Archive for July, 2008

7/13/08

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

On Michael Jackson’s classic album Off the Wall there’s this song called “I Can’t Help It.” It was written by Stevie Wonder, and when I first found that out it made so much sense. I could almost imagine the demo Stevie must’ve recorded to show Michael how to sing it. Well, Friday night I saw Stevie’s show out on the Indian reservation, and I’ll be damned, he played that song! I couldn’t believe it. He laughed and said, “Expect the unexpected.”

Well today I’m still shitfaced on life so expect the unexpected – after 2 weeks of inactivity here’s an avalanche of reviews.

By request: the topnotch robot cartoon: WALL-E

By years worth of requests: KISS KISS BANG BANG

Just because it’s amazing: UNFORGIVEN

And after you either read or refuse to read those ones I really suggest taking some time to watch the entries for the Seagalogy Youtube contest. I gathered together the winners and some of my other favorites on Ain’t It Cool last week, and there are other good ones on Youtube that I was forced to leave out because there were just too many. I gotta say I was incredibly impressed by all the creativity and effort people put into it. I wasn’t sure anybody would even enter, but I got all kinds of great ones. One guy spent the whole month doing animation, another guy broke his hand on the steering wheel while driving a monster truck over a pickup (no joke). When I heard that I think it was my proudest moment since getting 5 stars in Smooth Magazine.

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WALL-E

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

By now you’ve heard of WALL-E. Lovable robot, etc.

I’m no cartoon fetishist, but I’m not blind. Pixar is America’s most consistently great studio, and on first glance this is probaly the best they’ve done so far. You never thought you’d see something like WALT DISNEY’S 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, but that’s what the first act of this feels like. This movie is deep. There is a poetically tragic beauty to it that has never been captured in any cartoon all the way from PINOCCHIO to BARBIE’S FAIRY MERMAID CASTLE 2 or even (arguably) OSMOSIS JONES.

Here is this godforsaken shitpile of a planet, literally covered in garbage, the sky brown with garbage dust, a ring of space litter surrounding the atmosphere. Humans left this place behind 700 years ago, and the only things still moving around are one cockroach and the one remaining robot that was left behind to clean up the garbage.

So there WALL-E is picking up garbage, crushing it into cubes, and building structures out of them. I’m not sure whether this is what he was programmed to do, or whether he is using his crushing/stacking job to create art, but either one is interesting. He’s been doing this for 700 years and had to cannibalize all the other dead WALL-E’s to survive, so either he’s Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, finding his way in an abandoned world, or he’s the robot at the end of A.I., missing his mommy thousands of years after humans have gone extinct. Cleaning up garbage is what he was built for, so maybe he doesn’t know that nobody needs him to do it anymore. (more…)

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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

A couple years ago Shane Black, the hot shot wunderkind enfant terrible wave of the future 22 year old millionaire kid who wrote LETHAL WEAPON and a couple other movies, then got burnt out and disappeared for years, suddenly resurfaced as the writer-director of this well-received if not smash hit smart-alecky mystery comedy. I heard alot of good things about it so one Wednesday afternoon I checked the movie times and went downtown to see it. Unfortunately this was the day that movie about 50 Cent came out and all the showings of KISS KISS BANG BANG had been dropped without the movie times being updated online. I was so hurt that I didn’t watch the movie until just the other day.

Fortunately this one lives up to the word-of-the-mouth. This summer everybody’s excited about Robert Downey Jr.’s funny turn and ad-libs in IRON MAN, but it must’ve been less surprising to people who saw this one. Not only is Downey the star, he is the narrator who possesses the powers of someone recording a DVD commentary. He can skip around, make jokes, apologize for bad narration, complain about movie conventions (specifically comparing one scene to a shot in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER).

Yes, the movie is covered in meta. You got that all powerful narration, you also got a character obsessed with an old pulp detective series called Johnnie Gossamer, so the mystery elements of the story of course mirrors the types of things that would have happened in those books if they were real books. But also a movie adaptation of the books figures heavily into the plot. All of this could easily be annoying, but I guess Downey and Black are just good enough at it for it to come across more as genuine wit than as smarmy hipsters trying to show off. (more…)

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Unforgiven

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

I saw this movie years ago and like anybody I loved it. But watching it again recently I was surprised to find that it was better than I remembered. UNFORGIVEN is a GFM (Great Fucking Movie) for many different reasons, most of them you know, but I’ll try to point out a few of them.

For one thing it’s a story that you never quite know where it’s going. Supposedly it’s designed so you think Little Bill (Gene Hackman) is the good guy, since he’s the sheriff. I didn’t get that though because the first time you see him he comes in to settle this dispute in the brothel where some assholes cut up a prostitute because she gave a giggle at his “teeny pecker”. Little Bill isn’t evil but he obviously makes a poor decision by not punishing these guys but just fining them a couple ponies. No even horses, he specifically says ponies.

At best Little Bill seems like a Dirty Harry sub–villain, an ineffectual bureaucrat in the police department who is not tough enough on crime in the movie’s opinion. But that turns out to be just in this one scenario, because he happens to not be too enlightened when it comes to gender issues. In fact he is very tough on crime (Eastwood apparently asked Hackman to base his performance on notorious LAPD Chief Darryl Gates) and beats one of the protagonists to death during an interrogation. (more…)

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