6 things you should know about Shark Tale

1. I did not choose to watch Shark Tale.

   You have to understand that, back when I had two roommates, I was only able to get them to split my Netflix bill by alternating movie picks with them. Now I only live with Julia, my lovely girlfriend (hi Julia), but her picks leave something to be desired.

   Imagine following up The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly with White Chicks and it's like you live in our house.

2. Long time readers of Furdell.com are well aware that the lowest form of humor, right after "involves poop," is puns. That being the case, Shark Tale is a very, very, very bad film. The first five minutes packs in more puns than my high school english teacher managed in my entire junior year, and for those of you who didn't take English with me in 1997, that was a lot of puns. So many that I developed a Pun Defense System (PDS). It went a little something...like this.
   MS. LONG So you see class, it seems that Julius Caesar's friends were real brutes.

   ME
   Yes, good point. They were indeed loutish.

   Note that Katie Couric plays a character -- presumably based on herself -- named "Katie Current." Isn't that clever? Because current is a word you might associate with water! Which is like fish!

3. Did you know? Renee Zellweger put on three hundred million pounds to play the role of Angie, a fish.
   
4. If you thought Robert de Niro hit rock bottom in Meet the Fockers, you were way off. Oh for the halcyon days of Analyze That and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Wait, what?
5. After the longest 83 minutes of my life, the movie ends. Then comes the credits. Instead of outtakes, Shark Tale goes with a kind of system: wait five minutes; show a brief animation that wasn't worth waiting for; repeat.

   The worst example? Some kind of crab thing comes on the screen and, mockingly (I'm not imagining this), says "It's not even half-way done yet! HAW HAW HAW." This reminded me of the much-loved pod race scene from Star Wars Episode I: The Suckening, in which, after one excrutiatingly long lap of being forced to watch a little kid who can't act fly around in a circle, we are treated to Jar Jar Binks, who says, and these words are burned forever into my mind: "He has to do that two more times?"

   I don't know if I'm remembering things wrong, but I swear there was a crane shot when I stood up in the theater and yelled "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

6. Remember how I said Shark Tale was a Julia pick? Well, that's not to say she stays awake through the whole thing. She makes it about 30 minutes into any given movie. (Usually I look at her eyes every 5 minutes to determine exactly when she falls asleep. Today, I felt lazy and just mumbled "are you still awake?", which of course garnered no response.)

   Do to a personal rule, I am still forced to watch the entire movie from start to finish. (If you think that's ridiculous, you should see my DVD purchasing rules.) So, according to my Netflix queue, I'll soon be watching The Grudge with an unconscious girl in the room. That's the American remake, mind you. I should make her pay extra.

---

UPDATE!

---

I forgot one.
7. In the end, the fish played by Will Smith introduces fishes played by Missy Elliot and Christian Aguilera. Since warbling disco hits in abysmal movies is apparently her thing, Christina sings "Car Wash," which Missy declares "a Shark Tale exclusive," as if that somehow makes it more valuable. Bad Boys II Soundtrack. Word.