CHILDREN OF MEN. Believe me, you don’t want to miss this one. (the movie, not the review.)
p.s. Happy New Year. New column coming soon.
Archive for 2006
12/31/06
Sunday, December 31st, 2006
LikeChildren of Men
Sunday, December 31st, 2006There was a time a couple years ago when it seemed like every day the headlines were just trying to out-crazy the day before. Planes falling out of the sky, anthrax in the mail, snipers on the loose, hurricanes, that lady releasing doves for each charge Michael Jackson was acquitted of… you wouldn’t have been surprised to get the morning paper and read that killer bees had swarmed Congress, rabid baboons were loose on the Space Shuttle and the Olsen twins had torched themselves outside of the “Today Show” window to protest censorship of rap music and video games. There are no baboons in CHILDREN OF MEN (there is a deer walking through a building, come to think of it) but this is a movie that perfectly captures that knot in your stomach, that feeling of madness, where the world has gone so crazy you keep bouncing between complete desensitized detachment and wanting to cry at the slightest provocation.
Technically this is a sci-fi movie, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels so fuckin real. Most dystopia movies are stylized in some way to make them look cool. This one goes for reality. The only futuristic technology you see is for mundane things like video games and animated bus ads. It looks great (like all of director Alfonso Cuaron’s movies) but not like a beautiful painting, more like a good documentary, and mostly shot handheld. There are 4 or 5 classic sequences here that I have no idea how they could’ve possibly been done. Like, there’s a scene where Clive Owen, the hero, runs through a war zone surrounded by total fuckin mayhem. In what appears to be one continuous handheld shot he runs between buildings, up stairs, through hallways evading hundreds of gunshots, seeing tanks blow up buildings, having emotional moments with other characters. And not a moment of it looked artificial to me. The only thing in the whole movie that struck me as a special effect was, of all things, a baby. And that was a good special effect. But the rest looked like reality. (more…)
2006 End of Year Spectacular
Friday, December 29th, 2006First, a little about James Brown dying on Christmas.
God damn, JB. That one took me by surprise. I gotta figure he’s one of the great geniuses of our time. Nobody could ever deny him as a performer, a singer, a dancer, a songwriter. But to me it’s the music that gets me high – all those tight as hell, stop-in-the-exact-center-of-a-dime bands he had over the years. One time in 1969, James had a sold out show in Georgia, but most of his band quit. So Bobby Byrd took a Lear jet to Cincinatti, picked up a young band he’d seen called the Pacemakers from an empty bar gig they were getting paid $15 for. They flew directly to Georgia, came out onto stage with their hero who they’d never met, and still were the baddest band ever. That’s how 17 year old Bootsy Collins got in James Brown’s band.
Giving James credit as the producer of all that music, obviously you gotta keep in mind he’s not playing those instruments (although I saw him do a smokin organ solo one time) and he’s got hundreds of amazing musicians playing with him over the years that need to share that credit. But if it didn’t take genius to put all those people together and make that type of funk then how come nobody else did it? And if you ask me nobody to this day has matched the JBs. You wanna be blown away, pick up Pass the Peas: The Best of the JBs. I have had it in my head for years that if Skander Halim ever makes that Vern Tells It Like It Is movie the opening credits have to use “Hot Pants Road,” because I want that to be my theme music. I guess you can’t go wrong having theme music from the same people who did Black Caesar and Slaughter’s Big Ripoff.
I know it’s a cliche but you can’t get around the fact that if you took away the existence of James Brown, you’d have no hip hop. Or at least, half the songs would have no beats. Public Enemy wouldn’t have that blaring horn on “Night of the Living Baseheads.” They wouldn’t even have their first song, “Public Enemy #1,” because that’s all “Blow Your Head,” James going nuts on that weird synthesizer. Think about the “Funky Drummer” beat, man. Or the “Papa Don’t Take No Mess” beat. And they were sampled from James and then resampled from other samples and then other people added different samples but used the same rhythm from the Funky Drummer. Those beats have more children than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. (more…)
12/24/06
Sunday, December 24th, 2006Free Lisl: Fear & Loathing in Denver
Friday, December 22nd, 2006Howdy boys,
I sent you guys this review several days ago and you never ran it, so I added this new paragraph to get your attention. Rocky Rocky Rocky, dragons, silver surfers, x-men, etc. As well as boobs and ass, boner boner boner, everybody has a boner, bodily fluids all over the place, geekgasm, etc.
Now to FREE LISL: FEAR AND LOATHING IN DENVER. I know, what kind of a name is Lisl, but I didn’t name her. This is the new documentary by Wayne Ewing, who did the great Hunter S. Thompson documentary BREAKFAST WITH HUNTER. It is his third Thompson-related movie, although with the good doctor’s passing each one gets more removed from the man himself. This one is not really about Thompson, but it’s about a cause he aligned himself with in his last years. Lisl Auman is a woman who, at the age of 21, was sentenced to life in prison for a murder everyone agreed she did not commit. She was actually handcuffed in the back of a police car while a dude she just met the day before, who had been helping her move, killed a police officer and then himself. Because she was an accomplice to his crime she was considered guilty of the murder.
That crime, according to the movie, was moving her belongings out of the apartment where she lived with an abusive boyfriend. A friend who was helping her move out decided to enlist two skinheads. These assholes stole some of the ex-boyfriend’s stereo equipment and basically took Lisl as a hostage in a stolen car – I’m sure about the time they were hauling down mountain roads and firing out the window at cops she knew these were not the best movers to be dealing with.
We hear the story from the point of view of Lisl and her parents. We see a rally on the capitol steps, where Thompson enlisted Warren Zevon to sing a song. We watch Lisl and her parents watch a video of the rally. The story of the case comes out suspensefully (sometimes frustratingly) in little bits. The movie shows how the media got the story wrong from day 1, portraying Lisl as the murderer’s girlfriend and repeating questionable allegations as if they were fact. (more…)
12/14/06
Thursday, December 14th, 2006I been sick as a dog (a dog that happens to be sick) but I can finally lift my head long enough to write that review of Seagal’s ATTACK FORCE that everybody’s been asking for. And what the hell, LETHAL WEAPON too.
Attack Force
Thursday, December 14th, 2006ATTACK FORCE is Steven Seagal’s latest, where he takes on a bunch of sexy people given super powers by an experimental military drug. But until recently it was listed on IMDb as HARVESTER, where he takes on a bunch of aliens. After I savaged the last one, SHADOW MAN, I got a nice email from Seagal’s co-writer Joe Halpin, who I found very humble and down to earth. Having his ear for a minute I didn’t want to be rude and bury him in an avalanche of questions, but I couldn’t resist asking if this HARVESTER movie would really end up being about aliens, or if they would chicken out like they did with the “biological mutants” that ended up not being in SUBMERGED.
His answer: “Who knows.” He explained that they had shot it both ways. It could be about aliens, it could be about European mobsters, the studio and Seagal would have to come to an agreement in post-production. This of course brings up alot more questions (the main one being “Shouldn’t you decide on the premise before shooting the movie?”) but it also gives a huge amount of insight into how Seagal’s DTV movies end up the way they do. I mean, if they don’t even know who he’s fighting until after they’re done, no wonder they end up with these weird overdubbed lines, randomly dropped story threads, etc.
To no one’s surprise, they went with European mobsters. But actually I don’t think they hacked up the movie as much as I had figured before hand. These mobsters are treated pretty much as aliens (or actually vampires) – their eyes do a weird CGI effect, they have super strength for throwing people through walls, they use weird high tech weapons. It seems like they mostly left them as is, but changed the explanation for their powers. (And probaly cut out some bad CGI space ship shots here or there.) (more…)
Lethal Weapon
Thursday, December 14th, 2006I meant to see APOCALYPTO this week but I was too god damn sick to haul my ass to the theater. So I figured what the hell, it’s December, I’m Vern – might as well revisit LETHAL WEAPON. Haven’t seen that one since the ’80s. One of my buddies swears by it.
Well, it was interesting to watch this movie again, and I had fun, but I can’t say it has aged too well. I know it’s not fair to compare everything to DIE HARD, but LETHAL WEAPON is no DIE HARD. Bruce knew to keep the hair conservative, it will be timeless, no problem. His hair in that movie is so not dated that today, when the LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD teaser debuted online, everybody was pissed that he didn’t have the old hair do.
Not so Mel Gibson’s do in LETHAL WEAPON. That fuckin thing better be in a vault somewhere covered in ten feet of lead. What is it about the fuckin ’80s man, where even a ridiculous hair do can be so toxic as to not be cool years later? I mean, you find some silly flip hair do girls wore in the ’60s, or an afro from the ’70s, hell, the fancy high top fades from the ’90s even fair better than pretty much anything these people were trying to do in the ’80s. You cannot look at Mel Gibson’s lion mane of a mullet and take him seriously. Everything else is fine. He’s still lean like MAD MAX, he looks young but he seems grizzled, like life has tossed him through a few windows. He walks with a swagger, he dangles a cigarette from his mouth, he is completely nuts. But still, the fuckin mullet.
(not that the blonde girl who kills herself at the beginning is any better. What the hell was wrong with us, is what I’m asking.) (more…)
Smokin’ Aces
Thursday, December 7th, 2006You know what this movie is, it’s a remake of BOBBY. Almost the whole movie takes place in and around this hotel. And you got your huge all-star cast of characters with their various intersecting stories going on. But instead of them all living their lives and making corny speeches not knowing Bobby Kennedy is about to be assassinated, they are all trying to sneak into the hotel to kill Jeremy Piven. And instead of tons of stock footage of Kennedy speeches there is all kinds of fighting and guns. So it’s a reflection of our times. Or a very loose remake. A reimagining.
Let me give a little background so you can compare notes. I was hoping to like this movie, but not predisposed to it. Joe Carnahan wrote and directed, and I’m not a member of the cult of Carnahan yet. I liked NARC okay but to be frankly honest I didn’t understand why everybody made such a big deal about it. I thought the trailer for this one looked insane in a good way, but usually hate these hyperactive showoffy everybody-look-at-me type approaches to filmatism. There was clearly a higher than usual probability of Guy Ritchieness. Or CRANKitude. Or, gulp, DOMINOism. Going in I felt like there was a good chance I would love it and an equal or greater chance that I would want to kill it.
The opening scene has FBI agents Ray Liotta (why the fuck did they cancel SMITH?) and Ryan Reynolds (why the fuck did they cancel BLADE?) in a van staking out an old mafia dude. The dialogue and acting is somewhat naturalistic, the camera is handheld (director code for “gritty crime story and/or police procedural”). It seems serious. But then some giant fonts come on telling us the characters’ names and occupations.
Bad sign, right? Maybe even a dealbreaker, tying to pull that TRAINSPOTTING shit at this late date. But here’s the thing: it’s not a freeze frame. They write the names on the screen BUT THEY DON’T FREEZE THE FRAME! No avid farts either. And they hold the shots for a reasonable amount of time. I don’t think I ever saw this combination of styles before. The editing in this movie does not necessarily appear to have been done under the influence of pixie sticks, it serves the story well. As soon as I realized they had written the names on the screen without freezing, I was sold on the movie. It got me. (more…)
The Gingerdead Man
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006get it, gingerDEAD instead of gingerBREAD
For hundreds of years, gingerbread has been a delicious and vibrant European treat. It was used to make soft cakes that would be drenched in hot lemon sauce and whipped cream, or for ornate candy-covered houses like the “witch’s house” from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, or to form the shape of a small man, a reflection of its creator. As man is to God, gingerbread man is to man. And therefore also to God.
No one knows the origin of gingerbread, because how do you pin down something like that? I’m sure they could figure out who invented the McRib Sandwich, but not gingerbread. Some believe it came from the Eastern Mediterranean, and spread across Europe as soldiers came home from the Crusades. At least something good would’ve come out of the Crusades then. Wherever it came from, its ginger packs a powerful punch, so much so that throughout the 17th century you needed a license to bake gingerbread except at Christmas and Easter.
Perhaps the all time greatest gingerbread was found in Nuremberg in the early 1600s, where it was baked exclusively by an elite guild of master bakers known as the Lebkuchler. But even these highly trained artisans could never have foreseen THE GINGERDEAD MAN starring Gary Busey as the voice of the Gingerdead Man. The Lebkuchler knew that in fairy tales, the gingerbread man is a little guy who runs fast, always on the move to prevent being devoured by man or beast. But there is one gingerbread man who refuses to run. This is his story. (more…)
