To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make myself sit through United 93. That said, I still believe that it’s going to do really big business. Brian Lowry thinks so, too. And says the movie’s pretty good.

Bonus: After spending a long time in the wilderness, David Rasche is back with big roles in two major movies, basically back-to-back: United 93 and The Sentinel. Good for him! This guy deserves to work forever just for giving us Sledge Hammer!

I don’t know that these gentlemen are from Texas–I’m guessing based on their accents. But wow, this deposition video is just awesome.

(Bonus: Think any of them went to SMU Law?)

I haven’t seen the new Al Gore movie, but I’m pretty sure I liked the original better.

Although, I’ll say this: Straight one-to-one remakes are always a mistake (did you know that they’ve redone The Omen?). If you’re going to remake a movie, you have to do something different and interesting. Remaking fiction as a documentary is a pretty neat idea.

It’s not an original idea, of course. The Discovery Channel remade Perfect Storm as Deadliest Catch. The new season looks pretty great, actually.

Maybe Gore should have used Bon Jovi in his trailer.

I don’t mind bad movies. Making a good movie is very hard to do. Look at the filmographies of even the most talented directors and you’ll see a bunch of duds next to the gems. Making a movie, Walter Murch once said, is like playing a game of negative 20 questions. Even if everyone playing is at the top of their game, sometimes the movie is just going to fail. Nothing wrong with that.

What annoys me are incompetently-made movies. Movies so sloppily thrown together that not only does the director wind up with big structural problems, but he can’t even be bothered to get the small things right. The Sentinel is the most incompetently-made movie I’ve seen since Fantastic Four.

The plot is promising enough: There’s a mole inside the Secret Service who’s trying to kill the president. A respected agent (Michael Douglas) is being set up to take the fall, but he’s innocent. An agent who’s his protégé (Kiefer Sutherland) is charged with running the mole-hunt. And the protégé has a really hot new rookie agent sidekick (Eva Longoria). Go ahead and watch the trailer–looks okay, right?

Here are a couple of the structural problems:

* When we do finally meet the Bad Guys, we’re never told why in the world they want to kill the president.

* When we finally find the mole, we have no idea why he’s working for the Bad Guys.

But much more maddening are the movie’s mundane failings:

* When Michael Douglas’s character goes on the lam, we get a scene were he goes into a hardware store and buys a bunch of MacGuyver-esque items: Krazy Glue, WD-40, etc. He never uses any of them.

* The Bad Guys are a bunch of former KGB agents. The lead KGB agent has a cockney English accent.

* A scene between the mole and the British KGB agent begins in a bar where a waitress comes over and drops off a glass of beer. We see this in a master shot. Cut to coverage of KGBrit ordering “a pint” of beer. Cut to a master shot of the waitress saying, “Yes sir” as she removes an empty beer glass from in front of KGBrit as he and the mole resume their conversation.

* During the movie’s coda, Michael Douglas’s character is given a large, embarrassing retirement gift as he leaves the Secret Service office. His co-workers laugh as he asks how he’s supposed to walk out of the White House with this gift. He shrugs good-naturedly and heads to the elevator. Cut to the exterior of the White House where Douglas bumps into Sutherland and Eva Longoria. The embarrassing gift is nowhere to be seen.

There are niggling mistakes but they’re so obvious and sloppy that they become a little insulting to the audience. Everyone should be forgiven the stray shadow from a boom-mike. But to intentionally include unnecessary scenes that are botched is different. It’s as if the filmmakers were declaring that they don’t really care.

The Sentinel is directed by Clark Johnson, who you probably remember from his time on Homicide as Det. Meldrick Lewis. Johnson’s a wonderful actor. Perhaps there were outside forces conspiring to push the movie out the door before he was finished with it. But even so, The Sentinel is the type of movie that makes you weep for modern Hollywood.

There are like 15 different fetishes going on right here.

. . . make it, Santori time.

Brendon has this fabulous Japanese commercial where Bruce Willis is doing an ad for, well, something.

There are so many levels here. The idea of a Japanese director giving Willis the “slower, and with more intensity” speech. Picturing Bruno wandering the Grand Hyatt at 3:00 a.m.

But the best is seeing a commercial that looks like it was designed by the creators of Mr. Sparkle. I half-expected Willis to shout, “I am disrespectful to dirt!”

I’m not one to call Americans lazy but an email I recently received doesn’t help the case. It was for a new contraption called The Gravitizer. Maybe you’ve seen this already in your own inbox (you must be 21 to click on that link). But what it does is make things easier by means of a trampoline. With a hole in the middle. (If you do happen to click on that link, notice the one picture with the man relaxing with his hands behind his head as if he is contemplating what’s for dinner or which teams are in the playoffs.)

Name the top four “fourth” movie installments by first-weekend box office take. The first three are easy: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, and Lethal Weapon.

But who would have thunked Scary Movie 4 would make the list?