HOME ALONE 2: Lost in New York - You can't go Home Alone again.

HOME ALONE 2: Lost in New York - Alone again, naturally.

Ever get that feeling of deja vu while watching a movie? A feeling like, "I've seen this all before"? Well if not then you definitely have never seen Home Alone and it's highly unnecessary and oddly titled sequel, HOME ALONE 2: Lost in New York.

It's one year later after the events in Home Alone and little Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is still as alive, despite being saddled with the world's worst parents. To celebrate the anniversary of their previous year's disastrous Christmas mishap, the McCallisters (John Heard & Catherine O'Hara) decide to take their 27 children on a fun-filled Christmas family outing to sunny Florida. Twenty-seven children did I say? OOPS! KEVIN!

Yes, poor little Kevin has managed to slip through the cracks again and ends up in New York City before either of his clueless and irresponsible parental morons notice. Now at this point, any child raised by someone with even the slightest parenting skills, especially one that had previously been left home alone, would know to find a police officer or some person in authority and tell them, "Hi, my name is Kevin McCallister and my parents are idiots. They let me get on the wrong plane and now I'm lost, can you help me?" But of course this would take away from all the hijinks and fun to follow. So little Kevin does what any 9-year old lost in a city of 8 million strangers would do, he checks into a fancy Manhattan hotel using his dad's credit card and sets about recreating his antics from his previous home alone adventure.

So on the story goes. Little Kevin sets up shop in an expensive hotel room and goes about tormenting Hotel Concierge Tim Curry in the process. Later Kevin shows a glimmer of intelligence as he seeks out his uncle who lives in New York, unfortunately he runs afoul of the two bumbling crooks Marv and Harry from the first movie played by Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci. When Kevin does arrive at his uncle's home, he finds that the house is empty and being remodeled. So Kevin, in order to defend himself against the two hammer-bags, Marv and Harry, sets about a plan to defeat them and destroy most of his uncle’s home in the process. The dynamic dunderheads, Marv and Harry, follow little Kevin back to his uncle's house where he has prepared a funhouse of amusingly painful, not to mention borderline homicidal, traps and snares. The crooks, having been in, but apparently not having seen the first movie, fall into their old habit of getting their butts kicked. Kevin defeats the crooks through a series of wacky burns, funny flesh wounds, campy broken bones and looney head trauma. Eventually Kevin's numbskull family shows up and all is right with the world again. That is of course, if your definition of right is sending a neglected child back to live with his half-wit parents.

Nearly every scene of HOME ALONE 2: Lost in New York, including the jokes, the gags, even much of the dialogue, is lifted straight from the first film. It's pretty obvious that filmmakers John Hughes and Chris Columbus were just looking to cash in on the success of Home Alone by pumping out a hastily made and ill-conceived sequel. Whereas the first movie was fresh, novel and at times even cute, Home Alone 2 is stale and predictable at best. At times Home Alone 2 seems cruel especially during the "Kevin bests the dumb crooks again" scenes.

This film is a depressing, far less cute recap of Home Alone and should be avoided at all costs. Fortunately, or maybe not so much, it does seem at least that Home Alone 2: Lost in New York did apparently fulfill Culkin's contract with Satan thus freeing him to make far less successful films like Richie Rich and The Good Son. While other even less necessary sequels would be made, they would be made without Culkin, thus allowing him to become a drug abusing has-been by the age of 15! I blame the parents.

Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace - A Jar-Jarring Experience!

The Phantom Menace - Every Journey has a misstep.

George Lucas is insane.

Neither serious student of film, casual viewer, nor movie fan can deny this simple fact. Many artists throughout history have been lunatics AND geniuses. Even a lunatic can create a great work. However that is not the case with STAR WARS - Episode One: The Phantom Menace, the long awaited follow-up to Lucas’s wildly popular and infinitely better Original Star Wars Trilogy.

What’s wrong with The Phantom Menace? Well, in a word; everything, or almost everything.

The first and most obvious flaw with this movie is the fact that it is a PREQUEL, which means it’s the back story for characters and situations that we the viewers already know from the Original Trilogy. That fact alone drives the interest factor way down. We already know that 10-year old Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) will become Darth Vader, sorry if that spoils the surprise for you. We already know the fate of Obi-Wan Kenobi,(Ewan McGregor) Yoda (Frank Oz), and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), as well as what will become of R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels). So there isn’t a lot of suspense about these characters. The characters which are new to the Star Wars Galaxy, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Darth Maul (Ray Park), Queen Amidala/Padme’ (Natalie Portman), Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) and Shmi Skywalker (Pernilla August) are just not very interesting. They do just enough to keep us watching, but not enough to make us care about them.

Secondly, there are too many special effects in TPM, way too many, an odd complaint for a sci-fi movie. But in TPM, there are hundreds of thousand of computer generated effects per second. So many effects in fact, that they actually distract the viewer who is constantly trying to assimilate the massive amounts of CGI going on in front of them. This fact was driven home to me during one particularly forgettable moment near the film’s end as thousands of battle-droids spring to life in one of the film’s most computer generated sequences. I recall drifting off from the action on the screen to stare up at the darkened theater ceiling and wondering how many tiles were up there and whether the management had been able to stop all the leaks that made those water marks...oh yeah, look, an effect...oooh, is that gum on my shoe?

But thirdly, and most importantly, the one thing that absolutely ruined TPM and confirmed George Lucas as insane and possibly evil, is the combination of a bad character and CGI. You know what I’m leading up to...JAR-JAR BINKS! Yes, Jar-Jar Binks, the computer-generated Gungan voiced by poor Ahmed Best, who probably thought Lucas was doing him a favor by giving him this part. Jar-Jar Binks, the most hideous computer creation since Spam.

Why is Jar-Jar hated? Mainly because he’s an annoying cross between an overgrown frog and Daffy Duck, without the quiet dignity of either. He’s also in every scene, from the moment he’s introduced up until the credits roll, he’s in every frikkin’ scene! He doesn’t do anything important mind you, doesn’t add one thing to the picture with his scenery-chewing presence. Yet every word that comes from his mouth is an insult to the audience’s collective intellect, and his every move is a knife in the back of every fan. So what exactly is Jar-Jar doing while everyone else is going about the business of saving the galaxy? Why Jar-Jar is running around stealing food, sticking out his tongue, stepping in piles of excrement, getting farted on, getting knocked down, tripping over furniture, getting electrocuted, shrieking, hollering and generally being an all around nuisance! Why? Because Lucas thought his film needed some comedy relief, from all of the intense drama no doubt.

George Lucas, in his madness, probably believed that children would love his CGI-clown, Jar-Jar. That they would flock to the stores demanding that their parents buy them Jar-Jar dolls, Jar-Jar books, Jar-Jar underoos and Jar-Jar crazy-straws, but he was wrong. To this day, more children have been injured by firecrackers while trying to blow up Jar-Jar Binks, than with any other action figure. Star Wars loyalists have written fan-fiction of Jar-Jar’s gruesome and extremely painful death, still others have done re-edits of TPM, which cut out nearly all of Jar-Jar’s scenes and dialogue.

The same mental illness that created Ewoks, festered for 16 years, to bring us Jar-Jar Binks and a 10-year old Darth Vader shouting "Yippee"! STAR WARS - Episode One - The Phantom Menace, is the weakest and least rewatchable of the series. A movie which almost makes THE STARS WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL look slightly less putrid, and makes the viewer long for Bea Arthur’s bar room sing-a-long.