Doing this now, I guess. For those of you unfamiliar with me, I'm Dirk Strider. For those of you who are familiar with me, my condolences. I imagine there's a nonzero chance you've already heard more than enough about the particular brand of bullshit I bring to the table, whether through personal experience or some secondhand account of my exploits, the credibility of which I'm not especially inclined to dispute. Going to use this shitty insecure website to serve as my repository for film reviews. Maybe some photography, whatever digitally manipulated garbage I can cobble together. he reviews will be subjective, which is a pretty important distinction to establish upfront, because I have a demonstrably fucked relationship with the concept of quality. I'm fully capable of recognizing when something is objectively terrible. I just won't let that stop me from finding the movie interesting. THE MASTER OF DISGUISE (2002). Holy shit. For the uninitiated, this is a motion picture in which Dana Carvey plays a man named Pistachio Disguisey, heir to an ancient lineage of disguise practitioners, who must harness his hereditary powers of impersonation to rescue his kidnapped parents. This is a character in fiction I find myself relating to. I also have a namesake for things I enjoy doing. That being blades and walking, ergo, Dirk Strider. That's the premise. I'm not omitting some crucial narrative goodness. That's the actual narrative framework somebody sat down, typed into a screenplay, and successfully convinced a production company to fund. It's 80 minutes long if you include the credits. Somehow it gives the impression of a film that has been running continuously for centuries. The crown jewel of this cinematic turd is the Turtle Club sequence, in which Carvey disguises himself as a turtle by putting on an oversized green shell, wearing a bald cap, and repeating the iconic phrase "Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club?" A reasonable person might assume that this joke has some sort of payoff. That the repetition is establishing a premise which will eventually be subverted, elaborated upon, or otherwise justified by the machinery of comedy. That's the entire joke. He's a turtle, he's attempting to join a club based on how turtley he is. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time considering the philosophical implications of this sequence. Specifically, whether a joke can become funny through sheer repetition, or whether the act of repeating something devoid of comedic merit eventually constitutes its own distinct genre of humor. The answer is yes. Somewhere around the fourth repetition, I actually laughed. I fucking love it. Did you know that in the timeline this movie was made in, Carvey was in the turtle suit during the tragedy of 9/11? The movie is a disaster. The pacing is fucked. The protagonist behaves like somebody attempting to approximate human interaction from a corrupted instructional video. The entire supporting cast feels like they are under duress. The production has the aesthetic coherence of a children's birthday party. It's magnificent. You have to respect that. Or you don't. Frankly, you probably shouldn't. FINAL RATING: 2/10 AS A FILM. 9/10 AS AN ARTIFACT OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION. I recommend it to anyone interested in studying catastrophic misjudgments of humor. Anyway. That's the sort of shit you can expect here. Movies, photography, some aggressively unnecessary image editing, and the occasional thought experiment that probably should've remained a private thought. Welcome aboard. Oh, and tags. #CW-911 #CW-Terrorism #Violence #Death #Tragedy #EdgyHumor #Tragedy #MasterOfDisguise