Most of my contemporaries do a smattering of movie reviews, but as I rarely go to the theater to see what hollywood calls 'entertainment' these days I have yet to do one. But in an effort to spend more quality time with my family, I decided to take them to a local cineplex and see a film they were all looking forward to with unbridled anticipation.

 

I must admit, after seeing the first 2 installments of the "Shrek" franchise, I was also looking forward to seeing this movie. While there were enjoyable moments, for the most part I wished I was back at home with my explosive diarrhea. Even with my abdominal discomfort and the fact it was a kids' movie, I still laughed more than my kids. Which means they hardly laughed at all.

For the third part of this series, Dreamworks essentially "jumped the shark". They went overboard with the pwning of classic fairy tale characters, tried to have Shrek relate in "modern language" to a teenager (which was just hard to hear), and had them all have kids. Jesus titty fucking christ, what a disaster. And of course they tried to bring life to the movie by bringing in a "current" voice in the form of Justin Timberlake. Not only did he sound like the godfather of emo Corey Feldman, his character 'Artie' looked like him, too. Was this really intended to breathe more life into this series? I hope not.

I hate to say this, but the only good part of this movie was the fighting princesses. Sleeping Beauty's power to fall asleep and trip enemy soldiers was a laugh riot, but Snow White took the cake. She shows up at the enemy camp singing her gay little "Forest Friends" song from the original movie (or whateverthefuckitwas, I really don't care) and gathers all kinds of little birds and critters around herself. Then as the song reaches its crescendo, the music gets all heavy and she changes from a high note to the opening screams of "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin and causes all the critters to attack the troops. This wasn't even as funny as it was badass.

Of course there were a few redeeming references to Monty Python in the way of adding Eric Idle as "Merlin", John Cleese dying but really not but then for real, clacking two empty halves of coconuts together to mimic the sound of a horse's hooves (the coconut's tropical - this is a temperate zone), and a kickass new preview of the "Transformers" movie; still this movie really is not worth the price of admission. I have no doubt Spiderman 3 will be back on top very quickly. Not only would I wait for the DVD to come out, I would wait for the DVD to go to the $5.50 rack at Wal Mart.

At least maybe the special features would make it even that valuable.