Bollcrap (Part I of II)

I dont want to toot my own horn, but I am an American hero because I got beaten up by a crazed German in Canada. The guy on the right is what we in the US call 'a playah hatah'.

In case you somehow missed the recent memo the entire Internet has been sending everywhere, I'll try to summarize it for you: I'm the biggest pansy in the history of the entire world. This is a significant change in a fresh new direction from the previous Internet memo floating around, the one announcing I'm the biggest unfunny idiot in the entire world, which I actually printed out and accidentally stapled to the side of my thigh. To be honest, it's a real challenge to keep up to date with the latest bandwagons promulgating exactly how much I suck. Fortunately there are helpful, handy blogs like this gem which present nothing but honest facts in a clear, comprehensive, absolutely sane and rational fashion.

I'm thinking of outsourcing this work to India, where, every morning at 9:00 AM, a highly foreign individual will call me up and say, "Rich 'Lowtax' Kyanka, today the entire Internet thinks you're Hitler. GAY Hitler." Then I'll take note and punch it into my Microsoft Outlook calendar and be done with it. At the end of the year I'll have a gigantic spreadsheet listing every day with a detailed description explaining how I was a moron for that particular date. If I ever get audited by the IRS, I'll be able to look back upon specific days and say, "oh yeah, THAT day, that was the day I was a huge lying George Carlin rip off with bad hair and a small weiner and a mail-order bride." Then I'll stare with utmost pride as the tax agent tries to escape the majestic Something Awful headquarters located here in beautiful Lee's Summit, Missouri.

Regardless, this week I'm the biggest pansy in the entire world because I got beaten up by a boxer named "Uwe Boll" (that's pronounced "Oovah Boll" to all you folks who, for some unknown reason, want to say his name in public). How did this happen? Why on Earth did I agree to leave my comfortable, spacious basement and fly up to Vancouver with the sole purpose of having my crap kicked in by a professional crap kicker? I'm not exactly sure I can answer these questions in a form more eloquent than "durrr I'm stupid retarded dumb idiot go punchy fall down hurrr," but I will try to the best of my ability.

It all started back on, uh, some date which I do not recall. Uwe Boll, director of such bombs as "House of the Dead (6% positive reviews)," "Alone in the Dark (1% positive reviews)," and "Bloodrayne (5% positive reviews)," challenged his "loudest critics" to a boxing match against him, a professional boxer with 10+ years of experience. A professional GERMAN boxer with 10+ years of experience. You'll notice I added the word "German" and capitalized the entire thing. If you do not understand why, try getting repeatedly punched in the head by one. It will eventually explain itself.

Here's a little "fun fact" for all you folks who love both fun and facts: if you add together all his positive review scores from his previous three movies, you get a total of 12%, which is still 1% less than the rating for "Pulse," a movie about ghosts killing people on the Internet. Let me say that once again and center it for emphasis:

If you add together all his positive review scores from his previous three movies, you get a total of 12%, which is still 1% less than the rating for "Pulse," a movie about ghosts killing people on the Internet.
Dr. Boll being interviewed by some guy about something.

None of the critics he originally challenged, which included such big names as "Adultswimlover2," "ChineseOldMarketMan," and "howdy4641430-1," actually emailed the guy back, probably because they weren't stupid. Fortunately, I am. Let's take a moment to examine how painfully ridiculous this sequence of events has been so far:

1. Terrible movie director gets mad at random anonymous people on the Internet for making fun of his movies, something which critics across the globe have done for each and every one of his films.
2. Terrible movie director actually "calls out" these random anonymous people and writes a global press release which seriously challenges Internet users including "TylerDurden52" and "BigSexy77" to a fistfight.
3. Terrible website writer notices that nobody has taken up terrible movie director's challenge to a fight, SO HE VOLUNTEERS TO GET BEAT UP. BECAUSE HE IS STUPID.

Unfortunately, I hardly met Dr. Mr. Sr. Uwe Boll's strict criteria he laid out, requiring "to be eligible you must be a critic who has posted on the internet or have written in magazines / newspapers at least two extremely negative articles in the year 2005. Critics of 2006 will not be considered." I had never written a single bad word about the guy or reviewed any of his movies before reading his goofy press release, so I emailed him, asking if I could supersede the rules since he had nobody else retarded enough to beat up, and he agreed. I would say that I lucked out, but honestly I'm not too sure at this point in time. The Internet memo informs me this is because I'm the dumbest, most annoying nerd in the last 3,000 years.

Uwe Boll flew my wife and I up to Vancouver (I had to pay for my wife's ticket; apparently sales of "Bloodrayne" weren't good enough to afford two plane tickets), and soon we found ourselves on the set of "Postal" as "trailer trash extras." We weren't allowed to say any words in the movie because then he'd have to pay us, and apparently Tara Reid's lucrative "Alone In the Dark" contract took a bigger bite out of Uwe's finances then I previously assumed. I guess that's what happens when your last two movies end up costing $45 million to make, yet earn only $10 million in sales. After milling around on set for nearly 10 hours, I learned the following exciting facts about Uwe Boll's world famous directorial skills:


1. Nearly every single person on his staff actively and vocally refuses to watch the movies they make. I spoke with probably 10 or 15 different crew members, and nearly each one of them admitted they go out of their way to NOT watch the movies they work on for him. I wouldn't be surprised if his editor would admit the same, but I pretty much already envision the guy to look like Sam Neill at the end of "Event Horizon." I repeatedly asked folks, "so how can you sleep at night knowing you're responsible for crap like 'Alone In the Dark'?" and they'd reply it was easy since they never, ever watch any of Boll's movies. Most of them made me agree to not mention their names in this update, probably since "being fired from the set of a Uwe Boll film" is the point on the downward spiral right before "suicide via auto-erotic asphyxiation in a motel room bathtub."

2. Uwe Boll movies gain all their energy and momentum from harnessing uncertainty principles. The entire day of shooting resulted in, at most, one minute of usable footage. Boll spent 90% of the time there bickering over how to shoot each scene and WHAT THE CHARACTERS SHOULD ACTUALLY SAY AND DO. See, I was in the dark about major motion pictures and naively assumed there was this magical stack of paper called "a script" which actually listed these things so everybody knew what was going on. Not in Uwe Boll movies. Judging by "Postal," Uwe acts incredibly nonchalant when it comes to trivial nuances such as "plot" and "continuity," which don't really matter in movies when they contain star power thanks to cameos by Mini-Me and The Soup Nazi. And here I was, wondering whatever happened to both Mini-Me and The Soup Nazi. They're appearing in a movie with a script so terrible that Gary Coleman refused to be in it, despite the fact he was a major character in the video game.

GARY COLEMAN.

3. "Humor" can be accurately defined as "picking your nose and then eating the booger." Their set manager would repeatedly approach us extras and list some "funny" things to do, which included picking your nose, scratching your private parts, simulating incest, and burping / farting while picking our nose and scratching our private parts. From what I can tell, the entire concept of "Postal" was stolen from the "Old Guy Getting Hit In the Groin By a Football" video tape. This brings me to my next point:


4. Uwe Boll believes if you fail making horror and adventure and action movies, you should subsequently try failing to make comedies. When I asked Boll about "Postal," he tried to sell me the movie by saying, and I quote here, "it's like 'South Park' if it was a movie." I hate to break it to you big guy, but there was a "South Park: The Movie," and you didn't make it. Obviously he didn't get the Internet memo on that one.

To justify his comparison, he began bragging about how his film takes shots and offends EVERYBODY (I am bold facing and capitalizing this word because he seemed tremendously proud of it), including George Bush, Muslims, and Queen Elizabeth II. Finally, a movie that takes Queen Elizabeth II down a few pegs! I've been waiting for this movie my entire life! That stuffy broad will finally get what she deserves. And as for making fun of George Bush? Man, that's creative ingenuity at its greatest. I initially had my doubts as to if Boll could cram numerous groundbreaking "President George W. Bush is dumb and can't spell" jokes into the script amongst the prolific bounty of farts and rapes, but I was proven wrong.

I read through most of the "Postal" script and it literally contains lines exactly like this (this is an actual line, I kid you not, from the script):

MUSLIM: "Be quiet or else I'll fly planes into your mother, infidel!"

That's humor, by the way. I know some of you might be confused, since there was no booger eating or fart sound effects, but I've been personally assured by writer / producer / director Uwe Boll that this, in fact, is humor. The movie literally ends with George Bush and Osama Bin Laden holding hands and skipping together while mushroom clouds explode in the background (I swear to god). That too, is humor. The script reads like somebody walked into a suburban mall and asked a 12-year old wearing a Slipknot t-shirt "what would make a totally awesome movie?" and then they took his suggestions and somehow made them even less funny. Trust me on this one; I am apparently the bona fide expert on being less funny.

Boll seemed very proud that "Postal" will "begin by showing footage of 9/11," because that apparently is funny too, but not as humorous as boogers and not NEARLY as hilarious as rape, which he mentioned approximately one hundred thousand times in every discussion about "Postal." When he suggested things that the extras could do, he suggested "rape" at least twice. Then he stated, in his trademarked broken / nonsense bargain-bin English substitute, maybe it would be even funnier if a woman is raped and then has an abortion. After hearing this monumentally witty idea, I helpfully piped in and proposed, "and then the aborted fetus could RAPE ANOTHER ABORTED FETUS! HOW HILARIOUS WOULD THAT BE?!?" An uncomfortable hush fell upon us as he stopped talking and simply stared silently at me. I had apparently crossed the proverbial unspoken abortion-rape borderline of comedy. Once again, let me assure you I wish I was making this stupid crap up, but honestly, I'm not quite sure even I'm this unfunny. Oh wait, I just got today's Internet memo: I am!!!

5. Nobody on his staff has any ideas what his movies are even about. Boll tried to trick us into believing his next "horror" movie "Seed" will be scary, although he somehow magically forgot to show us any footage from it. The movie will apparently be "scary" because it uses all natural lighting and was filmed without a script. Once again, I am not making this up. He and his production assistant repeatedly described "Seed" as being "revolutionary" because they had no script while making it. Then the assistant began triumphantly proclaiming how irate the lighting crew acted because Boll refused to use any studio light kits, even in shots where nobody could see anything. Are you guys scared yet? A movie with no script that you can't see? Pretty horrifying, huh? Maybe they could've recorded it using all natural audio, which would've ended up being 90 minutes of Uwe Boll muttering "sheet, dees veel not verk, lees try dees a deefrent vay" while the guttural groans of his two dogs humping each other drone throughout the background.

Like I stated before, nobody could really describe to me what "Seed" was actually about, possibly since it lacked a script / lighting, and its crew members refused to watch the finished product, but the closest anybody came to actually talking specifically about the movie occurred when the production assistant asked me if I saw the movie "Shocker" starring Mitch Pileggi. "It's like that," he stated. "But it's really about Uwe's dislike of the American death penalty." Well wow, a social message from Uwe Boll AND it also stars Boll's favorite washed-up, never-been crony Michael Paré? Sign me up to be seeded first, ladies and gents!

It was kind of sad, but from one day of filming, I learned a lot about the way Uwe Boll functions and how his own cast and crew perceives him: as a big kid letting them play in his sandbox. I actually heard the "big kid / sandbox" analogy from them quite frequently during my trip, but I won't mention specific names because I cannot comprehend the shame of being fired from a Uwe Boll production. Where the hell do you go in life from there? What else is there left to fail at? I feel sorry because it seems a majority of folks working for Uwe Boll are trying to work their way up the ladder, under the false impression that being a stage assistant for "Postal" will somehow lend their resume sufficient padding when they try to find a real job that doesn't involve fart jokes and repeated impromptu rapes.

The majority of the crew are simply trying to make a semi-honest buck, and they attempt to protect themselves from the knowledge of what they have inflicted upon the world by refusing to watch the movies they helped create. Then there's Michael Paré, who is using Boll to bobble over the poverty line and avoid becoming a perpetual "Science Fiction Network exclusive" supporting actor in such upcoming breakout films as "Aztec Ghost Mummy Versus the Giant Space Grubs (From Space)." Good luck with your career, Mike. I hope Boll's movies don't sidetrack you from all your lucrative Japanese salad dressing commercials.

When a majority of your crew avoids your movies, when most of your filming day is spent arguing how to more effectively film somebody yell at a Chinese woman and accuse her of "being a dumb, slant-eyed, dog-eating foreign bitch," when nobody (including yourself) can provide two corroborating descriptions of your movies they played a major part creating, then you've got serious issues. And having been on set of "Postal" for a day, I witnessed firsthand these issues and many many more. Now before anybody can cry foul and proclaim I'm writing this simply because I'm bitter just because I was punched in the head a lot, let me point out two facts:

1. I wrote all these notes down a day before I was punched in the head a lot,
2. Dear god, seriously watch any of his previous movies and try to honestly convince me anything I described sounds remotely implausible.

Woo doggie, all those words and I haven't even began talking about the actual boxing match! Stay tuned for part two of my trip into Uwe Boll's sandbox.