The opening establishes that this guy is doing repairs on a rich family’s home and his interactions with each family member. But it also shows why he’s so desperate for money that he’d pull an asshole move like robbing their safe. He tells a crime boss (Robert Wisdom) that he’s the only guy that can get into that safe, but I think it’s a lie. He just has a little box he can use to listen to the clicks as he spins the dial – I feel confident that I could figure out how to use that thing if you gave me a couple minutes. But maybe he’s the only guy with one of those boxes, that’s why he said it. And because he knows the code to turn off the alarm.

The family’s supposed to be on vacation but he hears something while he’s in there, and it turns out to be The Collector, a guy in kind of a hybrid lucha libre/S&M mask who is currently torturing the family members. Not only that but he set up a bunch of booby traps. Some of them are little things like a needle that pokes our guy in the ear when he tries to use the phone, or razor blades that slice his fingers when he reaches for the window. But also there are tripwires all over the place that set off ridiculously elaborate traps. You know how the FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels established the rule that killers can catch up to their victims without running? I guess SAW set the precedent that killers are engineering geniuses with the ability to foresee and set up for any outcome.

The traps are increasingly ridiculous. By the time I noticed a bunch of bear traps on the floor in the background of a shot I was laughing, well before a guy fell onto about 8 or 9 of them. The silliest one somehow uses a cable to swing a girl across the room and stick her on a bunch of wall spikes like she’s one of those velcro balls you throw against a target.

Meanwhile The Collector has people tied up so he can pull out tongues and teeth and what not. As you know I don’t really like the torture movies, not for moral reasons but because I think it’s uncinematic. The thrill of the slasher movie is in the chase, in just barely getting away. The “kills” are enjoyable exclamation points on the end of some of the sentences. A torture scene is a long, dragged out exclamation point. An elipses. It can serve its purpose but in this case it doesn’t, it’s not really a scene you dread getting to. You just don’t enjoy getting through it.

The predicament that the safecracker is in is interesting – the family members see him there and he says “It’s okay, it’s just me!”, but of course they gotta be wondering what the hell he’s doing in their house. He’s gonna get himself in trouble, but he’s a good enough person that he stays and tries to help them. And when the dad tells him the combination to the safe so he can get the handgun he says, “Okay” and not”I don’t need the combo, I have a special box for listening to the clicks,” so you know he’s a sophisticated criminal.

I like the setup , the character is developed enough to root for and we can all related to a safecracker in trouble. An everyman. But this Collector guy is a different story. That guy’s just lame.

SPOILERS? I’m not sure if this even counts as a spoiler, because it doesn’t really matter who the killer turns out to be, it has no consequences. But as you suspect early on he’s a pest control guy working on the property. It’s kind of cool that the killer knew the alarm code for the same reason our protagonist did – he works there. But the director uses his profession as an excuse to linger on CGI spiders and wasps on the outskirts of events, which is laughable whenever it happens. At one point it shows a spider watching, and moving his mandibles. Somebody oughta dub in a “CHAOS REIGNS!”

I liked in BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT how the title came up at the very end. It’s kind of cocky to do it that way, like fuck you, I put the title on the end, I don’t care what anybody else does, but it’s an earned cockiness. Also, in both cases you realize the meaning of the title when it appears. Ah ha, so we’ve been through all this, now BATMAN BEGINS. Or okay, “Gotham’s White Knight” has slipped up, Batman’s gonna take the fall, only now is he THE DARK KNIGHT. With THE COLLECTOR what you realize as the title comes up is “Oh, they’re trying to do a series of these, like SAW.” They’ve shown us a killer and an M.O., they’ve even left the protagonist alive. I still think it’s novel that the SAW movies keep different characters alive and expect you to remember what’s going on from sequel to sequel, but I don’t want to see another series like that. Come on. It seems a little presumptuous to end that way.

Well, it turns out this was originally written as a SAW prequel, but then even the people who make the SAW movies didn’t want to see a fucking SAW prequel, so they rejiggered it into this. Man, I hope there aren’t a dozen rejected SAW sequel scripts that are gonna be turned into separate movies the way so many rejected DIE HARDs and LETHAL WEAPONs and stuff did. The people responsible for this one apparently did the FEAST movies and some of the SAW sequels, if that tells you anything.

Anyway, a semi-valiant attempt I guess. At least it had a good setup and a couple laughs. But I don’t recommend it. If you must, I guess it’s available exclusively at Blockbuster now (man, what a coup) and everywhere else April 6th.

Even as a still photo this is in slow motion.

I have to admit I don’t really get the Boondock Saints. Haven’t seen it since it first hit video, but I remember it just being kind of a shitty Guy Ritchie/post-Tarantino wannabe tough guy movie. It just seemed delusionally confident about how cool it was. It probly had some good bits here or possibly there, but it mostly seemed to me like some guys saying unconvincing macho lines and then some techno music comes on and the camera rotates around. It’s like an applause sign lights up that just says “AWESOME!” on it and you’re supposed to take its word for it.

I mean jesus, the fuckin guy who replaced Howard Hesseman for the last season of Head of the Class is supposed to be cool because you give him sunglasses and guns? What the fuck is that? I’ll tell you what it is, it’s what dumb motherfuckers decided after they saw Travolta in PULP FICTION and thought they understood the magic formula. Yeah, yeah, it’s the guy who replaced Howard Hesseman on the last season of Head of the Class. But what if he was… a hitman? Am I blowing your mind? Am I reinventing the guy who replaced Howard Hesseman on the last season of Head of the Class? This is the ’90s, this is the New Crime Cinema, get with the program. Did I mention he can hold the guns sideways? Well he can. Now do you understand what I’m talking about?

Okay, I know, that’s strictly an American point of view. In his homeland Billy Connolly’s not known for the declining year of a cheesy ’80s sitcom, he’s known as a standup comedian. So it’s totally different. He’s not a sitcom teacher, he’s this guy:

See, he’s not Howard Hesseman. He’s Howie Mandel. Now he’s old and grey and bearded, he looks like a homeless guy dressed up as Neo, and that’s what the movie has to offer as the ultimate badass. Also, he has a huge tattoo of a butterfly on his hand. (or is that supposed to be a re-entry stamp?)

I don’t get it. Nothing against Connolly, he’s a likable actor, and maybe his standup is good. But this character is a good metaphor for the movie. He clearly thinks he looks cool as hell. He must know something we don’t?

I’ve seen worse action/crime movies than BOONDOCK SAINTS, but mostly I’ve seen better. So it almost seemed like some kind of vindication when I saw that documentary OVERNIGHT and found out BOONDOCK writer/director Troy Duffy is a Guinness Book of World Records worthy asshole. The Weinsteins bought his screenplay and plucked him from bartending to become their new wonderboy, and he decided the next day that he was Francis Ford Coppolla multiplied by Stanley Kubrick divided by all of the Rolling Stones. He was such an impossibly arrogant shitbag that even the Weinsteins had to disavow him like a CIA assassin that blew his cover overseas.

Not only is OVERNIGHT a good cautionary tale, it’s also a hilarious movie full of some of the greatest poser tough guy talk ever captured on film. If anything that’s the beloved character I’m excited to have back on screen: that hilarious asshole Troy Duffy. So I was pleased to see he has a couple gems on the behind the scenes featurettes for part 2. I wish I had time to listen to his 2 (two) commentary tracks.

When we last left our beloved Boondock Saints, they were doing something in Boston I think, involving guns or action. They were wearing black. There were two of them, I believe. The Boondock Saints have no names, they are only known as Boondock Saints #1 (Sean Patrick Flannery, the one with unconvincing Irish accent) and Boondock Saints #2 (Norman Reedus from BLADE II, the one with the more subdued unconvincing Irish accent). Now, eight years later, the consequences of whatever it was they were doing then maybe have come home to roost or something. (?)

Honestly I have no clue. It’s hard to say because I saw the movie about ten years ago and since then have experienced these characters and stories only through the medium of hoodie.

The point is they now have American Taliban beards and live in a quaint little cottage in Ireland with their dad (Billy Connolly, who I thought was Scottish). But back in Boston some dude killed a priest and put pennies on his eyes, so everybody thinks the Boondock Saints did it (were they priest murderers in the first one? I don’t remember that). They know it’s a trap but they go back anyway and kill the people involved while saying prayers and stuff.

(anybody know what this Catholic assassin business is all about? Is it supposed to be a critique of perceived hypocrisy on Catholic theology? or is it just supposed to make it aaaaweeeesome for Catholics to watch? I don’t really get this part either.)

Judd Nelson, imitating Al Pacino, plays a crime boss who mostly hides inside a panic room and talks over closed circuit TV (kind of a cool idea). I liked when he was yelling at everybody and used the word “reconnoiter.” Julie Benz from RAMBO and PUNISHER: WAR ZONE replaces Willem Dafoe as an FBI agent on their tail. She does a Southern accent ten times worse than their Irish accents, and I don’t understand why. The only time it seems relevant that she’s from the South is one part where she says some folksy thing about a pig. (You know how Southern people are, they say cute things like “y’all are as clumsy as a cow playin marbles” or “He’s like a sheep confusing Dale Earnhardt, Jr. for Hank Williams, Sr.”) But I figure if she has to do the accent then you get a different actress; if it has to be this actress then you don’t make her do the accent. Should be pretty easy. If he just picked one of those two things it would’ve worked.

Poor Clifton Collins Jr. becomes the comic relief sidekick. Apparently he’s friends with Duffy, so I’m sure he wanted to do it and had fun. But I still feel sorry for him being in this and CRANK 2 in the same year. And those were probly seen by ten times as many people as saw him in EXTRACT. But oh well, he generally rises above the movies, he’s pretty likable.

Meanwhile the dad sits home in the little cottage staring at various objects that can segue into flashbacks about his old timey GODFATHER PART II childhood. Since the filmatist is an egomaniac making a movie for worshipful fans I knew there was a very good chance that this would not turn out to have any significance at all, it could just be that he figures everybody loves this character and wants to know some background. Fortunately it turns out to be leading to the climax of the movie (where the dad leaves the house) but along the way Duffy manages to show us the making of the leather vest with the holsters on the front that he looked so “cool” wearing in the first movie. Because that was important to know.

Then there is a HUGE surprise where the FBI agent admits she’s assigned to help them, not catch them (SPOILER). But these other cops who I guess were in the first one who I guess are also helping them get away with their murders don’t know that she knows that they’re in on it so they all go to a bar and squirt water on each other and laugh and say “You mean you knew all along?” I don’t really get this part either, why we watched the whole section of the story before this which is now meaningless. Whoops.

Okay, the story makes no sense (just wait until you get to the “mindblowing” cliffhanger ending) but it’s supposed to be a goofy action movie, let’s just look at the action scenes. The good news is Duffy’s stuck in the ’90s, so there’s none of the shakycam or Michael Bay/Tony Scott editing. The bad news is that the Boondock Saints have some kind of magic gun powers where almost all of the gun battles go exactly the same: Boondock Saints stand stationary next to each other firing in one direction, 5-10 bad guys stand across the room firing back at them, Boondock Saints hit all of the bad guys, bad guys do not hit any of the Boondock Saints. Sometimes they play a little trick to set up the bad guys (they make a guy strip to his bikini and shit his pants and then leave him on a cart with a message painted on his back) just so they can then say “You’re fucked!” and wait for them to turn around and aim all of their weapons and then they use their magic gun powers to defeat them. (I’d skip the pants-shitting part and just sneak up behind them. But I’m not Catholic.)

Another thing is it actually has a couple bullet-time-esque camera rotations. In the year 2009. So adorable.

At the end poor Peter Fonda shows up, apparently having burned through his check from GHOST RIDER. By this time I had lost track/interest of who he was supposed to be, but I learned from the DVD extras that he’s called “The Roman” and that Duffy thinks the audience will be “filled with righteous anger” toward him when he shows up but then when he starts talking we’re almost won over by him. So yes, if you were wondering, Troy Duffy has seen KILL BILL VOLUME 2.

I guess the heart of this movie would be the dream sequence where a character who apparently was their sidekick who died in the first one, although he doesn’t look familiar to me at all, appears to them in a dream to make a big speech about how they are not being macho enough. He appears in a hockey rink and on a roof talking about how “these are hard men, doing hard things, and it gives me a hard on.” It made me a little embarrassed to have a dick, but Duffy explains on the featurette that “in my opinion it became a manifesto” for blue collar men who have never had a chance to be represented in movies before, not even in the movie BLUE COLLAR. Or PAUL BLART IS: MALL COP. In the manifesto the longhair talks about how real men don’t cry, so it’s ironic that Duffy wipes a tear away while talking about what a powerful and important scene he created.

So no, I would not consider this to be any better than part 1, although I guess I got a little more of a kick out of it because it’s even further off the mark. On the other hand, it tries to be more nudge-nudge, wink-wink, with the characters talking about being “the sidekick,” coming up with catch phrases, trying to think of “creative” ways to attack, and in that sense it’s kind of more tedious. Unfortunately I can’t give Boondock Saintheads any advice because I have no clue if this will seem good to them or not. The only evidence I have is: one guy I never heard of gave it a positive review and gave away tickets to two screenings of it on Ain’t It Cool (and is quoted on the ad). Otherwise I’ve heard that fans were disappointed.

So you can’t learn much from this review, but maybe I can learn something from it. Here is a summary of a few of the things I don’t get:

1. The whole “BOONDOCK SAINTS” thing.
2. Why is Billy Connolly with guns supposed to be badass
3. what’s the deal with having a butterfly tattoo on his hand. And did he steal it from some girl’s lower back
4. Catholic?
5. Southern accent?
6. squirting water at bar

can’t wait for part 3.

As an adaptation of the original book, ALICE IN WONDERLAND is not entirely faithful. Like many versions it combines characters from the first book and the sequel (Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum and Humpty Dumpty were from the second book according to Wikipedia, a popular websight). However it’s not meant as a straightforward translation of the book, but more a riff on the world of Wonderland, using our familiarity with some of the imagery and characters from previous adaptations and trying to be clever about re-interpreting them in a different context.

In this version Alice is not a little girl anymore, she has grown up quite a bit. In the world of reality she’s having relationship troubles. But this awkward looking white rabbit runs by, she follows him and escapes into this fantasy world where her encounters make her realize what she needs to do.

She’s completely naive and innocent, but because of her age her interactions with the fantasy characters take on more adult meanings. When she shrinks out of her dress she ends up naked, and the behavior of the weird animal people she runs into makes her uncomfortable. But it’s not until nearly a half hour into the movie that a talking rock convinces her to finger herself and then next thing you know she meets the Mad Hatter, who has no pants on, and she gets curious enough to start giving him a blow job.

By the way I don’t know if I mentioned this is the 1976 porn version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND I’m talking about, not the new Tim Burton one. I’m gonna talk about that later in the review.

Directed by Bud Townsend (NIGHTMARE IN WAX), it stars Kristine DeBell as Alice. She was a Playboy model, but there’s at least one hardcore scene that seems like it’s gotta really be her. (There’s also an R-rated version, like PIRATES). She still managed to go onto a pretty good career in TV and movies, everything from MEATBALLS to THE BIG BRAWL to The Young & the Restless. And she’s the best thing in the movie, playing the ludicrous porn naivete pretty straight. She’s kind of like the poor man’s Barbarella, and come to think of it I never really thought about how much the plot of BARBARELLA resembles a porno with the sex scenes cut out. Oh well. Coulda woulda shoulda.

Basically the story is about her going around meeting the different Wonderland characters, but don’t worry, she doesn’t screw all of them. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum for example are depicted as a man and woman wearing beanies and no pants, they take care of each other. Humpty Dumpty (played by screenwriter Bude Searle) gets his boner back thanks to Alice’s help, but her technique is offscreen and then it looks like he just has a dildo attached to his costume. She doesn’t have to actually do an eggman. That’s why she could still be on CHiPs and NIGHT COURT.

The weirdest thing about the movie is that it seems to be trying harder than you’d expect. The sets and costumes are cheap, and for some reason the rabbit’s ears attach to the side of his face. But it’s got all these musical numbers and dance sequences and they obviously have real dancers and choreographers, even if sometimes they end up getting naked and licking each other. There’s more time and emphasis spent on the musical numbers than the sex scenes, though. And it seems kind of serious about Alice going on this journey, it’s only the wacky music and title cards with sex puns that make it seem like it’s trying to be funny. Also there’s a joke where a character says they used to have a towel but a hotel stole it from them. There’s a character who looks kind of like Bruce Vilanch, but I don’t think he was a writer on this one.

I don’t remember a Cheshire Cat or a Caterpillar. Some Carroll purists may be disappointed by these liberties, as well as the part where Tweedle Dum pulls out of Tweedle Dee and cums all over her butt. (I could’ve said “some may be disappointed by these omissions, as well as several emissions,” but this is a pretty classy websight in my opinion so I don’t write that kind of garbage.) I personally was disappointed that the credit for “nude underwater volleyball sequence” turned out to be a joke.

To be honest ALICE IN WONDERLAND is not all that entertaining. It’s kind of funny that it exists, and there are some okay blowjobs. And it is probly one of the only movies where a girl talks to a bunch of animals and learns that she should stop being so uptight and screw her boyfriend. But there are better porns, better musicals and better versions of this particular story.

By coincidence I also watched the new Tim Burton movie called ALICE IN WONDERLAND. This one is designed more as a RETURN TO OZ type deal, a sequel, where an older Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to Wonderland, although she can’t remember being there before. It has the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts and everybody but in more of a fantasy quest type thing where Alice is a chosen one who gets a sword and fights a dragon and shit.

I have some real mixed feelings about this movie. As a visual experience I think it’s unprecedented. Some people claim it’s more of the same from Tim Burton, but that’s not true at all, he’s never made anything half this elaborate. It’s fucking incredible to look at, even ignoring that it’s in 3-D with lots of nice CAPTAIN EO style flying-out-at-the-audience show-off shots. He’s using all that “mo-cap” and what not but in a more artful animatory kind of way. It looks like a very detailed psychedelic painting like you’d see in that “Juxtapoz” magazine they got at Borders.

The Queen of Hearts is Helena Bonham Carter with a head the size of a La-Z Boy, and it looks pretty real. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum (strictly Platonic in this version) look like a painting of Pugsley Addams. Crispin Glover plays the Knave of Hearts, whose proportions look very exaggerated but it was a while before I realized they were digitally stretching his limbs. And you got all these little frogs running around wearing clothes, living playing cards that could be stop motion characters, a very real looking Cheshire Cat floating out of the screen into your face, a talking bassett hound who strikes a perfect balance between realism and cartoonish characterization, 100% free of GARFIELD style creepiness.

They also do a good job with the shifting of sizes. You remember Alice drinks potions and eats cookies and it makes her shrink or grow and all that? They do that here too, she changes sizes many times so we see the characters from different perspectives. Sometimes the caterpillar is her peer, sometimes he’s a bug on her shoulder. When she first meets the Tweedles they’re behemoths, later they’re little boys. That’s one aspect where they got the dreamlikeness down just right.

It all looks fucking incredible, I never seen anything like it. It really puts the Whoopi Goldberg version to shame, in my opinion. Unfortunately it’s an amazing visual depiction of a pretty boneheaded script. If it was a straight adaptation of the story people would probly say “been there, done that,” but fuck ‘em, it would be an impressive new visualization of a classic story, like that version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL that I loved and nobody else I know was willing to watch. Instead they decided to make references to all the familiar Wonderland shit (the Mad Hatter is still having a tea party, still asks the same riddle, caterpillar’s still sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah asking “who are you?”, Queen is still trying to find out who stole her tarts, etc.).

THen they take that half-assed ALICE IN WONDERLAND and cross it with some obvious CHRONICLES OF NARNIA shit. And I say that as someone who has only seen the trailers for NARNIA. This has the same amount of depth as those trailers. And when it gets into this by-the-numbers fight-the-monsters plot it no longer feels like Wonderland. Instead of trying to follow these characters and their insane logic you just watch them run around on a mission to save the kingdom from evil. It loses way too much crazy.

I don’t give a shit that they’re changing the story, but it just doesn’t mesh. THe new shit is not in the spirit of the old shit and doesn’t have any imagination to it. And putting the characters into that type of story takes away what makes them cool in the first place. To me the Cheshire Cat even in the Disney cartoon is a terryifing character without doing anything evil. He’s just unpredictable and hard to read and jesus man stop smiling at me you’re gonna make me shit my pants. In this movie he turns out to be heroic. That fucking ruins it, man!

Same goes for the Mad Hatter. In fact, they’re all facing a grave danger and are working together to save the world or whatever. This can be scientifically proven to be less entertaining than when they were crazy and had no logic or purpose. The story is supposed to be nonsense, right? So how do you shove it into a formula? Mathematically that can’t work.

Here’s an example. Alot of it is based off of that “Jabberwocky” poem. The poem says “Oh, frabjous day,” so they turn that into an important holiday called “Frabjous Day” when a prophecy is gonna go down. They’re literally trying to turn nonsense into sense. But they’re not Jodorowky, they can’t turn shit into gold. It’s just a bad idea.

Also it’s strangely humorless for Tim Burton. Anne Hathaway is kind of funny, though. She plays some kind of queen and she keeps posing her arms into bizarre poses. I’m not sure why.

Have you noticed, they got Sam Worthington in AVATAR and CLASH OF THE TITANS, now this Mia W. in ALICE IN WONDERLAND. For some reason they’re farming out the cast of Greg McLean’s ROGUE to all the 3-D movies. She seems like a good young actress, but unfortunately the character in the movie is pretty bland, I didn’t really feel like following her into the rabbit hole necessarily. She’s almost as old as Kristine DeBell was in the other one, but she looks more like a kid so I think it was a good choice by Walt Disney Pictures not to do it as a porno.

It’s a movie full of cool looking characters but not memorable ones. If I had to pick one that was the best I guess I would go with the Queen of Hearts. They actually added a little vulnerability to her. She still cuts off heads but she’s really self-conscious about her own giant head (wait a minute, I just now I understood that) and very susceptible to people who pretend to care about her. I’ve heard criticisms of Burton casting his lady friend in a movie yet again but I have to ask, who else would be better at this character? I can’t think of too many. Although it would’ve been funny if they cast Helen Mirren.

Glover’s Knave of Hearts is not as memorable but I approve of the scene where Alice is bigger than him so he fondles her head and talks excitedly about liking her size. And you realize he’s a fuckin fetishist just like he was with hair in the C’s A’s pictures.

So unfortunately the movie is pretty boring. Amazing and boring. Jawdropping and thumb twiddling. I almost want to see it again just to try harder to like it. It should be great. But it’s not. Somebody’s gotta figure out how to make Tim Burton hungry again. Or maybe just write him a better script.

A couple of random thoughts to start things off:

1. I know people always complain when you discuss Oscars and have to point out that they are meaningless or whatever. Fair enough. Like anybody doesn’t know that. But I’ve noticed that this year more than usual they have had a positive effect already. The main one is the amount of discussion I have heard about Kathryn Bigelow. As recently as when THE HURT LOCKER came out you could not find anybody outside of nerd clubs who even knew that movie existed. Now it’s one of the most discussed movies and Kathryn Bigelow leans closer to “household name” than to “name only known by movie nerds who like NEAR DARK or POINT BREAK.” I’ve also run into many people who would not have seen HURT LOCKER if not for all this awards talk, and also some of the other nominees that wouldn’t have been nominated without the expanded 10 best picture nominees, mostly A SERIOUS MAN. So that’s good. I myself have to admit I probly wouldn’t have gotten around to seeing CRAZY HEART if Bridges wasn’t up for best actor.

2. I put Kathryn Bigelow up there because I want her to win (and think she will) but if Cameron ends up winning let’s not roll any cars or anything. I personally don’t think AVATAR is up to the standards of earlier in his career, but you have to admit that “best director” is a good way to honor the movie for its technical achievement and daring. It’s easy to look at its ridiculously gigantic success and say that it was an obvious crowdplease, but that dude was working on that movie for years with sayers saying “nay” on all sides. The tenacity to get that made at that budget, to invent the technology and to at least on a technical level orchestrate it all together is something probly no other director could’ve done. So although I would rather reward a movie that to me has more heart and soul to it I think those would be legitimate reasons to give him the award.

If Jason Reitman got it I would be kind of pissed though.

After the “jump” or whatever it’s called I will present to you a series of posters commemorating previous works of all the best director nominees, arranged in order of preference of who I would want to win.

(pretty big spoilers in this one, sorry)

This is not the romantic one where Christian Slater has a baboon heart, this is the dramatic one where Jeff Bridges may soon need a baboon liver, on account of his country singer lifestyle. I heard alot about CRAZY HEART being good only for Bridges’s about-to-win-an-Academy-Award performance. (Did you know he was also nominated for THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT?) But I thought the movie itself was pretty damn good too, let’s give it some credit please.

Bridges plays Bad Blake (first name Bad, last name Blake), a legendary and influential country singer now stuck touring small bars, barely getting paid, satisfied just using his small notoriety to get laid by groupies of a class not much higher than you would expect for a singer putting on a show in the back of a bowling alley when it’s not karaoke night. As you might guess he spends more time with whiskey than with people, he hasn’t had a hit record in forever, and he’s not very happy.

Of course it’s a little bit of a redemption story, a not-too-far-fetched comeback, like THE WRESTLER. Hopefully “this year’s THE WRESTLER” will become this year’s “this year’s THE FULL MONTY,” and we’ll have all kinds of underrated actors breaking out topnotch performances in smart low budget dramas about lovable fuckups who’ve seen way, way better days. Bad finds his inspiration when he agrees to do an interview with his piano player’s niece, and she turns out to be Maggie Gyllenhaal. They form a relationship (warning: he fucks her) and when he gets to know her what he really does is get to know himself, etc.

Sounds terrible, actually, but the story and the way it’s told has a certain truth to to it and an understatedness that’s real appealing to me. I should mention that he’s squarely in the old school country mode, you would never see him on CMT, singing on a truck commercial or hanging out with that joker with the “boot in your ass” song, and he would not be one of these people that releases two versions of his album, one regular and one with fiddle. I think I read he’s supposed to be based on a combination of Waylon Jennings and a couple other guys, and they definitely got him looking like Kris Kristofferson and having some of Kristofferson’s poetic touch in his songs. His big hit that he’s known for has a good line about “funny how falling feels like flying for a little while.” I enjoyed the songs and that’s important. A great way to ruin a movie is to make it all about music and then have bad music in it.

Bad has a little bit of a rivalry with a former sideman named Tommy Sweet who has become a modern country superstar. That whole subplot is a good example of why I liked the movie. You keep hearing about this guy and thinking “Who is this prick?” I figured he would be played by some real country singer, I didn’t know he was gonna be Colin Farrell with a ponytail. And when I realized that’s what it was I didn’t know he was gonna pull it off. I wonder if he had to fight for this role, or if somebody had to go to Colin Farrell and say, “Look man, we’re gonna teach you how to sing country songs. Seriously. You should do this.”

I'm not crazy, right? Looks exactly like Kris Kristofferson.

When Bad swallows his pride and agrees to open for Tommy Sweet there’s a great scene where he pulls his shitty truck into the secure parking lot and parks next to Tommy’s vehicles – a couple gargantuan black tour buses and a fleet of big rigs. And you just know that’s exactly what this fucker would really have. (And sure I enough I read afterwards that they shot this stuff at a Toby Keith concert.) Bad Blake is the legend, the one who gave him his career, the one who does better music, and this fucking truck is his reward. This shows how society values him compared to his young protegee.

But then it gets better. You expect Tommy to be an asshole. You want him to be an asshole. But he’s obviously genuine. During Bad’s opening act Tommy sneaks onto the stage and joins him, and the crowd goes nuts. It’s kind of humiliating for Bad… it’s like, they only give a shit about him if the guy they came for comes out there with him. And he’s stealing his spotlight. And also, by the way, they want Bad to sit at his merch table later and sell CDs. But you know what, when Tommy says this is the guy who taught him everything he knows you know he means it. You can’t be mad at him. He seems like a really nice guy, actually.

And then, from this crazy night playing at a huge outdoor arena, it cuts to Bad all by himself the next day, parked on a desert highway, talking on a payphone in the glaring sun. And even though I have never opened for Tommy Sweet at the such and such casino amphitheater in whereverthefuck, middle of America, I felt like I knew exactly that feeling of some crazy shit goes down and then the next day you come down to regular life. You were on such a high and it seemed so huge and now everything’s normal again. Though your ears are still ringing a little. But it’s hard to believe that was just yesterday. Almost like it never happened.

The part about alcoholism is not nearly as ugly or depressing as it could be, but it got me tense. You just sit there waiting for him to fuck up. But part of why he’s still around is because he’s functional, and that’s why the movie’s not torture to watch either. He keeps doing better than you expect. There is genuine suspense over whether or not he’s gonna remember to dedicate a song to a fan he met earlier. I guess it’s debatable whether he did good by that fan or not (you’ll see). But it’s not a “wouldn’t you know it, dad got distracted and forgot to show up to the recital” type of movie. The specifics of his failure are not very predictable. You never know when and how he’s gonna horribly disappoint somebody.

But as soon as he’s taking care of a little kid you’re like, oh jesus, do I really want to watch this? And then he keeps doing better than expected. When he finally (SPOILER) misplaces the kid like some car keys it’s almost too upsetting. But it’s a pretty good rock bottom moment to motivate him to get clean. I mean, that would be pretty embarrassing to lose somebody’s kid. You know how people are about those things. Real protective. They can get uptight about shit like that.

To be perfectly honest I have not seen the baboon heart one so it would not be fair to say that this is the better of the two. But I would be surprised if that was as good as CRAZY HEART. I really enjoyed this one.

Speaking of (SPOILER) Bruce, I also want to call attention to the new banner to the right, advertising my new book YIPPEE KI-YAY MOVIEGOER: WRITINGS ON BRUCE WILLIS, BADASS CINEMA AND OTHER IMPORTANT TOPICS. It’s a collection of some of my (and your) favorite reviews and it comes out– well, I thought at the end of this month, but Amazon says April 27th now. I’ll have to ask my publisher. Anyway, please help me spread the word on this one, I’m not sure how the hell I’m gonna convince people to buy it, but I think we all agree that if they do buy it it will change their lives forever and make their children smarter and possibly even work as some sort of a renewable fuel source. Also it smells like Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler.

You give up? Okay, it’s Bruce Willis in the video.

RANK is another John Hyams documentary in the tradition of THE SMASHING MACHINE, but this one’s in the world of professional bullriding. In both sports Hyams has documented so far the athletes break parts of themselves that they aren’t gonna be able to fix. And the filmatistic approach he used in SMASHING MACHINE ain’t broke so he doesn’t fix that either: it’s almost-direct cinema (just following people around, but they do talk to the camera sometimes), hypnotic score, themes that make themselves apparent and don’t need to be underlined. This time around it looks like he got better cameras, though. The cinematography is outstanding.

Hyams follows the finalists in the 2004 Professional Bull Riders World Championship, a 7-day event in Las Vegas. He also follows a bull trainer hoping to become Livestock Trader of the Year. We meet these people on their ranches and with their families and then we see them transported to this stadium in the middle of Las Vegas. There’s a great montage of traditional Vegas sights underlayed with country guitar as the rodeo fans all shuffle in in the daylight.

This is gonna sound outrageous, but I never gave bullriding much thought before. It just never came up, you know? RANK does a good job of explaining how it works, and of leaving you trying to figure out why they do it. They gotta hold onto the bull and have one hand in the air for 8 seconds, or they get no points. If they make it they’re judged half on their riding and half on the bull’s bucking. There doesn’t seem to be much art to it, and more balls and grit than skills.

The injuries these people sustain make MMA look like some girls having a tickle fight. As the days of the competition go on they get more and more beat to shit, hobbling around, showing off their misplaced bones and giant yellow bruises. One guy laughingly reveals that he’s had a giant blood blister covering one entire side of his ass and legs for days. Another guy talks about the time he got gored but luckily it didn’t hit any organs or infect him.

Then they reveal that you’re allowed to wear a helmet and protective vest, but most of these guys are too stubborn to, too traditional. I mean, what is the fun in risking getting stomped to death if your skull and brain are partially protected? It just wouldn’t have the same magic.

You think that’s rough? What about the bullfighters? They’re there to attract the bull’s attention away from the rider when he falls off. They get butted through the air, sometimes gored or stepped on. They used to dress as clowns, but now they’re treated as athletes and wear vests with corporate logos on them like NASCAR.

The big question you have to wonder about while watching this is what the hell inspires people to do this? As a city guy I figured well, if you’re raised around cattle it probly seems more sane. But one guy’s father says people accused him of abusing his son because he had him riding broncos or something as a kid. We also see a tiny little kid doing just that, taming wild horses, keeping them under control, and it’s a freakish sight. How is this kid gonna collect all the pokeymans when he’s spending all his afternoons wrestling the beast out of wild animals?

This one guy, I think his name was Justin, but he’s a real interesting character. He seems really nice, is very religious, also you gotta worry just looking at him. He’s young and boyish, but has a big line in his hair where his head was split open one time. And the rhythm of his speech seems just a tiny bit off. He’s got a wife in the crowd, and another guy has his wife and young kids, and it doesn’t look like it’s fun for them to watch. There’s a great shot near the end of the winner embracing his wife as everybody celebrates his victory, but to me her face looks less like “He did it! He’s the world champion!” than like “We just survived a plane crash – I need some sleep.” I mean, it’s more like the end of THE PIANIST than ROCKY II.

These guys are shown to be very nice, with nothing but professional respect for each other, and in some cases they are very selfless and good friends. But there’s an aspect to them that is questionable. My favorite scene has Justin I believe visiting with his mom. She talks proudly about his accomplishments and how he’s like his father, who died riding a bull right before he was born. But as she’s talking about watching her son she starts to cry. And you gotta wonder how moral it is to put your loved ones through that. That’s a question explicitly asked in Eric Bana’s racing documentary LOVE THE BEAST and the wrestling documentary BEYOND THE MAT, and it’s implicit in THE SMASHING MACHINE. But of all those sports this seems the most questionable to me. The fighters and wrestlers put on these long performances, they’re hurt but almost never die in the ring. The drivers construct their cars for safety. But these guys risk death for 8 seconds or less of pissing off cattle. We know a guy was killed last season. A guy from the PBR says he can try to talk people out of riding with injuries, but he can’t stop them if they want to do it. And that’s basically what the contest seems to be about. It’s 50% grip and 50% surviving heinous injuries.

That drive, that illogical obsession, is what makes a documentary like this great. It makes you wish you had something you loved so much you were willing to maim yourself for it. And also it makes you glad you don’t.

WRONG SIDE OF TOWN is not horror, it’s a B-or-lower action movie more along the lines of POINT DOOM (a terrible Richard Grieco movie that DeFalco wrote and appeared in). It belongs to the new subgenre of DTV action movies starring lesser known WWE stars*, a sister-genre of the DTV action movies starring guys from UFC. It stars Rob Van Dam (named for his slight resemblance to Jean-Claude, I assume) as Bobby Kalinowsky, a former Navy SEAL who is in the wrong place (i.e. side of town) at the wrong time and ends up in the crosshairs of a drug dealer or something. A club owner anyway. A guy who wears suits and has henchmen.

Bobby has to get across town when everybody’s trying to kill him, like in THE WARRIORS. Also his daughter gets kidnapped. At one point he explains his predicament as, “A neighbor invited Donna and I to a club and we got into some trouble.” That would also be a good title.

Rob Van Dam is… A NEIGHBOR INVITED DONNA AND I TO A CLUB… AND WE GOT INTO SOME TROUBLE!

See, the couple who just moved in next door invite them to dinner at this club, The Mayan. When the ladies go to the bathroom and the neighbor gets back before Donna, Bobby immediately jumps up and runs to help, as if this is a sure sign of trouble. He happens to be right, because the coked out co-owner of the club, left in charge for only an hour, tried to hit on Donna and is now pinning her down in a backroom trying to rape her. Bobby tosses him around, the creep pulls out a knife, accidentally falls onto it and dies.

Now the club owner guy has made sure everybody in town (at least on this side) is trying to kill Bobby. Luckily he has some skills. “As far as trained killers go,” we’re told, “this guy’s the elite of the elite.” He can get the cops to leave him alone just by pulling out the “Special Services” ID card that he keeps loose in his pocket, although he doesn’t try that trick until the second time he’s in an interrogation room. He’s believably tough and does some pretty good stunts, but doesn’t have the grace of the “elite of the elite,” more like the stiff movements of a guy who’s injured every body part known to science in the ring. But he tries to use his wits to get out of messes, not just brawn, and he knows how to do self bullet removal and what not. He’s surprisingly worldly for a dude with that shaved-on-the-sides/ponytail hair cut and an ugly Ed Hardy type t-shirt with a sequin cross over his heart.

This is not what most people would call “a good or above average movie.” There’s not even trace amounts of imagination in it, most of the acting is bad, the dialogue is stiff and lazy (when they need somewhere to meet they just call it “the abandoned pier by the bridge.” What the fuck is an abandoned pier anyway? How do you know a boat’s not gonna show up?) And with the exception of one fight which I’ll get to later none of the action is very well choreographed or staged. I also gotta say that as much as I didn’t like CHAOS there was something to be said for the rawness of it, and the lack of music. Now that DeFalco’s making a movie with a sense of humor he’s got a cheesier look and slathers the thing in shitty metal and rap songs that just pile on top of the scenes instead of work with them.

But I’m glad I chose not to spend the four or five years since CHAOS training to face The Demon in the ring in case I had to negatively review his next movie, because the truth is I got a kick out of WRONG SIDE OF TOWN and would recommend it to others who enjoy DTV action for the not necessarily intentional quirks that make them a little more charming and funny than their higher budget counterparts. You can no longer say something like this is “good for DTV” because it’s so clearly obliterated on every artistic or spiritual level by UNDISPUTED II, BLOOD AND BONE, NINJA or of course UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION. But it’s some goofy shit that made me smile, starting with its James Bond style opening credits (when was the last time you saw a movie where a silhouetted woman actually lip synchs the theme song?)

The script is made up almost entirely of recycled materials, the oldest cliches possible (the old Navy buddy who he saved the life of who now saves him and says they’re “even”, etc.) but some of them aren’t all the way thought through, and that makes for some good entertainment. For example, when Bobby finally gets to the right side of town his wife tells him they kidnapped his daughter and, “They said they were gonna kill her if you didn’t come rescue her!” That’s their demand. Not “give us a million dollars” or “promise to leave town” or even “turn yourself in,” but “come rescue her.”

Another good one is when some thugs seeking the bounty on his head have him at gunpoint and he tricks them by saying, “You shoot me you lose the money and the diamonds.” He tells them a phony story about the boss being after him because he has diamonds in his sock. Although skeptical about his claim they at least accept the logic that if they shot him it would be impossible to then take diamonds out of his sock.

And I wouldn’t dream of giving away the big twist at the end. Okay, I’ll give it away. Turns out that the brother of the club owner who was killed was actually… his son. So that’s the true reason why he was so mad. It wasn’t because his brother was killed, it was his son, but he pretended they were brothers. That changes everything, right? You almost want to go back to watch it from the beginning to see if there were any hints. A real mindblower.

Most people wouldn’t care about this, but I appreciate that it has a few subtle tweaks on action movie business as usual. The hero’s wife looks more normal than usual, and is at least in her mid-thirties. They save the hot twentysomething to play the daughter. Although Ja Rule is in the movie briefly there’s not a wisecracking or streetwise black sidekick – in fact it’s a nerdy black architect sidekick. He doesn’t jump around acting scared like Martin Lawrence, though he later lays in bed and talks about wishing he had done more to help. It’s not the usual minstrel show shit. After escaping some street thugs he says, “We’ve come a long way from slavery to Obama. You need to stop using the n-word. It’s disrespectful.”

Director David "The Demon" DeFalco

I honestly think whatever charm is in the movie actually comes from DeFalco. Even though I think he overreacted to me calling him a “dipshit” in my review, I do think it’s cool that there’s a guy like him out there who straddles the worlds of wrestling, horror conventions, movies about “pit fighters” and softcore porn. Because of that unusual background he seems to be able to flush alot of interesting weirdos out of the fringes of L.A. (even though this one was filmed in Baton Rouge). Here he’s got this goofy looking wrestler trying to be a square family man, getting chased by a motley crew of rappers, wrestlers, bodybuilders, dudes with mohawks and blue hair, a guy who looks like Ric Flair without muscles, bouncer types with ZZ Top beards, and even DeFalco himself leading a gang who attack Bobby at a gas station. When he goes to ask an old friend for a favor he finds him sitting in a club next to Stormy Daniels with her tits casually hanging out. This is a world where you can be walking down the street and suddenly a guy with a skeleton bandana over his face drives by on a motorcycle and whips you with a chain. You beat him up, steal his motorcycle and luckily already own a helmet. This is my reality, Roger Ebert.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice though is that they cast the wrong guy in the lead. Nothing against Van Dam (well, maybe against his haircut). He seems like a charming guy in the interviews on the disc, but in the movie has a typical retired NFL player level of movie star charisma. But there’s another wrestler I wasn’t familiar with, Dave Batista, who plays his old friend Big Ronnie, and that guy is great! He’s monstrously tall, has an interesting face and a strong screen presence, and of course is only in a supporting role. And it almost seems like the movie figures out he’s the more interesting one because Big Ronnie ends up having a longer and more involved fight at the climax than Bobby. A henchman who spent the rest of the movie standing around in sunglasses looking like Sticky Fingaz suddenly turns out to be a great martial artist – he’s played by Marrese Crump, the movie’s fight trainer (whose only other credit on IMDb is a GI Joe fan film). Crump and Batista have a long martial arts battle and knife fight while Van Dam just knocks the main villain over and snaps his neck in about 5 seconds.

Big Ronnie also gets the best shot in the movie, when he abandons Bobby to be killed (partly because he’s mad that he never invites him out to dinner) and then you see him in vivid color in the foreground stopping and thinking about it before changing his mind and deciding to save him.

Wait a minute – I just went to get the cover art and realized the cover has Batista in the foreground, five times bigger than Van Dam, with his name at the top in a much bigger font. Van Dam, the actual star of the movie, is standing in the background on equal footing with Ja Rule, who just has a cameo. Now I feel bad for the guy. Sorry Van Dam. At least he gets his name ahead of Omarion from YOU GOT SERVED (I’m not sure who he played in the movie). And they spelled Batista’s name wrong. I guess it all evens out.

The extras unfortunately don’t have much of Dave the Demon, you see him on set but there are no interviews, commentaries or visits to morgues. This is not the movie that opens the Doorway to True Evil that he talked about back in the CHAOS days. But for a shitty wrestler movie it’s pretty watchable – I definitely enjoyed it more than some of the official WWE Films releases like THE CONDEMNED and THE MARINE. I hope he continues in this direction but lets his freak flag fly even higher, and maybe then everybody will stand up and pledge allegiance to it.

Also, let’s get this Batista guy in some more movies. In real life his badass juxtaposition is that he collects metal lunchboxes:

*By this I guess I mean anybody less mainstream popular than Stone Cold Steve Austin. From reading Wikipedia it’s clear that Van Dam is a superstar in wrestling, but I figure since I didn’t really know who he was exactly then nobody who doesn’t watch wrestling ever heard of him. I might have seen him before though when I watched wrestling in the ’80s because it says he was an audience plant who got paid $100 to kiss the foot of “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase.

The opening got me right away because it’s a voiceover on top of fight footage, and something seems wrong. The gentle, almost nerdy voice that’s talking to us doesn’t seem to match this muscleman we’re watching use his bare hands and feet to take flesh that God shaped in His own image and reconfigure it into an ugly pile of of bruise and injury. If Mark Kerr called you on the phone and said, “I’m the Smashing Machine,” you’d hear his voice and you’d never believe him. You’d hang up. But it’s true, he’s the Smashing Machine. And also a nice, thoughtful guy.

Kerr started as a wrestler – not pro-wrestling, the other kind – but he needed money and found out about this fighting circuit in Thailand. (Same way people get into porn.) He laughs about being so terrified he couldn’t sip a Dixie cup of water without throwing up. But he destroyed the guy and never looked back. He fights UFC until they get banned from cable, then goes to Japan for Pride FC. But during the filming he loses a fight for the first time ever, then has to back out of another one.

The problem, the movie shows, is a lack of focus. He has two major distractions.

1. His girlfriend Dawn, who he’s stupid enough to bring to fights with him, and she gets needy and tries to get his attention even while he’s trying to focus before a fight. Also she gets him to go out drinking when he should be training and gets in big crazy fights with him when he should be sleeping.

2. Drugs. Man, this guy is really addicted to painkillers. He makes THE WRESTLER look like a lightweight. You should see how many syringes and pill bottles he has laying around. WHen he decides to quit and gathers up all the shit he has it fills up a whole grocery bag.

The movie is perfectly crafted to put you into the mentality of a fighter. This is sort of the idea I got from the movie: in the beginning, men fought. Then they found out about women and chemicals. That made them not as good.

The people who are the best are the ones completely dedicating their lives to fighting. You watch this movie and every time Dawn shows up you think “Uh oh, he’s gonna blow it.” At one point he’s broken up with her and things seem to be going well. Then all the sudden he’s in training and she’s there, all gussied up too like she’s trying to lure him. (Same way Bugs Bunny defeated some of his foes.) They reveal her presence a piece at a time – first a shot of her high heel, then a piece of her short skirt. It’s like she’s the shark in JAWS.

This is my favorite type of documentary, the verite or direct cinema style, fly on the wall – but assuming that this particular fly that’s on the wall is a great storyteller. This is the same instincts that made UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION, the ones that don’t try to spell everything out for you. And they’re very good at leaving things unsaid until they’re important, then give you just enough information when it’s needed.

The story of Mark Kerr at this time is the story of a guy who loses his discipline, loses his edge, but at least got sober. Otherwise he’d be dead. But the story of THE SMASHING MACHINE is the story of Kerr and his buddy Mark Coleman, a fighter who seems to have given up on his dream so he can help others who still have a shot. But then while Kerr is in rehab Coleman stages a huge comeback. It ends cutting between the two guys after a big tournament, a contrast of highs and lows. Some people get to the top of the world, some just lay there and cry. Everybody gets beat up.

I have to admit that I groaned when the end told me Mark and Dawn later got married. These events leave you believing in a strict kicks-before-chicks credo. She seemed like a bad influence who got him drinking beer when he should’ve been totally clean and had to always cause drama at the exact times that it would fuck him over. After he loses the first match of his career she says she knew he would, because he wasn’t training that hard, and the other night they went out partying. As if she couldn’t have said anything at the time. I mean obviously it’s his fault, but what kind of a girlfriend doesn’t say anything when you’re flushing your dreams down the toilet?

The movie made me hate her, but that’s from the POV of wanting to see him be this perfect warrior. From the perspective of a human being though maybe family is more important than smashing. I hope they both sobered up and were good for each other. On a commentary track the director and producer both say that Dawn is actually a nice person and that they kept wishing Mark would quit fighting for his own good. So maybe it’s better in the long run.

Anyway, Coleman has a wife and two daughters, he still has the edge. So you don’t necessarily have to be a monk.

If you rent it be sure to also check out Hyams’ 35-minute short documentary FIGHT DAY, which is one of the special features. Seemingly made out of outtakes from SMASHING MACHINE, FIGHT DAY follows Renzo Gracie of the famous Gracie Brazilian Jui-Jitsu empire through the course of a day when he has a big fight. My favorite part is how it shows a big event from the perspective of a guy waiting backstage. You see all these incredible fighters warming up, preparing themselves mentally, going out to fight. But it stays with Gracie and doesn’t show what happened in their fights. Suddenly, they reappear with puffy faces, covered in blood and cuts, some of them not happy about what has happened. He looks at them and then looks away, trying to stay focused.

THE SMASHING MACHINE is a great documentary. I watched it a few days after first seeing REGENERATION, and it’s really stuck with me in the weeks since then. Whether he’s doing a documentary or the fourth sequel to a Roland Emmerich movie, Hyams has an eye for what’s interesting and how to mold it into the best story. This guy is no joke. I hope he has more in the works.

The guy that plays Leno is Daniel Roebuck, who also plays talk show host Morris Green in the Rob Zombie pictures. And he was in BUBBA HO-TEP. Letterman is played by John Michael Higgins (BLADE: TRINITY). It’s also populated with character actors like Bob Balaban and Ed Begley Jr. playing executives whose names you used to hear all the time in the ’80s and ’90s but never really paid attention to who they were. Treat Williams plays Letterman’s super agent Michael Ovitz, so it’s the guy from the SUBSTITUTE sequels playing the guy who got Seagal into movies. The director is Betty Thomas, a fairly respected filmatist at the time because THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE and then PRIVATE PARTS were better than anybody expected. But I just looked it up and it turns out her most recent directorial work is ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS THE SQUEAKQUEL, so I guess that’s how that story ended.

I know many of you aren’t in the U.S., so you’ve never seen these shows anyway. To help you out, The Tonight Show is the grandfather of all American late night talk shows, having started with Steve Allen in ‘54 (then hosted by Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien for 7 months, and Leno again from Monday until he snaps). Letterman is another talk show host who had a show that aired after Johnny Carson for 10 years but when Carson retired and they chose Leno to replace him he got mad and moved to CBS where he is now the direct competition of The Tonight Show.

You know, let me try this a different way. Letterman is the guy who tries to sell a monkey to Chris Elliot in CABIN BOY. Leno did the buddy movie COLLISION COURSE with Pat Morita, and showed off his cars to Eric Bana in LOVE THE BEAST. For Americans, though, they’re constant TV fixtures, so to see someone playing them can be pretty silly, like a Saturday Night Live skit. Saturday Night Live is an American TV show also. You know the movie IT’S PAT, that came from Saturday Night Live. Make sense? Okay, I think we’re all on the same page here.

Accepting an actor imitating a familiar real life person is always a challenge for any celebrity bio. For my brain anyway it’s a bigger hurdle than the usual suspension-of-disbelief. It’s weird to see a guy who was in VAMPIRE’S KISS wearing a baseball hat, chewing a cigar, having a dramatic discussion with his agent on a beach and continually launching into familiar Letterman shtick. But as the viewer it is our responsibility to just try to go with it, otherwise the movie is fucked. In this one it took a bit, but I was ultimately able to project my consciousness into an alternate reality where this guy with the fake chin and cartoonishly high voice is the real Leno.

The Leno of the movie is a nice guy, but still kind of a weasel. He has a Ronald Reagan (Ronald Reagan was a president we had in the United States from 1980-1988) plausible deniability approach – his manager breaks the fingers and he doesn’t have to know about it. So from the movie’s POV it’s all Kathy Bates’s fault. She’s the bitch who played dirty to get him to the top, even creating press leaks designed to pressure Carson to retire. Can you believe that shit? In the movie Leno is pissed that she lied to him about it, and in reality she sued the publisher of the book for that claim and they settled out of court. But just the idea of it, man. You always remember Carson retiring as being this sad goodbye to a guy that wanted to hang it up and settle down, so to think that actually he was pushed into that position by some horrible person trying to get a good gig for her client… that’s fucking awful.

Also she got M.A.S.H. cancelled. And she killed Bambi’s mom.

I mean, as portrayed in the movie this bitch is a supervillain. As producer of the Tonight Show she throws a fit because Ronald Reagan’s (see, it was important that I explain who that was earlier, it came up again) speech at the GOP convention goes long and delays their broadcast. She calls up NBC News yelling and swearing at them to cut him off. She’s so horrible I think even Jello Biafra would’ve been like, “Hey, lay off the old man.”

All of this seems pretty dated, more of a re-enactment of Variety headlines than an insightful exposee. But of course it takes on new relevance in light of recent events. (Note to readers of the future: Conan O’Brien was recently pushed out after 7 months of hosting The Tonight Show and Jay Leno returned even though he had pretended to willingly pass the torch. By the way do you guys have sex robots yet?) The Leno of this movie seems like you would imagine the Leno that would say yes to that deal. He wants everyone to like him and he’s not malicious, but when it comes down to it he’ll gladly reap rewards he didn’t earn. As long as he didn’t get his hands bloody he’ll chew the meat. You can tell that in his head he’s trying to justify it to himself. The putting-your-hands-over-your-ears-and-singing-Mary-Had-A-Little-Lamb ethical defense. His whole approach here is to grimace at the ugliness but then sit there and not say anything against it. Then maybe he’ll luck out and nobody will blame him.

Even giving up on his manager when he does is mighty convenient. Sure, he stands up to her – when it’s best for his career. Before he just cringed and looked embarrassed, only now that it’s the easier choice does he disavow her.

Not that Letterman’s exactly a samurai here either. He’s angry at NBC because they know he wants the job and he’s been loyal to them for 10 years, and they give it to the guest host. Letterman’s like a long time worker passed over for a promotion that went to an outside hire. It makes sense for him to be mad. But when Leno already has the show and Dave’s got a better deal set up at CBS he still wants to accept an offer to take over The Tonight Show. Nobody thinks he should do it, and one person mentions that it would be screwing over Leno. But the decision doesn’t come down to ethics, just that CBS offers more money and security.

It’s funny, watching this now makes Leno seem nicer than I think of him as, but it really reminds you how hypocritical he is in this Conan deal. At the time of that fight he was getting weak ratings and was struggling to come out from under Carson’s shadow. His producer claims he represents a new, younger audience. Now it’s Leno replacing the guy who didn’t get a chance, and he’s also the old guy who supposedly got pushed out. But he doesn’t mind. He’ll go along with that. I guess he thinks he’s Johnny.

All this seems to have reignited the Letterman/Leno feud a little bit, judging by the guests lined up for Letterman this week. Monday begins Leno’s Bush v. Gore style return to The Tonight Show, but be sure not to watch because 1. if anything funny happens it’ll be online 2. Letterman has Bill Murray on, always a funny guest. For Tuesday Leno has Sarah Palin, so Letterman got Mitt Romney (you can’t tell me that wasn’t a calculated move to take a few Republican ratings away from Leno). For the rest of the week he’s got Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Hanks and Matt Damon (going head-to-head with Morgan Freeman on Leno – INVICTUS fans will have to choose a side).

So it’s funny, because the “Late Night Wars” shown in this made-for-cable movie seem like so long ago, but the effects still linger, like Agent Orange or PTSD. Whatever you do don’t draw first blood on these guys.