took with his modern camera in a crowded room in the past, there's Kate. She was in the past. Or rather, she WILL be in the past... in the future.

Despite appearances, this actually makes a lot of sense. If you think of the entirety of time as an always existing fabric, everything that has and will happen has already happened. This is a good way to say time travel is possible, it's basically leaping from one point to another. And you don't have to worry about screwing things up because you were already there. Your present is a direct causation of the past you already affected.

Using this knowledge, Kate, Stuart, and her brother Charlie race to the bridge where the wormhole is. She then leaps off, but instead of dying from the fall, she arrives safely in the past where she lives happily ever after.

Except...

She did die. In the present, by every definition imaginable, she is now dead. She went to the past where she lived out her life and is long dead by this point in time. The authorities are going to have a lot of questions for Stuart and Charlie. Obviously they can't tell the truth, who would believe them? Or if they did tell the truth, the law would probably decide they're delusional murderers.

But let's say they kept quiet, and the police didn't put them down as prime suspects, what then? Charlie's going to have to deal with his grieving family. Again, he can't exactly tell the truth, "Don't worry mom, Kate just went to the past." They'll put up missing person posters and billboards, they'll search, but they'll never find anything. And this could go on for years.

It was a happy ending for Kate... but really not so much for her entire family.

Kinda selfish.

Zel-kun out.

Despicable Me: Economy of Evil

A point touched upon once or twice during the movie is that Gru needs money. And why wouldn't he? He has a home, multiple vehicles, a massive underground base, and an army to feed (possibly) and pay (possibly). Because of this, he is indebted to the 'Bank of Evil.'

In this universe, evil is a business, and business is good. The bank president has money to spare, with such extravagances as a gold laptop. From what we see in the movie, you steal something, hold it for ransom, then reap the rewards. The bank profits by funding these villains, then taking what I assume is a healthy portion of the payoff. This is a great system for all evil parties involved.

However, for such a system to work, there are some dire implications. First, that governments will in fact negotiate with terrorists. From what is shown in the movie, while the items stolen are pretty important, they're not really all that dangerous (the catastrophic environmental damage from the removal of the moon and subsequent addition of the moon to the upper atmosphere notwithstanding). It would make a lot more sense for the government to either ignore the ransom for the object, or launch an all out attack on the villain. As we've seen, these people aren't exactly discreet.

The second implication is that there really is no form of law enforcement. The world of Despicable Me is a harsh world, where a person is only as safe as their strength allows them to be. There's evidence of this all throughout the movie. People are able to walk into the orphanage's office to talk to the headmistress, and right there are kids being kept in boxes. In a world with law enforcement that would get reported right away. Gru violates hundreds of parking and traffic laws in his exceptionally conspicuous vehicle, and we never even see a squad car.

In a world such as this, it wouldn't just make sense to be a supervillain, it'd be foolish not to be. Given these factors, the Bank of Evil is actually pretty generous with it's loans. You'd think an aspiring villain would only get once chance to prove their worth. After all, there's always another possibly more capable villain standing next in line. But Gru has apparently had several chances with a pretty low payoff. Sure, he successfully stole some things, but it doesn't appear that anyone paid the ransom, being as he still has them. Maybe he's just that charismatic?

In any case, it's time for me to prepare my presentation for my loan. After all, it's going to take a lot of money to perform the 'Great Sears Tower Heist.'

Zel-kun out.

Despicable Me: Minions

Ask anyone who watched Despicable Me who their favorite characters were. Go ahead, I'll wait. So, did they say it was the minions?

What? The orphanage lady? No, they said the minions. You know, these guys:



And why the heck not? They're cute and hilarious. And most importantly, prone to bits of slaptick. They're like an army of stooges.

But what are the minions really? Here's where things get interesting.

On several occasions throughout the movie, even while at his most despicable, Gru (the big dude in the scarf) shows a fair amount of attachment to these little guys. He revels in their admiration, he knows each one of them by face and name, and while he is sometimes annoyed by their antics, never really gets angry at them.

On the other half of that, the minions adore Gru. They support his plans, share his excitement, and when things turn ugly and he's forced to lay them all off (implying that they're all there of their own free will and likely paid), they dip into their own pockets to fund his plan.

You could say he has a rather fatherly relationship with them, albeit a somewhat distant father for the most part. And it all makes sense if you spot one important thing in the film. In the girls' room, during one of the good night scenes, you can see a minion schematic in the background. This means that the minions were designed and created by Gru (maybe with help from Nefario).

To sum it up, even at his most evil, Gru creates an army of minions, treats them fairly well, and pays them (probably). This all synchs in pretty well with the plot of the movie, where it's really all about him tapping into his human side, his 'heart.' It makes a lot of sense that he always had compassion, rather than it suddenly springing from nowhere.

Unlike a lot of times I overthink things, this one wraps up very nicely and makes perfect sense.

Kudos, Despicable Me, kudos.

I'm not done with you, though.

*evil eye*

I'm watching you.

Zel-kun out.

Overthinking

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes / And other science facts / Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show, / I should really just relax.'"

- MST3K Theme Song

You know, I would really love this to be the case, but it is not. I can lie awake for hours contemplating the implications of the things I watch. I sometimes spend days on the road while my mind will be busy cataloguing political climates of imaginary worlds and writing up psychological profiles of cartoon characters.

So here for your amusement (or pity, I'm not picky) is a sampling of the things I overthink.

More to come.

Zel-kun out.