The 16mm Shrine

2009-02-03T13:03:00.002-05:00

R.I.P.

2008-01-15T16:10:00.001-05:00

An Opiate for the Mongoloid Masses.

2007-04-22T22:33:00.000-04:00

Ghost Rider
2007, USA
Mark Steven Johnson
35mm

I don't know why I'm surprised that Ghost Rider is a bad movie. It's a bad comic, so an adaptation is like trying to spin straw into gold, or more accurately, trying to spin a puerile pre-adolescent fantasy into something the whole hillbilly family can enjoy. And that's exactly what has happened here. It's as if the wet dream of every glue-sniffing tween too brain damaged to ever have an erection again has taken form on celluloid, all motorcycles and skulls and fire and chains. This whole movie is the paint job on a hot-rod, a decal on a monster truck, a drawing made during free time at a mental hospital for the severely retarded. In fact, that last comparison is the most accurate, for the following reasons:

1) Ghost Rider contains no sex. This is because the retarded have no sex drive. Firstly, they're too medicated to move most of the time, and secondly, they've deliberately not been taught anything about sex. It's mainly a preventative measure, since no one wants them to breed, and also because everyone knows that retards have the
strength of 10 men, so any copulation with anything but a chimpanzee or an elephant would result in the ejaculation breaking the spine of the poor victim. I mean partner.

When they breed, they make wrestling fans.

2) Ghost Rider contains no plot, or at least no plot that makes sense. That's because retards don't want to see things happen. They want to see things explode. Also, they like bright and shiny things, like chrome, and red. That's why Michael Bay keeps making movies, and the American Idol sets are all in primary colors.

3) Ghost Rider contains no dialogue, only explanation. This is because the retarded don't need to know why things are happening; they need to know what is happening. So, anything anybody ever says in this entire film is dedicated to a) explaining who they are, and b) explaining what is happening on screen. Lots of "I am Blackheart, a demon", and "We are fighting".

So, I can't really fault Ghost Rider, which stars Nicholas Cage as a daredevil who sells his soul to Peter Fonda, because it’s helping to keep the retards pacified. In case you’re wondering, the film is Faust for Dummies. In exchange for his father's life, Cage, as Johnny Blaze, is cursed to walk the Earth as the Ghost Rider, a vengeful spirit who punishes the wicked. I don't really understand why this is something the devil would want to do, but hey, I'm not retarded.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Sympathy For The Retarded Coat Hangers Of The Fashion Industry

2007-04-13T11:38:00.000-04:00

The Devil Wears Prada
2006, USA
David Frankel
DVD

I think I'm done with the fashion industry. I know that may not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever seen me in person, with my stylish look mixing James Dean, homeless couture, and Evil Ernie, but what I'm trying to say is that I’m more than just rejecting baroque and meaningless excess of the fashion industry. No, I've been done with that for years. What I meant is that I'm done making fun of it, because that just brings every useless coke-sniffing twat involved in the industry more attention. Fashion isn't important. We all know it isn't important. It's a bunch of flamboyant poofs with no marketable skills crudely stitching garish fabrics together to drape over skeletal drug addicts with the same level of self-importance a scientist would have cloning Jesus. Then, fashion writers seeking to justify their paychecks arbitrarily pick which laughable vinyl atrocity is the trendsetter of the season, and which is a wearable version of an inflatable pool. The models, of course, are paid to walk a straight line and try not to get too pregnant. They are all, obviously, various incarnations of The Great Satan Paris Hilton, talentless and unbearably rich, hellish spawn that number legion, and in The Devil Wears Prada , Meryl Streep fulfills this role to a T, or more accurately, to an inverted cross.

Meryl Streep .

Anne Hathaway plays every girl in every teen movie where a studious young lady in frumpy clothes falls in with the hip crowd and takes off her glasses. Except in this movie she's a college graduate working at Vogue, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Meryl Streep is Lucifer, offering fame, fortune, and purses in exchange for learning how to stare down your coke nose at the girl working the counter at Starbucks. But I'm getting ahead of myself, already abandoning my vow to ignore the fashion industry. Instead, let's just focus on Streep's Oscar nominated performance as the Devil. Her muted, soft-spoken but ludicrously unreasonable demands toe the line between pure evil and paste-eating psychosis. And her smooth, seemingly paralyzed features present an agelessness that speaks less to botox than it does to a portrait hanging in her mansion which ages instead of her. Her black wings are leathery yet supple, and her enormous curled horns have been delicately arranged to be elegant with just the slightest touch of spontaneity. Her performance dwarfs those of her co-stars, partially because of its subtlety and reserve, but mainly because at 12 feet of winged glory, she literally towers over the other actors. Her forked tongue slithers and darts about like an eyeless black snake, and her eyes brim with sulfurous fire, pits of glowing darkness that reflect the majesty of infernal power. The heat from her internalized flame sublimates the cracked and blackened hide that covers her ebony bones, reducing it to clouds of black smoke that almost instantly coalesce back into thick skin covered in razor sharp bristles. While this description of Streep's character may have lost its grip on verisimilitude a while back, it's as distracting as her performance was, standing out from the mediocrity of the film like Mozart at the keyboards of a Yes concert. But most importantly, it keeps me from making jokes about the fashion industry.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Full Metal Handjob

2007-04-08T20:12:00.000-04:00

Full Metal Jacket

1987, USA

Stanley Kubrick

DVD

It's a shame that the best Vietnam war movie ever made will forever be known for popularizing the term "reach-around". I suppose I'd rather hear people quoting this than Scarface, but it's still reducing a complex, realistic meditation on war to a fag joke you can tell at a frat party. And while the first half of the film, the legendary boot camp sequence starring R. Lee Ermey as the foul-mouthed drill sergeant, is the more entertaining part of the film, it means nothing without the portion of the film that takes place in Vietnam. Both sections mirror each other, ending with a gunshot and a loss of innocence, and that similarity, that one shared point of reference, is what pulls the somewhat amorphous form of the film into some sort of structure.

Full Metal Jacket unfolds anecdotally, the only backbone to the scenes the linearity of time. Scenes are disconnected vignettes, pages from a diary, except instead of being full of breathless closet make-out confessions or details of an awkward handjob in a public park, it's details of watching a close friend's intestines pour out over their combat boots; dispatches from Vietnam, written in blood and stamped in gunpowder, and thankfully full of enough references to sodomy and fucking Asian prostitutes to make it appealing to young males who like NASCAR, as well as people who can spell things.

Wonder Woman: Warrior Princess, Queen of the Amazons, and Lord of the Retarded.

It's actually a fairly significant achievement, to have created a film that's appealing to both the mentally capable demographic and people who got sports scholarships to state universities. That's a broad spectrum. Normally, one could only please both groups by running an episode of Ali G in the corner of a screen playing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nevertheless, Kubrick manages it, getting both demographics off at once, proving that not only is he a master of film, he's clearly a master of the reach-around, as well.

The Phantom Of The Trailer Park

2007-03-29T20:32:00.000-04:00

Phantom of the Opera

1998, Italy

Dario Argento

DVD

Dario Argento isn't trying anymore. That's the only explanation for this nonsense. His last few films have been shot on video, shoddily written, and show all the effort of a 7-year-old shoveling the driveway. He's old and tired, still insane in the sense that his scripts have the cohesion of a half-remembered episode of G.I. Joe, but disinterested in all the things that made his movies fun in the first place. Without gore or the wildly inventive visual style that made films like Susperia and Opera viewable, all we're left with is plots that would confuse a chaos mathematician, and actors whose use even as a moveable prop would be debatable.

In this particular installment in Argento's journey from horror auteur to high school kid with video camera, Julian Sands and Argento's daughter Asia star in an adaptation of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. And by adaptation, I mean rough approximation, the sort of thing you might write if you've never read the book, but your roommate really likes the musical and plays the soundtrack every morning while he gets ready to go to the gym. It bears a rough similarity to the novel, though as I recall the Phantom was somewhat disfigured and hadn't been raised by rats like a rodent version of The Penguin. For some reason, my guess is either a second mortgage or alimony, Julian Sands is in this movie, perhaps expecting to parlay his roles in Arachnophobia and Warlock into a career in B movies on the continent. He has an English accent, which invariably commands both respect and the desire to eat spotted dick, but the Fabio hairstyle is starting to clash rather harshly with a face swollen from Vicodin and alcohol, like Conan the Barbarian has gone puffy and fey. But while that might stand at odds with the perception of the darkly brooding Phantom, it certainly matches Asia Argento's look like a brown belt does leather shoes.

Argento's castle.

Asia is, of course, pure, unadulterated Euro-trash of the worst kind, the type that takes their title seriously, mixing the aristocratic, spoiled haughtiness of their continental stereotype with the type of skanky classlessness that licks the mirror after a coke binge. And it's the way you imagine her tonguing the mirror that's so disgusting, like she'd be looking you in the eyes, daring you to imagine your phallus between her gap teeth, when in reality you're just wondering how this dog-faced woman got into the dinner party, and why one of her tits is hanging out of her shirt. The whole movie, she seems barely capable of looking at her co-stars instead of leering at the camera like one of those girls in the phone sex ads on cable TV after midnight. I can't for the life of me imagine why she would be doing that. Why would I want to call her? I can barely look at her. She looks like a pig in an ill-fitting mini-skirt, pink and slutty, to be sure, but I'm of a different species than Euro-trash. Not to say that I'm better, I just prefer standard white trash to the European variety. Sure, the latter has rich parents that can afford better drugs, but there's something in the desperation of a truck stop hooker's eyes as she goes down on you for crystal meth that really turns my crank. Turns hers, too, if her dealer hasn't blown up his trailer yet. And while both hide generations of inbreeding under poorly applied makeup, the smoky eye shadow of the Eurotrash is a poor substitute for the blackened eyes of the white trash woman, as one is merely cosmetic, and the other a mark that the housebreaking process has already begun. In short, the allure of the Eurotrash, her Stoli Vodka, and the title to her land pales in comparison to the promise of toothless fellatio from someone who can probably go a week without sleeping, or probably breathing. Plus, she'll be so drug addled she'll barely be able to ask for food, let alone complain about the servants, or lack thereof. Who knows, maybe she'll be confused enough to understand Phantom of the Opera.

Sunday School On The Short Bus.

2007-03-26T17:53:00.000-04:00

An American Haunting
2005, USA
Courtney Solomon
DVD

As if I didn't worry enough about molesting children, now I have to worry about poltergeists? Man, the Christian right in American is doing pretty much everything it can to bury every pleasure beneath a mound of guilt. And ever since The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, they've discovered that horror may well be the way to reach the youth of today with their messages of repression and self-denial. First, we're not allowed to kill, then we're not allowed to eat unleavened bread, and now we can't diddle our daughters or the spirit of their lost innocence will haunt us to death? Jeez, Christianity sure is a drag.

Yeah! Take that! Try to protect my kids, will you?

An American Haunting is based on a true story, allegedly, about a cursed family, headed by Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek. Those two have already been cursed, apparently, by either bank debts or a bad agent, because they both should be above toothless ghost stories directed by the guy who did Dungeons and Dragons. There are some unsettling scenes, to be sure, but the pioneer setting definitely engenders more mirth than fear, since it's difficult to find anyone in a bonnet terrifying. But the moral lesson of An American Haunting, that you probably shouldn't molest your kids, is just the latest in a long string of fun spoiled by moralist filmmakers.

1) The Exorcist taught us not to use a Ouija Board by ourselves, and not to piss on the rug. This ruins everything drunk 17 year old girls like to do at house parties, aside from throw up tequila in a punch bowl.

2) Halloween showed us the perils of drinking beer after comically brief sex, showing your left nipple, and speaking in a high, annoyingly squeaky voice. So really, don't be P.J. Soles. Well, there go my plans for Saturday night.

3) The Saw films taught us not to do anything, ever, lest we get judged by a sanctimonious prude with voice like a paper-shredder chewing a thesaurus with a infantile sense of ironic punishment. If you want to live without being tortured to death via an elaborate device, do absolutely nothing, ever. Still, even as you sit in your apartment, fearing to leave should you accidentally violate a commandment, Biblical rule, or by-law, you should try to get some exercise, lest you get fed to a mechanical sloth or something.

There are lessons to be learned, to be sure, but frankly I'd rather learn them with, say, Jason Voorhees than with some septuagenarian in a frock at Sunday school. If I'm going to have my fun spoiled, I'd at least like it to be done with a machete, not a bonnet.

I Smell Sex And Candy. Also Rotting Vagina Stuffed With Dirt And Twigs And Left By The Side Of The Highway.

2007-03-24T17:11:00.000-04:00

Perfume: The Story of Murderer
2006, USA
Tom Tykwer
35mm

You know, I would have never thought to use 12 dead women to distill the scent of love. To top off my shoebox full of genitals? Sure. To make a dead skin mask? Of course. To help build a larger, stronger women out of the parts of smaller, weaker ones? Maybe. But a perfume? Never. I guess I just don't have the imagination to really succeed in the serial killing industry, since the most inventive pecadillo I can come up with is snorting the bone dust of a pulverized Native American prostitute. But in Perfume, murderer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has done me one better, by reducing beauty, adoration, and the stink of sex to an essence. The closest I've come is making glue from a hooker's hair, a poor substitute for a perfume that, as the movie's climax suggests, will cause crowds to be so overcome with affection they will tear their clothes off and ravage each other. The only smell I know that will get women to take their clothes off is the stench of ether, and usually it's me doing the actually stripping while they loll around and try not to choke on their own vomit. The film is about Grenouille, who is born with a perfect sense of smell and no conscience in 18th century Paris, where his obsession with preserving the scent of perfection leads him to a career first as a perfumer, and then as a serial killer.

And they make fine sweater-vests, as well.

Perfume is directed by Tom Tykwer, a great filmmaker who has been applying poetic interpretations to literal themes for quite some time. The frenetic pacing he established in his breakthrough film Run, Lola, Run is absent here, replaced by a brooding, hypnotic speed that seeks to entrance the viewer with languid poetry. Unfortunately, the thrall of Perfume is often interrupted by bad performances, heavy-handed direction, and over-the-top theatrics. Towards the end of the film, this settles into its grove, and everything fits into a sort of magic realist interpretation, but in the first half, it's quite jarring. Dustin Hoffman, in particular, is violently terrible as faded master perfumer Baldini, with an accent that would shame even the people who do bad Christopher Walken impressions. He bursts every bubble of engrossing enchantment, so out of place it feels like your father is standing in the room while you masturbate over the body of a dead prostitute. Which, incidentally, is the best way to get them ready to be glue.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

The Pursuit of A Ferrari Enzo.

2007-03-15T18:16:00.001-04:00

The Pursuit of Happyness
2006, USA
Gabriele Muccino
35mm

What kind of monster lets his son sleep on a bathroom floor in a bus station just so he can afford a red Ferrari? Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a true-life self made man who struggled with homelessness while training to be a stockbroker. Unfortunately, he was unable to support his family on the no-wages the internship pays, which is supposed to be inspirational, but is really just infuriating. Get a night job, you fucking deadbeat. This isn't a feel good movie. It's a feel angry at irresponsible parenting movie. Yeah, I'd like to follow my dreams, too. I want to be an astronaut, but I'm not going to strap my kid in a storage locker while I go through NASA flight school. If I did, she'd never trust me enough to take her clothes off for the webcam ever again! Gardner is an awful father, a fact that is glossed over with a saccharine glaze, like icing on a stale donut, or semen on a porn star with bad skin.

Add a few more blackheads, and you have a general idea of this film. Only it looks less like Jenny Garth.

So, Gardner sells medical supplies, poorly, after investing his life savings in bone density scanners that appear more difficult to peddle door to door than he anticipated. His wife, played by the talented and often unrecognized Thandie Newton, pulls double shifts at her job, which as far as I can tell is maintaining a delicate balance between exotically indeterminate ethnicity and freakish deformation. They're behind on their rent, and buried beneath debt and parking tickets, and Gardner’s solution to this is to take 6 months off work in order to take an unpaid internship at a brokerage. Of course, things work out for the best, because they likely wouldn't make a movie about a guy who starved his kid to death trying to afford a sports car. But Gardner is an bad father, in a sappy movie that tugs at heartstrings like violent siblings pull at pigtails, and I don't have time for this. You know what? I want to be somebody too, instead of spending my life toiling in obscurity and complaining about Will Smith movies. But my amphetamines don’t buy themselves, and pimping my children out to Internet pedophiles is a time-consuming gig. I try to live my life responsibly, putting food on the table for me and my family. Or more accurately, on the table for me, and in dog bowls in the crawlspace for my family. I would never sacrifice my child's happiness for personal gain or for entertainment, as both Garnder and this movie does. I sacrificed my wife for that, and Mammon was well pleased with the burnt flesh, boiled blood, and melted fat I offered up Walpurgis Night last. The Pursuit of Happyness is the pursuit of selfish financial gain at the expense of a child, and quite frankly, I find that inappropriate, unamusing, and cruel. And if my kids had enough teeth left to answer, I'm sure they'd agree.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

The Worst Nautical Disaster Since Titanic Won The Oscar.

2007-03-12T12:34:00.000-04:00

Poseidon
2006, USA
Wolfgang Peterson
DVD

In this remake of 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, a luxury cruise liner is capsized by a rogue wave, drowning most of the passengers, crew, and apparently the screenwriter right in the middle of his first draft. If I were to guess, I would say that he died with an outline, four scenes, and some sketches of at least three characters complete. After his untimely demise, probably as a result of either a flash fire from the ship's galleys or a computer generated fall down an elevator shaft, the script was probably taken over by one of the animators in charge of the CGI wave effects, clearly under the impression that since he works on computers, he can probably type fairly quickly and finish up the script before shooting ends.

How to save a drowning screenwriter. Provided you want to see Poseidon 2.

And finish up quickly the film does, like a bad one-night stand, racing from idiotic situation to improbable resolution so fast I barely had time to throw anything at the screen before the end credits ran. It was like dropping cinderblocks off the overpass into traffic; you have to time it just right if want to brain the shithead in the Cadillac Escalade right through the windshield. Sadly, I didn't hit the TV in time, and I had to watch this film go from a dumb action movie to a cataclysmic failure right before my eyes. Poseidon stars a host of talented actors, from Richard Dreyfuss to Josh Lucas, and even throws in Kurt Russell in case you want to bring your father along, but nothing, nothing, can save it from a fully retarded script. What makes it worse, is that some interesting plot points and ideas are brought up, only to be dropped in favor of another explosion, one that destroys not only part of the ship, but most of the laws of physics and all of my patience. No one in this movie is even trying to make a good film. It looks good, to be sure, but no effort whatsoever has been put into making this anything more than a frustrating exercise in rote action. Poseidon is like watching an obstacle course being completed by the retarded, with our only pleasure coming from them bumping their heads on the covered slide, or slipping on the tire field. Granted, these retards are prettier than most, their eyes properly spaced and their foreheads only mildly sloped, but they still muck around and bumble, saved by a combination of divine providence, deux ex machina, and lazy screenwriting.

Kurt Russell is an ex-firefighter on the cruise with his daughter and her boyfriend, Richard Dreyfuss is a aged gay man suffering from a broken heart and a cheap stereotype, and Josh Lucas is a professional gambler with a knowledge of the ship so precise I wouldn’t be surprised if he were the poor sap hired to finish off the script. Together with some expendable bodies and a cute kid to tug at heartstrings when the violin score isn't cutting it, they navigate through fire, water, and air to make it off the ship alive. And not only do they live through that, they dodged my cinderblock, as well.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

God Save The Cock Ring.

2007-03-08T18:42:00.000-05:00

Children of Men
2006, USA/UK
Alfonso Cuaron
35mm

Clive Owen needs to shave. Every film I've seen him in, he seems intent on redefining "rugged good looks" as "hobo on a three day drunk", and Children of Men is no exception. Here, Owen and his stubble play a disillusioned ex-radical working an office job in an apocalyptic Britain. The human race has lost the ability to conceive children, and in the dying throes of civilization, England is the only country left standing. However, it's standing on shaky legs, degenerating into chaos and anarchy under a fascist, racist government, sort of like Mad Max meets Mein Kampf meets my wet, immigrant-free dreams.

Apparently, Mad Max has already met Mein Kampf.

In the Britain of the future, things have gotten so bad there is apparently only one camera and no tripods left in the whole country, so Children of Men looks like cell phone footage shot while running through an industrial district. That certainly helps to heighten the tension, since we never know when the characters, or even the camera, might have to stop and send a text message through AIM. Gritty and realistic, Children of Men excels because it's relevant, realistic, and exciting. Touching on issues such as terrorism, xenophobia, and the Patriot Act, the film's futuristic setting doesn't make it any less timely, and the documentary feel, tense script, and engrossing performances help to make the film among the most gripping you'll see all year.

But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is the insistence the Britain will somehow forever be the last bastion of humanity come the end of the world, the lighthouse in an apocalyptic storm. Judging from films like this and V For Vendetta, England is apparently capable of surviving any number of destructive cataclysms, based entirely upon the sheer strength of their haughty elitism. I guess since they don't breathe the same air us commoners do, they get spared whatever destruction is rained upon the rest of the world. Listen, England, I know you guys were pretty good sailors 2 hundred years ago, but aside from Patrick O'Brien, nobody gives a fuck anymore. Once, the sun never set on the British Empire. Now, the sun never sets on a computer programmer doing a Monty Python routine, or an international version of one of their shitty reality TV shows and that’s ALL YOU HAVE LEFT! You barely even have food over there, and what there is smells like it emigrated from India in the 1960s. For all your airs, you'd think every woman over there was the Queen of England, not some gap-toothed provincial with an accent like a fishmonger in Whitechapel, and all the men are all a lace handkerchief and a frilly collar away from getting sodomized by Lord Byron. I think the problem with infertility in this movie may not be barren wombs, but rather infectious homosexuality, because I've never heard a British accent that didn't sound like regular English navigating its way around a mouthful of cock. Plus, the Brits seem intent on exporting as much gay as possible through their incessantly queer indie bands. Babyshambles? That's supposed to be punk? Then why does it sound like the Smiths with late-stage HIV? Actually, they don't sound like anything, because I refuse to listen to anything where the guitars chimes his guitar instead of strumming it because his wrists are too limp. So, I think that when the end of the world comes, I'll avoid running off to Merry Old England to pop E and listen to ripped-off Stone Roses riffs. I'll just stay in North America and die. At least the soundtrack will be better.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Everything I Need To Know In Life, I Learned Trapped In A Maze With A Satyr.

2007-03-07T20:43:00.000-05:00

Pan's Labyrinth
2006, MexicoGuillermo Del Toro
35mm

It may not seem true, but at one point in time it was possible to tell a fairy tale without having a lobster or a warthog sing a stupid song about the circle of life every ten minutes. In order to distract the kids from the lack of Nathan Lane belting out show tunes , story-tellers resorted to other tactics to keep children interested, namely killing people in horrific ways. And Pan's Labyrinth is a throwback to those halcyon days of witches in the oven, frozen matchstick girls, and Goldilocks gang raped by bears. Okay, so that last bit may only be part of the fairy tale when I tell it to my kids, but you do get the idea.

Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, harkens back to the good old days, when children learned their lessons by having the shit scared out of them and their lives threatened. Guillermo Del Toro understands that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child, or more accurately, if you don't show the child a man getting his cheek slit open from the inside by a paring knife, they grow up as panty-waisted homosexuals. And that's what this movie is about: telling a story about princesses and underworld kingdoms while showing an anti-government guerilla getting tortured with an awl and a blacksmith's hammer. That will teach the little fucks the meaning of obedience. Make a scene in a McDonald's parking lot because you didn't get the right Happy Meal? I'll have your fucking fingers for that, and then I'll feed them to the god-awful Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth, who has eyeballs in his hands and eats babies.

Ronald McDonald without his makeup.

In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan's Labyrinth isn't the decadent exercise in special effect wankery I had expected. Instead, it's actually a tragic tale of a young girl with a sick mother, a wicked army captain stepfather, and her overactive imagination. There's a faun, fairies, an enormous toad, and plenty of graphic violence, which helps separate the fantasy scenes from the reality ones. Or rather, the different types of violence distinguish the two worlds, with the graphic, realistic knife wounds and gunshots contrasting with the phantasmagorically baroque bloodshed of the fantasy sequences. It's enough to shock and interest adults and children alike, which is great, because it will help kids learn an important lesson, which is that if you speak Spanish, something will try to eat you. It's a great lesson that helps keep Mexicans out of my neighborhood, but frankly, since this film is so well constructed and appealing, it's a shame it doesn't teach children some other important life lessons.

1) Don't touch my action figures. I know they look like fun, especially the shelf dedicated to the various incarnations of Bruce Campbell, but there are small pieces that you might choke on. And believe me, if you fuck up my diorama of Jason giving it to Elvira up the pooper with the shaft of an axe, you will choke on them.

2) Yes, children like comic books. And yes, I like comic books. But no, I do not like children, and if the children I don't like like my comic books, they will find out what happens to people who do not respect strict alpha-numeric classification systems. And is that Nutella on my mint-condition copy of Swamp Thing #18 It is? Charming. Don't mix it with the blood you're about to lose, and I'll try not to get my semen on it when I'm done with you.

3) I know children are curious. But curiosity killed the cat, and throttled the little boy who snuck into my basement and discovered what I do to little girls.

The moral of the last story is that nosiness leads to nothing but trouble, both for the child, and for the adult who's trying to figure out how to get arm bones through the garbage disposa chutel. And that's the kind of fairy tale that, like Pan's Labyrinth, has something for both kids and adults.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Story of a Breast Fetish.

2007-03-05T15:05:00.000-05:00

Gia
USA, 1998
Michael Cristofer
DVD

This is the story of a supermodel. She does a lot of drugs, has promiscuous sex, and spends her time dressing up ludicrously and practicing shaking her hips like a tipsy prostitute. Actually, it sounds like the story of all supermodels. Throw in some gossiping and back-stabbing, and it's the story of all women as well. But all this description is incidental, because Gia is the movie where Angelina Jolie shows her tits.

There. I just saved you 126 minutes. Don't forget to wash that sock.

It's a shame that's all this film is known for, for two reasons. Firstly, it's a good movie in its own right, with more interesting directorial flourishes than most made-for-cable films, and strong performances from Jolie and Mercedes Ruehl, as Gia's mother. And secondly, because seeing Angelina Jolie’s tits is not a good thing. While most people seem to find her irresistibly attractive, that is because most people are stupid. To me, she looks like she's eaten improperly canned tomatoes, and her face is puffing up like a sprained knee from botulism. And her lips? Those bee-stung, cock-sucking lips? I wouldn't let those anywhere near my cock. They look fucking contagious. I know I'm poorly hung, but I'd still rather not have my genitals get whatever gargantuan elephantitis is disfiguring her face.

But actresses should not be judged by their faces, despite what Life & Style magazine hacks would have you believe. They should be judged by their breasts, and if I were a 10 year-old boy on the cusp of puberty, I would be thoroughly impressed. However, I'm significantly older than that, and as I have access to the Internet, I no longer need to jerk off to HBO movies played after 11 PM. Strangely, most of the people who like this movie like it for just that reason. Or the males do, at least. The girls that like it do so because it helps convince them that the coke they do is glamorous instead of a trashy way to drink more cheap rum without passing out. But the men, they've got the DVD for the tits and the tits only. Maybe it reminds them of massaging their crotch to the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue, or it's some weird Oedipal breast-feeding thing, but it certainly doesn't do it for me. What does do it is the interesting structure, with staged interview segments interspersed with more standard docudrama, and occasional black and white scenes recalling fashion photography, and the harrowing depiction of heroin addiction and AIDS. That's what gets me off, not the tits. And yet, people call me the weird one.

Movie Review? Or Excuse to Surf for Porn? You Decide.

2007-02-21T18:48:00.000-05:00

Do You Like Hitchcock?
2005, Italy

Dario Argento

DVD

No, I don't. Not after this stupid movie ruined him for me. And now I don't like Dario Argento, either. Not that I ever did, exactly. I did, however, have an appreciation of his earlier work, which was essentially comprised of garbled, nonsensical scripts clothed in a an extravagant, baroque visual style, like dogs playing poker painted by Rubens. Argento has always been incoherent and childish, but at least he was pretty, like Tara Reid. Now, he's incoherent and childish, but ugly and grainy, filtered through shitty video, like Paris Hilton. This isn't a riff on Hitchcock; it's a bad pun.

Like Argento, she also clearly doesn't know what she's doing.

Do You Like Hitchcock? is a mix of Rear Window, Strangers On A Train, and a turd. The mighty have fallen, and they've landed in a septic tank. Argento is either not trying, dead and involved in some sort of Weekend At Bernie's-type scheme, or broke from his daughter Asia draining his bank account for cocaine and abortion money. This film is a mess, and is so devoid of Argento's trademark visual style it could just as easily be an ad for a used car dealership on a TV station in Pembroke, Ontario. A film student stumbles upon a murder, and takes it upon himself to solve it, with all the investigative skills of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. But here's the thing! No one will believe him! Not even his girlfriend! Not even the video store clerk who couldn't more clearly be a killer if he had chunks of 9-year old girl hanging from his teeth! He would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that meddling kid!

Not only are the effects awful, they're not even present. This is an Italian horror film from an acknowledged master, and 2 people die in the whole fucking thing. Considering that much of the screen time is spent repeating actions endlessly to fill time, like falling off and then getting back on a bike during a thrilling moped/foot chase scene, one would think they'd have time to shoehorn in at least one more gory death. Instead, there's a lot of poorly dubbed dialogue, and acting that wouldn't impress a housewife hooked on General Hospital. This film represents the longest fall from grace since Gabrielle Carmouche fell from Cosby Show guest-stardom and landed on a black man's engorged penis. Except instead of Argento landing on a dick, he fell on a Hitchcock. And while you’re not laughing at that joke, just be thankful you’re also not watching this movie.

Here But For The Grace of God Go You

2007-02-19T19:24:00.000-05:00

Ultraviolet
2006, USA
Kurt Wimmer
DVD

It's not everyday you run across something this dumb. Unless you work in an American Apparel store, in which case you deal with that every day. But this is a different kind of dumb. This is a colossal stupid, not just the kind of dumb that thinks paying an extra $10 for a shirt is worth it if it's made by sexually abused white Californians instead of physically abused yellow children. This is the kind of dumb that wears either a hockey helmet or a Looney Tunes sweatshirt to high school. This is the kind of dumb that Tivos episodes of VIP. This is the kind of dumb that argues the merits of Terminator sequels, and likes Aliens better than Alien. This is clinically retarded.

Undercover at a screening of Ghost Rider.

And yet, Ultraviolet is one of the most beautiful films you'll ever see. Art directed, costumed, and set-decorated nearly to death, it feels as if all the money was spent on the look of the film, with the script cobbled together from Choose Your Own Adventure books. In a future world where science is so advanced it appears to exist for no other purpose other than to look cool, a disease is ravaging the population. Dubbed hemophagia, the disease is blood-born, and transforms its victims into people who have exactly balanced the number of times they've seen Interview With The Vampire with screenings of Akira. Milla Jovovich is infected, and spends most of the movie fighting the health department, which is something I'm quite familiar with after trying to establish my provincial residency. However, Jovovich has a more direct way of going about it, rather than waiting on hold for 92 minutes. She uses swords, which makes about as much sense as churning your own butter in the future. Why are they fighting with medieval weapons and kung-fu? I know there's nothing brain damaged frat boys and Special Needs students on a field trip like to see more in a movie than a hot chick flipping around like Jet Li
with tits, but it's pretty hard to roundhouse kick a bullet, unless you're making a bad Chuck Norris joke. And when they do use guns, the bad guys in this movie don't really have an understanding of how they work. I'm no sniper, but I understand that in order to shoot someone, one does not need to have 20 men armed with handguns, standing 2 feet away from their target, arranged in a circle, essentially pointing the guns at each other. Also, their body armor is made of glass.

I'm actually getting upset writing about this movie. My IQ is dropping, and I hate myself a little bit for bothering to see it, let alone complain about it. It's weird that Ultraviolet would be triggering thoughts of suicide, more so than the poetry of Rimbaud and the music of Take That combined. I have no skill whatsoever with the opposite sex, no friends, and less money than most panhandlers, and yet the only thing that makes me want to die of a pill overdose while soaking in a bathtub and drinking my own blood from a glass half filled with red wine is this stupid piece of shit. It's a mystery that bears investigation, but I'll have to leave that to the detectives examining my suicide. And I hope that my death will serve as a warning to others, who think themselves strong enough to walk the path that the retarded tread, the one that leads from the Head shop, down by the bowling alley, and into a video store to rent Ultraviolet.

Please, Please, Please Don't Read This At Work. Or Anywhere The FBI Can See.

2007-02-13T23:00:00.000-05:00

Volver
2006, Spain
Pedro Almodovar
35mm

There aren't a lot of sexual taboos left in the age of information. With the vast resources of the virtual world at our fingertips, we can explore every possible permutation of human sexuality, all without actually having to shit in someone's mouth or touch a black girl. So what's left for filmmakers like Almodovar, to whom sexuality forms such an important element of his work? When the most taboo elements he can come up with already have a half-dozen websites and are at least 4 volumes into the Evil Angel DVD series, it must be a bit difficult for sexual progressives to push the envelope. So, Almodovar adapts, and presents elements of deviant sexuality as the backdrop to stories concerning something else. In this case, incest, pedophilia, and adultery are merely backgound elements in a light-hearted story of family and forgiveness. And it seems a perfect fit, because as this website would suggest, there's nothing I find funnier than diddling a toddler in front of a camera.

Volver is a great example of how prejudices and intolerances can be changed. Taboos are shattered not by marches and bullhorns, slogans, and public demonstration, but rather by presenting what's considered unnatural as normal. The images, once shocking, become commonplace, and are accepted. And that's a noble and progressive goal, and it's one that Volver has convinced me that I should adopt as my own.

This is a woman covered in shit fucking. Normally, I would comment on that, but in my quest to make taboos accepted, instead I'll just pretend that that's okay, and write a personal ad instead.

Single White Female Seeking Single White Male For Long Walks On The Beach and Romantic Meals High In Fiber.

This is a woman getting tongued by a dog. Again, it's okay, it's normal, and you won't notice it.

Beautiful German Shepherd seeks a home. Cute, friendly, and hung like a Labrador. No fat chicks.

There. I feel progressive already. And I'm sure I'll feel even more so when I make a romantic comedy starring my neighbor's kid and a 12 inch plastic dick.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Capitol of Sin

2007-02-10T09:22:00.000-05:00

Fear of the Black.

2007-02-08T17:03:00.000-05:00

Dreamgirls
2006, USA
Bill Condon
35mm

If there were enough sun to tan where I lived, I would be a redneck. As it stands, the frigid northern climes have left me more of an intolerant, bug-eyed cavefish. I've got the same amount of guns and prejudices as rednecks, but I just don't look the part. But despite the particular shade of white trash my skin happens to me, I still approached Dreamgirls, the story of the birth of the Supremes, sort of, with as much trepidation as a trucker at a 50 Cent show. Every other guy gets to complain that they don’t like musicals because they’re gay, so I’m going to bitch about Dreamgirls because it’s got black people in it. But it turns out, the fact that the film is comprised off an all-negro cast wasn't as off-putting as I'd imagined. Rather, what's distancing about the film is that they break out in song as abruptly and suddenly as a drunk girl throws up at a party.

My film school was a drive-in.

It's not that I'm inherently against musicals. Sure, they're gayer than lesions and swollen lymph nodes, but I'm tolerant enough for that. But there needs to be some sort of motivation to the musical numbers, other than an attempt to win a Golden Globe in a category that's easier to dominate than Best Drama. In a film like Chicago, all of the numbers were clearly established as fantasy sequences; in Rent, hallucinogenic reactions to anti-virals. However, in Dreamgirls, while many of the musical bits are diegetic, in that they take place within the context of the film, as performances or whatnot, there are about 3 or 4 scenes that are just characters bursting into song seemingly at random. As this occurs only a limited number of times, as opposed to consistently throughout the film, it always seems jarring, confusing, and uncalled for, like someone spitting in your face during sex after whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

So, Dreamgirls is weirdly incoherent and full of black people, so I probably should hate it. But I don't. Firstly, I'm not convinced that Beyonce is black. I think she's a Barbie-based robot covered in chocolate, the ultimate product for pre-teen girls and middle-aged men with early stage jungle fever. Plus, while the story is clichéd and as predictable as the last minute of a porn film, there are some great performances and some well-written roles. Every character is flawed, realistically, believably, and in some cases dramatically. Except, of course, for the chocolate robot, because the multi-national cybernetics conglomerate won't allow her to sully her image, and therefore impede Skynet's plan to become self-aware. Eddie Murphy's rising and falling soul singer is both well written and well played, and the numerous accolades Jennifer Hudson is receiving as the brassy, self-destructively arrogant yet supremely talented Effie are fully deserved. The music, if you're into that sort of that thing, is loud and ebullient, full of wildly ululating tones and jaws flapping like a marionette with a cut string. The costumes are glittery, the hair is big, and the set design and theatrical staging is enough to straighten even the limpest wrist in to a clapping position. Except for mine, because I'm busy grabbing my gun.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Love In The Time Of Mental Retardation.

2007-02-07T22:31:00.000-05:00

Punch Drunk Love
2002, USA
P.T. Anderson
DVD

I'm glad you don't like this movie. And you don't, because Adam Sandler doesn't make stupid voices, and so you don't get it. He does play a retarded man-child, to be sure, but that's likely because years of marijuana abuse and video game addiction have rendered him cretinous. It's been an interesting progression for Sandler, and by progress I mean stagnant decay, as his lack of growth and movement as an actor and a comedian has led to movies best described as bed sores. Let's chart it, shall we?

Saturday Night Live - Sandler alternates between Cajun Man, Opera Man, and Canteen Boy, skits featuring retarded men-children. All have funny voices. None contain jokes. Sometimes, they rhyme.

Billy Madison - A retarded man-child goes back to school to learn how to walk properly and chew his food without choking.

The Waterboy - A retarded man-child joins a football team, due to his prodigious strength. Somehow, this is meant to be funny, instead of horrifying viewers with the idea of a violent, superhuman Mongoloid.

Little Nicky - A retarded man-child with a stupid voice gets up to no good, because he happens to be the retarded man-child of Satan. A cameo by Ozzy Osborne, intended to be a brief humorous aside, is instead a chilling reminder that imbecility is devoured by the masses in a figurative rather than a literal sense. I'm not saying the retarded should be eaten, because they're probably contagious, but they certainly shouldn't be encouraged with their own reality TV show and massive pop-metal festival tour.

He freely admits to being the Antichrist. Why hasn't someone gone to Megiddo to pick up the daggers?

Alright, so that's less of a chart as it is a line of retards stacked like cordwood, or more specifically, cordwood that needs to be immediately sterilized and institutionalized. Which is why it doesn't surprise me that he was chosen for his role in Punch Drunk Love. Though the film is far more cerebral and artistic than Sandler's usual fare, it's still a romantic comedy about a retard, meaning he's about as comfortable in the role as he would be smearing himself with Jell-O Chocolate Pudding and clapping his hands like a seal.

And what a romantic comedy it is. Director P.T. Anderson mocks and ignores the conventions of the traditional romantic comedy, but keeps the warm, beating heart of the romance intact. Everything you'd expect in a Wedding Singer or When Harry Met Sally is inverted, corrupted, or ignored; quips replaced by awkward silences, quirks replaced by sociopathy. The lighting is deliberately poor, the timing is off, but the romance is still, improbably, there. The point of the film seems to be that love exists outside of the formula prescribed to it by filmic convention. And the point of casting Adam Sandler seems to be that love exists outside of the normal IQ range. Now that's romance.

Golden Statue, Golden Opportunity.

2007-02-05T19:16:00.000-05:00

Transamerica
USA, 2005
Duncan Tucker

The transgendered community has long been mis-represented in film, despite the success of the long-running Chicks With Dicks series. Thankfully, writer-director Duncan Tucker and actress Felicity Huffman, join famous transsexuals Jamie Lee Curtis, Jessica Biel, and Orlando Bloom in the chorus of voices clamoring for mainstream acceptance. Unfortunately, all of these voices are a disconcerting mix of gruffness and a mellifluous lilt, like a brook babbling over a bone file, or a Cannibal Corpse love song. They make me uncomfortably erect, which incidentally seems to be the basic premise of this movie.

Transamerica stars Huffman as a pre-operative transsexual who discovers, the week before she/he's to make the transition from asexual freak to ugly, ugly woman, that she/he has a son. This son, played by Kevin Zegers, is a drug-addicted hustler looking to start a pornographic film career in Los Angeles, which, coincidentally, is exactly where Huffman needs to go for her operation. The road trip that follows is funny without being crass, realistic without being quirky, and gently arousing without being explicit, because you know the whole thing is leading up to Zegers trying to dick his own Mom-Dad.

And the Golden Shower goes to...

Huffman is great as the trannie, probably because she's spent most of her life being mistaken for one. Doesn't matter. I'd still fuck him/her, but only because she/he's probably so rich from Desperate Housewives that she/he would pay me off not to describe his/her genitals on Defamer. Essentially, Transamerica is a road movie, and the story does tend to wander, as do most road trips. But her Huffman’s performance is great, though the Oscar nomination she received doesn’t mean much. Often, Oscars are given out for actors being 'brave', which means playing either a fag or a retard. In my quest to get my own golden statuette, I'm writing and directing my own feature length film, a period piece about a gay retard trying to find love in, oh, let's say 15th century Spain. That should guarantee a couple of Costume Design Oscars as well as the inevitable Best Actor trophy. Also, the main character will retreat into some variety of bizarre fantasy land, where all the backgrounds are based on Hieronymus Bosch paintings or something, and his best friend is a CGI pixie, to get the special effects guys theirs, as well. Oh, and an older British actress will get like a 3 minute cameo as Queen Isabella, or the madam at a bordello, to get her a Supporting Actress nomination. As for me, I probably won't get an award myself, as the film won't be about the Holocaust, but I'll get the satisfaction of helping others, spreading the wealth, and further advancing the cause of gay retardation. I figure I should get Nobel Peace Prize out of that one.

Everything I Need To Know About Love, I Learned From A Prostitute's Intestines.

2007-02-01T22:22:00.000-05:00

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
1986, USA
John McNaughton
DVD

From a distance, Michael Rooker looks like Tom Hanks, though he sounds like Tom Waites with throat cancer. And Tracy Arnold looks like Meg Ryan, only slightly more swollen in the jowls. So, in essence, this movie is You've Got Mail with knives. And somehow, that makes it more romantic, like Bonnie and Clyde, or Badlands, except with more dead prostitutes filled with broken glass and stab wounds. And Rooker's cold, unfeeling performance as serial killer Henry Lee Lucas is so good, that coupled with John McNaughton's uncomplicated, flourishless direction and loosely structured script, Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer is what all romantic comedies should aspire to be: humorless, empty, and full of repressed rage and rape fantasies. Just like real romance. Case in point:

True love.

The Wedding Singer would have been much better had Drew Barrymore been a serial killer. Not her character, but Barrymore herself. And her victim profile should have been boorish, talentless frat boys whose sole marketable ability seems to be to make stupid voices.

The Holiday. The only part of Cameron Diaz I would pay to see is her insides. And Jude Law looks creepy enough to pull off a young Hannibal Lector. His smile doesn't reach his eyes, and all the British sound either like aristocratic serial killers or debaucherous poets, and Law doesn't seem like he can rhyme.

When Harry Met Sally, he didn't cut out her eyes and inseminate her brain. But he should have. Maybe then the orgasm would have been real.

As you can see, romance isn't dead. But it does keep killing, until the crawlspace gets full and it's time to dump some love into the river.

A Trip Through Time, Space, And Rehab.

2007-01-29T22:38:00.000-05:00

Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
2001, USA
Richard Kelly
DVD

The most impressive thing about this newly minted cult classic about time travel and schizophrenia is that the film itself is a portal through time. By watching Donnie Darko, I was catapulted 2 hours and 9 minutes into the future, where boredom reigns supreme, and simultaneously launched back to a time where taking Ketamine was cool. Sadly, even by watching the film in reverse, there is no way to get your 2 hours back, but at least when the lights go back on, you don't feel quite so much like you're on a couple bumps of disassociative anesthetic.

One of the special features on the DVD.

The original cut of Donnie Darko is a dreamy, unsettling, masterpiece of poetic science fiction. The director's cut, on the other hand, is long. That's probably the only thing I can say about it. If you've got enough drugs running through your system, or at least drifting about in the fluid of your spinal column, this movie will be the greatest thing since the stash can and the coke spoon. If, however, you're like me, and have about as much patience for indulgent club-kid trip-outs as you do for waiting on hold to the best of Aqua, this film will be about as palatable as Go, except much, much slower. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Darko, a mental disturbed teen who narrowly escapes death and then becomes convinced he's living in a parallel universe, a blip in the space-time continuum. In order to set things right and save Jena Malone's life, he must hallucinate a lot of those water things from The Abyss, pose his head like Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, and kill a guy in bunny suit. Don't worry, this all makes sense if you've gone retarded from chemicals, and it's way better than reading a book. It joins the ranks of other important films in drug culture, and shines as one of the jewels of the paper Burger King crown of trashy cinema.

1) Trainspotting. A fantastic film, exhilarating and fresh, that suffers only slightly from the fact that its only purpose seems to be to get ravers hooked on smack.

2) Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. Children's movies + LSD = annoying Marilyn Manson fans.

3) Spun. Fuck you. I could cut a single frame from a bunch of NFB documentaries and shake them in a bag full of splicing tape and make a better movie than this piece of shit seizure. Sure, it's directed by one of the old percussionists from Bathory, but he edits like drummers do blast beats, and makes drug use look like watching music videos on fast forward.

4) Requiem For A Dream. This is like the Reefer Madness for the 90s, teaching the viewer that if you do drugs, your arm will fall off, or you'll get fucked in the ass with a dildo while the entire board of directors for Nortel watches.

5) Dazed and Confused. A great film ruined by a retarded audience. I shudder to think of the nuances of Richard Linklater's drowsy film lost in a haze of pot smoke in rep theatres, the sound lost in the crackling of burning Royal Blunt papers and the snitching of bugs crawling through matted dreadlocks. It's like playing Mozart at an after-hours club, or reading Dante to women.

Still, Donnie Darko is a great film. Or rather, was a great film, until Richard Kelly got his hands on it again. The morning after watching the director's cut, all I'm left with is a bad headache, a 2-hour chunk of missing time. And I didn’t even get to take any Ketamine.

Light, Human, and Sexual. Just The Way I Like My Children.

2007-01-22T20:18:00.000-05:00

Little Children
2006, USA
Todd Fields
35mm

It's not every day you come across a child molestation comedy. Well, not a legal one, at least. The Internet is full of surprises, but a lot of them will get your IP address tracked by the FBI, so it's best to leave well enough alone. Sometimes, no matter how much you'd like to see a naked woman and a pack of wild dogs driven by equal parts lust and hunger, you should just stick to surfing for pictures of Britney Spears' shaved vagina like everybody else. I hear TMZ or whatever crap website Perez Hilton complains about not being famous on has some charming pictures of Lindsay Lohan looking like her coke buzz is wearing off. Maybe check that out instead of googling "funny pederast".

Surpringly, it took me about 20 minutes to find this photo. A 20 seconds to get off to it.

Or, alternately, watch Little Children, a strangely comic look at the dark underbelly of suburbia. A subject explored in only 2 to 3 hundred films in the past few years, Little Children is a refreshingly light take on adultery, pedophilia, and pornography. It's been noted that couples who laugh during sex have sex more often, so judging by the way I responded to this film, I should be quite busy with the next Girl Scout troop I meet. Starring Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, and several people with disturbingly pock- marked faces, the film is certainly not farce or satire, but the tone isn't weighed down by the usual grimness and sobriety that burden films of this type. Instead, there's a humanity and a natural sense of humor. And coupled with narration that sounds like William Burroughs reading fairy tales through a heroin nod, there's a dreamy, upbeat feel to the film.

Speaking of heroin, Winslet is ours, with an added 'e'. She's a bad mother, as inattentive to her daughter as she is to her bushy eyebrows, who starts up a torrid affair with the guy from Angels In America after catching her husband sniffing mail order panties and masturbating to internet porn. Meanwhile, a convicted sex offender moves into the neighborhood, which stirs up a whole hornet's nest worth of trouble. Director Todd Field clearly has learned a great deal about evoking humanity and emotion without grinding things to a heavy- handed halt while voicing Ol' Drippy on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and those lessons come into play here. By maintaining a non-judgmental moral stance, and letting the characters and situations speak for themselves, Little Children manages to balance the tightrope between humor and exploitation, humanity and drama, and creates a warm, realistic film. For more information, try googling 'realistic pedophile movie'. Just don't tell the FBI I told you to.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Like Where's Waldo, But You're Looking For The Actual Movie Review.

2007-01-19T14:18:00.000-05:00

The Queen
2006, UK
Stephen Frears
35mm

Honestly, I don't know what the big deal with Princess Diana was. People keep claiming her transformation from school teacher to princess was some sort of fairy tale, but all the fairy tales I've ever read at least had a cool monster or two to menace the heroine, not some inbred blue-blood with skin hanging off his face like a coat on a hook. Diana was like the Paris Hilton of Britain, completely devoid of any skill or talent, but famous nonetheless. Of course, her notoriety came from disliking land mines and waving like golf fans clap, instead of from taking an awkward cum shot and throwing up Grey Goose vodka, but she's useless nonetheless. Still, her death inexplicably shook the world, in one of those really gay outpourings of useless grief. It's like the whole planet had a really cute dog that got hit by a train. Even useless layabouts like Britney Spears are at least famous for a reason, which is they have big tits and can stitch together a vocal track with Pro tools, but celebrities who are famous for no reason are infuriating. And Diana and Paris Hilton are by no means the only ones who have captured the public eye seemingly accidentally.

There. That should be worth a few more hits. But not the kind I'm looking for, which would break her nose.

1) Nicole Ritchie. Famous for being friends with someone who's famous. Also for looking kind of like a shaved shitzu.

2) Anna Nicole Smith. Was she a Playboy model? Was that it? Posing with your top off in a magazine so tame it wouldn't get a 13 year-old boy off is enough to lead to a TV show? I can't wait for the new sitcom starring that girl from the VO5 Hot Oil ads. Plus, Smith’s got tits like milk bags, which should be enough to disqualify you from wearing tight clothing, let alone prancing around in the buff.

3) Ashlee Simpson. This is the only recording artist I know who is famous for not singing. Or she was. Then, she got famous for getting a nose job, a career move that turned out great for Jennifer Grey, and will no doubt work wonders for the bony sister of a famous dimwit. Before, with her enormous nose, there was at least something on her face to distract from her vapid stare, which drifted unfocused around the room like a co-ed at her first keg party. Except, unlike the co-ed, Simpson’s evening ends with her spending $10 000 on surgery instead of throwing up in a bathtub while being sodomized by a football player. Life is not fair.

What a disgusting bunch. Like Diana, who incidentally is not in The Queen, a subtle and enthralling story of the Royal Family's public relations crisis after the princess’ death that featuring a Golden Globe-winning performance by Helen Mirren, these people are universally loved for no valid reason. They're famous because they're celebrities, and celebrities because they're famous. It's like we're caught in a time look, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a snake eating its own tail, which by default, is shitting in it's own mouth. And in ours.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Guilt Trips and Gold Teeth.

2007-01-16T21:59:00.000-05:00

Blood Diamond
2006, USA
Edward Zwick
35mm

Remind me never to go to Africa. Not that my going was ever a particular danger, since I enjoy visiting areas where the culinary specialties run a bit more exotic than dirt and grubs, but now I'm especially sure. When I go on vacation, I like to keep all my limbs attached to the trunk of my body, as opposed to twitching in the iron rich dust like maggots in bone meal. The whole point of this movie, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a Rhodesian diamond smuggler/mercenary, Djimon Honsou as a fisherman with a hidden gem, and Jennifer Connelly as Lois Lane, seems to be to make me feel guilty for buying conflict diamonds. Well, it's not going to fly. Sure, the trade results in the deaths of thousands in slave camps, civil war, and general strife, but it does also results in cheap diamonds. And ultimately, when I'm spelling my own name on my platinum fronts, I try to be cost effective, in order to still have money for spinning hubcaps, fur coats, and various other gaudy accoutrements better suited for a Valley Girl Barbie than a grown man. It's all about value, and since I would normally pay extra for merchandise someone has died over, like my Bonnie and Clyde death car and Anne Frank oven knob, those blood diamonds are a real steal. Plus, I wouldn't want the Chinese pre-teen ghosts who haunt my Nike Air Force Ones to feel lonely. I also have a belt buckle that speaks in tongues, and a dress that's possessed by the spirits of three plus-sized prostitutes and a senator's daughter.

That's how I roll. Like an idiot.

But that's beside the point. I don't know why I should feel guilty about this mass genocide supporting my swap meet jewelry. After all, it's just Africa. Sure, the continent is the cradle of civilization. But, it's also the cradle of HIV and those annoying Christian buy-a-black-baby commercials. In fact, that's what these movie is, one of those stupid infomercials with the kids with swollen stomachs and crusted eyelids covered in insects while a white guy in a beard and a C level soap opera star try to extort money out of teary-eyed viewers. In Blood Diamond, the bearded white guy is played by Jennifer Connelly, as the moral center of the film. She does this completely oblivious to the fact that portraying a white American as the moral center in Africa is like, well, portraying a white American as the moral center of anything. Americans like to think of themselves as John Wayne's, tough-but-fair, violent-but-just vigilantes who do the right thing no matter what, when in reality they're just that Jared guy from the Subway ads pre-diet: fat, retarded children who consume all they encounter in a cocoon of oblivious entitlement. They couldn't form the moral center of a Twinkie, let alone a continent.

And this reference to deliciously sickly sweetness is no accident. While most of Blood Diamond is a realistic, gripping, and violent exploration of a country tearing itself and its people to pieces, it's peppered with saccharine, cheaply melodramatic scenes that stick out and distract from all the machete hacking and gunshot wounds. It's a shame really, that the pockets of histrionic emotion spoil the film, like cooking clam chowder with icing sugar instead of flour, because Leonardo DiCaprio is great in it. One of the few instances in which he seems like a character instead of a Tiger Beat cover, DiCaprio's Danny Archer is amoral but intensely likeable, evil but entertaining, Dennis the Menace with a Mauser instead of a slingshot. As awful as he his, he’s the real draw of the film. They should have made his character the American.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

A Sweet Tooth, And A Nose For Meth.

2007-01-15T15:21:00.000-05:00

Apocalypto
2006, USA
Mel Gibson
35mm

As far as Hollywood filmmaking goes, Mel Gibson makes flawless diamonds of cinematic perfection. Wait, did I say 'diamond'? Because I meant 'one of those sugar crystal rings you get from candy machines in bus stations'. This movie is Cheez Wiz. I'm not trying to be stuck up or elitist, but I don't drive a fucking Chevy and I've got all my teeth, so there's no way I'm falling for this bullshit. It's like hanging on the edge of your seat to find out how Walker, Texas Ranger is going to end. I'd say this movie is formulaic, but that would imply that math was involved in the computation of the plot. Instead, I'm guessing they used a ruler, drawing a straight line from point A to point B. So, less algebra and more shop class, which is exactly the workmanlike approach to filmmaking that ruins Mel Gibson movies. These are films for people who get confused by wrestling plotlines, who buy hot dogs from 7-11, who mix Pepsi and Orange crush in their Big Gulps. These are films for the unwashed, Old Spiced masses, full of action, romance, pseudo-Christian morality, and a rousing score.

The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 1.

Apocalypto is five episodes of Cops strung together. Everyone has bad teeth, the theatre smells like breath on a Sunday morning, and, just like Cops, I can't understand what anyone in the movie is saying because they're all Spanish. Or Mexican or Indian or whatever, point is they're brown and probably on crystal meth. That would explain why the whole movie is
ephedrine, border patrol minutes behind. Apparently, in the days before the age of home electronics, this is what you did instead of staying up for three days taking apart a VCR then dying of renal failure. Also, you set a lot of traps like a particularly vicious Roadrunner cartoon. Jaguar Paw is a noble Mexican living with his family in small jungle village, for from the temptations of the big city. His idyllic,childishly pastoral existence is shattered, however, when his village is attacked by a bunch of guys with tattoos and body piercing, provingthat Mel Gibson has the same phobias as my mother.

The rest of the movie, aside from the running, concerns itself with the essential rural/urban conflict that has inflamed Christian fundamentalists since the times of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Las Vegas. Most Bible thumpers would have you believe that living in the country is like a vacation for the soul, and we'd all pick daisies and drink fresh cream while our children skipped in fields of golden wheat and laughed along with the sound of church bells. The city, on the other hand, is a suppurating sore of vice and sin, where the screams of the innocent are silenced only by the cocks of the guilty. In reality, the only people I know who moved to the country did so in order they could beat their wives without the neighbors calling the police. Still, the reactionary moral posturing is ever-present and obvious in this film, with the Mayan city portrayed as full of obese children with shaved eyebrows, like they've spent their entire lives immobile, stuffed full of cocoa and rubbing themselves until the hair comes off. Gibson's juvenile portrayal is just subversive enough that it plays into the Bible Belt's subconscious prejudices and fear of the other without getting too offensive, with enough trappings of art-house respectability to win over some of the film critics in the red states. By subtitling the film, Gibson attempts to move it away from the simplistic 80s action movie template to a more universal context, making it look like not just Texas hates Mexicans. Sadly, he's probably right, and what's worse, I'm pretty sure the whole world loves those little candy rings, too.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Brit Popculture.

2007-01-12T12:26:00.000-05:00

Billy Liar
1963, UK
John Schlesinger
DVD

The British sense of humor is a difficult thing to define, primarily because it doesn’t seem to exist. The Brits have a sense of the absurd, certainly, as evidenced by Monty Python and Tony Blair, and they do pronounce things amusingly, but if those were the sole criteria for being funny, we'd all be listening to stand up recordings of people from Alabama reading from university textbooks. Still, it seems to be quite popular among older white parents and kids who like calculus. That's not to say that early 60s British comedy Billy Liar isn't a good movie. With its childlike play between fantasy and reality, childhood and maturity, this story of a creative but flighty young man with a Peter-Pan-complex toys between being lighthearted and tragic, like a conversation with me when I haven't been taking my Lithium. But the real highlight of the film is its rapid-fire, improvisational dialogue. American comedies of the same period were all weighty, clunky affairs, every joke telegraphed and the plot so constructed it feels like it was directed by cranes. Even now, I picture most Hollywood comedies as being helmed by some boorish, whiskey-fattened lout, as if James Belushi has been behind the camera of every movie ever made. So while Billy Liar never made me laugh, it never made me want to give up laughing for fear the sound might carry on a southerly blowing wind current and encourage a sequel to Beer Fest. I've actually been on a humor strike since they cancelled Futurama, replacing it with the preening excuse for a post-football drinking game that is Family Guy. Did Stewie say something as if he were a cross between James Mason and Hitler? Take another shot of Jagermeister, frat boy. But don't drink too much! You'll want to be able to remember enough to quote the whole fucking thing in the back of Early American Literature class, should your voice be too hoarse to do a good impression of Cartman from South Park.

Comic genius. I hope Chris Farley plays him in the feature film. In hell.

In fact, what's even the point in smiling? And I say that not because I've spent too much money on Joy Division CDs. It's just that trying to find a good comedy is like finding a virgin at a Peaches concert; it takes a really long time, and once you finally succeed, you've forgotten how to either laugh or tie a ball gag, depending on which stream of metaphor you're following. There hasn't been a funny movie made since 1993, when Army of Darkness reached a zenith in comedic genius and set up the inevitable long decline that follows such a lofty peak. And now, as we wallow in the rut left behind by such mighty giants as Army of Darkness and Billy Liar, we can only let the facial muscles atrophy as we watch humor fade away, leaving us only with reruns of Three's Company and ball gag jokes.

Reich & Roll 2007

2007-01-11T23:59:00.000-05:00

Night Of The Living Metalcore Retards.

2007-01-11T18:18:00.000-05:00

Day of the Dead
1985, USA
George A. Romero
DVD

Day of the Dead has long been regarded as the least of George A. Romero's Dead films. Thankfully for fans, Romero had the decency to make a much crappier film with Land of the Dead, causing the third movie in the series to rise leaps and bounds in comparative quality. And that's nothing to scoff at. People have made very good livings being bad at what they do, but at least being better than their competition. American Idol is a prime example of this phenomenon. No one on that show is capable of doing anything other than modulate their voices hysterically like an Arab woman ululated over the Israeli-bullet-riddled body of her son. However, some of them wail a little more or less atonally than others, which apparently is enough to make Simon Cowell stop imitating Anne Robinson long enough to give out some grudging praise. Jessica Simpson looks like a talent because she's not quite as shrill as her hook-nosed, aggressively ignorant sister, and the only reason that people watch CBS Evening News with Katie Couric is that they can't cum watching war footage when it's narrated by Tom Brokaw.

I can't finish until someone who sounds like my kindergarten teacher tells me how tragic this is.

Following the pattern of the series, Day of the Dead has humanity reduced to its last dying embers, with a few soldiers and scientists ensconced in an underground bunker, struggling to cure the zombie epidemic that has already destroyed civilization. More claustrophobic and contained than its predecessor, Dawn of the Dead, the film is also more nihilistic, with a real sense of entropy pervading the film. As the zombies fitfully wander about, reduced to nothing but instinctual cues and memories of their past lives, so do the humans, going through the motions of productivity amid the ruins of humanity. But yet, it still has the happiest ending of all the films, with the altruistic heroes ending their ordeal on a sunny beach, lounging, fishing, and preparing to inbreed themselves into a new world.

What's best about this movie is, of course, the pet zombie they train, who is capable of rudimentary thought and simplistic, primal instincts. Since this movie was made in 1985, that would give the mindless hordes bred from this monstrosity time to grow up and put Atreyu in their Friend List on MySpace. It all makes sense now. The hair that looks like it was cut with a machete to crudely resemble a Motley Crue groupie from the 80s, the toothpick-leg jeans like a second, weathered skin, the shoes that look like checkered slippers so they can slide easily over feet swollen with decay, it’s all so obvious; emo kids are the undead. This explains why their entire vernacular is imitated from those 90s skatepunks who have since grown up to work in kitchens. They’re just monkeys aping zoo janitors. Their bite appears to be contagious, judging from the fact that I can't pass a radio without hearing My Chemical Romance whining about something, and that everyone on the subway at 11 PM looks like they slept outside waiting in line to get the same Avenged Sevenfold belt buckle. They stink of that foul mix of tobacco you get when you smoke whatever you can bum outside the fire doors in high school, and have that kind of carefully constructed disheveled look that speaks to either a perfectly embalmed corpse mussing its suit climbing out of a grave, or a few hours in the bathroom with a case of that Tigi BedHead mousse. And yet, with all these similarities, I'm still not allowed to shoot them in the head whenever they pull out their Blackberrys and text someone a link to a Hedley video on YouTube. Compared to Day of the Dead, this is hell.

High on Hatred.

2007-01-09T22:25:00.000-05:00

Pusher
1996, Denmark
Nicolas Winding Refn
DVD

There's no such thing as a cool drug dealer. They subsist on misery, despair, and stupid looking track pants. Despite what shitty dope movies marketed at retarded club kids would have you believe, drug dealers have their 'jobs' not because they're bad asses you need to admire, but rather because it's the only profession where you can sleep until 3 pm, watch The Price Is Right everyday, and still make the rent on their shitty bachelor apartment that smells like sweat and old beer. Yes, I know you wish your life was like Go, but it's not. Instead, you're buying coke off a scabby high school drop out who doesn't remember your name. But, that won't stop you from pretending you played WWF Smackdown on his 52' plasma screen so you can impress the 18 year old girl you're looking to bang with how hard you are. Unless you're a girl, in which case you're trying to impress everyone with how hard you can party, which is shorthand for saying how quickly you can pass out with your top off in a room full of guys who have never had sex sober.

The best way to get popular in high school.

Uh, where was I? Oh yeah, Pusher. Well, Pusher is not a good movie. It doesn't seem to have much of a point, and there's not a single character in the whole film that I wouldn't cross the street to avoid, much less stare at for an hour and 42 minutes. But, in the context of drug movies, when placed along side thinly veiled glorifications of drug culture like Trainspotting, Go, and Human Traffic, Pusher really stands out as a brutal antithesis. It's not that's it's a particularly grim or frightening portrayal, but it does show drug culture the way it is: depressing, stagnant, and full of middle aged guys with gold jewelry moving powder down the drug chain until it makes itself up the nose of a 23 year-old at a Prodigy concert. Never mind the damage drugs do to your body, what about the damage they do to your mind, when all you're capable of talking about is how high you got at Osheaga, and how hung over you are today? Fuck! Talk about something else! Anything else! Quit comparing hash oils and coke prices! I like eggs, but you don't see me spending all day loudly arguing over the merits of white versus brown, how good my grocer is, or how big the omelet I ate last night was. You're like a broken record, and the music fucking sucks.

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, Pusher. Yeah, the movie's Danish, or some country where the language sounds like gay German. It's about a drug dealer, as you may have guessed, who owes his supplier some money, then ends up owing him some more money, and then some more. Nothing really happens, aside from this guy getting more and more screwed, and then things end really abruptly. The film is shot with a hand-held, Run Lola Run sense of pacing, emphasizing the grittiness of the story, and trying to make a lifestyle that's essentially a lot of sitting in parked cars waiting for the cell phone to ring look exciting. It sort of works, I guess, because some people get their heads beaten in with baseball bats, but in the end it doesn't seem worth it. The two leads look like Tom Sizemore and a shark, respectively, and the movie makes you feel so ugly and depressed, you'll need to get right fucked up afterwards.

Short, And Anything But Sweet. Unless You Find Rape Romantic. And Hey, That's Your Business.

2007-01-05T08:30:00.000-05:00

All That Heaven Allows

1955, USA
Douglas Sirk
DVD

Douglas Sirk is the king of the melodrama, which means he was the queen of the soap opera. 'Melodrama' is just a nice way of saying 'regurgitated Sweet 'N' Low', of course, so that film professors can teach classes without sounding like the cinematic version of Oprah's Book Club, but we'll grant that conceit for now and move on. All of his films include tortured love that for some reason or another dare not speak its name, the scorn of society heaped upon trembling shoulders, and scores that swell like my crotch during a Jerry's Kids Telethon. As you can see, I as well suffer from a love that dare not speak its name, which is that I like to fuck retarded children, but you don't see any Technicolor cameras following me around in Panavision. It's a little unfair, I think, that certain, let's say peccadilloes, are privileged, whereas others are still vilified. Jane Wyman can date a bohemian tree-planter in All That Heaven Allows, and she gets a movie made about her. I rape my way through one short bus and I end up spending 6 months in a hospital for sex offenders. It's just not fair.

The shag-wagon.

The love that dare not speak its name, in the particular case of All That Heaven Allows, is inter-class dating with an age difference. The first part of the movie is encumbered by clunky, over-expository dialogue, but after we meet the characters, primarily recently widowed Wyman and gardener love interest, this move a long a little more rapidly, allowing the beautiful cinematography and Sirk's patented overly-dramatic framing to take center stage to the weepy story. Amusingly enough, the lower class gardener is played by Rock Hudson, which means that the scandal in reality is Jane Wyman fucking a gay guy with AIDS. But no one knew that the time, which is always the case when you're giving a girl an STD. Or, in my case, a 6-year-old boy with Down's Syndrome, riding the bus to school.

I'm Not Racist. Some Of My Best T-Shirts Are Black.

2007-01-04T21:07:00.000-05:00

Roots, Episode 3
1977, USA
Marvin J. Chompsky, John Erman, David Greene, Gilbert Moses
VHS

I've learned a lot from Roots, through the television miniseries' subtle examination of the history of the African in America, tracing their journey from slavery to The Flavor of Love 2. I don't know what the crap is up with that show, but that seems an awfully tacky way to cap a 250-year journey, like ending a 5 course meal with a bucket of fried chicken. For those of you unfamiliar with that particular reality TV gem, I feel like it gives a much better perspective of the black experience than Roots. In it, disfigured retard Flavor Flav lounges around in his nouveau riche mansion, enveloped in garish clown clothing and surrounded by gaggles of ugly hood rats vying for the honor of getting an STD from the confused half of Public Enemy. But still, I learned more from Roots. In fact, I've learned so much, I think my brain is so full I'll have to stop watching this pedantic, lecturing nonsense. In this episode, Geordie Laforge grows up into that guy from Good Times, and gets his foot cut off by slave catchers. Also, Louis Gossett Jr dies, though sadly not soon enough to prevent his role in Diggstown. While I may not continue with the series much further, I will nevertheless take the time to share some of the important lessons I've learned from this enlightening show, which presumes that the viewer is some sort of ignorant plantation owner requiring slow repetition of an after-school-special-quality.

250 years of history ends here. I'm glad I get to see it.

1) You used to be able to buy and sell black people. Why you would want to do that is beyond me. The overhead costs for owning a Negro must be astronomical. The malt liquor bills alone would bankrupt all but the wealthiest tobacco farmer, plus I prefer my silverware in the kitchen drawer, not pawned to buy Jamaican press. This explains why life is so cheap in the 'hood, or so the nearly indecipherable mumblings of 50 Cent would have me believe.

2) Coloreds were forbidden to read in the days of the slave trade. This explains why they refuse to do so now, and every rap album is titled with a crude approximation of phonetics.

3) Slaves were assigned their names instead of being allowed to use their own. This explains the term 'slave name', and the myriad of modern colored names created by mixing attitudes of rebellion, a bunch of 'y's, and the suffix '-esha'.

And, I think that's about it for me and Roots. I might try to pick up the rest of the series later on, but odds are I'm done. After all, I know how the plight of the African American ends. In a gaudy mansion, surrounded by scabby hookers.

More Roots: Episode 1, Episode 2

Don't Believe The Hype. Because The Jews Control The Media.

2006-12-25T23:52:00.000-05:00

Rumor Has It
2005, USA
Rob Reiner
DVD

Surprisingly, I once liked Jennifer Aniston. Not because of her performance in Friends, the show that launched a thousand shitty Goo Goo Doll haircuts and made New York women seem like neurotics on helium, but rather because of her pre-rhinoplasty role in Leprechaun. Her Valley-Girl-by-way-of-the-Sinai-peninsula hooknose made her look like she'd maybe spit up gold coins the harder I hit her, like a Semitic slot machine. I always found that combination of greed, anti-Semitism, and misogyny very satisfying, so I decided to follow her career. Sadly, after her plastic surgery, my interest in her waned as the gold fever passed, as I no longer fantasize about mining for diamonds in her genitals, or cutting slices from her tender flesh, is so sweetened by champagne baths and caviar brunches it tastes like sugared Kobe beef. Plus, after that, she kept starring in those romantic comedies marked towards housewives whose husbands take them to Applebee's and a movie on date night once a month, and then come home to have sex in the moments before Sports Desk comes on, still sucking the traces of a baked potato with Cheez Wiz out of their teeth.

In a pinch, it works great as a lubricant. Well, not great, but the whore you picked up at the bus station won't know the difference.

And Rumor Has It hasn't changed my opinion. I was interested in seeing it because it's a sequel of sorts to The Graduate, and I was really dying to find out if Benjamin Braddock got into plastics or not. However, it did seem like it was doomed to failure from the very start, for commercial if not artistic reasons. The only people who liked The Graduate when it was released in 1967 are now spending their time finding their teeth or trying to remember if they have a daughter, not going to the theatre. And people who were young enough at the time to still be coherent now, with enough money available to spend on movie tickets instead of losing it to telemarketing fraud, didn't see the film when it was out. Youths at the time did not like The Graduate. What they liked was trading beads for quaaludes and having unprotected sex while trying to ignore the fact that their partner smells like turned wine and old leather. But, like as the peace and love generation spawned the mercantile avarice of the 1980s, so has The Graduate led to Rumor Has It, a blatant and shamefaced attempt to get my mother and her sister to spend $20 on movie tickets and popcorn.

Everything about this movie has middle-aged woman written all over it, in flowery cursive on scented rose stationary. Kevin Costner's in it, for one, as the grown up Benjamin Braddock, in his sickly jaundiced tan so superficial it seems his smile makes his wrinkles glow white like cracks in meringue. Then, there's Shirley McLaine as Mrs. Robinson, mugging desperately for the camera in between bourbon-laced drinks, with exactly the kind of broad, bland humor that would spice up an episode of Another World and have the whole sewing circle talk about how wild the movie was. Unfortunately, as I am neither a mother nor an unmarried, lonely aunt, all I see is a couple of faces like beef jerky trading barbs so dulled by age they sound like grammar lessons in middle school. Jennifer Aniston plays a young woman engaged to a thunderously boring Mark Ruffalo. She discovers that the novel The Graduate was based upon her family with sher dead mother as Katherine Ross, and her grandmother as Mrs. Robinson. It's an interesting enough premise, I suppose, but it's so lifeless and stale, like old Wonderbread, But then again, this is the kind of film that's marketed to people that feed their children ham salad. Unfortunately, my tastes are a little more refined that that. I prefer Jew meat.

Merry Paganmas!

2006-12-25T22:57:00.000-05:00

In whatever way you choose to worship your filthy Jewish god, enjoy yourself. I will send an enemy to Valhalla in his honor.

I Know Son Of Sam Didn't Kill Gay People. But I Do.

2006-12-19T23:12:00.000-05:00

Stranger Than Fiction
2006, USA
Marc Foster
35mm

I like a Will Ferrell movie. Did he get better, or did I get dumber? I really hope it's the former and not the latter, because I'm not looking forward to getting to the point where I can't figure out how to work my keys and get impressed by Dan Brown novels. However, if he is getting better, then there might be trouble on the horizon, as bad comedians turned good actors is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse, where the seas will run red with blood and a beast with 10 crowns 10 heads, each doing bad Christopher Walken impressions and bits about programming VCRs, will rule the earth. One fourth of the Earth's population will be ravaged by Jim Carrey, one forth scoured by Robin Williams, and a quarter slaughtered by Jack Black, with the final portion of the population, apparently, falling victim to Will Ferrell as a poisoned star falls from the sky to boil the oceans.

Ferrell's the second from the left.

As for Stranger Than Fiction, the film is high concept without being either confusing, like Primer, or nerdy, like Adaptation. Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a tax agent for the IRS who discovers he's a character in Emma Thompson's new novel. He discovers this because he's hearing her narration as she writes the story, which is something like being able to read the script of the TV movie of the week based on your life. For the record, mine will be called To Walk The Night: The Ash Karreau Story. It will star Mark Paul Gosselar from TV's Saved By The Bell as yours truly, with Tiffany Amber Theissen as the love interest, and Eddie from Frasier as the dog that tells me to kill people. The police detective on my trail will be Richard Greico, and he will loudly proclaim, without irony, "he's turning this into a game!" about 45 minutes into the first hour. Un, where was I? Oh, yes, Stranger Than Fiction. It's good, surprisingly. It's actually fairly intelligent, and playfully raises a bunch of interesting questions about both narrative and fatalism, in a way that's charming without being so gay a dog has to tell me to shoot it.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Too Stoned To Conjugate. The Tenses Are Melting.

2006-12-18T00:40:00.000-05:00

Night of the Living Dead 3D
2006, USA
Jeff Broadstreet
35mm

I'm not sure what's more frightening, zombies or stoned idiots making movies. One will eat your brains, and the other will, well, probably they’d probably eat your brains too, if they were made of tofu or organic produce. The only thing worse than aging hippie is young grassroots activist hippie. I'm not sure which one of them had a hand in this, but someone was way gone on Jamaican Blonde when they wrote the script for this, probably on the back of a cigarette package half torn up for filter paper. For crap's sake, how can you fuck up a 3D zombie movie? By remaking Night of the Living Dead and turning most of the gags into people blowing pot-smoke rings at the camera. People always talk about how hard drugs ruin lives, but how about how soft drugs ruin movies? Dazed and Confused would be a great movie to watch if the rep theatres playing it didn't smell like an ashtray at a Phish concert. Sean William Scott would be tending bar in the lounge of a university he could never attend if it weren't for pot culture, and video stores would be able to save shelf space for good movies if they didn’t have to stocking quite so many copies of Half Baked and How High. If it weren’t for drug culture, I could rest assured that Jack Black would never make another movie, and Will Ferrell would be relegated to bit parts and cameos on Saturday Night Live anniversary shows. The entire cast and crew of That 70s Show would be executed for crimes against intelligence, and Adam Sandler's head would be on a pike outside a walled city, warning of the dangers a little brain damage can have on the humor system. The city, of course, would have walls and battlements constructed from the pressed bones and gristle of lamb, chicken grown in horrible captivity, and all kinds of small animals that are way too cute to eat if you're high and own a Morrissey CD. Within the city, we would feast on veal and the corpses off all those that worked in vegan co-ops, and spend the night not dancing to trance music, and avoiding pulling out an acoustic guitar to strum Redemption Song around a bonfire. In this paradise, Sublime CDs will be burned for warmth, as will Grateful Dead fans and all copies of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (both print and film), and anyone with a hemp necklace will be transformed into bio-mass fuel in the crematoriums. Public assembly of anybody who believes in tarot, astrology, or the power of the universe will be forbidden, in case their hysterical babbling feeds back upon itself and starts breaking the windows of the showers where we gas mushroom-heads and people who drink fair trade coffee from independent retailers. And no, hippie, it's not nitrous gas. Every night, we will drink the blood of ex-Doors roadies and current Dave Chapelle fans, while everybody who gets stoned on Sunday evenings to watch The Simpsons spends all night sifting through oil sand fields with their bare hands. Any one over the age of 12 who has a poster of either the Mona Lisa or a Gray alien smoking a joint will be sterilized and forced to work in the Styrofoam factories, or surf the internet deleting any references to Ween. Flames will consume the writings of Jack Kerouack, Timothy Leary, and Naomi Klien, and the smoke of their burning will clog the air with the thick black cloud of reason. Huff that for medicinal purposes, hippie.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Talibanic Terror.

2006-12-14T13:37:00.000-05:00

Saw 3
2006, USA
Darren Lynn Bousman
35mm

There are no such things as snuff films. However, there is plenty of footage floating around of people who have fallen down elevator shafts or lost their face in a mortar attack. And, like a heavily made-up transsexual in a New York bar at last call, in a pinch those will do the trick. All this is to say that if you need to masturbate to someone dying, there are better ways that watching Saw 3.

I'm pretty proud that I got from Saw to this in less than 200 words.

The relationship between violence and sex is not an undeveloped one, and it's long been used by conservatives to forge a link between pornography and sexual assault. The mix of endorphins and adrenaline that rush through the system when violence is presented is very similar to the one most people get during sex, or I experience when I ejaculate into my clenched fist and then punch my 3 year old son. So, it must be an enhanced state of arousal that prompts people to make and consume films like the Saw series. Empty of anything but a confused sense of Old Testament morality and an insatiable blood lust, this series must be the product of inflamed genitalia and subsequent brain damage from blood loss. It can only be a culture that reduces women to objects and sexualizes children that must relieve itself through glorification of cruelty and debased torture. There's clearly no other message here, since the series has devolved from punishing drug addicts and rapists to tearing out people's tongues for spitting on the sidewalk and mispronouncing "schedule". Jigsaw, the film's villain, has devolved from a sort of Puritanical avenger to what would happen if the Punisher took offense at moving violations, and his triviality extends itself throughout the film, which is more obsessed with set-design and mechanical torture contraptions than anything resembling a plot. If this were a porn film, it would be 20 minutes long and comprised entirely of gaping vagina close-ups edited together to a Drowning Pool song.

And who's to blame for this pornographic orgy of violence? Women, probably. I mean, if they didn't dress so provocatively, audiences wouldn't be forced to sublimate our sexual urges into cheap, exploitative, judgmental trash like Saw, and I wouldn't go through quite so much GBH. The cruel moral tone that the film takes, blatantly glorifying the killers' Draconian moral code, could only be a response to seeing Janet Jackson's breast at the Super Bowl 2 years ago (check date). Ever since women got the vote, they've been showing more and more ankle in public, and that bare skin is no doubt to blame for filth like this, born of pent-up arousal and swollen genitalia. All those 17 second Britney Spears blowjob videos, Lindsay Lohan nipple reveals, drunken Tara Reid panty shots, and looped sequences of the rape scene in The Accused have reduced our culture to rabid, oversexed perverts whose only outlet for repressed arousal is watching someone get their eye blowtorched as punishment for passing gas at a dinner party. After all, it’s fine, moralistic movies like this that show us how wrong it is to be human, and how fun it is to punish people for it. Consequently, as films like Hostel and the Saw series have taught me, the only way to end such sexuality-cum-graphic-violence is to staple women's vaginas shut and cut the skin off their cheeks so they don't look so pretty no more. That way, we can take violence off of the screen, and save our children from being traumatized and scarred. Well, our male children, at least.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Vacation In the Sun, Covered In My Own Blood.

2006-12-07T22:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm off to the murder capital of Canada. Wish me luck. I'll be back soon, or possibly never.

American Film Critic.

2006-12-05T20:12:00.000-05:00

American Psycho
2000, USA
Mary Harron
DVD

Everyone likes American Psycho, but not usually for the right reasons. Most people just think it's a damning criticism of the dehumanizing materialism and selfishness of the cocaine-fueled 80s, which revolves around the inability of even a vicious serial killer to make an impression in his world. Most call it the very definition of a mordant satire, a comedy so black it abandons its moral center to make the humor all the more biting. But most people are missing the higher point of the film, the true meaning behind the superficial incisive social commentary and formal experimentation, which is that I get an erection when women die. You may have missed this subtle nuance in the film, because you didn't go to film school for five years, but you can trust me on this. I'm a film critic, and I know way better than you unwashed masses.

Not only did American Psycho set the standard for all serial killer films to come, with its shameless acceptance of the killer as anti-hero and morbid black humor, but it also set the standard for all serial killers to come. No longer can I hope to distinguish myself by stuffing a young co-ed's vagina with dirt and twigs and leaving her by the highway, or sodomizing a toddler with a scalpel. I'll have to come up with something new and inventive to set my self apart from the pack, maybe involving boiling water and a turkey baster. I don't know. It's kind of depressing, actually, that I will never kill anyone as well as Patrick Bateman can. But regardless, it's the subtle touches, probably lost on simpler film viewers, that really make the film, like the gracefulness with which Bateman, played by Christian Bale channeling only a touch of Jim Carrey, selects a coat hanger for a hooker lobotomy, or the hint of a sparkle in his smile as he bites a chunk out of a live woman's leg. You really have to be trained to pick up on that kind of subtlety, and that kind of training you can only get in a 17th or 18th nationally-ranked film studies program.

My graduation photo.

That's why you need people like me. Because, on your own, you won't pick up all the intricacies of the more complicated films like American Psycho, which rely on sub-text and subtlety to make their points. If it weren't for perceptive critics like myself, the lumpen-proletariat would have no idea that Natural Born Killers was a media critique, or that Mission Impossible 3 was the thrill ride of the summer. It's our job to ignore the obvious, to peel back the layers and reveal the essential truths beneath; buried so deep only our uniquely perspicacious and intuitive abilities can sniff them out. It's our job to point out the nuances that inform graceful, complicated meditations on society like American Psycho, xXx: State of the Union, and The Librarian and the Spear of Destiny. It's our job to point out how smart we are by finding the homoerotic subtext in Brokeback Mountain, and the Christian overtones of The Passion of the Christ. It's our job to justify our existence with patronizing attitudes and overly intellectual analyses regarding the most simplistic and obvious of cinematic statements. After all, if we don't find the core of meaning, of deep, inviolable truth at the heart of the American Psycho s, the Original Gangstas , and the King Kong Versus Godzillas, how are we going to justify five years of sleeping through Tarkovsky movies? You should be thankful for the service we provide, lest be forced to pick up all the intricacies of American Psycho all by yourself. In a time when film critics are being fired and re-assigned left, right, and center in favor of wire reviews from the major markets, it's time for all you film fans to rally together and support your local pretentious, whiny, maggot-pale film critic, so you can be told why you should like a movie, and all about my erection.

Rock 'N' Roll Will Never Die. It Just Has A Degenerative Mental Illness.

2006-11-30T22:49:00.000-05:00

American Hardcore
2006, USA
Paul Rachman
35mm

Fuck your scene. And don't pretend you don't have one. First of all, you're on the Internet, which means you're either on your way to complain about the new Raconteurs album at Pitchfork media, or to lurk around private message boards to find out if it's still cool to like Franz Ferdinand. Second of all, just look at yourself, and your second hand corduroy pants and your oh so fucking ironic Skid Row T-shirt, and try not to vomit, you annoying little trend-head. You suck, your music sucks, and you don't even need to wear those stupid glasses. And The Arcade Fire sucks.

Oh, sorry, what's that? You don't like indie-rock? Your scene is techno, or dance, or rave, or whatever the fuck you call it when you're not too flipped on ecstasy to talk? Well, then you don't even need me to tell you how goddamed gay you are. The whole world does it for you, and that fucking PLUR shirt doesn't help. Yeah! Vinyl rules! And the more of the Ninja Tunes catalogue you have on 12", the less likely you are to catch AIDS by getting so fucked up on coke you let one of the Chemical Brothers pork you in the ass!

Oh, sorry, what’s that? Your scene is goth? Then shouldn’t you be posting an Anne Rice quote on some website that spells ‘vampire’ with a ‘y’? Don’t read this site, it won’t piss off your Mom enough. But do try to crank the Marilyn Manson up a little louder. If your eardrums burst you won’t have to listen to Siouxsie and The Banshees anymore and strain yourself trying to pretend it isn’t awful. And that Nine Inch Nails brand isn’t fooling anybody. You’re about as tough as your dragon belt buckle.

Magyck! Faggyt!

Oh, sorry, what's that? Your scene is hardcore? Then how are you even reading this? Everyone who like hardcore is retarded, because everyone who makes hardcore is retarded. Have you ever seen Hatebreed live? It's like Adam Sandler got bitten by those rage monkeys from 28 Days Later. American Hardcore tries to tell the story of the birth of hardcore in the early 80s, but there isn't a story to tell other than a bunch of kids too stupid to play punk and not stupid enough to play metal. The music all sounds like the bridge to a Slayer song, the lyrics are grade 4 rhyming couplets mixed with all the attitude of a school yard bully, and people in the scene are instantly identifiable by their pleated khakis and overhanging Paleolithic brows. The scene went from street kids to frat boys in a heartbeat, which is like shifting from piss to shit at a lunch buffet.

Oh, sorry, what's that? You don't have a scene? That’s pathetic.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Ultramanic Depressive.

2006-11-29T23:03:00.000-05:00

Ultraman
Australia
I can’t be bothered with the director
VHS

I'm at a loss for words. If I were reading this out loud, instead of huddled in the dark typing and trying to avoid watching America's Next Top Model, I'd say I was speechless. Instead, I'm just hovering over the keyboard, trying to decide which fate is worse: to have to relive the cacophonous nonsense of Ultraman, or to watch a bunch of poofs and fag-hags try to convince the viewing public that modeling requires more than long legs and a coke nose. I feel that while America's Next Top Model may be infuriatingly stupid, but thinking about the disordered gibberish that is Ultraman may be capable of finally pushing me over the line separating charming idiosyncrasy and schizophrenia. And as much as I like talking to myself, I'd rather not do so while cutting open my palm in order to mix blood with ropey strands of semen and defecate. Seriously, this movie is mentally ill.

Insert double-entendre "high" fashion joke here, and pretend 8 million people haven't done it before.

That's the kind of crazy Ultraman inspires. It's an unsettling mess, an entry into the famous Ultraman series of Japanese films, made all the more distressing because it's not a Japanese film. As near as I can tell, this is an Australian movie made to introduce Ultraman to Western audiences. The strategy for said introduction, it seems, is to make a horrible movie in English that requires the viewer to have seen several dozen films in Japanese to understand what's going on. This is not unlike teaching English to Slovakian kids by reading them the third act of Henry V Part II, only with more monster suits. For those who haven't had the pleasure of having their pre-frontal lobe drilled long enough to enjoy Ultraman, the series is like Godzilla mixed with Power Rangers, with all the ridiculousness that implies. Ultraman, the character, is essentially a huge guy in what appears to be an Olympic luge uniform, who fights latex monsters that resemble the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal. I'd love to say that that sentence sums up the plot, but I think trying to explain the actual story would take longer than the film itself. You know when you're talking to, let's say, your niece, trying to take her mind off of what you just did to her so that she won't tell her mother, and she's just rambling on with some story she's making up as he goes along, and it gets more and more bizarre and convoluted the more blood she loses from her now-mangled genitals? That's what this story is like. It's an incoherent, rambling rant, not quite frothy at the mouth, but nowhere near cogent; a screenplay with wanderlust and an unlimited Dexedrine prescription.

I don't know if there's a point describing the plot, or the actors, the characters, the technical aspects of the film, or anything that a film review would normally contain. For to name these things will be to give them power, and this film needs to whither away and die before it starts causing seizures in children. It's like the lost name of God, or the word "Shazam". I dare not speak about the film, lest the earth be torn asunder or I be transformed by a lightning bolt into Captain Marvel, Black Adam, or worse, Ultraman.

School of Hard Cocks.

2006-11-28T09:59:00.000-05:00

The Graduate
1967, USA
Mike Nichols

This movie is as good as anything featuring Simon and Garfunkle's music can be. Which is still pretty good, considering that Simon and Garfunkle gay things up like a pink shirt at a Slayer concert. This is one of those films that everyone uses as a pop-culture reference point, but the closest most people of my generation have come to the film is a couple of Simpsons parodies they vaguely remember. I swear, if it wasn't for that show, everyone under the age of 30 would be unable to identify any form of culture that wasn't broadcast on Fox in the 90s. Based upon a play that was based upon a novel, the film famously tells the story of young Benjamin Braddock, a university graduate whom a married friend of the family seduces. Personally, I have a great deal of experience romancing older women, and I can tell you that this film is a very accurate portrayal of a May-December relationship. Of course, by 'romancing' I mean 'ejaculating into granny underpants stolen from a clothesline while fantasizing about my 83-year-old neighbor lying dead with nylons wrapped around her neck', but it's essentially the same thing.

Ah, the good old days.

The best comedies are always treated, as Nichols does here, as dramas that contain funny situations and funny characters. Too much time is spend in most comedies coaxing actors to mug for the camera and telegraphing punch lines with Marx Brothers editing. The story develops here as a drama, with moments of tragedy and pathos that accentuates some of the more lighthearted dialogue. Dustin Hoffman is excellent as always, despite looking less like a college student and more like a Jewish uncle on his way back from the bank. And Anne Bancroft is commanding as Mrs. Robinson, cold and desperate at the same time, like a horny assistant principal. This movie, however, does lose points for bringing MILF into the mainstream, where American Pie and frat boys who want to sleep with Michelle Pfeiffer could popularize it. The concept of MILFs, or "mothers I'd like to fuck", for those of you who don't have the internet and a fetish, is not a new one, but its popularization has led to an explosion of adult videos aimed at that particular fixation. I'm not one to judge, but that's fucking gross. Old women are all withered, saggy and dry, their skin like the testicles of an elephant. And, though toothless, their mouths are too desiccated to be of much use, tongues like sandpaper and throats like a goat hair shirt. And what's worse, all these MILF DVDs are taking up valuable floor space that could be put to use showcase better, healthier fetishes, like Golden Showers and women getting fucked with feet. Midgets, grotesquely swollen clitori, and machine sex are all loosing market share to these deviant MILF movies. Many of my favorite fetishes are currently competing for your perverted dollar, and I won't stand for it. So, I think all three of you loyal fans should join me in voting with your wallet, and picking up a few titles in the following fetishes.

1) Squish videos. Here, women in high heels step on small animals until they die and I ejaculate.

2) Insertions. Nothing makes me hungrier for vegetarian lasagna then seeing a woman stuff a zucchini into her vagina until it bleeds.

3) Ass-To-Mouth. Watching women pretend to enjoy the taste of fecal coliform bacteria is one of my greatest pleasures as a film critic, because you will not enjoy a better performance anywhere in filmdom.

4) Interracial. Sure, it's sin, but being bad always feels so good. Not so much when you're getting impaled by Justin Slayer's horse cock, perhaps, but it's sure fun to watch.

5) Fat Women. I once saw a German film in which an obese woman got her bellybutton fisted. I've never been the same since, and probably, neither has she.

I hope that, like me, The Graduate has inspired you to take matters, and your genitals, into your own hands, and make the pornographic world a better place. I hope that the film's influence will extend far beyond film schools and re-runs of The Simpsons, and reach down into the moist crotch of Silicon Implant Valley. I'm sure that's what all involved would have wanted, especially Simon and Garfunkle.

When A Stranger Does Absolutely Nothing For 90 Wasted Minutes.

2006-11-24T15:09:00.000-05:00

When A Stranger Calls
2006, USA
Simon West
DVD

Normally, when confronted by one of the seemingly endless parade of horror movie remakes, I would join the similarly endless parade of people complaining about how the original film was so great, and remakes sucks, and Hollywood sucks, and Superman's boots had the wrong kind of tread in the new movie. But, this movie is so god-awful I don't even feel like wasting my time complaining about it. The original was fairly boring as well. Both films revolve around the terrifying phenomenon of scary phone calls, with all the horror that a ringing phone in a dark room can possibly muster, which is the same sort of terror I’m struck with when my alarm clock rings. The original film had one cool part, when the guy on the phone croaked True Anal Stories 23. In the remake, that line is delivered with all the menace of a Harry Potter book on tape, so in that respect the movie pales in comparison. In every other respect, I'm too bored to care. Essentially, this movie stars no one you know, and has a babysitter getting mildly annoying phone calls for 70 minutes, and then getting chased by a guy dressed like a garage mechanic for the last 15. Nothing happens in this movie. Nothing. The main character doesn't talk to anybody, doesn't interact with anybody, and doesn't do anything. The killer doesn't really kill anybody, and spends most of his time on the phone, like a 14-year-old girl between classes at high school. Let's see, what can we talk about. There must be some intellectual nourishment here, some bone to pick that will lead to a tangent amusing enough to keep me entertained while writing about it. Let's see... everyone in this movie is white, so that rules out about half my material. There are plenty of women, but picking on them is like playing chess with a retard: too easy and liable to make someone cry. I suppose I could go on a rant about lesbians, somehow, but I was saving a really good bit where I confused them with the Lebanese for an up-coming L Word review. There's nothing for me to structure this article around in this amorphous mess of a movie. It's like writing a review about a breeze, or a wine stain on a couch that looks like nothing. I suppose this review will have to take the form of the movie, a long build-up without structure that ends abruptly in disappointment.

Funny For All The Wrong Reasons.

2006-11-22T22:47:00.000-05:00

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
2006, USA
Larry Charles
35mm

I'm quite proud to admit that I've never watched Da Ali G Show. Generally, a show about a Jew pretending to be black would already be about as appealing to me as getting leprosy on my gangrene, but that's not what's bothering me. Actually, I find Sacha Baron Cohen quite a gifted performer, a comedian capable of committing completely andtotally to a role, refusing to break character under any circumstances. What's annoying as hell, however, is the kind of people who like Da Ali G Show, and I'd rather deprive myself of hours of mordant satire than associate myself with those mouth-breathing degenerates. Most people who like the show have no idea what's going on. They see some idiot dressed like them interviewing Butros Butros Gali, confusing the poor man half into the grave he escaped from by moving from Africa to New York, and they think the joke’s on him. But in reality, the joke's on Ali G, or more accurately, the media, which is so obsessed with the youth market they're exactly three demographic points away from getting Tony Yayo to anchor NCB Nightly News. They see his flagrantly homosexual character Bruno, and think it's a slur against gays, whereas it's actually a confrontational stance against celebrity homophobia. And most don't realize that Borat is not meant to ridicule Kazakhstan, but rather the shit-head idiots who go to see Borat. And you know the kind of idiots I'm talking about.

Public Idiot Number 1. And now he's going to shoot me.

1) They've got the box set of Scarface, and they keep their weed in it.
2) They have girlfriends with ponytails so tight the thick layer of pancake makeup covering their pasty white faces is threatening to split and reveal pimply 14 year old skin.
3) Jewelry seems like an acceptable thing to wear to every occasion, whereas most men try to limit wearing necklaces and rings to trips to the gay bar, and whenever they need to be a middle aged Russian gangster.
4) A tattoo of a panther? Seriously?
5) They keep a lot of Tupac CDs in the glove box of their mother's SUV.

These people don't realize that as funny as Borat may be, it's empty and meaningless. Instead of revealing the intolerance and bigotry of the people he encounters, Cohen merely buffoons around, breaking things in an antique shop and trying to kiss people on the subway. There are moments, like a horrifying scene with some half drunk and fully retarded frat boys, that threaten to become interesting, but the rest is just an over-educated Englishman pretending to be a bumbling foreigner in front of annoyed Americans. While a bunch of idiots watch.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Pretty In Suppurating Lesion Red.

2006-11-20T22:46:00.000-05:00

Pretty In Pink
1986
Howard Deutch
DVD

Well, I guess I'm gay now. It's not so bad, I guess. I wasn't doing so well with the ladies anyway, since they always break whenever I bend them the way I like, and these lousy 'informed consent' laws have put a real crimp in my date raping style. Maybe with this new homosexual thing, I'll get lucky more often, as I understand the gays are much morepromiscuous, trying to cram in as much sex as possible before they get AIDS and die. Plus, I'll finally be able to take better care of my skin, which currently looks like I shoot heroin directly into my T Zone, instead of in the webs of my toes as per usual. I’ll get a better, non-Evil Ernie based fashion sense, and I'll becoming more open to the idea of gay marriage, and even gay citizenship, should that ever become an issue.

As you can see, I clearly need to get gayed up by Queer Eye.

The reason for my conversion to the rosy side of the force is, of course, Pretty In Pink, in which Howard Deutch and John Hughes transplant Marx's theories of class struggle into an episode of Dawson's Creek. This is not the sort of movie I would normally have watched on my own, back in my heterosexual days, but I was still in the doghouse regarding two screenings of a 1984 Samhain bootleg and a live Dwarves DVD. Now that I'm gay, however, I look forward to exploring a lot more of the poofy relics of the 80s I'd once avoided. Like an archeologist digging for treasure but finding only tampons and pages ripped from Cosmo Girl, I will sift through the chick flicks and dopey teen movies to help me get more in touch with my feminine side, so I can really learn to take it like a slut from my new leather daddy.

I think it's probably a function of my new gay leaf that I don't think Pretty In Pink is all that bad. For once, it seems to be a high school movie made for high school students, so the language is as realistic and frank as a fluffy comedy can be. Molly Ringwald only kind of looks like her jaw is made of cement, and Andrew McCarthy appears to have the talented he possessed before Weekend At Bernie's sapped his will to live. Aside from Duckie, who seems to have been created by middle aged screenwriters trying to woo 12 year old girls, the film is fairly adult and reasonable, and manages to say a little something about life in high school around the mouthful of cock it's swallowing, though what it's saying appears to be that class mixing is problematic. Generally, I contain most of my opinions of mixed relationships to mimeographed pamphlets on miscegenation and race treason, but it's enlightening to see that such things are possible. And, with my new, more liberal attitude, I'm finding the socialist views of this movie, in which love conquers all class barriers, more and more palatable. As long as they're not allowed to marry.

No Habla Ugly.

2006-11-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Babel
2006, USA
Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
35mm

Normally, Brad Pitt makes me want to vomit. The man is rich, possessed of good lucks that would moisten my dead grandmother, and actually a fairly competent actor. And yet, here he is, romancing that freakish Morlock queen, Angelina Jolie. Clearly sent here from the underworld to reinvigorate the mole people's gene pool with fresh DNA, Jolie's maggot-pale face and disfigured visage screams of generations living underground, scavenging for insects, cavefish, and the occasional lost spelunker. Obviously, while the savagery and brutality of underground life may have prevented the development of higher forms of technology, magic and sorcery were practiced. It's these bewitchments thathave ensorcelled both Brad Pitt and the rest of the world into thinking she's anything but a pasty hag with swollen salt-sucker lips.

Now, those are cock sucking lips.

But that really doesn't have much to do with Babel, aside from the fact that Brad Pitt's in it. The film, a somewhat rambling treatise on miscommunication, is strong, powerful, and instantly forgettable, like all of Inarritu’s other films. Comprised of 4 stories, each strongly connected by theme and loosely connected by a rifle, the film explores issues of communication breakdown the world over, with plot lines taking place in Morocco, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. Pitt and Cate Blanchett play an American couple traveling in Morocco when Blanchett is shot. The effects of this shooting play out across the 3 continents and 4 stories of the film, and resonate deeply with screenwriters begging for an Oscar nomination.

Pitt is good in this film. Not as good as Blanchett, but good nonetheless. So, he doesn't make me want to throw up. What does, however, is the hand-held camera work. Not because it give me motion sickness, but rather because I don't understand why every movie set in one of those countries with languages that sound like a retard beat-boxing has to be hand-held and shaky. I know these are backwards banana republics, and while you may not be able to get clean water or food not comprised of dust and insects, I'm sure you can rent a tripod somewhere, or at least find enough scattered leg bones around to jury-rig one. It's a cheap form of filmic shorthand, like making an Italian a mobster, or a woman a bad driver whose only purpose is to bat their eyelashes at the male lead and have erect nipples. I mean, both those things are true, but that doesn't mean it's not lazy to rely on them. I'll understand that a film is set in Africa even if the frame doesn't giggle around like a pregnant woman with epilepsy. I'll understand that a country is hot even if the film stock isn't all blown out. What I'll never understand is what Brad Pitt sees in Angelina.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Art Through Random Number Generation.

2006-11-16T20:23:00.000-05:00

Ju On 2
2000, Japan
Takashi Shimizu

I think I've seen this movie before. And not only that, I think I've already reviewed it. Not that it really matters, because Japanese horror movies are just visual gibberish anyway. They're like staring into a cloud bank; every time you do, you see something different, and it's always boring. I'm not sure why that is. They certainly have creepy moments in them, or rather moments that should be creepy, and yet I feel nothing when confronted with the myriad horrors presented in these types of films. Wait, did I say 'myriad'? Because I meant 'solitary': girl with long hair. I don't really understand how a 7 year old kid is supposed to make me afraid of anything but getting grape juice mixed with wine on my bedspread when I’m pouring Jesus juice down their throats, but the Japanese seem to have an irrational fear of youth without bangs.

The first Ju-On didn't really make any sense. Or rather, it was so unbearably simple, it lost all cohesion and turned into what happens when you boil potatoes too long. The movie was a sentence, and a simple one at that: There's a haunted house, and everyone who goes inside it dies. Sometimes, people who don't go inside it die, allowing that one causal link to fade away, and the thread of narrative unity connecting the various segments of the film to tangle into a knot of nonsense even Lewis Carroll couldn't untie. Ju-On 2 is no different, but this time the fact that the Japanese tell a story like a toddler explaining string theory actually works for the film, instead of transforming it into an exercise in narrative futility. The sentence explaining the film remains the same, but this time director Takashi Shimizu plays with temporality as well as linearity, messing with the chronology of the both the film and the story. Of course, this interplay between the diegetic world and the film's structure is probably unintentional, as the only Japanese films that I've ever seen that were any good whatsoever seemed to be watchable only accidentally, like monkeys throwing shit at a wall that eventually resembles Whistler's Arrangement In Grey And Black.

If you look closely, you'll discover chimps are mainly vegetarian.

There's no progression from the last film to this one, save some technical improvement and a greater sense of desperation in some of the scares. Some of them work, and some of them don't, but all in all it's a step up from the first film, which essentially consisted of a woman crawling around while croaking like a cross between a death rattle and Tom Waits' singing voice. There's also a little kid ghost, because North American government regulations require either a spooky child or a samurai before a film can be imported from Japan. Some other crap happens, and every once in a while, the shit drips down the wall until I can see Munch's The Scream.

I'm Not Racist. Some Of My Best Friends Know Black People.

2006-11-14T01:26:00.000-05:00

Roots, Episode 2
USA, 1977
Marvin J Chomsky, John Erman, David Greene, Gilbert Moses
VHS

Wow. After the powerful message of racial tolerance of the first episode of Roots, I didn't think there was more I could possibly learn. I thought I had absorbed enough valuable lessons from the first show (black people come from Africa, racism is bad), but it seems I still have a ways to go before I become either black, or Quentin Tarantino. In the last episode, slavers from America travel up the river Gambia to harvest a fresh crop of Negroes, whom as I understand it live an idyllic, pastoral existence in Africa not unlike Ewoks, but with a worse grasp of English. Among the batch netted and sent across the ocean is a young Geordie LaForge, who helps organize a revolt on the ship caused by the horrific living conditions and poor selection of Holodeck programming. In addition, he falls in love with a colored woman on sight. Also, apparently I'm an enormous idiot who requires ham-fisted proselytizing to understand my own prejudice. So be it.

The slave ship that brought Goerdie Laforge to America.

In this episode, the revolt rises and fails, and Geordie is bought and sold to a plantation owner. Separated from his imaginary girlfriend, Geordie makes a new friend on the farm in the form of that guy from Iron Eagle. Presumably, this is Geordie's first introduction to the science of engineering, and LaForge and Iron Eagle no doubt while away the summer nights with plenty of corn whiskey and talk of aerofoils. Geordie escapes, then is recaptured, and falls in love again with another woman he mistakes for the first one, apparently having just as much trouble distinguishing the coloreds as I do. I learned a great deal from this episode. Mainly, I learned about the roots of the socio-economic slavery that still plagues the colored community. I already knew that this link existed, but I hadn't realized that this slavery extended to picking tobacco as well as fucking up my order at Burger King and working the Lost and Found counter at the Buffalo bus station. Now that I know, I'll be more appreciative of the tobacco I roll into my Philly blunts, as well as the black guy I buy the drugs from. I can't wait for the lessons of episode three.

This Time Around, I'll Try Not To Kill Anyone At My Prom

2006-11-13T11:11:00.000-05:00

Marie Antoinette
2006, USA
Sofia Coppola
35mm

I think I'm going to throw up. This is a movie about a spoiled little retard, made by a spoiled little retard, which feels somehow incestuous. And not the good kind of incest, either, like two red-headed sisters scissoring or a MILTF getting fisted by her pre-teen daughter. It's the nauseating kind of incest, where a grandfather with hair in his ears goes down on a baby. I think it's because this movie is so self-consciously hip and bratty, and it seems exactly like an idea Sofia Coppola came up with while getting stoned with Spike Jonze.

As the title would suggest, this film is a biography of Marie Antoinette, of sorts, and as such is a period piece. But aside from the detailed costumes and set design, everything about the movie screams John Hughes without the wry sense of humor. The language, theperformances, the soundtrack that sounds like a college radio station around 10 PM, everything is modern and ultra-cool; a backstage documentary at a Strokes concert, in high collars and frilly dresses. These anachronisms, coupled with a hand-held camera and cinema verite visual style, make for a jarring but interesting interpretation of Antoinette's story, essentially positing that the French court at Versailles was a lot like high school.

Still from Marie Antoinette, moments before her execution.

Big fucking deal. Everything is a lot like high school. Work is like high school. University is like high school. The Internet is like high school. Everybody is trying to fuck everybody else, but failing, you get called a 'faggot' a lot if you don't watch football, and I'm hooked on Benzedrine. Things have been like high school before there even was high school, because high school is full of the retarded, a timeless condition independent of whether or not gym class is in session. Gossip and pack behavior are eternal conditions, and the movie reflects that life will has always been, and always will be, Mean Girls. It somewhat depressing to realize that no matter how successful I become in life, I'll still be trying to bum cigarettes and giving my girlfriend a hurried abortion with a coat hanger in a bathroom stall, and perhaps that's where some of my animosity towardsthis film comes. I don’t like bumming cigarettes, especially from all the raver idiots who seemed to have plenty of Dad’s money to by menthols, scared to death of me because I wore a leather jacket instead of a candy colored jumper and didn’t have a cock in my mouth, and I don’t like this movie. It's certainly competently made, and the stylistic choices are as bold as they are irritating, but despite the interesting ideas I came out of it frustrated. I should have liked it too, because Kirsten Dunst is in it, and she's got those nice crooked teeth that show she's already been properly housebroken, but it still didn't do it for me. Despite the incest.

To Serve Black Man.

2006-11-08T00:55:00.000-05:00

The Last King Of Scotland
2006, UK
Kevin Macdonald
35mm

Despite their yellow coloring, the Chinese do not taste like lemon. Caucasians aren't vanilla, and Red Indians are neither cinnamon flavored nor candy-apple. Black people, however, do taste like liquorish root, unless you're lucky enough to get a southerner flavored like bacon fat and fryer oil, which is why I hate eating them. Well, that, and I don't want to get AIDS. And if that kind of attitude offends you, then you just might enjoy the scathing commentary on Western arrogance found in The Last King Of Scotland, a film that takes place during Idi Amin’s cannibalistic reign over Uganda.

The film follows Nicholas Garrigan, a Scottish doctor fresh out of med school, yearning to live the jet-setting life of a family practitioner, speeding from old woman with rheumatoid arthritis to infant with colic. He begins his adventurous life by traveling to Uganda, sort of like a 19th century nobleman's Grand Tour, except instead of smoking opium in a Shanghai basement while a scabby prostitute teases his dope-sickened genitals, he's patching up some 10 year-old's spear wound. Once in Africa, he tries to sleep with Scully from The X-Files, apparently forgetting that her skepticism runs so deep she no longer believes in the myth of the female orgasm. However, a chance encounter with General Idi Amin, having just recently seized power, leads Garrigan to take a job as Amin's personal physician. The film revolves around the doctor, and his stubborn insistence on remaining oblivious to the atrocities and human rights abuses surrounding Amin's regime. Caught up in Amin's infectious affability, his own sense of power, and the separation of cultural tourism, Garrigan refuses to believe the whispers of mass murder and torture that invade his cocoon of detachment. Until, that is, Amin has his girlfriend's legs put where her arms should go. It's like modern art, only with dismemberment. Once the horrors have hit home, Garrigan trades in his white indifference for white guilt, taking on the requisite droopy-faced countenance, long wavy hair, and perpetual odor of last night’s hash familiar to all liberal arts students, and the movie proceeds from there.

Any creative writing class, anywhere.

The Last King of Scotland is a personal story, one that focuses on the doctor instead of the regime, which is interesting if you're looking for an affecting character study, disappointing if you're trying to grill up some coon steak and need tips on seasoning. Normally, I'd feel guilty about making such an off color remark, but that sort of attitude, be it explicit, as in everything I've ever written on this site, or implicit, as in anything any one British has ever written, anywhere, is what’s being engaged here. Africa has long been seen by the Western world as a land of savage children pretending to be adults, taking the occasional break to snort brown-brown and play cowboys and Indians with real guns and no cowboys. The Last King Of Scotland both criticizes and reinforces that paradigm, exploring the complexity of the situation through a microscopic character study. It's neither a condemnation of the attitude, nor an endorsement of it, merely an explanation of why it exists, and the harm that it does. So, despite the fact that it's yet another movie about Africa told through the eyes of a white person, the film does attempt to at least bring attention to the way in which Africa is viewed, if not change that view entirely. Not that that sort of change would be possible, anyway, because this is Africa were talking about here. If I were trying to show the Western world that I was a civilized continent capable of self-rule, I would probably try not to chop people up with machetes and eat them. But perhaps that's just my Western arrogance talking.

Love, Death, and a Pile of Human Shit.

2006-11-06T11:01:00.000-05:00

Hated
1994, USA
Todd Phillips
VHS

G.G.Allin ate a lot of shit. If this is something that you need to see physical evidence of, then Hated is the movie for you. If you just want to take my word for it, you might save yourself 60 minutes of coprophilia, minutes that could perhaps be spent smearing yourself in your own defecate. There's not much depth to this documentary of the legendary punk rocker’s life, and it contains precious little actual information on G.G. Plus, his genitals are too drug-withered and shriveled for this tape to be much use as a scat video, unless you're mixing your defecation fetish with homosexual pedophilia. Thankfully, I am, but while I was pleased with the film, more discerning viewers will probably not be so generous.

Directed by Todd Phillips, the man who cursed my new apartment with endless screenings of Old School, this film school documentary purports to be an examination of Allin, a punk icon who took Iggy Pop's notorious on-stage antics and buggered them with something sharp. He performed naked, beat up women, vomited and swallowed, pissed and drank it, and shit and ate it, occasionally finding time to play "I Kill Everything I Fuck". Allin got more attention for his behavior than for his music, mainly because he couldn't even spell 'rapist' right on his album jackets, let alone write a coherent song, but that's entirely the point. But the songs were pretty good, for music that isn't Gorgoroth. But despite his failings in grammar, spelling, and personal hygiene, Allin's stage act was more important than his music. As much as I like to hear a catchy pop tune with a social message, like "Bite It, You Scum", or "No Room For Nigger", it's Allin's performance art that I really respond to. During shows, Allin would draw attention to nearly every behavioral taboo in existence, getting into fights with male, or more likely female audience members, beating himself bloody and usually senseless, and frequently inserting some variety of foodstuff into his anal cavity before either eating it or hurling it into the audience. But not only is Allin an avant-garde performer using shock tactics to draw attention to the ridiculously arbitrary societal disgust with the human body, he's taking performance art back from faggots picking their AIDS scabs and women talking about their periods. Compared to him, the last half of that sentence was a quote from Bible study.

Actually, "No Room For Nigger" is one of the less popular psalms in the King James Bible.

Not that this movie really addresses that aspect of Allin’s career. Essentially, Hated is a chronicle of the first show of G.G.'s final tour, set up by Phillips in an inadvertently Michael Moore-y intrusion into the cinematic reality. There are a smattering of interviews with other members of Allin's back up band, the Murder Junkies, like the drummer, Dino, who bases every conversation he has on past acid trips, and Brother Merle, who looks like Hitler mixed with a 19th century plantation owner. What little insight provided into Allin's artistic endeavors is gleaned solely from Allin's disjointed ramblings and the rushed voice-over by the director that bookends the picture. The rest of the film is comprised of live footage and news clips, as well as some amusing but unenlightening interviews with Allin's former high school teachers and childhood friends. Allin died shortly after the production of this film, so footage of his funeral, where he looks like a swollen Fu Manchu in black face, is added, but no additional depth is obtained. Essentially, this film reduces Allin's act to a novelty, which is only a half truth. As far as Hated is concerned, Allin is all fun and games until somebody gets covered in shit. Then, it's a thesis film.

Googling Little Girls.

2006-11-05T00:10:00.000-05:00

What do you get when you search for “sweet kiddie porn” or “why does my cum come out with blood”? Aside from a marked IP address and a wire-tap? Me. My mother would be so proud.

The Nightmare Before The Registered Tradermark.

2006-11-03T16:17:00.000-05:00

The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D
1993, USA (2006 re-release)
Henry Selick
35mm

Despite its apparent complexity, 3D is actually a deceptively simple process. Two images are filmed, one offset from the other by a same measurement that separates your two eyes, and then one is projected in red, the other in blue. The glasses that are handed out in the cinema, or in a copy of TV Guide if you're stupid enough to be watching the season finale of Medium, have one red lens, and one blue. By giving each eye the same image but shifted, the film tricks your brain into thinking that you have a headache and kind of want to throw up a little bit. It can be a powerful effect when used properly, but all it's been used for in the past few years is to try and make Superman Returns not a colossal waste of time, and to try and sell at least a few tickets to Spy Kids 3.

Here, however, is the exception that proves the rule. For its 10th anniversary, The Nightmare Before Christmas has been given the Disney 3D treatment not to sell tickets, but rather to sell black leather purses to Goth girls too old for Emily the Strange merchandise but too young to masturbate with a black skull dildo while listening toMarduk's 'Funeral Bitch'. I swear to Christ, this movie is the only thing keeping the Disney store afloat. I think they plastered Jack Skellington's face on so much merchandise, 30th century archeologist are going to think we're all lonely high school girls with bad skin and Marilyn Manson T-shirts.

What's a goth thing? Acne? I hate you.

As for the movie itself, I can't even tell if I like it or not anymore. Every time I watch it, all I see is dollar signs and Oogie Boogie plush toys dancing around with Hello Kitty wallets and Tickle Me Elmos. It's like the 80s all over again, except instead of My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake toys, I'm supposed to buy a grown woman slippers shaped like pumpkins. I don't even remember what this movie's supposed to be about. I think the king of Halloweentown decides to hijack Christmas, but then learns that shrunken heads don't make good presents anywhere outside of the Belgian Congo. But that's all incidental, because this film is just a computer program written to get me to buy actionfigures. By the movie's 20th anniversary, I'm betting you'll be able to get a Nightmare Before Christmas nativity scene, in a crèche shaped like a rib cage. What was a great idea for a film has been turned into a great idea for a $20 belt buckle, and everyone seems to be buying into it. Why must everything even remotely cool be co-opted by My Chemical Romance fans so they can post about it on MySpace? Fuck! Fuck you and your goddamn black nail polish and Lock, Shock, and Barrel shoelaces. Fuck your Dr. Finklestein curtains, and your Sally snow globes, and your Bobble Head of that lummox with the axe in his skull. Fuck your idiosyncratic conformity, fuck the bad attitude you can fit inside your black skull-patterned pencil case, and fuck the shitty poetry you write in your Oyster Boy pencil case. And fuck the fact that I've turned into yet another website with a Nightmare Before Christmas post on it.

A Slow Descent Into Language.

2006-10-30T01:24:00.000-05:00

The Harder They Come
1972, Jamaica
Perry Henzell
DVD

Before anyone else makes the joke, let me assure you that this is not a pornographic film. Even if it were, I wouldn't watch it, because it's from Jamaica. Ever since I moved into a low income neighborhood, my jungle fever has transformed itself into jungle fear, and the once stiff erection I received from watching an ample-bottomed Nubian princess getting double penetrated by two of the lesser members of the Wu-Tang Clan has been withered by the fear of getting shot to death for figuring out the secret knock to the crack den beneath my apartment.

That's why anthropological films such as this fascinate me so. They're a chance to peer deep into a particular culture without getting a contact high and pissing dirty on one of my random monthly drug tests. The Harder They Come is the first feature film made in Jamaica by Jamaicans, and while whoever's working the camera is clearly too stoned to move too far past the 'point and shoot' style of cinematography, the film has a certain genuine quality to is that is most invigorating. Despite its ragged edges, the movie's appeal is in its ethnographic quality, making the viewer feel not so much a participant as a, I don’t know, let’s say imperialist conqueror. It's so.... informative to see the natives in their natural element, playing their tribal 'reggae' music, speaking in their charming pidgin dialect. Much more than just a curiosity for us to marvel at, this film provides great insight into life amidst the colonials.

Some secondary research I used for this article.

A Mr. James Cliff enacts the lead role of Ivanhoe Martin with a level of panache and veracity previously known only to the Shakespearean players of the Elizabethan era. Relocating from his pastoral ancestral home to the urban squalor of King's Town, Ivan seeks to make his living as a minstrel, parlaying his dulcet singing voice and sense of tribal rhythm into a popular sheet music pamphlet of some kind. Unfortunately, the machinations of an unscrupulous native disc jockey and the permutations of a capricious universe lay his expectations low, and Ivan is forced to turn to a life of narcotics trafficking and highway robbery. I will resist the temptation to prostelyze, and state that had Ivanhoe been pressed into the Royal Navy, he would have learned discipline and duty along side the browned Malays of the East Indies. Instead, I’ll merely state that Ivanhoe's poor example should not be followed by other unfortunates in the same sad circumstance. Heaven forbid that the natives, inspired by Ivanhoe's actions and inflamed by the sacrilegiously sensuous music, should be driven into a frenzy, and rebel against the civilizing influence of their British rulers. While the Empire would feel the loss of that particular island colony as a dog would mourn the loss of one of its fleas, I feel that it would do the natives much more harm than good, and I fear for their Christian souls should such a travesty arise. So, in the name of God, Queen, and Country, this movie should be banned, lest the proud rule of the British Empire be challenged by those who would wish to see her destroyed. God Save The Queen!

First You Get The Money, Then You Get The Power, Then You Get The Locker Poster of Tony Montana.

2006-10-27T14:05:00.000-04:00

The Black Dahlia
2006, USA
Brian DePalma
35mm

So I like Brian De Palma. What's it to you? You think you're better than me? Listen, I've got a white gold chain with a diamond microphone on it that I got at the swap meet, and I know every line to DePalma’s Scarface. My facial hair is trimmed into razor thin lines, I like to lick my lips in public, and I have several oversized black T shirts with Simpsons characters posing like The Sopranos, and I would kick your ass if I didn’t have to get back to my job handing out club flyers on a street corner. Just kidding. I graduated high school. No, I like Brian De Palma not because he annoyed the hell out of me by accidentally making Scarface a cultural phenomenon among people whose idea of culture is the latest Tupac B sides collection. I like him because his early films were nerdy little riffs on Hitchcock, and he seems to hate women almost as much as I do.

It actually says "say hello to my little friend" on his teeth. And "I'm a fucking retard" on his chain.

But aside from ejaculating every time he spatters a brunette with blood, I haven't gleaned much enjoyment from De Palma's films of late. Femme Fatale was an interesting inflammation of the sub-textual eroticism of film noir, but Mission To Mars was a little baffling, and I'm still not sure whether Mission Impossible was supposed to be funny or sad. The Black Dahlia, however, I had high hopes for. Based upon James Ellroy's novel, the film is about the famous Black Dahlia murder case, in which aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was found chopped in two with her mouth carved open. Being both a fan of Ellroy's novels and mutilation, I was looking forward to seeing what De Palma was going to do with the story. While the movie doesn't fail completely, it doesn't live up to the material's potential as did, say, L. A. Confidential, based upon another Ellroy novel. The cast, comprised of Josh Hartnett, Hilary Swank, and Scarlet Johansson's visible ego, are far too young to sell their performances, and the story gets so convoluted De Palma has to rush a compressed explanation into the final act of the film. Also, De Palma's Hitchockian camera trickery, apparently the only way he knows how to prove he went to film school, distracts from the film's atmosphere, destroying the frail illusion of the The Black Dahlia’s temporal setting. Plus, I can't watch this movie and get high with my friends at 2 pm on a Tuesday while the civilized world is at work. There's barely anything to quote loudly while trying to sneak into the Sean Paul after party at Club Zone, and Josh Hartnett doesn't look nearly as good on a locker poster as Al Pacino.

Fair Trade Lady Boys.

2006-10-25T00:16:00.000-04:00

Human Trafficking
2005, USA
Christian Duguay
DVD

TV movies are so good hearted. Whether they're earnestly warning us of the dangers of F5 tornados or blaming terrorism on Democrats and gay marriage, they always have our best interests at heart. Though it can be argued were the TV film any good, it would have been produced for the big screen instead of for after Will & Grace, there's a lot to be said for the informative and heartfelt quality of most made-for-cable films. Human Trafficking, originally aired on the Lifetime Network, is no different. With open arms and an open heart, the film seeks to educate and inform the viewing public about the seedy world of sex slavery. While there's no way I'm going to sit through 3 hours of Mia Sorvino trying to act, I can only assume that the trite direction of Christian Duguay and the obvious sensibilities of all TV movies are meant to warn us about the obvious implications of the trafficking in human lives, which is caveat emptor: let the buyer beware. In the unregulated industry of sex slaves, it's easy to be taken advantage of by an unscrupulous human dealer, and rented an 8-year-old Thai girl instead of a 7-year-old Korean boy. And believe me, the Consumer Control Board is not happy to hear those complaints. But without government regulation, there’s little you they can do to help a cheated client get his money back, or his blood work clean. So, while I'm not sure exactly how much detail the film gets into, here are a few helpful hints and warnings about the dangers of human trafficking.

She could be anybody's daughter. Sadly, she's not mine.

1) Russian women will do anything for food. Unfortunately, if you couple desperation with unkempt body hair, you get rug burn.

2) Filipinos are a real treat. Adding tears to the usual mix of blood and semen, they require practically no lubricant.

3) Romanians have an exciting mix of Slavic and Roma bloodlines, resulting in intriguing Asiatic features and STIs they don't even have names for.

4) The difference between a 6-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl is negligible in practice, immense in theory. Make your preference known early, so you don't accidentally turn gay in the dark.

5) Everyone from South America has the clap.

As you can see, Human Trafficking is a powerful and moving exploration of the horrors of getting ripped of by sex slavers. I recommend it heartily, because of its educational value, and not because my friend Bjanka is in it. Rent it today, and protect yourself and your investment.

Not A Plug

2006-10-24T00:58:00.000-04:00

I think all of you, and all of your friends, should check out Fangoria TV. Specifically the subscriber’s part of the site. At least until Friday. For no reason whatsoever.

It's Purple Raining Men Who Are Having Oral Sex With Other Men.

2006-10-24T00:50:00.000-04:00

Purple Rain
1984, USA
Albert Magnoli
DVD

Lots of weird shit happened in the 80s. Bandanas became acceptable attire for people other than bikers and Wild West bandits, Tony Danza turned a skull full of Italian sausage and chauvinism into a career, and dressing like a 19th century pirate could make you a rock star. Such was the world in which Prince made Purple Rain, a 2-hour propaganda film dedicated to proving he's not a homosexual. Similar charges have been leveled against me, due to my fanatical Danzig worship, America's Next Top Model body type, and affected use of language, but I've never thought to dispel them by singing and dancing while costumed as a French Revolution Era aristocrat, which seems to be Prince's line of attack.

Prince's keyboardist, Poncey the Cruel.

Purple Rain has Prince and the New Power Generation as a struggling house band in a hot nightclub. How the nightclub got hot when its star attraction is a mixed-race midget rubbing himself on an amplifier is beyond me. Actually, come to think of it, I did visit a bar in Slovakia that had the same kind of thing going on, but they were using blood as lubricant and there was a hermaphrodite involved. Apollonia, a small town girl with big city dreams and a fag hag name shows up with designs on being a star, and she quickly latches onto Prince. However, club headliner Morris Day, gamely giving the performance his all despite clearly having suffered a stroke of some kind, has his own ideas. The fact that his ideas seem to actually involve helping Apollonia instead of smacking her around and throwing her in a lake like Prince does seems not to faze anyone involved in the film. Prince is abusive and cruel, both to Apollonia and the female members of his band. This behavior stems from the family dynamic portrayed in the film, where a violent but musically brilliant father torments Prince's mom. This sympathetically portrayed relationship forms the heart of the film, but sadly, all the music, frilly shirts, and purple forms the stiffened erection of the film, with Prince forming the willing male mouth engulfing it.

I've got no problem with musicals. In fact, I like them. Musical theatre keeps all the undesirables in one place, ensconced in a movie theatre giving each other handjobs, making them easier to nailbomb when the line between shock comedy and militant action becomes blurred. But one of the things I can't stand about musicals or rock movies is that they invariably capture a sense of cool that becomes absolutely ridiculous within a month of the movie's release. It's like old yearbook photos, or a time capsule that you open, expecting to discover a sense of nostalgia but finding only the rat-tail you cut off in 6th grade and $300 in now-worthless Pogs. Purple Rain is just embarrassing, a dated wedding video where everyone is drunk and has beards. It's like watching home movies of your parents smoking pot, like a slideshow of high school prom photos, set to a song that made you cry in 1988, but now sounds like something an autistic kid made with a Cassio keyboard and a key-tar. I don't want to remember the '80s, and I don't want to remember Purple Rain anymore.

For The Orientalist In You

2006-10-22T11:02:00.000-04:00

The Departed
2006, USA
Martin Scorsese
35mm

Halfway through this movie, I realized that I had seen it before. Except the first time I watched it, it was yellower and made less sense, indicating to me that it was probably from the Orient. The Far East has provided much in the way of valuable exports to the New World since the Chrysanthemum and Dragon Thrones open their jade gates to Western trade. First silk and spices, then powdered rhinoceros horn for impotent opium addicts, and now incomprehensible horror and action movies, much has come our way from the Portuguese trade routes and the Dutch East India Company. Infernal Affairs, now The Departed, is no exception.

Now, I'm normally of the opinion that trans-cultural remakes are a bad idea. The films are generally better the first time around, and since I don't want to get anyone else's culture on me anyway, it's best to leave these things well enough alone. However, in the case of the Japans, the proud Nipponese are still beginners when it comes to language and narrative, unable to tell simple stories without throwing in a pink-haired lady constantly complaining in a shrill voice not unlike a mewling, toothless infant. So, it's a good thing that these films are translated, sanitized, and repackaged for North American audiences, because otherwise I couldn't possibly understand the artistry of these noble savages. After all, a movie can't possibly be good if it doesn't have either Jack Nicholson or Leonardo Di Caprio in it.

This kimono will be remade with Jessical Biel.

And The Departed has both, plus director Martin Scorsese, which means it's an Oscar nomination waiting for a full page Variety ad. Sticking fairly close to the original script, The Departed tells a complex story rather simply, paralleling the life of an undercover cop infiltrating a crime boss with a crooked cop infiltrating the police department. The two stories intertwine, and things go steadily downhill from there, with Scorsese's trademark love of violence and nerdy structuralist film. The script is tight, and despite the fact that Jack Nicholson seems to be planning to lose it sometime in the next few years, the performances really elevate the film from a great script to a great film. And thank goodness. If Scorsese hadn't brought this film over the sea, no doubt in a galleon full of nutmeg, saffron, and bolts of fine silk, and translated it into white, the masses wouldn't be able to appreciate the winding, surprising plot and the taut screenplay. Like a Filipino pearl diver, he has plucked a gem out of the land of raw seafood and polished it to a brilliant shine that all civilized peoples can enjoy. If it weren't for great cultural philanthropists like Scorsese, we would have to watch The Ring in its original form, hysteria and goobledygook intact. I would have to watch Shall We Dance with its original Asian cast, struggling to tell the female lead from the male, instead of trying to avoid being aroused by the fact that Richard Gere looks like a 10 year old boy and Jennifer Lopez dresses like a hooker. I would have to read The Grudge instead of refusing to watch it because it looks retarded. So, I'm thankful that Scorsese brought this film over, since the last thing I ordered from the Orient came in a box full of air holes, and refused to cook unless she got to eat too. Plus, despite what the pamphlet led me to believe, the bruises showed up despite the yellow skin. So it seems that The Departed is as close one can get to the Orient, without risking polluting our Western minds with the seductive mysteries of the East. How very exotic.

The More the Merrier.

2006-10-20T16:13:00.000-04:00

Judging from my Site Meter, I’m rapidly becoming the net’s biggest resource for Chloe Sevigny blow job pics. Add a couple more references to Ashley Simpson getting rimmed by a German Shepherd while Mary-Kate Olson kills a baby, and this will be like one stop shopping for those creepy guys who jerk off in internet cafes while I’m trying to avoid CSIS by visiting godhatesfags.com from a public computer. Freaks.

Hooked on Brains and Phonics: Learning Lessons From the Undead.

2006-10-18T00:23:00.000-04:00

Night of the Living Dead
USA, 1968
George Romero
DVD

It's not like I watch this movie over and over again just for fun. No, no, Romero's 1968 horror masterpiece must be compulsively revisited in order to unearth the pearls of wisdom it contains. The lessons to be learned from this zombie epic/hysterical diatribe against communism are legion, and they're not just confined to warnings about the dangers of cultural homogeny and the obliteration of identity. Many more valuable lessons can be gleaned from this unsettling, eerie film, such as the danger of falling asleep naked, because you might get half eaten and return to life, and undeath is not kind to middle aged breasts. Saddlebag tits are bad enough, let alone when they’re full of rotted meat. Other lessons of note:

1) A sleeveless shirt is not a flattering thing to die in. Its resemblance to a toga in grainy black and white photography is unmistakable. Add a couple of extra layers of fat, and comparisons to a zombie John Belushi are unavoidable.

2) Black people are way better at yelling than white people. Not so good at dodging bullets, though. One cancels the other out.

3) Shrieking is not an effective defense against either the undead, or film critics. Star Judith O’Dea got savaged by both, and deserved it.

4) Bark is not a good substitute for a balanced breakfast of intestines and burnt foot.

5) Stay in the cellar. No matter what. I summer down there. It's great for hiding from zombies, creditors, and black people who yell a lot and get shot.

Now, I'm off to pick up some fall entertaining tips from 10 Man Cock Slam #10.

Affirmative Craption.

2006-10-17T23:57:00.000-04:00

Roots
USA, 1977
Marvin J Chomsky, John Erman, David Greene, Gilbert Moses
VHS

Contrary to popular belief, I am not a racist. Like most people who hold views that some might label prejudiced, virulently xenophobic, or militantly white supremacist, my beliefs are born of ignorance, rather than hatred. And what's most important is that I recognize that I have a problem, and I'm taking steps to rectify that. One of the important steps I'm taking, other than selling off most of my David Allen Coe/Johnny Rebel collection, is to educate myself on the plight of the coloreds. And so, Roots. For those of you who don't know, Roots is a landmark television series that recounts the history of Africans in the United States from slavery until Geordie LaForge became chief engineer on the USS Enterprise. Problem is, Roots is really long, and I have a lot of militia meetings to attend, so it may take a while for me to get through the whole thing. But in order to maximize the educational potential of the exercise, I will be typing up mini reviews, or reports, about each episode, to aid in memory retention. I hope you'll bear with me as I learn, grow, and become a better person, and hopefully, maybe, you'll learn a little something too.

Episode 1

Wow. Only one preachy, pedantic hour in, and I've already learned a lot. Apparently, black people come from Africa, not Detroit. And, you can tell that someone leads an idyllic, noble existence because they don't use contractions. I guess when you're too busy living a life of decadence and evil, corrupting all that you touch with the virulence of a small pox blanket, crushing all resistance in the name of Manifest Destiny and country music, you don't have time to say words in their entirety. But when you live in grass huts and have nothing to do but talk to the moon and herd goats, you have all the time in the world to say words like ‘cannot’, as in “I cannot believe how simplistically I am being portrayed”.

Don't worry, blacks, only 300 years until you finally overcome slavery. And work in the engine room for white people.

The episode begins with Levar Burton, apparently before he learned to read, becoming a man in his native Africa by trying to catch a bird and absorbing nuggets of folk wisdom from his father. This is clumsily intercut with scenes feature evil Americans cackling about the slave trade while eating abortions out of silver buckets. Geordi LaForge is captured, despite the misgivings of a humanitarian slave ship's captain meant to embody the conscientious objector trapped by the standards of his time. The episode ends with LaForge on the ship, held in abominable conditions alongside several basketball teams worth of slaves, plotting revenge and revolt.

I feel enlightened already. Even just one hour into to this mammoth, no doubt unbelievably patronizing exploration of early African American history, I feel more comfortable with the shit head crack dealer living in the apartment below me, selling drugs out his broken front window and beating his girlfriend. I find I'm able to watch old UPN sitcoms without feeling nervous, and I can listen to rap music without breaking out in hives. Thank you, Roots, for curing racism by treating a complex problem to a fancy light and picture show. I can't wait to see what boon the next episode will grant me. Maybe I’ll learn the true meaning of Christmas.

Updates

2006-10-17T23:05:00.000-04:00

Someone found my site by searching for “dismembered filipina”. I can die happy. Also, thank you, Jaymis. I have celebrated by adding an off colour joke to my Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning review. See if you can find it! It’s like finding a hog’s penis in a haystack of run-on sentences!

A Remembrance of Things Past, If That Thing Was Getting Diddled By Your Uncle.

2006-10-16T00:04:00.000-04:00

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
2006, USA
Jonathan Liebesman
35 mm

Have you ever had deja vu? Now, have you ever paid $10.50 to have deja vu of a bad memory? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is kind of like flashing back to the brown acid trip at Woodstock '94: awful, confusing, and full of retarded 18 year old boys dressed like Fred Durst. The first Texas remake was awful, and this prequel does nothing but remake the remake. Ostensibly a prequel, this film appears to be set approximately 93 minutes before the start of the first film, filling in all the details we were dying to know regarding what Leatherface had for dinner before tried to kill Jessica Biel (people, incidentally). This is as much a prequel as vomit is the sequel to Jack Daniels and cocaine. The sheer disrespect for the audience is much more appalling that the rape and graphic violence that are splattered all over the screen like my sperm on a daycare window. And no matter how many pedophile jokes I make, tasteless though they may be, I will never offend anyone as much as my intelligence was insulted by this sad and pathetic attempt to weasel a few extra dollars out of the 18-25 IQ set. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a grim, gritty, nasty little film that explored the demise of the American family and the collision between the realistic and the insane. The remake was the same thing, except with a slightly higher chance that My Chemical Romance was going to start playing their new single halfway through any given scene. This prequel takes the enhanced stupidity of the remake and the music video aesthetic and, uh, does nothing with it. It just gives it another shot, like a rewrite on a final paper in Stock Slasher Sequels 101.

My prequel to the last photo I posted.

The plot follows a group of stupid kids who crash their stupid car near a stupid inbred family that eats people. So, they get eaten, apparently as appetizers for the car full of stupid kids that get eaten maybe 90 minutes later in the other Texas remake. The cast making up the doomed teens are barely worth mentioning, made up entirely of kids who may or may not have been on The OC, as well as Jordana Brewster's eyebrows. The only part of the film worth noting is the performance of Full Metal Jacket's R. Lee Ermey, who has parlayed yelling obscenities into a lucrative career. He's creepy and horrible, and is probably not acting, but his performance is unsettling and manages to keep the film's head above water. The special effects are also helpful in maintaining a sense of tension, but it's broken any time Jordana Brewster's eyebrows deliver one of the horrible lines of Aliens-era Ripley dialogue that pepper the script like macho punctuation. The thing that made the original film work as well as it did was the realism with which the characters responded to their surreal situation. Marilyn Burns, the star of the 1974 original, didn't react to being chased around by an obese man in a butcher's apron by mouthing off with hollow heroics; she just screamed a lot and ran through a second story window. Here, our heroine's eyebrows manage to pluck up some unrealistic courage, fire off a couple of unreasonably snappy one liners, and launch into acts of supreme courage that smack of the Rambo school of character development. I don't know about you, but every time I chain a young woman to my dinner table while feeding her parts of her friends, she barely says anything snarky to me, but that may be because it's hard to talk when you've got a mouthful of pig's genitals.

Director Jonathan Leibesman has seen a great many television commercials, as well as the first remake, and feels the need to emphasize that over any personal style he may or may not have. The lighting is as dark and scary as a quarter of a million dollars in halogen can look, and the music is only interesting when it's remembering the 1974 film's soundtrack. Sadly, I can remember the original movie too, and I remember that I want my $10.50 back.

Back in Blue Jeans and an Emperor T Shirt. Don't Get Too Excited.

2006-10-13T15:07:00.000-04:00

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
USA, 2004
Asia Argento
DVD

Like Seth Putnam of Anal Cunt, I like drugs and child abuse. Unfortunately, the closest I can come to the latter is punching my underage girlfriend in the stomach after unprotected sex. As for the former, stomach ulcers, teeth ground down to saw-edged nubs, and a partially functional left lung leave only the intravenous variety available to me, and that’s a little pricey on a welfare-fraudster’s salary. So, I have to get my fix from watching movies like Asia Argento’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. And while The Heart May Be Deceitful Above All Things may not correctly simulate the dizzying heights of high school Benzedrine abuse as well as I would have hoped, it did make me feel like throwing up blood, so the comparison remains accurate.

That's also how I felt after watching America's Next Top Model, but for diffferent reasons.

The film is based on J.T. Leroy’s memoir of a troubled youth filled with drug abuse, a violently insane mother, and a succession of horrible father figures, each more twisted than the last. The book attempts, and largely succeeds, in transforming Leroy’s childhood into a Holocaust of horror and abuse, where each page brings a new atrocity that befell the youngster. Unfortunately, like the Holocaust, it never happened. Leroy is actually Laura Albert, an author who perpetrated a James Frey-like hoax that was unmasked in 2006 by Steven Beachy in New York magazine. Though this is irrelevant to the film, it does make the viewing experience a little less satisfying, as I have trouble ejaculating when the child throwing up in the meth lab on screen is only a fictional creation. I do find it kind of disgusting that someone would seek to profit off of an over-the-top, exaggerated persona, but that’s only because I hate myself.

Depending on what mood I’m in, Argento’s direction is either incompetent or brilliant. The film is shot in a strange mix of a documentary style, Dogma-ish realism and standard Hollywood techniques, like crane shots and Steadicam. This is either a comment on the source material’s hybridization of reality and fiction, or Argento ran out of equipment rental money halfway through the shoot. As she is the daughter of one of the greatest visual stylists/narrative incompetents in film history, I’m leaning towards the ‘idiot’ explanation, but I guess anything’s possible. Argento also takes a co-starring role in the film, as the young Leroy’s mother. Though she spends most of the movie looking like someone beat the shit out of Uma Thurman and struggling not to sound like coked out Euro Trash, she is suitably scabby and lot-lizard-ugly for the role. Jimmy Bennett as the child is a real pleasant surprise, as he manages to range from shrill to stoned quite effectively for a 10 year old, plus he’s got a pretty mouth. The cast is rounded out by Peter Fonda, Marilyn Manson, sadly, and the always good-but-uncomfortable Michael Pitt. There’s lots of AIDS, hooking, and everything else you might expect to find backstage at Rent. The film is annoying and pretension, just the sort of thing that The Village Voice would pretend to like if the transgendered community were watching, but that’s not to say there’s nothing of interest here. It’s just to say that what’s there is gay, high, and likes to hit kids.

These Girls Have Funny Make-up.

2006-05-12T00:24:00.000-04:00

I've got a bit up on Said the Gramophone, the best MP3 blog on the net, if anyone cares. Oh, and if you're coming here from there, read all the fun stuff I wrote before I quit. Feel free to leave hostile and humorless remarks below.

Like Jesus, I Will Rise From The Dead. And Hate Homosexuals.

2006-04-25T22:48:00.000-04:00

Wow, that was nice. Thanks for the emails, and all the pleasant comments, except for Derek and that goth girl that sent me black flowers and a dead rat, like that’s supposed to make me feel better. In the future, dead children are worth the extra postage.

So, it’s been fun, and while any explanation I give for my absence will be meaningless since none of you actually know me personally, I will give a somewhat cursory one. Essentially, for the immediate future, I have some current concerns that require immediate and constant attention. Coupled with a sense of being a little burned out and quite clearly not very funny anymore, I don’t really have the energy or the time for complaining about movies. And most important of all, I don’t have a house or a computer at the moment, which means that I’ve been posting lately through the use of smoke signals and a Cherokee interpreter. But, the Cherokee stole my TV and most of my remaining DVDs and traded them in for fire water and anti-freeze, so now I’m shit out of luck. There’s a small chance I will be back on my feet blogging wise in mid June, or earlier, but I couldn’t really bear to see the hits dwindle while people gradually lose interest, so I figured I would just call it quits, and maybe try to re-boot later on in the summer. And even if I could come back in June, things would be very sporadic, because of some other stuff that’s going on at the end of the month. So, instead of making everybody wait, I pulled the plug, and also swallowed a bottle of Atavan and threw up in a bathtub. Essentially, all I’m trying to say is that I’m not dead, despite my best efforts, and I might be back, if only to use a joke I’ve been saving up about Jessica Biel looking like Jennifer Tilly’s younger brother. Truth be told, I feel a lot more motivated about coming back now that I see that my readership is actually 18, and not the even dozen I had assumed.

Point being, drop by every once in a while if you feel like it, email me if you want to know if a movie’s good or not, check out The Comic Book Bin once a week for my stuff, and visit all the links on the right hand side of the page daily. Bye for now,

Ash

Ut animus dolor , EGO recedo.

2006-04-24T01:36:00.002-04:00

I'm done. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all in whatever hell you go to for laughing at my Jew jokes.

Death March Of The Penguins

2006-04-20T00:27:00.000-04:00

March of the Penguins
2005, France
Luc Jacquet
DVD

A surprise box office hit, this Oscar-winning documentary about the elaborate mating and birthing cycles of the Emperor penguin was the feel-good film of the year. To most people. Personally, I found it a little depressing, probably because the movie reminds me of how many of my relationships end in isolation, misery, and a frozen corpse lying on an ice floe. But that’s more a personal problem, and I’m not going to let it affect my opinion of the film. Which is, of course, that it sucks.

Women can be so cold.

This movie is like a cute baby seal waiting to be clubbed. It’s self-consciously cute and charming, like it’s begging to be immortalized on a McDonald’s Happy Meal Cup. It’s not that penguins lead a particularly harsh, gritty existence that’s being glossed over to sell movie tickets to Sunday afternoon family outings, like the Nazis in Sound of Music, or any movie with black people. It’s just that they’re trying to make a monstrously stupid animal seem noble. It is not impressive that penguins can survive in the most inhospitable environment on earth. It is miserably dumb. These animals are too stupid to die, so they engage on long, pointless marches to the middle of nowhere and back six or seven times a year, just so they can birth pear-shaped babies that usually die immediately. Sometimes they get tired of marching, and they slide around on their stomachs, which is sort of cute until you notice that one out of every two birds is smeared with the shit of the other fifty percent.

The hills are alive with the ashes of the European Jewry.

March of the Penguins is a capably made film, with beautiful photography. I suppose my hostility stems from the fact that the film is so shamelessly manipulative and childish that it feels like a TV ad for Euro-Disney. The English narration, delivered by Morgan Freeman, is simplistic and trite, and gives the distinct impression of being poorly researched. But all is meant to be forgiven as soon as we see the first cute little bird waddling its way across the ice shelf, and smell the gentle scent of shit stink wafting from its chest.

As Funny as a Brick In Someone Else's Teeth

2006-04-12T21:28:00.000-04:00

Brick
2005, USA
Rian Johnson
35mm

There are many different kinds of funny. There’s funny ‘ha-ha’, and there’s funny ‘strange’. There’s funny ‘Saturday Night Live’, or ‘not funny’ as it’s often called, and there’s funny ‘what’s that funny smell and why haven’t I seen your girlfriend in three weeks?’. Then, there’s funny ‘Chaplin’, and there’s funny ‘Buster Keaton’. Brick is funny ‘Buster Keaton’, staring you dead in the face without a smile and blinking, daring you not to laugh, while Chaplin is busy tripping over his cane and loosing his hat. And the best part is, Brick is funny without actually having any jokes in it. It accomplishes this by setting a note-perfect 1940s film noir film in a 21st century high school. The image of Tommy Solomon from 3rd Rock trading barbs with a femme fatale in her tweens is so inherently ludicrous it’s inspired, yet never does the film stop taking itself completely seriously.

The Olsen Twins play a pair of sleazy strippers. Well, they should.

The only problem is, it takes about half an hour to figure this out. Up until then, Brick just feels like somebody in Hollywood really likes Blue Velvet and Encyclopaedia Brown books, and has gone too funny ‘strange’ on cocaine to tell the difference between the two. And every once in a while, Brick does slip, drifting into a high school drama production of Touch of Evil. But when the film is working, you almost forget that you’re watching a ridiculous, contrary impossibility, the novelty equivalent of an all-midget western, or a female Mathlete. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the school private eye, Brick takes the viewer into a gritty and depraved underworld of drugs, sex, and violence, all carried out by teenagers speaking as if Dashiell Hammett taught them English. The plot is labyrinthine and complex, the kind of story you’re going to have to explain to your girlfriend, and you’re still going to get it wrong, unless you happen to have seen both The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

Detective novelist Dashiel Hammett. I had a different picture to go here originally, but I like this one better.

But the fact that the movie cribs from every detective film in sight is entirely forgivable, given the nature of the movie as a tribute/parody to the genre. After seeing it, I’m hoping Brick is a big success, and leads to a host of other films paying tribute to classic film structures. I hear Jim Henson Studios is working on a Muppet version of Schindler’s List, where Fozzy Bear and Kermit imprison and gas all the big-nosed Muppets, and there’s a retirement home sex-comedy in the works over at Dreamworks. Myself, I’m working on a big-screen version of Debbie Does Dallas starring a girl that looks like Dakota Fanning and my neighbour’s kids. I assure you, the film will be hilariously funny. But not in a ‘ha ha’ way.

What Radiation Created, One Long Movie Can Destroy

2006-04-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

Madadayo
1993, Japan
Akira Kurosawa
DVD

Filmed in 1993, Madadayo was master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s final film, before tragically boring himself to death. What’s worse is that this film also took down uncredited co-director Ishiro Honda, director of Godzilla and the man who brought us an entire genre of Japanese man-in-monster-suit movies. Madadayo is the story of a Japanese university professor who retires at age 60 and then refuses to die for maybe 10 hours of screen time, despite having made his last good film in 1985. I mean taught his last class before the Second World War.

Akira Kurosawa Vs. Ishiro Honda.

There’s a lot of partying in this movie, a lot of enjoying life, and a lot of really trying to be Frank Capra. But the thing about Akira Kurosawa is that I really like it when he’s being Kurosawa, not Capra, because being Kurosawa means being like John Ford but with swords and costumes that look like swaddling clothes. Frankly, if Toshiro Mifune’s not it the movie and somebody doesn’t get shot in the neck with an arrow, I don’t need to see it. Kurosawa, at his best, was a powerful filmmaker who compromised a uniquely Japanese vision for an international accessible hybrid of Western sensibilities and Asian culture. At his worst, however, he’s self-indulgent and tired, as in Madadayo. Still, even then, he proved to be strong enough to kill Godzilla.

Video Round Up: April 11, 2006

2006-04-11T09:14:00.000-04:00

If, like me, you’re currently wallowing in a suicidal depression, watching your hair fall out as the will to live seeps from you like a punctured tire, you’ll be pleased to know that Fun With Dick And Jane has just been released on DVD, giving you that extra push in front of the subway.

Suck It, Guv'nor.

2006-04-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
2005, UK
Michael Winterbottom
35mm

The English have a very unique style of filmmaking. Rather than taking the path of least resistance, as many national cinemas do, the UK film industry refuses to merely ape the style and form of Hollywood cinema. Instead, they take American films and add a gentle touch of flaming homosexuality, like accenting a severe gray suit with a lavender tie. No matter how gangster the lean, how slap the stick, delivering every line of dialogue from the mouths of pasty, rail-thin fops with accents like Victorian aristocrats with head-colds gives British film a unique flavor, and that flavor is semen. I love British comedy, as well as the English take on the gangster film, but there’s no way to be either tough or manly when you sound like Lord Bullingdon from Barry Lyndon. Tristram Shandy is no different. Here, Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce attempt the grand experiment of filming an unfilmmable novel, and succeed in gaying up Adaptation.

The Terminator, from the British remake of T2: Judgement Day.

And, of course, it’s brilliant, because all great art comes from some form of mental illness, be it depression, schizophrenia, or homosexuality. The film is based on a book that seems so bizarre I’m not sure I believe it exists, despite owning it. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a rambling, wonderfully self indulgent piece of structuralist literature that’s so strange it’s been labelled post-modern by people who learned the term from Scream, despite the book being written in the 1760s. However, about 20 minutes into the film, it stops being about the book and starts being about the movie crew making the film. This is pretty annoying on paper, but fairly satisfying on screen. The book itself is about tangents and unpredictability, so it’s fitting that the film follows the same pattern.

This still from the movie demonstrates that Winterbottom took a very literal approach to filming the novel.

The cast is comprised of a “who’s who” of British actors, a stellar collection of preening queers unmatched even by the most densely cast volume of Priape’s School of Hard Cocks. Steve Coogan stars as Tristram Shandy and himself, no doubt because he jumps at any chance to talk directly to the camera. Rob Brydon, unfortunately from Little Briton, co-stars, along with the black girl from 28 Days Later and that pretty blonde with the horrifically crass Scottish brogue that’s in Extras. The film moves quickly and chaotically, adapting the novel in spirit if not in story, so in its own way, it makes a comment about the very process of adaptation that’s actually quite refreshing to hear. Or rather it would be, if it were intelligible over the mouthful of cock this movie’s sucking.

The Unacurry.

2006-04-05T18:11:00.000-04:00

Gandhi
1982, UK / India
Richard Attenborough
DVD

Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is an almost legendary film, and rightly so. One of the greatest men in history, the filmed version of Mohandas Gandhi’s life, propelled by an Oscar-winning performance by Ben Kingsley, is a powerful piece of filmmaking. Throughout his life, Gandhi battled institutionalized injustice and racism in South Africa and India, eventually winning Indian independence from Britain. And he did all this through non-violent resistance, resulting in a life story, and a film, that is truly astounding. Ly boring. I meant to add that on the end of the last sentence, but I get tired even thinking about the 3 hours of this movie. Yes, yes, I know, Gandhi was an incredible man, Kingsley is an incredible actor, but pacifism take sooooo long to get anywhere. And I’m pretty sure that tactic would only work for Gandhi, probably because he looked kind of like E.T., and therefore instantly endearing. On the flip side of the coin, if you attack your government using actual violence instead of squatting on the ground and refusing to move, you often get to wear a cape and cool mask, and sometimes star in a dystopian Frank Miller comic book. And in a cultural climate based on image instead of message, Gandhi’s going to need to update his style if he wants to stay relevant and off of Mr. Blackwell’s catty fashion list. Instead of us learning from Gandhi, Gandhi should learn from these legendary and historical anti-government combatants.

Gandhi and child actor Henry Thomas.

1. Green Arrow. In The Dark Knight Returns, Oliver Queen has one arm, one bulging eye, and looks like something a crazy man would doodle in his own feces after wriggling out of a straightjacket. Way cooler than a shriveled Indian.

2. Osama Bin Ladin. A seven-foot tall, unimaginably rich evil-doer who lives in a network of caves and underground bunkers. If he had metal teeth or a golden hand, he’d be perfect Bond villain.

Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command.

3. Timothy Kasczinsky, the Unabomber. In a sweatshirt and sunglasses, he didn’t cut a very imposing figure, but he’s still more dramatic than Gandhi’s California Raisin look.

So, while I appreciate the moral lesson taught here, I think it needs some updating for the modern world. Or at least a better costume.

What's Slimy, Evil, And Tries To Crawl Inside Your Mouth? My Genitals. Also, Slither's a Pretty Good Movie.

2006-04-03T18:28:00.000-04:00

Slither
2006, USA
James Gunn
35mm

About once every ten years, a horror movie comes along that’s so energetic, so infectiously fun, that you can’t help but fall in love with it. Unfortunately for Slither, this decade that film was Top of the Food Chain. Still, this low-budget horror-comedy is pulling in bizarrely positive reviews, though judging from its opening weekend box office, the critics are the only people who have seen it, and they’re didn’t pay.

Slither takes place in small town in the American South, because that way you only need one barn, a forest, three actors and ten teeth to make a film. Alien slugs from Night of the Creeps invade the town, courtesy of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’s Michael Rooker, turning much of the population into killer, hive-mind linked zombies. For some reason, this is viewed negatively by many of the townsfolk, despite the fact that a single Borg-like hive-mind is generally exactly one more mind than hillbilly Republicans have. Nevertheless, resist they must, led by intrepid chief of police Nathan Fillion, who is apparently not making enough money off Firefly residuals to avoid movies about killer mollusks. Joined by an actress who is very nearly Rachel McAdams and an underage girl who shows her nipples, Fillion must battle slugs, zombies, and the inevitable B-movie boredom that kicks in between gory and disgusting set-pieces.

Thank you, Google, for not letting me down with a 'mind eating slug' search.

Director James Gunn clearly has a great love for sci-fi and horror, though his hard-on for David Cronenberg’s Shivers is showing through his pants, and the pre-ejaculate smells a little bit like Invaders From Mars. The premise of Slither owes a great deal to the schlock sci-fi of Ray Kellogg, and that’s not a debt you want to repay come Judgement Day. Taken as a comedy, Slither is quite good. Gunn directs his actors with a great sense of comedic timing, and despite the fact that the trailer makes the film look horrible, it’s really quite fun. As a horror film, however, it leaves a little to be desired. There are some distressing moments, but the emphasis here is on laughs rather than scares, and bad computer graphics over anything remotely frightening. Nevertheless, Slither has climbed to the top of my list of favorite monster slug movies. Now if only Gunn would set his sights on The Killer Shrews.

Invasion of the Baby Snatchers.

2006-03-30T17:18:00.000-05:00

Tsotsi
2005, South Africa
Gavin Hood
35mm

In the past few years, the profile of international cinema has really been significantly raised in the US. The success of films like City of God have shown audiences that foreign filmmakers can make American action films just as good as Tony Scott can. Consequently, everybody and their immigrant mother are making foreign films about ethnic gangs living in slums, with originally being measured by the style of the subtitles. Tsotsi is the latest of the new wave of transplanted American gangster films, coming to us from South Africa. In this film, white Afrikaans director Gavin Hood orders around a group of young, poor black actors in a violent tale of life in the ghetto, demonstrating that while South Africa may have lost the letter of the apartheid laws, they’re keeping the spirit alive.

Because no one is capable of making a gangster movie not directly influenced by Martin Scorsese, Tsotsi is a tale of redemption, following the titular Tsotsi through his attempts to rehabilitate his gangster lifestyle by stealing a baby. If I’d known child kidnapping is all it takes to make things right with karma, I would have stopped my catch and release regimen a while back. Nevertheless, confusing moral message aside, this sweet story of an urban black man taking care of a child was a surprise winner at this year’s Oscars, as the Academy generally does not reward fantasy films unless they’re about the Holocaust. The film is not without its positive qualities, however. Since the film is emblematic of the Oscars’ recent attempts to replace their voting body with the United Colors of Beneton, Tsotsi does provide ample opportunity for reactionary racist jokes that help keep American theatres focused on Hollywood movies for white football players, as evidenced above. Taken on its own terms, the film is capably made, and entirely watchable, but aside from a strong performance by Presley Chweneyagae as the lead, there’s nothing that really distinguishes this movie from its imitators, or the films it imitates. And while it’s a good movie, I still think that German movie about the Holocaust should have won.

R.I.P., Barnabas Collins. Sort of.

2006-03-29T20:38:00.000-05:00

Sadly, Dan Curtis died Monday, and the age of 77. This is the man who brought cheesy, prime-time ready horror to the network TV market. Thank you, Mr. Curtis, for threatening millions with large spiders, Karen Black’s lazy eye, and a vampire soap opera. You will be missed.

Men Are From Mars, Women Belong In The Kitchen.

2006-03-28T20:22:00.000-05:00

The Bank Dick
1940, USA
Edward F. Cline
DVD

Women hate W.C. Fields. But not for the same reasons they hate the Three Stooges. Hatred for Larry, Moe, Curley, and to a lesser extent Shemp comes not from a genetic predilection, but rather stems from a traumatic childhood event. Like most psychiatric pathologies, hatred of the Three Stooges, or ‘triretardophobia’, comes from a woman’s father, who crept in their bedroom late at night, pulled back the covers, and took them downstairs to watch late night stand-up comedians on Showtime at the Apollo. Short of quips about having trouble programming the VCR, women hating the Three Stooges is literally the oldest joke in the book, after the one about the Neolithic caveman, the Mastodon, and the Rabbi walking into a bar.

In case you're wondering, the punchline has something to do with big noses.

The aversion to W.C. Fields is, however, coded directly into female DNA, along with an exceptionally high tolerance for Jimmy Fallon and the ability to speak entirely in Sex and the City quotes. With men being blessed with strength, intelligence, in the case of certain ethnic groups, the ability to tolerate the stench of cheap, sour cologne , you’d think women would get some equally useful skills, like a repressed gag reflex. But no, all their extra X chromosome gives them is an instant, violent reaction to W.C. Fields and the almost supernatural ability to pick up the stale scent of Kleenex and KY Jelly that indicates that there is pornography in the apartment.

KY Jelly jokes are the fourth oldest, incidentally.

You’ll have to excuse me for falling into a tired, familiar pattern of gender stereotyping. It’s just that a discussion of The Bank Dick is impossible without it, like talking about American history but avoiding Lincoln, or giving a genocide lecture without opening with a joke. W.C. Fields spends most of the film reminding us why we love (or hate) his short films, and why that’s not a good enough reason to watch a feature. He drinks a lot, abuses his children amusingly, and does an excellent job of defining the word ‘bumbling’ for a game of charades. If you’re into that sort of thing, this is definitely the movie for you. If you’re not, go into the kitchen and make me a sandwich.

Video Round-up: March 28, 2006

2006-03-28T19:35:00.000-05:00

Today, King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha were released. So, really, your rental decision depends entirely on which group of savages you’d like to see exploited.

God Is Dead, But The Plot Device Lives On.

2006-03-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

16 Blocks
2006, USA
Richard Donner
35mm

I broke a promise today. Long ago, I swore that should I ever again stumble upon a film that uses a hand-held tape recorded as a deus ex machina plot device, I would douse myself in gasoline and self-immolate to protest both lazy screenwriters and the effect Murder She Wrote has had on popular culture. Yet today, I sat through 16 Blocks, and still I live. Perhaps it was Mos Def’s charmingly idiosyncratic character. Perhaps it was the high-energy pacing. Or perhaps I slipped the roofie into the wrong large Pepsi, sacrificing a fun-filled evening with the girl I was babysitting in exchange for actually enjoying a movie for once . Regardless of what caused it, after 16 Blocks was done, I very strangely didn’t feel like ending my life in a fury of accelerant-fueled fire.

Me moments after watching The Inside Man.

Director Richard Donner is no stranger to action movies. He is, however, a stranger to good action movies. Those wishing to advance Lethal Weapon as evidence to the contrary should take a long, hard look at Mel Gibson’s lengthy mullet before making any hasty decisions, and what little room was left for pity in my heart was erased the moment To his credit, Donner has apparently learned a thing or two in the past few years, namely that people enjoy watching 24. 16 Blocks owes a great deal to that show, taking place in real time as it follows the attempts of a detective to get a hunted witness 16 blocks from a police station to a courthouse. Bruce Willis plays the detective, a tired, drunken old man who looks like he’s given up on life and liver, and he fits the role to a T. I think Willis is very good in this film, but I can’t be sure because I’ve never seen that happen before. What I am sure of is that 16 Blocks is a ridiculous film, even as action movies go, but manages to distract with original, captivating performances and a lightening quick pace, like a David Blaine TV special or Billy Graham.

Now, watch him pull a repressive and outdated moral code out of hat.

Which explains why the movie was so unsuccessful. Nobody wants to see an original action movie, even if it is just as unthreateningly stupid as the usual fare. 16 Blocks is an action movie without a love interest or a significantly large explosion, which is like a Martin Scorsese film without a redemption sub-text or a Harry Potter movie without a flamboyantly gay drama student in the audience. What the film does have is a lot of interesting characterization, which is no way to win an MTV Movie Award. Instead, 16 Blocks is destined to languish in the twilight zone between action and drama, rubbing shoulders with Heat and most late-period George Clooney pictures, and within spitting distance of Payback. And while cinematic purgatory may not seem like an ideal resting place for all eternity, it could be worse. You could be trapped in hell with Jessica Fletcher.

Beyond The Valley of the Blow-Up Dolls

2006-03-24T21:59:00.000-05:00

Seed of Chucky
2004, USA
Don Mancini
DVD

Let’s deal with the obvious right away: this is not a good movie. But Jennifer Tilly and erections go hand in hand, or more accurately sweaty, twitching hand in tiny, 12 year old girl on the cusp of puberty hand. It’s a fact of life, and it should be mentioned at the beginning of every review of her performance. It doesn’t matter that she looks like a Reubens painting of a prostitute, she still sounds like your date talking dirty at a junior high dance. Of course, the net result of her presence in any film is that all the blood rushes from your head, leaving you much more susceptible to idiocy and illogic that usual, which explains the popularity of Bound.

Hot. That 12 year old girl is in bed with that 12 year old boy.

In Seed of Chucky, Tilly reprises her role as Tiffany, Chucky’s girlfriend from the previous film. The long-running Child’s Play series was thought dead when slasher films passed out of vogue in the mid-nineties, but the post-Scream boom led to a reinvigoration of the genre. 1998’s Bride of Chucky breathed new life into the series by giving Chucky a girlfriend, a distinct visual style courtesy of Asian director Ronnie Yu, and a bunch of labored Frankenstein references. Seed of Chucky continues that theme, patching itself together with twisted versions of other familiar story lines, like the screenwriter is trying to prove working in a video store for four years is a valuable learning experience. As the title would suggest, the star of the film is the progeny of the two dolls, an impossibility explained away rather dismissively by “voodoo”. As far as I know, the only thing voodoo’s good for is Haitian tourism and Anne Rice plot conceits, though if it made dolls speak like Jennifer Tilly I’d be prancing around in a top hat and chicken-bone necklace in no time flat.

The only way to enjoy The Vampire Lestat.

Chucky’s titular seed is nameless, British, and in search of his parents during the film’s very Dickensian first act. Once he discovers that his parents are murderous serial killers toys, the film morphs into a gender-bending riff on Ed Wood’s Glen Or Glenda, and a tongue in cheek story of addiction, as Chucky and Tiffany try to stop killing and become better role models. In fact, tongue-in-cheek is a good way to describe the movie, as it’s humorous, light-hearted, and cartoonishly violent. But, like keeping your tongue in cheek, afterwards all you’re left with is a canker-sore. And once all the blood flows back to your head, that can start to sting.

Buried Treasure.

2006-03-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
1927, Germany
Walter Ruttman
DVD

Seventy-nine years after its release, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City remains one of the most powerful, innovative, and exciting documentaries ever made. Completely eschewing traditional narration, the film instead structures its imagery chronologically, giving the viewer a literal day in the life of a great city, set to a great score and edited both poetically and rhythmically. There, that’s probably gotten rid of most readers, who just stopped by hoping that I’d tear into She’s The Man by claiming that man or no man, I’d still do Amanda Bynes up the shitter. When I was in high school, I got the best grades in any of my classes, not because I was particularly intelligent, but rather because I figured out pretty quickly that all you had to do with textbook learning was read the first and last sentences of any paragraph to grasp anything you would ever possibly need for a test. As I get plenty of hate mail from people who clearly haven’t actually read anything on this site not included in the title and opening joke, I’ve decided to apply that reasoning here. Since this is the sort of film people who skipped an Intro To Documentary Cinema class need to have seen for their exam, I’m obliged to provide some intellectual content, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still have some fun, and by fun I mean disparage the German people. Still, despite criticisms that Berlin: Symphony of a Great City avoids addressing any relevant issues or provide any sort of social commentary, the film’s very nature and structure provides a beautiful example of the many ways in which the form of documentary cinema, and film itself, can be expanded beyond its traditional borders.

If you look closely, you can see a hidden Mercedes Benz advert. And an anti-Semitic slur.

Director Walter Ruttman fills the movie with imagery that is almost distracting in its beauty, but every time we’re in danger of drifting off into a mindless appreciation of mere aesthetics, the robust, almost Eisensteinian editing draws us back into the film. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, by focusing on a temporal structure instead of a traditional character driven narrative, manages to turn the city itself into a character. Which is great, because it means we don’t have to watch Marlene Dietrich stomp through a scene like a Teutonic Godzilla. I’m fairly positive the only reason she’s regarded as a beauty is because she looks like she’s made of granite, and therefore infinitely stronger than her detractors. All German women are frightening in their mannishness, like their culture so values strength and power their women are born with dicks bigger than my arm. Which is what makes German porn so terrifying. It’s not that they’re always defecating on each other or drinking sperm from milk buckets, it’s that I can’t tell who’s defecating on who, which causes me to question my sexuality even further than my Tiger Beat magazines do. And German men look like they collect Rutger Hauer action figures. So, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is not only a fascinating viewing experience in its own right, it provides an example of the vast potential of the cinematic form, an example that, sadly, has rarely been followed in the subsequent century. Highly recommended, it's a film you should seek out, to find the buried treasure of entertainment within.

'Twas Brillig, and the Slithy Toves Did Stick It Right Up In Brianna Love.

2006-03-22T20:01:00.000-05:00

Robot Monster
1953, USA
Phil Tucker
VHS

Most men, on the rare occasions when they get the house all to themselves for an extended period, piss with the door open and watch lesbian pornography. I watch Robot Monster, over and over again. And lesbian pornography. But mostly Robot Monster, because this is the only film I have ever seen that makes me ask the question “how did anyone think this up?”. People ask this sort of thing all the time, usually rhetorically, when faced with a variety of either inventive or horrifically depraved movies. Recently, film critics have been posing the same question, particularly in regards to the newer glut of startlingly graphic horror films, like Saw 2 or The Hills Have Eyes. The latter film has a scene in which one mutated freak rapes an underage girl while another eats her pet birds. The scene has disgusted many, but I’m not terribly impressed, since I have to consciously make an effort not to think up stuff like that in public, or my pants will bulge in uncomfortable places. What I do admire, however, is the absolute dedication to gibberish evident in Robot Monster. This movie is nonsense poetry without the literary sensibility, like Lewis Carroll with a factory worker’s education. If I were to throw up alphabet soup onto a page, I’d still make more sense than this movie. Legendarily bad, but overshadowed by the films of Ed Wood, Robot Monster is a gem of ‘50s Z-grade sci-fi that must truly be seen to believed. I’ll try to describe it for you, but I’m not sure I can capture the essence of it. Perhaps if I lay it out on the page in sequential, things will make more sense. You tell me:

Several dinosaurs get into a fight. At least, I assume their meant to be dinosaurs. What they actually are, are lizards filmed in close-up. The ‘dinosaurs’ wrestle for a bit, but it appears that one or both of them may be dead or rubber.

The screen is filled with the covers of several fake comic books, or perhaps postage stamps. The image is unclear, but probably not worth examining closer. The title card comes up. “Robot Monster”, it proudly proclaims, despite the fact that neither a robot nor a monster are really in the film. There is also a credit for ‘Bubble Machine Provided By’, which is not the most terrifying title to lead into your film with.

A young boy approaches two men in a cave. For a moment, I thought I’d accidentally taped over the film with some footage I shouldn’t have downloaded from the Internet, but sadly, this is not the case. The young boy introduces himself to the men, who claim to be archeologists, before running off to go home for dinner. Nothing is mentioned about either the comic books or the fighting dinosaurs. This is perhaps for the best.

The young boy and his mother now live in a compound, two of the last 7 surviving humans on earth. One of the archeologists is now his father, and the other his sister’s wife, giving the viewer the distinct impression that the script has been re-written but no one has thought to inform the director until midway through the shooting.

It is revealed that civilization has been wiped out by a “Ro-man”, which is a man in a gorilla suit with a fishbowl on his head. This is not what he looks like, this is what he is. It is not questioned by anyone in the film, and I fear reprisals should I do so now. The Ro-man is in contact with another Ro-man via television. Every time the second Ro-Man speaks, the on-screen room he’s communicating from fills up with bubbles. I wonder who provided the machine.

The archeologist is apparently no longer an archeologist, but a chemist, and he has developed a cure for all diseases. This cure apparently also protects him and his family from the Ro-Man’s ray gun, a stunning causal link on par with the frothiest conspiracy theories or tin-foil hat ravings.

The Ro-Man, frustrated in his attempts to exterminate the human race, manually strangles most of the family. Much of the last half of the film is devoted to this.

The young boy wakes up outside the cave, having fallen down and hit his head. The two archeologists help him up, and it turns out everything was just a dream. Then, a bunch of bubbles come out of a cave, and Ro-Man walks out. Twice. I’m not sure if we’re meant the thing that he went back inside after forgetting his keys, or if the film has just been looped. Either way, it has no bearing over what happens next, or even what happened before, really.

Then, Sativa Rose sticks a glass dildo into Brianna Love. I’m not sure if this was from the same movie, but it happened right after, and continued happening up until someone else came home.

A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as.

2006-03-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

The Outlaw

1943, USA
Howard Hughes
VHS

For a movie banned because of Jane Russell’s ample and spotlighted cleavage, this movie sure is gay. And I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense. I mean this movie is homosexual, literally. It aspires to high airs, has stilted, affected dialogue, and I’m pretty sure I caught it fucking The Ox-Bow Incident at the repertory drive-in off the 401. Jane Russell’s tits are huge, to be sure, but they take a back seat to the strangely familial sexual tension between Walter Huston’s Doc Holliday and Jack Beutel’s Billy The Kid. The two men spar verbally and physically throughout the movie, ostensibly over Russell and a horse, but in reality it’s just a pissing contest to see who has the bigger dick, which is like foreplay for gay guys when they run out of X. Essentially, this film would be Brokeback Mountain's ancestor, if it wasn't far too gay to breed.

Don't eat the brown Outlaw!

The Outlaw, directed by Howard Hughes before he started saving his urine, is a kind of pastiche of Old West heroes and legends, like a commemorative quilt or a laboured film clip collage at the 2006 Oscars. Holliday and William Bonney are joined by Pat Garrett and not a lot of research, coming off like a story about Sherlock Holmes fighting Dracula written by someone who has read neither. There’s too much dialogue and not enough action, with the camerawork in particular being more suited to a filmed stage play than a traditional Western. However, the subtext of the characters is fairly interesting. Bonney and Holliday alternate between friends and enemies at the drop of a hat, passing Jane Russell between them like a glass pipe full of crystal meth or, more accurately, like a fag hag trying to catch an infection. Pat Garrett, the hero of many a Western yarn, is a weasely lawman trying to make a name for himself, but in reality just distracts from the two protagonists, who switch sides like a bi-sexual high-school girl listening to an Ani Difranco mixed tape. Russell can’t act to save her life, but that doesn’t really matter, because she’s only there to give men a reason to watch this movie that won’t tip off their wives, like the fight-statistics in grappling magazines. And while the subtext does make the film interesting, there’s not enough on the surface to make it entertaining, essentially reducing it, like this review, to a series of bad gay-themed metaphors and similes.

The Anarchist's Comic Book.

2006-03-20T16:53:00.000-05:00

V For Vendetta
2005, USA
James McTeigue
35mm

This movie makes me want to blow up buildings. Well, more accurately, it makes me want to blow up more buildings. Generally, I prefer to stick to abortion clinics and churches in Alabama, using one to mask the motives of the other, but Alan Moore’s comic book and the subsequent film have aroused a more militant streak in me. Now, because I'm an impressionable idiot, I’m going to use my internet-learned bomb-making skills to blow up government buildings that oppress me, like the Post Office and the Sex Offender Registry, then blame it on this movie.

I bet you a ton of fertilizer and a detonator will get me off that list.

V For Vendetta is an adaptation of a comic book, or ‘graphic novel’ if you’re looking to get beat up and stuffed into a locker. As usual with comic adaptations, there’s plenty in this film to make purists retract their testicles deep into the abdominal cavity as they clench and shriek about Wolverine’ height and Peter Parker’s organic web-shooters. But ultimately, V For Vendetta succeeds because it preserves the original spirit of the comic book. In fact, many of the myriad changes and alterations made from the source material serve to enhance the militant, revolutionary social message of the comic, while dumbing everything down to the level that even if you sneak into the theatre after a Deuce Bigalow: European Gigelow screening, you’ll still get fired up enough to knock over a mailbox on your way to the Irish pub.

That's not even disturbingly unfunny. It just lies there, like a dead transient that no one wants to notice.

V For Vendetta is directed by James McTeigue, the second unit director from The Matrix trilogy, so already it’s in for an uphill battle. McTiegue approaches the material in a workman-like fashion, displaying flair only in the action scenes and giving the rest of the movie the same attention one would lavish on an industrial film about meat carving. The screenplay was written by the Wachowski Brothers, who stripped much of the poetry and beauty from Alan Moore’s original story in favor of a lean slice of pulp fiction. This is not necessary a bad thing, since many of Moore’s fascinating ideas were half-baked or, if you’re re-assigning the idiom to a drug reference, quite fully baked. While these changes do little to elevate the movie to the status of high art, it does make it tighter, and the message more direct. Ultimately, the film and the comic examine the relationship between fear and control, and the fine line between terrorist and freedom fighter. But while the comic was written in the 1980s as a critique of the British conservative party, the film has been updated to function essentially as a direct attack on the Bush administration, using the smokescreen of science fiction to advance concerns about the abuse of power, comment on the seductive power of fascism, and dribble saliva over frothy 9/11 conspiracy theories.

V For Vendetta features uncredited script re-writes by Michael Moore.

Starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving, the film tells the story of the titular V, a masked terrorist in a futuristic England who attacks the government in an attempt to both gain revenge and awake a sleeping populace grown complacent with the comfort and security of fascism. V struggles with sanity and his conscience, Portman struggles with her accent, and everyone in the film struggles to be as good as Stephen Rea, an Irish actor so used to putting in excellent performances in Neil Jordan movies he forgets how to ham it up in superhero fare, consequently making everyone else look bad. The film, also, is making critics look bad, forcing many of them ask embarrassingly stupid questions about whether the film advocates or condemns terrorism, whether it’s a parable or fantasy, and how many times one can use the word ‘dystopian’ in one review. The answers, if you’ve paid attention to the film, are 1) it’s trying to show both sides of the issue, 2) it’s both, idiot, and 3) I don’t know, but if I read than in one more review that tries to break the record, I’m sending a letter bomb. Once I’m done with the abortion clinic.

A Remembrance Of Things Past.

2006-03-18T11:29:00.000-05:00

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. Years ago, I used to “write” for a website called Tangmonkey.com. I use the quotation marks because I would only do so on rare occasions where there was a Dr. Who rerun on Space: The Imagination Station that I’d seen more than twice, and it wasn’t so much writing as flooding the screen with racially-themed profanity. Among the several other writers who contributed to the site was a fellow named Dan Beirne, who went on to co-found Said The Gramophone, the go-to site for people looking to reference an obscure indie-folk band so they can lay the girl in glasses who works at the fair trade coffee shop. Dan wrote a weekly column called Waiting With Nathan, in which he watched a movie with Nathan Lane every week and then wrote about it. I had never met Dan, though I suppose he read my stuff enough to be irritated by it, so one week he wrote a Waiting With Ash column, in which he pretended to hang out with me instead of Nathan Lane. In this imaginary fable, we hung out and watched Russian classic The Cranes Are Flying, an unlikely event due to both my anti-social tendencies and the ultra-Nationalistic sense of pride that precludes me from watching anything not made by white German Protestants. Apparently, not only did I read this article, but I was introduced to Dan some time later and rather briskly dismissed him because I had actually liked the film he made me seem to hate in our imaginary meeting. I remember neither of these occasions, but nevertheless, I’ve read the article now, and am rather embarrassed to admit that it’s significantly funnier than most of what I write on this site (though I would not have opened with a David Spade joke). Anyway, check it out here if you’re interested.

House of Predictability.

2006-03-17T13:07:00.000-05:00

House of Wax
2005, USA
Jaume Collet-Serra
DVD

I hate that I hate Paris Hilton. It makes me feel so pedestrian, like I should be downloading ring-tones or complaining about Spiderman casting. Clearly, her handlers are marketing her as the girl you love to hate, like a blonde Hitler but with stupider ideas, and nowhere is this more evident than in her much-publicized, gory House of Wax death scene. But I like to think that I hate her for different reasons than I’m meant to. It’s not because she’s rich. No, that’s obviously not her fault, since she has no marketable skills other than the ability to not vomit when someone shoots off on her breasts. And it’s not because she’s so beastly ugly she almost makes Nicole Ritchie look like she isn’t a shitzu that’s been punched in the mouth. It’s not because she’s dumb, or ditzy, or because she cocks her head in every picture like she just snapped her neck going down on a Backstreet Boy. It’s because she is single-handedly responsible for more bad jokes than Monica Lewinsky and Janet Jackson’s right tit combined. She goes on these stupid talk shows, knowing full well that the very next day, Jay Leno is going to ham his way through an opening monologue to the delight of only Kevin Eubanks and whatever retirement communities happen to catch the reruns on Comedy Central. Then, she writes a book, fully expecting that Tina Fey and David Spade will have a foot race to see who can come up with the same lame joke about how that’ll end up being the only book she’ll ever read. Comedians are like dogs. If you feed them shit, they’re going to eat it, and then everything they say’s going to stink.

Just straighten your neck! And wipe your chin.

Just like House of Wax, which is as inconsequential as teen horror movies come. It’s got no surprises, and nothing to say. It’s just a string of increasingly violent death scenes placed at mathematically determined intervals to allow for cell-phone conversations to run their course between murders. House of Wax is obviously created and marketed towards the 18-30 set, both in terms of age and IQ points, and if you’re expecting nothing else, you might be entertained. Personally, I fully accept and agree with feminist theoretician Carol Clover’s Final Girl Theory, as with other critics who view the male gaze and identification with the killer as tropes which align horror films with violent pornography, so I hated the film because seeing Paris Hilton in lingerie ruined my erection. Honestly, she looked like a bag of bones in a red ribbon, like someone gift-wrapped King Tut but gave him smaller breasts and a nose job. But then again, this wasn’t the first time she did something embarrassing on camera. And the fact that I had to make that last joke, ladies and gentlemen, is why I hate Paris Hilton.

Still Not Stoned Enough To Like Foghat.

2006-03-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

Freeway
1988, USA
Francis Delia
DVD

Did you know that you can still buy cough syrup containing codeine if you ask your pharmacist nicely? If you’re planning on watching Freeway, I suggest you pick some of that up instead of popcorn, because the very specific beast that is made-for-TV horror requires very specific chemical alteration to keep it interesting. Not only do you need to lower your cognitive reasoning skills down to the level that Total Request Live becomes appointment television, but you need to be sedate enough that sitting through a bad movie about road rage is a better alternative than rolling over far enough to reach the remote control. Apparently, in the southern United States, this also makes rap music somehow palatable.

Now free with any DJ Screw mixtape.

Thankfully, my semi-annual bronchial infection allowed me to watch Freeway all the way through, a feat I may not have been able to accomplish on my own without the aid of opium poppy. Otherwise, despite the presence of Richard Belzer and a guy who looks almost like Mickey Rourke pre-failed boxing career, Freeway is not really worth watching. Billy Drago, a character actor vying with Richard Lynch, Clint Howard, and Angelina Jolie’s lips as the most popular film freak since the death of Michael Berryman, plays a crazy priest driving around freeways shooting innocent drivers with a Magnum. He quotes biblical passages and excerpts from the NBC Standards and Practices regulations sheet, resulting in a movie that could probably play after Sesame Street without any significant edits. Still, with the new Anchor Bay DVD release, the film will finds a home amid any true movie junkie’s collection of drug-specific films.

Even with the yellow teeth, I'd rather fuck him than get whatever infection's swelling up Angelina Jolie's mouth.

Marijuana – Any movie which attempts to make either Harland Williams or Foghat seem cool, i.e. Half Baked, Dazed and Confused.

Psylocibin (magic mushrooms) – Films which require significant brain damage to enjoy and are long enough to allow in-theatre sobering-up, so you don’t get hit by a bus trying to hump a mailbox, i.e. films by or about Oliver Stone.

Codeine/Promethazine Cough Syrup – Films which require both a profound sense of apathy and partial paralysis. i.e. Made-For-TV movies, specifically Sci-Fi Channel originals. If you happen to flip to Yo! MTV Raps during one of the commercial breaks, add a cup of Sprite/7 Up and two to three Jolly Ranchers hard candies in case you catch a Paul Wall video.

Stay tuned next week when I review Gone With The Wind using the Anarchist’s Cookbook.

Aesop's Wushu

2006-03-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

Unleashed
2005, France/USA
Louis Leterrier
35mm

Every film has a moral. Often, they’re made explicit, as if the film were a fable and the audience were kindergarten students sitting in rapt attention instead of 23 year old losers in basketball jerseys playing games on their cell-phones. Sometimes, the moral exists in the subtext, and often may not be there deliberately, a result of a subconscious judgment or fear on the part of the filmmakers. It’s certain that the message in Saving Private Ryan that war is chaotic and cruel is deliberate, but when it comes to those straight-to-DVD action movies sold out of the back of Source magazine starring whatever G-Unit member happens to be out on bail at the moment, the obvious moral that pride comes before a fall is often subservient to a subtext glorifying guns and drugs. While it’s unclear whether the decision was deliberate or unconscious, it’s obvious that the filmmakers of Unleashed are trying to convince us that the Chinese don’t make good pets.

Text, subtext, or Tech-9?

And they’re not wrong. The Chinese are feral, difficult to domesticate, and do not respond well to English commands. And while they’re very cheap to feed, subsisting on a diet of white rice and Styrofoam take-out containers, they often injure themselves racing import-tuned Hondas. In Unleashed, Jet Li plays just such a Chinia-Pet, a martial arts master kept on a dog collar and trained to kill by Bob Hoskins, who has apparently decided that his last good role was in The Long Good Friday and he would like to remind people of that.

Jet Li.

Other than that, there’s not a lot to say about this movie. Of course, it’s patently ridiculous, from its very premise to the end credits and everything in between, but pointing that out would be like picking a scab: satisfying, but ultimately detrimental to the healing process. I will mention, however, that if I were a blind piano tuner played by Morgan Freeman, and I discovered a half-dead Chinese fellow bleeding on the ground in a warehouse, I would probably call either the police or the city, instead of taking him home to probably rape my white daughter. Also, while I’ve never been in a street gang, I’ve seen one or to dealing crack outside my window in my time, and I can assure you that when they’re waiting in line patiently to get beaten up one by one by Jet Li in a bad Eurotrash kung-fu movie, they’re not comprised of two Wu-Tang Clan rejects, an Asian kid with a bandana from the local video game arcade, and a few street-punk-lites from No Doubt. But then again, maybe the film is trying to preach racial harmony. What a noble moral.

Where Have All The Killer Dinosaurs Gone?

2006-03-14T12:04:00.000-05:00

Head-On
2004, Germany/Turkey
Fatih Arkin
DVD

God. I’m so sick of movies examining culture clash and the simultaneously healing and destructive power of love as it relates to the Turkish community in Germany. They’re like Holocaust movies; a dime a dozen, and more common than the cold. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing Kelly Rippa giggle her way through an interview with Sibel Kekilli like a six-year old flipped on nitrous, or catching Steven Cojocaru trading frothy fashion tips with Birol Unel like a couple of hideously ethnic schoolgirls. Even director Fatih Akin has been making the talk show rounds, appearing drunk and pimped out on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, even directing an episode of The Amazing Race during February sweeps.

Birol Unel: The new face of GQ.

I hate the way the media rewards these “filmmakers” for producing commercial trash by making them celebrities instead of exposing them for the marketing hucksters they are. Clearly, films like Head-On are made for a quick buck, using German tax breaks and money-grubbing investment bankers to take advantage of government loopholes and a gullible public, turning a quick buck on easy-sell properties. A story about two self-destructive German Turks who meet in a mental hospital and decide to enter a doomed sham marriage to escape strict cultural constraints is just the kind of movie that guarantees a huge opening weekend, before word of mouth can turn people away from the theatre. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were based on a video game. My call, nay, my demand, is that the international film community stop glutting the market with these low-brow, deeply-moving character studies and let some other genres get some exposure. For once, I’d like to see something with a massive special effects budget but a script the length of a Hardy Boys novel at my local multiplex, instead of this unpredictable, wildly gripping tripe. I want something I can fall asleep ten minutes in and still figure out, something with dialogue cut together from various Lethal Weapon movies, something with a shiny, glossy, and empty soul. Something, essentially, with killer dinosaurs or possibly time traveling robots. Then, maybe, Hollywood get a fair shake at creating a healthy, stable American film industry, and I can finally get a sequel to Dungeons and Dragons.

The Hills Have NRA Memberships

2006-03-13T11:49:00.000-05:00

The Hills Have Eyes
2006, USA
Alexandre Aja
35mm

Born from the ~~70s~~ 2000s ~~new~~ old wave of ~~gritty, realistic horror~~, shitty, teeny bopper remakes, ~~Wes Craven's~~ Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is an ~~overlooked~~ over-hyped gem of ~~surprisingly intelligent exploitation cinema~~ money grubbing, soulless commercialism. In the ~~1970s~~ 21st century, American culture was consumed with fear regarding ~~the death of the so-called ‘nuclear family’ unit~~ falling box office receipts. ~~The sexual revolution~~ Internet porn downloads, ~~rising divorce rates~~ movie piracy, and ~~the new-found independence of teenagers~~ Michael Bay movies were threatening to destroy the traditional ~~family's Sunday dinner with 2.5 kids and a dog~~ Hollywood hegemony of stupid action movies. ~~Wes Craven~~ Alexandre Aja, ever the master of ~~subtlety~~ music-video camera tricks masked by ~~horrific violence~~ really horrific violence, took this idea to the extreme, as did other ~~low-budget~~ high-budget ~~horror filmmakers~~ TV commercial directors. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen, The Hills Have Eyes, all these films ~~dealt with a family either under attack or corrupted by progress~~ have been remade to exploit dumb teenagers who won’t watch anything more than 5 years old. ~~Written~~ Photocopied by ~~Craven~~ Aja, the script for The Hills Have Eyes takes this idea to an extreme, as a happy, all-American nuclear family unit on vacation is attacked by ~~a literal nuclear family, in the form of a gang of Mad Max type killers mutated by nuclear testing~~ bleeding heart liberal anti-gun legislation. The conflict between the two essentially destroys both, but not without forcing ~~each family to compromise their values~~ a hippie peace-nick to kill a guy with a baseball bat. While unflinchingly violent, the film draws its real power from its ~~subtext~~ alarmingly right-wing point of view. The family, lost in the desert and besieged by a ~~Sawney Beane penny dreadful~~ flashy snuff movie, must abandon their peaceful, Christian morals in the face of wild, untamed frontier justice. Essentially, the film posits that ~~in order to survive, a culture must adapt, change, or mutate, perhaps into something that it hates or fears, or be destroyed~~ you can be as liberal as you want, so long as you have at least three guns to fight off cannibals or possibly negroes. And that is where the real ~~terror~~ money lies.

Creutzfeld-Verhoeven Disease

2006-03-08T23:43:00.000-05:00

Soldier of Orange
1977, The Netherlands
Paul Verhoeven
DVD

Recently, studies have shown that injecting stem cells into the brains of mice suffering from Alzheimer’s may clear away the amyloid plaque that builds up in the cerebellum, indicating that there may one day be a cure for whatever’s causing Paul Verhoenven to make terrible movies. As evidenced by Soldier of Orange, and to a lesser extent Spetters, Verhoeven once had the ability to construct a cogent narrative, develop characterization, and stage action scenes all at the same time, whereas now, he’s so far gone into dementia he cast Jessie from Saved By The Bell in a lead role.

That's a real good way to get a cold sore.

Soldier of Orange has nearly everything you could want in a war film: action, subterfuge, and Rutger Hauer’s penis, thrown in to placate women still wet from being obsessed with Blade Runner in high school. Set in the Netherlands during the Second World War, the film follows a group of University students whose lives are changed when the Nazis invade. Some live, some die, and most show their genitals. The highlight of Verhoeven’s career, everything went downhill after this film. For a while, as in Robocop and Showgirls, it seemed like he might be doing it on purpose, like a crazy old man who shits his pants not because he’s incontinent, but because he can get away with it. Sadly, it quickly became apparent that he was just losing his mind. And he’s not the first to suffer from director’s Mad Cow.

Ridley Scott. First, he made The Duelists, a light-hearted but beautifully shot period piece. Then, he did Alien, probably the best science-fiction film ever made for people who couldn’t sit still through 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then, the stress of trying to make Tom Berenger a star in Someone To Watch Over Me tore his mind apart, and before you knew it, G.I. Jane was being seriously pitched as the title for a drama.

John Dahl. Revisionist film noir? Check. Low-key Western crime thriller? Check. Movie about killer truck? Awesome. That’s like authoring Wuthering Heights and then taking a job writing copy for AM radio.

John Singleton. From the youngest person to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar to the only person to have seen his own film 2 Fast 2 Furious, all in just 12 years. Quite an accomplishment.

If you ask me, I blame Hollywood. Or Canadian beef.

Ignorance Is Bliss.

2006-03-08T23:07:00.000-05:00

Inside Man
2006, USA
Spike Lee
35mm

I don’t know about you, but when I think of action movies, I think of Spike Lee. Wait, no, I don’t. In fact, I don’t think at all, because brainless action movies are for illiterate immigrants and the retarded, so they only way I can enjoy them is by holding my breath till I go stupid and forget how to speak English. Regardless, Spike Lee is probably the last person I would choose to direct an action film, after maybe Michael Moore and any woman. In fact, judging from this movie, I don’t think Lee has even seen an action movie before, much less thought about how to make one.

Coincidentally, he's also the last person I'd like to see do a documentary.

But that turns out to be a good thing. Because Lee is absolutely unprepared to make anything but an overlong, vaguely anti-Semitic diatribe about racism in New York spiced up with a few New York Knicks references, Inside Man manages to avoid most of the action movie clichés that have come to define the genre. A graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts, Lee comes from a generation taught to appreciate filmmaking as an art, not as a way to sleep with Lil’ Kim on the set of a music video. He’s a structuralist, mainly so he can claim the bad acting in his film is deliberate deconstructionism, which is an approach generally not suited to making things explode in slow motion. But by being completely unfamiliar in action film conventions, he ends up approaching a lot of things in a different way, making for some interesting viewing. He still manages to make the film his own, by including the standard character-standing-on-a-dolly shot, a greedy Jew, and horribly inappropriate music that ranges from what appears to be African chanting to free-form clarinet, but the movie remains unique in his filmography.

I got my degree in popping on her tits.

Inside Man is one of those heist films so full of twists and turns you can’t really describe the plot without spoiling it for the one idiot out of a thousand who can’t figure it out from the trailer. Suffice it to say that it’s about a bank robbery that turns into a hostage taking that turns into an extra half hour of unnecessary denouement after the main action is over. Clive Owen plays the lead hostage-taker with the cold, clinical feel of a speculum as he buts heads with Denzel Washington’s Detective Frazier. Washington is at his best when he lets a playfulness partially mask the depth of his character, and also when he remembers that he’s black. He does both here, and is definitely the highlight of the film. In terms of plot, none of the surprises are really that surprising, especially if you’ve been watching Masterminds on the History Channel. Also, the fact that the heist is over half an hour before the end leads to a deflating of tension and the complete collapse of the film in the last quarter, but it’s still fairly diverting. What’s more interesting, however, is how terribly self-serving each and every character in the film is, Washington included, so much so that the only person you end up feeling sympathy for is the one person you’re clearly not intended to, because he’s the only one who seems to have the guilt gene. Still, if you’re looking for an action film, you could do a lot worse than Inside Man. Provided you can speak English.

Rest In Peaceploitation.

2006-03-08T22:50:00.000-05:00

Gordon Parks, the man who made Shaft, died on Tuesday at the age of 93. By all accounts, he was a good motherfucker.

9/11 Is A Joke.

2006-03-07T00:08:00.000-05:00

911 In Plane Site
2004, USA
William Lewis
DVD

Thanks to the Oscars, I’ve now sworn off of movies entirely. I’m paralyzed by the fear that should I see a good one, it’s going to end up as part of a lame montage sequence that plays like a cut Tonight Show sketch. And film isn’t the first art form I’ve abandoned. The last vestiges of my love of music died with the first Strokes record, forcing me to blow out my left eardrum with Darkthrone’s Transylvanian Hunger album so I’d never hear another recycled Stooges riff again, and The Simple Life actually made my TV dumber, so now all it plays is FOX News and So You Want To Be A Millionaire. I haven’t read a word since glancing at the back-cover copy of The DaVinci Code, and I’ve long since given up on pornography, choosing instead to masturbate to the obituaries in my local newspaper, a practice which is helped along by their close proximity to pictures of newborns in the Births section.

Yes. Take it off.

So, instead, I’ve decided to only watch films that directly oppose all the conventions of traditional narrative cinema. As black metal is to music, as abstract art is to landscapes, as Jerry Bruckheimer is to humanity, so is 911 in Plane Site to regular films. This movie is the outsider art of documentary, an abomination made by the retarded. Yet, as with retarded art, it’s perversely fascinating, like a sculpture made out of feces in a home for the mentally ill. I didn’t think I could find a worse documentary than Fahrenheit 9/11 until I saw Fahrenhype 9/11, but even that load has been topped by 911 in Plane Site, mainly by the obnoxious title alone. I mean, one pun is enough of a father-in-law joke as it is, but two is just uncomfortable and awkward.

The Anti-Christ has a nice tan.

911 in Plane Site is a film that uncovers the truth behind the events of September 11th, 2001, which is that a bunch of crazy people flew planes into buildings so that even crazier people could make money selling DVDs to even crazier people. But, as usual, I’m just taking the piss to be contrary. There’s a lot about the “terrorist” attacks that’s suspicious to the critical thinker, and despite all the “evidence” that’s been put forth by the government controlled “news” organizations, most people in their hearts know that something’s screwy, and that they need to use apostrophes so their delicious sarcasm will read well. But there’s just too much contradictory “information” out there for me to sort through on my own, so I’ll just defer to narrator/host David Von Kleist, who draws upon his expert training in being a lunatic internet talk show host to sift through several unreliable websites and come up with the truth. Apparently, it’s obvious from several still photos that a plane never hit the Pentagon, and if you slow down the footage of the World Trade Center attacks and watch it enough times, you can clearly see a second shooter on the grassy knoll. Combine all this startling research with 52 minutes of a guy sitting at a desk breezing through logical fallacies while reading off of cue cards slightly to the left of the camera, and you’ve got yourself a convincing documentary.

Proof that aliens exist at Area 51. No, wait. Proof that Bigfoot is a communist.

There’s a great deal of nothing in this documentary. Von Kleist has a great deal of non-existent evidence that he uses to prove his point, which is nothing. He just doesn’t believe what every one else does, for no reason other than to be contrary. He offers no explanation, just a bunch of mumbo jumbo easily refutable by anyone with the magical powers of logic. But there’s no way to convince any Lone Gunmen of that. The best part about arguing with conspiracy theorists is that any evidence you provide to contradict their claims can be easily refuted by them saying that it’s fake, like everything in the world is part of some vast lie and they just happened to find the Angelfire-hosted website that holds the truth in a couple of grainy, doctored photographs. It’s like arguing with a Creationist, or a woman; rationality or big words don’t work, and eventually you just give up. And move on to the obituaries.

Video Wrap-up: March 7, 2006

2006-03-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Today, both Jarhead and the new Harry Potter were released. The Harry Potter review I'm linking to is not of the most recent one, but I'm not convinced it matters.

Oscar Fever. Oh, Wait. That's An Infected Vein.

2006-03-06T23:30:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the delay in posting, but I just woke up from falling asleep during the Oscars. Thanks to Jon Stewart and a whole bunch of shitty movies, this year’s telecast managed to be almost narcotic in its boredom, as evidenced by me waking up choking on my own sick and scratching an open sore on the inside of my thigh. Consequently, I’m now hooked on being incredibly bored all the time, going on a daily nod to Radiohead albums and C-SPAN. And every second Thursday, I blow my whole welfare cheque on Lord of the Rings DVDs and spend the rest of the week parked in front of the computer reading people complain about The Phantom Menace on the Ain’t It Cool News forums like I’ve had nothing to do in the last six years but fume over Jar Jar Binks.

He's an Ewok for younger, stupider kids. Get over it.

I’m not sure when exactly it was that I feel asleep. Probably, it was somewhere in between Jon Stewart’s proudly mediocre opening monologue and realizing that the Academy was treating the Oscar statues like loot bags, giving one out to everyone who came to the party. Normally, I’m a big Jon Stewart fan, because I have the smug sense of moral superiority that festers right between graduating from art school and killing myself and three others in a telemarketing office after three years of trying to sell business directories over the phone while desperately applying for grant funding. But I couldn’t take his tame, wiffle-bat swings at conservatives and rehashed Seinfeld stand-up bits. And the acceptance speeches, oh, the acceptance speeches. Clooney, patting Hollywood on the back for being socially progressive? Yeah, for every bigot whose prejudice was erased by Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, there’s a thousand shit-heads with Marine Corps tattoos who learned cultural sensitivity by watching Stallone kick turbaned ass in Rambo 3. And don’t forget that every third ticket to Passion of the Christ came with a swastika cell-phone charm. Between Philip Seymore Hoffman preening and Robert Altman apparently confessing to eating a woman’s heart, the best speech of the night ended up being a pile of gibberish from the Three 6 Mafia guys.

You should see them when they dress down.

But what was it that really puzzled me to the point of unconsciousness? It was that the best picture of the year apparently didn’t have a good director or cast, or that Brokeback Mountain¸ though exquisitely written and directed, was apparently not a very good movie. It’s not that I have a problem with splitting up the awards; it tends to make things more interesting for those of us who still care about watching Hollywood give itself a hand-job on national television. But it seems like this year they were trying to cover all their bases in regards to the Brokeback backlash, showing that they weren’t pushing the homosexual agenda, merely recognizing its existence. And in the process, they accidentally end up giving an award to Reese Witherspoon, who is clearly not an actress but some variety of giant forehead, like those brain bugs from Starship Troopers. I kept hoping the forehead would burst, spewing forth a host of space spiders to consume the audience, and end my boredom addiction. Sadly, I had to settle for the bugs crawling under my skin as I jonesed for another hit of The Two Towers.

Nocturnal Emissions: The Reprint.

2006-03-03T12:49:00.000-05:00

Nightwatch
2004, Russia
Timur Bekmambetov
35mm

***The following is a reprint of a previous review. There's some new stuff below.***

There was a time when Russian film was known mainly for its editing. They ran the gamut from Sergei Eisenstein’s rapid seizure cutting in the 20s to Andrei Tarkovsky’s bong-mellowed montage style in the 70s, where he postponed ending his shots in favor of sitting on the couch for another twenty minutes and polishing off a bag of Fritos while watching Duran Duran music videos. There was, strangely, nothing in between these two extreme editing styles, probably because Russians were otherwise occupied with trying not to starve while waiting in line for toilet paper. Then, communism collapsed, falling prey to the lure of capitalism, which promised the free flow of money through a meritocracy and easy access to Guns & Roses cassettes. American films were finally allowed over the border, and Russians discovered that along with moral superiority, they clearly had an intellectual one, because while Russia had discovered the power of editing to create associative links and mould time into emotional arcs, Americans had found that people will watch stuff about cars that talk.

I actually feel dumber having searched for Knight Rider photos.

So, Russia was clearly superior to the US in terms of filmmaking, though the US still won in the categories of music not involving balalaikas, food, and women who don’t look like lumberjacks dressed in brightly colored shawls. However, this did not last, for though Hollywood isn’t intelligent, it is contagious. Hollywood is like the bassline of a Jennifer Lopez song; it’s not something you would willingly allow into your home, but your girlfriend is inevitably going to pick it up by accident through a car radio or a speaker in a mall, and then it’s going to dance around in her head like an earwig in an urban legend until you either replace her with a latex Kobe Thai moulded vagina or shred her vocal chords with a cheese grater so she will finally please god stop humming that goddamned Herbie Mann sample so I can get some sleep. Now, where was I? Oh yes, Nightwatch. Apparently, Russia watched too many American movies on newly acquired satellite channels, and lost their ability to make intelligent films. Instead, they made Nightwatch, which is an overly-stylized fantasy film that’s something like watching Harry Potter fuck Frodo while watching a Mazda commercial, except not as good, because you don’t actually get to see a hairless pre-pubescent boy porking a midget. Not that that’s particularly arousing, but I’d still like to see how it ends. And an ending is exactly what Nightwatch doesn’t give us.

Yes. Now stick it in his one true ring.

Nightwatch is the first part of a planned trilogy of fantasy films based upon a series of Russian books. Apparently, there are forces of light and darkness that are forever in conflict with one another, kind of like Democrats and Republicans, except the forces of darkness are vampires that suck blood instead of money from MediCare and IQ points. The two sides have held an uneasy truce for several hundred years, administered by the Nightwatch and the Daywatch, who are sort of like the fairy police. However, there is a prophecy, as there tends to be when screenwriters don’t want to delve into too much back-story, and a child is born that can sway the balance from one to the other. Which side will he choose? I suppose we’ll have to wait for part three to come out, which is really annoying. These aren’t comic books or Saturday afternoon serials, people. These movies take years to make and release, and the fact that this film feels so incomplete, like an unfinished sentence, is almost an insult to the audience. I can forgive the over-reliance on special effects, the rapturous worship of Tony Scott evidenced in the editing, and the choking, smothering sense of style that overwhelms the senses, but I cannot forgive the lazy story-telling that denies the audience at least a sense of closure. There have been trilogies and to-be-continueds that at least offered an end, if not the end, without compromising the nature of the story, but to just give up like that and expect the audience to be waiting around three years later to find out what happens is completely

Mo' Horrible Music

2006-02-28T23:57:00.000-05:00

Mo’ Better Blues
1990, USA
Spike Lee
VHS

Apparently, “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas is not the worst song ever made. That particular honor goes to anything and everything Denzel Washington sings in Mo’ Better Blues, in particular the length title song about love, which is mix between spoken word, jazz, rap, and a beat poet with Tourette’s. Washington plays a talented trumpeter with ego and commitment problems, juggling two women and a band that’s beginning to resent him. There’s a lot to complain about in this movie, like the fact that neither Joie nor Spike Lee can act, or that while Lee’s over-arching filmic thesis is that white people hate black people, he seems to be proving everyone else’s point that black people hate Jews, with his consistent portrayal of them as slimy agents and managers. But all of this is secondary to the hideous, hideous music, which so distracts from everything else that you can’t distinguish the good from the bad, as if the film were an otherwise beautiful stripper with ingrown hairs and razor burn. Despite some interesting directorial flourishes, despite a strong performance by Wesley Snipes, you’ll leave the film with nothing but ringing ears and a bad taste in your mouth, like you’d just given head at a Chemical Brothers’ concert.

Sounds like fun. Tastes like semen.

Since I brought it up, and since the movie has left me with nothing else to say, here’s my top five worst songs of all time.

“My Humps” – The Black Eyed Peas. This seems like the sort of thing a rapping granny would free-style on the spot in an Adam Sandler film. And “lovely lady lumps” just sounds distasteful.

Anything by Queen. Queen is the worst band that has ever been. One of the worst memories of my teenage years involves working in a kitchen and being forced to listen to a ‘classic rock’ station, and the crawling sensation that would creep up my spine whenever the rest of the kitchen staff would join in with “Bohemian Rhapsody”. It was like a hellish, GED opera.

“Grillz” – Nelly featuring Paul Wall, Ali, Gipp. Several large, frightening gorillas mumble while a hooker with a tin ear makes up a hook on the spot, then forgets it by the next verse.

The Beastie Boys’ entire discography almost made the cut, but I wouldn’t want to give them any more press. Plus if I put them in the same paragraph as Nelly, he’d probably start a fight.