Look mom, no butt pads

Sugar Land father-son Wu duo gets iced in The Amazing Race

Michael and Kevin Wu know their way around an airport.
Photo by Jeffrey R. Staab/©2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc.
Michael and Kevin Wu know that this isn't the real joke.
Photo by Jeffrey R. Staab/©2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc.
No, the real joke would be surviving sitting on ice chairs with minimumfrosting.

In the last emotional episode of The Amazing Race, Team Houston — father and son Sugar Landers Michael and Kevin Wu — came in last place, but are still in the race thanks to a non-elimination leg.

As the fourth episode begins, all the teams learn they will soon have relief from the Ghanaian heat as they are sent to the Swedish Lapland in the Arctic Circle. Surprisingly none of the racers take the opportunity to repeat the word Lapland several times. It’s just a funny sounding name, though probably no more than Sugar Land would be to any visiting Laplander.

All teams are given tickets on the same flights, one from Ghana to Frankfurt and a connecting one into Sweden, but they are under no obligation to use the tickets if they can find earlier flights. So we begin the first bout of airport strategizing of the season.

Michael and Kevin are the last ones on the road to the airport, but they appear to be the first team to attempt to find a faster route to Kiruna Sweden. Kevin asks to borrow their taxi driver’s cell phone and soon finds an earlier Frankfurt flight. At the airport, they decide to share their information with the only other parent/child team left in the race, father/daughter team, Gary and Mallory. The teams seem friendly and this looks to be a loose alliance.

They book the earlier flight out of Frankfurt along with two other teams who did online research. There’s a frantic airport run in Frankfurt, but Team Houston makes the flight, and they end up in Sweden two hours before the other five teams.

Once in Kiruna they have to drive to the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, though technically they have to drive to the giant warehouse where the Ice Hotel is put on ice in the summer. There the teams each find the next clue carved, of course, into a block of ice.

Unfortunately, Team Houston can’t leave the Ice Hotel warehouse quite yet because they’ve hit their speed bump. Since in the previous non-elimination leg they arrived last, in this episode they have to perform a special task. Their assignment is to relax and watch a little TV for 10 minutes. The catch is that their chairs are carved out of huge blocks of ice. To torture them further, the only channel available is Yule Log T.V.

The task looks uncomfortable for Team Houston, but hilarious for viewers. For some reason Kevin decided to traipse around the arctic circle in soccer shorts, so he is having the most trouble with the task, while Michael has a “technique” involving shifting from one side of his bottom to the other. The Swedish ice princess greeter — we know she’s a princess because she’s wearing white furs and a tiara — finally tells them their time is up.

As they leave Kevin says the line that will be the episode title, “We Should Have Brought Gloves and Butt Pads.”

At this point, we would like to send a special question out to our friends at IKEA who provided furniture for the remodeled CultureMap lounge. Why are these ice block chairs not available at your Houston store? An ice block chair could be The Hot Chair for Houston August. Think about it, IKEA. Don’t make us call Mattress Mac. He might add cup holders to the design and that would be kind of tacky.

Team Houston receives good directions to the roadblock challenge, a place called Fjellborg’s Lodge, and arrives first while the other three teams wander around the Lapland woods. For this challenge, the teams have to use a summer sled to run a dog team along a forest trail, snatching five flags along the route.

Michael does this task and has the time of his life. Racing along, Michael begins a running monologue to his dogs that might be some of the funniest lines of the whole race. Michael tells his Swedish dogs: “Good doggy,” “Good job, man,” “Don’t fight, don’t fight. Oh that’s a bear.” The dogs appear to get riled up as they pass a bear in the woods, but Michael then says it’s a fake bear.

The episode moves on without a clear explanation of the whole fake bear incident, but that’s The Amazing Race.

Michael finishes first and Team Houston heads to its next stop, the detour challenge, Sled or Bed. Racers have the choice of racing a Tech Sled down a mountain course in a time less than 1:58 or building a traditional tent, called a Goahte, used by Sámi nomads. Team Houston chooses to build the Goahte, which is not the fastest task, but is probably a good decision for them. Later in the episode three other teams will choose sledding only to give up after crashing several times.

Michael and Kevin build their tent fairly quickly, while giving the Amazing editors several funny shots of the Goahte devouring them whole and their attempts to wrestle it into submission.

The three other teams from the early flight make it to the pit stop before them, but Team Houston easily comes in fourth, cool, refreshed and ready to race again.

Go Team Houston ... to the ice block chair store. We'd like two, please.

unspecified

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

---

Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film