my week at the movies: ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,’ ‘Kit Kittredge: An American Girl’

So this is probably a good time to explain why I see certain movies when reason and logic and a sense of self-preservation might seem to dictate otherwise. I get emails and comments along these lines all the time: Why do I bother seeing such-and-such when I know I’ll hate it, or if it’s not my cup of tea? The answer is simple: though this site and my work as a film critic started out just as me pleasing myself, seeing what I wanted to see and writing what I wanted to write, it’s grown beyond that now. A bunch of alternative-weekly newspapers across the United States now run some of my reviews, and sometimes I take a bullet for those noble entertainment editors who need a critic to cover, say, the latest Adam Sandler atrocity. From the perspective of those editors, I’m the grunt in the trench, and out of respect for and honor of my betters, sometimes I gotta be the guy who jumps on the grenade. So just to forestall the inevitable complaints about why I am even wasting my time bothering to see and review You Don’t Mess With the Zohan [opens wide June 6] -- in which Sandler *gag* stars as an Israeli commando *snort* who moves to New York to pursue his dream of becoming a hairstylist *argh* -- that’s the reason. Someone is paying me to do so. Not a lot. Not enough to consider myself anything other than the cheapest of whores. But hey, even whores have to pay the bills.

Other than that, it’s another slow week for me. The only other movie I’ll see is Kit Kittredge: An American Girl [opens limited June 20; opens wide July 2], which is a movie based on a line of dolls. *sigh*

(Technorati tags: You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Kit Kittredge An American Girl)