Million Dollar Baby

[CREDITS APPEAR ALL WRITTEN IN CHILDLIKE ‘CRAYON’ FONT]

As the title is ‘Million Dollar Baby’ we know there’s going to be a baby in it (obviously, or else it’d just be stupid). And so the first shot we see is a ten-month old toddling about in a massive nappy (or however old babies are once they become sentient beings). We think he’s a normal baby (why wouldn’t we?) until something amazing happens. When his dummy falls out, he says “Damn!”. Say whaaat?! He’s a talking baby! Voiced by one of the most versatile actors of our generation… Mark(y Mark) Wahlberg! Already we know that this is going to be an amazing film, as funny as it is ground-breaking.

But having a little guy speaking isn’t enough to sustain an entire movie, contrary to popular belief. We need a twist. And it arrives in the form of a letter that results in our baby (called Clint) inheriting money from a deceased distant relative (it has to be distant so that we’re not really that bothered). He goes to a lawyer’s office and sits on one of those green leather Chesterfield chairs that all lawyers have. There is a huge X-Factor-esque gap before the amount of inheritance is announced. It’s a million dollars! Naturally, despite the unambiguous title of the movie, we’re still shocked. His distant relative (who is still not named so that we don’t get attached — a bit like a pet pig you might go on to eat) is actually English. This means that due to exchange rates at the time of filming, this is about £657,000 in pounds sterling. However, it not only sounds more in dollars, it’s a nice, conveniently round number too.

Understandably, Clint the baby is extremely excited. So much so that he actually craps himself. We know this because he tells us in his man’s voice. He has his nappy changed. Despite being able to talk and develop complex trains of thought, he’s unable to do this himself. Then he runs/waddles out and sets about spending the million dollars/£657,000 in the style that a grown man would (because he has a man’s voice).

[THIS NEXT BIT WAS IN THE COMMENTARY]

Mark Walhberg got it written into his contract that one scene would show Clint the baby buying copies of his 1992 album ‘You Gotta Believe’ by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

[A FEW SCENES OF HIM FLASHING THE CASH HAPPEN]

One particular scene involves him going to a strip club. The beers are flowing, a cigar hangs between his tiny lips and he’s putting $20 bills in the g-strings of the sexy young ladies. The strippers are loving it, pinching his cheeks and pushing their impressive bosoms into his face. It’s all great fun, until you remember this is a pre-toddler and realise it’s actually quite disturbing. We can only imagine the emotional damage that this is doing.

It’s not even realistic as in real life, he’d get ID’d everywhere. To cover this, the director makes a half-hearted attempt to mention that everyone assumes that Clint the baby is in fact, Verne Troyer of Mini-Me fame. As a real-life friend of the baby, Troyer actually agreed to do a belittling (pun intended) cameo dressed as one of his shrunken baby mates. It added very little (again, pun intended) to the story, but it meant they could add another name to the film posters.

[MORE DVD EXTRAS]

As the film was quite popular at the time, the line “I filled my diaper again!” becomes somewhat of a catchphrase. An extensive merchandise range was even brought out, with dolls that shouted the phrase and then wet themselves.

Due to its unexpected popularity, it also spawned 18 sequels. The first two did reasonably well at the box office (Million Dollar Dog and Million Dollar Twins, respectively). But the rest went straight to DVD/illegal download — Million Dollar Mexican, Million Dollar Zombie and Million Dollar Jew being particular lows in the franchise.

[THE SERIOUS BIT AND ‘LESSON LEARNT’]

But before all that, the first one needs to finish in a suitably upbeat way. So, Clint realises there’s more to life than drinking, smoking, buying gold-plated breast pumps for his wet nurse and paying Christina Aguilera to sing lullabies to him in her leather chaps. So he invests in a boxing academy for women, as this fulfils his three passions: aggressive women, investing in niche markets and big red shiny things (the boxing gloves).

Some critics hailed it as a metaphor for stolen youth as it came out the same time the first Michael Jackson trials (the following three sequels coincided with Jackson’s subsequent trials). Others said it was just a comedy about a rich, boxing-loving baby.

[SETTING IT UP FOR THE SEQUEL]

In cinemas across the country, audiences shout in one voice: “What’s he doing now? A baby wouldn’t do that! Aha ha ha ha ha ha!”. It’s essentially a one-joke movie. And, as the credits go up at the end, we see clips of the baby as he is now — a carefree young man running a business. He has a hot wife and toddler twins (the signs of success). Then just as we think all’s well that ends well, the camera zooms in on the twins who look at each, roll their eyes and say simultaneously, “Oh brother!”, ready for the sequel.

Dirty Dancing

One sewage worker who refused to drop the ball(room).

It opens on Strictly Come Dancing (except that for copyright reasons, they have to call it Quickly Go Prancing). The dresses are dazzling, the moves astounding, the choreography captivating. We’re under a spell. A spell broken by one word spoken in a broad Yorkshire accent: “Trannie”. The camera then homes in on a blokey bloke. We know this because he’s wearing a dirty white vest and drinking a can of supermarket own brand lager that’s spelt with an ‘r’, so that it actually reads ‘larger’. (The can is also slightly bigger than is standard, making it a very clever pun.) 

Then another voice is heard. “I think they look amazing”. Then the original voice again, “Shut yer cake ‘ole Johnny, you sound like one of them bumbandits”. So we know now that Johnny’s dad doesn’t like dancing or, apparently, people who are gay. Right there and then, Johnny decides his love of dancing must be hidden and they both get ready for work.

Like all Yorkshire men in films (apart from pretend ones like Patrick Stewart), they’re manual labourers and wear a flat cap at all times — even though this is highly impractical for their job in the sewage plant. We also discover Johnny’s nickname is ‘Captain’ — a derogatory moniker given by the other lads, as Johnny’s job is to fish out all the particularly chunky lumps in the sewage before it’s processed into Carling Extra Cold.

But one day, everything changes. And he fishes out a tiara. It’s caked in faecal matter, both human and animal (Johnny can now tell the difference between last night’s madras and a well-digested tin of Pedigree Chum from 50 paces). But as he washes the tiara, it unlocks ambitions of becoming a dancer.

[DANCING QUEEN BY ABBA PLAYS WITH NO VOCALS, JUST THE HAUNTING MELODY]

He rushes home but the only dance he knows is ‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield. He soon realises this is the musical domain of the 40^th birthday party (or ‘do’, being in the north of England). So he looks for a dance teacher in the Yellow Pages (Yorkshire being the last remaining place where the paper version exists). He has to do this without his dad knowing, as he’s shouting at Quickly Go Prancing again. It’s not made clear as to why he keeps watching it to be honest.

[THE FIRST MEETING WITH THE DANCE TEACHER]

Johnny’s dance teacher doesn’t have a studio. Then he has a lightbulb moment (he calls it this because he once had a great idea that involved using old lightbulbs as a pestle, but sadly, his crushed herbs mixed with tiny shards of broken glass and resulted in significant blood loss. In hindsight, it’s not a great analogy). He suggests the sewage works! He doesn’t really question why a dance teacher would advertise if they had no space, as the practice location will probably be part of the plot.

[SCENE OF THEM CREEPING INTO THE SEWAGE WORKS FOR THE FIRST LESSON]

You’d expect him to be rubbish but as the film has already been on a while, things are speeded up a bit. He’s pretty good and soon they’re tripping the light fantastic in a dark sewage works — the moonlight glinting off the chunks in the brown soup. Then they hear something! But it’s fine, it’s just late-night doggers and we all have a good laugh about it. The only person who doesn’t is the dance teacher. She cries and tells Johnny that her old dancing partner was a prolific dogger who accidently trapped his babymakers in the car door, rendering him unable to dance again. All on the eve of the Quickly Go Prancing trials. This is great news for us as viewers, as until now, the film hasn’t really had a plot as such. The silence hangs in the air (with the exception of the occasional car horn accidently pressed by a clammy rogue dogger’s buttock) before he suggests they try out for it.

[MONTAGE WHERE JOHNNY QUICKLY LEARNS THE ESSENTIAL MACARENA, LAS KETCHUP AND GANGNAM STYLE DANCES]

All the classics tunes come out, from ‘Love Man’ to ‘I’ve Had The Time Of My Life’. Except the filmmakers couldn’t afford the licensing, so each one is a cover by Steve Brookstein. Still, it’s a beautiful sight and for no real reason, they decide to practice in the water. If the dances had lifts in, this might be an obvious choice, but for the Viennese Waltz, it seems mere folly. And as they’re in an isolated town, the only place with water deep enough is the processing plant. Watching them jostle around in human waste of varying degrees of viscosity is actually quite harrowing. The two leads don’t seem to care though. And it’s clear a romance is developing between them when Johnny emerges from the sewage water with a used condom he’s found in it and says (with a cheeky wink), “Fancy another johnnie instead?”. They both laugh raucously at the hilarious joke.

Then they walk home to shower and in an act of gallantry, Johnny carries her shopping. She’s done a ‘big shop’ so has loads, especially as Tesco are heavily promoting the ‘five pieces of fruit a day’ thing, and Johnny is secretly a bit gutted he offered to carry a watermelon. Still, after throwing shapes in truly mucky water, it seems the least of the strange things he’s done that night.

We’ve had trials, tribulations and a lengthy montage. So you’d think that after all that, there’d be a proper ending. Nope. What actually happens is they go to the sewage works and do some more dirty dancing in front of Johnny’s parents and a few of their friends. That’s it.

[CREDITS ROLL]

Philadelphia

Lifting the lid off America’s most notorious cheesemakers.

This is a Michael Moore type documentary, set to crumble the soft cheese and cracker visionaries, Philadelphia. Shrouded in controversy, even now rumours are rife that the whole film was an elaborate marketing ploy to increase disappointing sales of chocolate Philadelphia, hailed as “the folly of the cheesemakers” upon its release.

[MOSTLY SHOT WITH A HAND-HELD CAMERA, WHICH LED TO CHRONIC MOTION SICKNESS FOR MOST CINEMA AUDIENCES]

The documentary is narrated by a voice-over artist whose brief was “an American Patrick Stewart”. His response was to impersonate William Shatner. For the UK release, the producers went with Richard Madeley — who does his Ali G impression seven times, despite this not being in the script. This version is now only available to buy from websites registered in New Zealand, where Madeley is somewhat of a national hero after they mistook his impression for a biting satire on their Education Secretary.

The narration is set to a montage of photos. There are actually just six pictures, so the same ones are endlessly repeated with different Instagram filters, interspersed with low quality thumbnails from Google images. The story we hear focuses on the rumoured seedy underbelly of the Philadelphia cheese emporium — that the Executive Board share a penchant for clothing cats in various national dress, and then photographing them.

[WE SEE SOME BORING NEWS REPORTS]

It all started back in the ‘90s, widely considered as Philadelphia’s heyday. The legend goes that a now-forgotten pitch for an ad campaign showed a mouse drawing lipstick and a fake moustache on a cat. Apparently, PETA saw the footage and immediately petitioned to have it banned. Philadelphia Corps neither confirmed nor denied the allegations. But when a cat-hair covered pair of miniature lederhosen were found in a bin behind their offices, the rumours were fuelled. They continued to run rife, even snowballing to include tales of the Board trawling the streets for stray felines willing to do anything for a tin of Dolphin-friendly tuna.

[GRAINY NIGHT FOOTAGE WITH WAILING CATS HEARD IN BACKGROUND]

Legal action was threatened when an investigative journalist insisted that the Philadelphia Corporation took the internet cat (that one that’s always wearing a hollowed-out lime helmet) hostage in their executive disabled toilet.

I should add here that our intrepid documentary maker is a man (women don’t really do that sort of thing). Like a hairy Richard O’Brien dashing around the Aztec Zone of the Crystal Maze, we see shot after shot of him skirting Philly HQ, trying to get in.

[‘STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA’ BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN PLAYS]

He’s met with hostility, and lots of people putting their hand to the camera. Most are people saying (without saying) that they don’t want to say anything. The only exception being a man who just has a squeaky voice and is embarrassed about it.

It soon escalates and he does stunts to try and provoke them into talking. One involves stuffing 300 Garfield toys dressed as Andalusians into the MDs car. Another included Siegfried or Roy — whichever one got attacked by a tiger — being filmed getting a tattoo of the Blue Peter cats with “Purrrfect” underneath.

There is also an interview with an ex-employee who worked there too long ago for it to be relevant. The man is clearly old enough to remember cats being invented, and is very confused. He utters the phrase “I was promised hot pastries. Where are my hot pastries?” on more than one occasion. We learn nothing and the man is almost incomprehensible (with the exception of the hot pastry requests). But our documentary-maker insists that he’s pretty much sort of admitted Philadelphia Corps’ involvement in cat-gate.

So that we don’t forget the real underlying issue of the hit film ‘Philadelphia’, he digs a grubby finger into the creamy spread. He’s even bought it from Walmart, just to prove how evil it is. He also makes a big deal about how they only sell fattening food with zero nutritional value. However, he needs a new gun and they sell those, so doesn’t give Walmart too much of a hard time. That documentary is saved for another time.

[LOTS OF PIE CHARTS ARE SHOWN, SET TO ‘AGADOO’, TO LIFT THE SERIOUS TONE]

When it finishes, we don’t really get any closer to finding out what happened. However, just before the credits, the screen goes black and text appears — sort of like the ‘people who’ve died this year’ bit at the Oscars. It tells us that it turns out they didn’t exploit real animals at all. Instead, they used very small children in cat costumes. Knowing that his wife had been trying to get their daughter to break into the pageant circuit, in a surprise twist, the documentary-maker volunteers his own child in exchange for a year’s supply of spread.

We also find out that the old pastry guy died before the end of filming. He choked on a Ginster’s, but sadly nobody knew first aid or the Heimlich maneuver. Another life tragically lost due to a lack of awareness about aid.