Unstoppable dapper crane and unbelievably bad Van Helsing

1. Thank you, Dave, for introducing us all to the unstoppable dapper crane shirt-folding technique. (Of course, I welcome alternate suggestions for the name of this method. I have no idea what the written or spoken words in the video mean.)

2. Van Helsing is an incredibly bad movie. I can hardly think of enough bad things to say about it, but it's fun to try.

• Poor Hugh Jackman. (Have you ever noticed how, when someone says "Hugh Jackman," you hear, "Hugh needs a new agent"?) His title character of Van Helsing, as Kerry noted, is like a cross between Indiana Jones and Aragorn, without the panache of either, wearing a costume left over from Brotherhood of the Wolf.
• Kerry also noted that Kate Beckinsale's character looked like "hooker Zorro."
• The accents! Oh, the accents!
• The music sounded like rejected tracks from Gauntlet for PlayStation, or numbers from the next Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
• Most impressive of all was the breadth of the movie's assault on other cinema. Primarily, the film abuses the legacies of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Werewolf. But thanks to a large budget and a script that knows no shame, Van Helsing also manages to taint Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, James Bond, The Name of the Rose, Return of the Jedi, Fellowship of the Ring, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Castaway.
• At the same time that it is all-encompassingly offensive, the script also has numerous holes. But they're not like ambiguity intended to provoke thought or speculation; it just seems like laziness.
  

I can't say the movie was perfectly bad. The little baby vampires were cute, as was the way they spontaneously exploded.