So Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face with a shotgun. Big fuckin deal. I know it sounds like some cold blooded badass shit for a guy to do but keep in mind it was AN ACCIDENT. So it doesn’t make him tough. Being clumsy is nothing to brag about.
I know this is last week’s scandal but I want to spend a couple paragraphs on it because you can’t help but draw parallels between Cheney’s flurry of buckshot and every other colossal mess these morons have created. Have you heard the details of the hunting setup at this place? They were hunting domesticated, flightless, penned in quail. And even still, they had to DRIVE UP to the place where the domesticated, flightless, penned in quail are. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Actually not even that. It’s like driving up to a barrel full of fish that can’t swim and shooting them. That’s not hunting, real hunters don’t do that kind of shit. It’s just animal cruelty. What I’m saying is this is classic Bush administration: set out to do something that is morally wrong, then do such a bad fuckin job of it that it turns out way worse than anyone could’ve imagined it would.
As you know I have personally flipped off Dick Cheney from less than ten feet away, so I’ve looked into the eyes of the abyss. I know the type of individual we are dealing with here. We are talking a HARD TARGET type of individual. I have no doubt in my mind that Dick Cheney would like to let loose some homeless vets or hurricane refugees on his private compound and go hunting for the Most Dangerous Game. Fortunately this is a rare case where the guy realizes the limits of his capabilities. He would not be able to hunt Ice-T or Jean-Claude Van Damme, because he can’t shoot for shit. I am positive – though I don’t want to test this out because it would be too dangerous – that any child, even a child without fingers, could be handed a gun and would get closer to hitting the quail than this bald bastard did. If it was ethical to do, this would be scientifically proven. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 26th, 2006 | 13 Comments »
I finally got off my ass and saw THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA. If you are a fan of the films of badass cinema I recommend you also get off your ass. Also I just added a short review of a Steve McQueen movie, THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR.
February 25th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
This movie is directed by and starring Mr. Tommy Lee Jones (UNDER SIEGE) and it’s a western, even though it takes place today. It might be the first western with cell phones. As far as I could tell there were only two literal burials of Melquiades Estrada depicted in the movie so I figure the other one is some kind of metaphor.
Tommy plays Pete, a Texas ranch hand with unspecified past, and his best friend Melquiades is played by a guy named Julio Cesar Cedillo. He’s not in the movie as much as Pete though, because he’s dead. The movie opens with some good ol’ boys driving around with guns and they see a coyote chewing on something, and they shoot it. Then when they go to gather up the sweet, sweet coyote meat they notice that what the coyote was chewing on was The One Dead Body of Melquiades Estrada.
Poor Melquiades – dead and the cops don’t seem to give a shit. We don’t know it at first but it’s pretty easy to figure out that the culprit was this asshole border guard named Mike Norton (Barry Pepper from THE 25TH HOUR). He’s a scary Timothy Mcveigh looking motherfucker who obviously doesn’t get much joy out of life but does like to throw in a little of the unneccessary roughness when chasing illegal immigrants. This guy is a real asshole and you expect him to be over the top evil. But the shooting is an accident, a misunderstanding.
Doesn’t matter though. Pete is pretty pissed off about his best friend being dead, and even moreso when the sherriff, Dwight Yoakam, doesn’t notify him and just has Estrada quickie-buried with a little cross that says “Melquiades, Mexico” on it in sharpie. See, Melquiades once made Pete promise to have him buried in his home town. So Pete finds out Mike is responsible, kidnaps him at gunpoint, forces him to dig up Melquiades and then they head on horseback to Mexico to find the home town and bury him. And that’s what most of the movie is about.
So no, it’s not a remake of THREE WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. Similar, maybe. I haven’t seen that one. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 25th, 2006 | No Comments »
This movie stars Steve McQueen as a bank robber, which automatically makes it worth seeing. And this is a good movie. But to be honest it doesn’t live up to its reputation or its potential. I know that Steve McQueen, like me, was someone who often could be spotted out and about striving for excellence. So I don’t think he would have a problem with me holding him to a high standard of achievement.
The first thing you’ll notice about the movie is that it’s very stylish. The opening and various other scenes use split-screen up the wazoo, splitting the screen into something like six different little boxes to show the different people intersecting for a heist. The cinematographer is Haskell Wexler (see TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE above for more on him) so despite all the showoffery in the editing alot of the footage is very handheld, documentary looking, like you’re there. Alot of the scenes are just dialogue-free footage of Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown fucking around. For example he flies in a glider or drives around really fast in a dune buggy. The dune buggy footage is pretty spectular, it seems like he’s about to flip over at any moment and you can’t help but notice he’s got no roll bars above his head.
After the opening heist, the rest of the movie is about a hot insurance investigator (Faye Dunaway) tracking down the mastermind Thomas Crown and seducing him, toying with him, falling in love with him and finally realizing maybe she doesn’t want to bust him. It reminded me a little bit of OUT OF SIGHT and the whole romance between bank robber and federal marshall. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 25th, 2006 | No Comments »
I don’t know if you ever saw that Nick Broomfield documentary BIGGIE AND TUPAC. It’s a pretty good one, but I mention it because it had this one part that kind of threw me off. At one point in the narration, Broomfield claims that the government had Tupac under surveillance. It seemed believable, but the movie doesn’t back it up or mention it again and I’ve never seen it explored since then. I just wondered if this was true why the documentary didn’t explore it at all. I mean that seems like a pretty big story to me.
This movie is not exactly that story, but almost. It’s about a special task force of the NYPD set up specifically to spy on famous rappers. At first the movie kind of seems like it’s full of shit. They interview various A-list and B-list rappers who sort of brag about getting harassed by cops. In particular I noticed there was a white dude named Pitbull who bragged that “the hip hop cops” must be following him, he bets, in his opinion. I almost turned the movie off at this point figuring this was going to be the level of documentation they were willing to settle for. Some dumbass white rapper you never heard of claiming that MAYBE people are spying on him. Not because he has noticed being spied on, but because he’s fuckin PITBULL, man. Why wouldn’t they spy on him?
But then right away the movie actually proves that it’s not full of shit. They talk to some journalists in Miami who were the first to prove the existence of the long rumored “hip hop cops.” It started with a reporter who did a profile on some local rapper, and later she received a letter from the police department asking for contact information on this rapper, and the letter specifically stated that it was for a database the Miami Police Department was keeping on rappers. The reporter was smart enough to realize there was a story there and investigated until she uncovered that the Miami rap squad had been trained by the long-rumored-but-never-before-proven-to-exist task force in New York. And specifically she found a retired cop named Derrick Parker who had started the task force. Apparently the NYPD still hasn’t officially admitted to its existence, but Parker and other retired cops tell all about it. None of them think there’s anything wrong with the task force so they’re pretty open about it. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 24th, 2006 | No Comments »
You know what movie I’m excited about? Let me tell you. A while back I reviewed this old Tommy Lee Jones movie called THE PARK IS MINE. I mentioned in the review how it was based on a book and the guy who wrote the book didn’t have too many movies he was involved in but he did happen to be the guy who wrote the brilliant script for WILD THINGS. Well now Scott Peters (WILD THINGS) is back with a movie called BACKSTABBERS. It will be directed by John McNaughton (WILD THINGS) and is expected to star Neve Campbell (WILD THINGS) and Denise Richards (WILD THINGS). I don’t know about you but to me this is great news, a chance to make up for that WILD THINGS 2-3 bullshit and have another great fucked up ridiculous over-the-top sleazy crime thriller masterpiece. Warning to nerds: if this movie is bad, it will be my PHANTOM MENACE. You will not hear the end of it. That is a promise.
Anyway here’s a review of a shitty late ’90s crime movie I saw called THURSDAY starring Thomas Jane.
February 17th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
This poor bastard Skip Woods. How was he supposed to know? He stumbles across this winning formula of late ’90s independent quirky crime drama, and it just so happens that another individual, somebody named Quentin Tarantino, has already done it.
You gotta feel sorry for Skip. How was he supposed to know that Tarantino loved to take larger than life movie archetypes and show the mundane parts of their lives? Like this opening scene where three criminals who obviously don’t realize how annoying they are (Aaron Ekchart, Paulina Porezkova, James LeGros) stop in a convenience store after a big score to get coffee, and argue over the price until they end up killing the clerk and then have to pretend to work there when a cop comes in. And how could Skip have known that when he has the cop ask, for no reason, whether Eckhart prefers Picard or Kirk… that it JUST MIGHT look like he was some fuckin idiot jackass blatantly and embarassingly trying to copy the most superficial elements of Tarantino’s formula?
I mean let’s face it, Tarantino is not the only person who enjoys wacky intertitles to divide his stories into chapters. Or scenes where people are duct taped to chairs being casually tortured. Or criminals who casually use racial slurs and deliver random trivia about the Roman empire or porno films. Or people in the suburbs trying to clean up huge bloody messes before their wives get home. Or criminals stopping to tell each other colorful stories. Or all the other shit that this movie does that happens to be exactly what was done way better in Tarantino’s movies. I mean, Tarantino doesn’t have a copyright on the exact rhythm and tone of the speech Dennis Hopper famously delivers to Christopher Walken in TRUE ROMANCE, so why is it so wrong for Skip to COMPLETELY INNOCENTLY AND INDEPENDENTLY come up with a seemingly asinine and clueless dipshit retread of that speech for Thomas Jane to deliver? I mean he put his own spin on it anyway. For some reason an angry, heavily armed black drug dealer is willing to sit back passively as Jane gets in his face with a blatantly racist and personally insulting speech questioning the size of his dick. This unbelievable element adds a kind of poorly thought out and/or magic realism vibe to it that makes it COMPLETELY different from Tarantino. I mean come on. Skip Woods is an original. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 17th, 2006 | 1 Comment »
I’m a little behind schedule here but I got my review of BUBBLE, Steve Soderbergh’s new movie/DVD/cable show. Also in case you missed it I had a couple Ain’t It Cool pieces this week: 2001 MANIACS and of course the Walt Disney heroic snow dogs movie EIGHT BELOW INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY. Warning: they don’t actually have that line about there being “eight heroes out there” in the movie.
February 14th, 2006 | No Comments »
I might’ve mentioned before, I like this Steve Soderbergh guy. Number one, he knows what the fuck he’s doing. Number two, he does what the fuck he wants. He’s the epitome of the guy who does smart but crowdpleasing commercial movies (OCEAN’S 11, ERIN BROCKOVICH) then turns around and makes a crazy no budget weird ass movie (SCHIZOPOLIS, FULL FRONTAL). I wish he’d make more badass crime movies like THE LIMEY and OUT OF SIGHT but that’s just me. If I could tell him what to do that would violate number two (see above). A violation like that would probaly ruin the roll he’s on and all the sudden he’d start doing half-assed FINAL DESTINATION sequels or something.
Now that this guy has a best director Oscar (for TRAFFIC), a Criterion Edition (for SCHIZOPOLIS), an outlaw award winner (THE LIMEY) and the all important misunderstood sequel (OCEAN’S 12), he decided there was one thing he was missing: a series of six digitally shot improvisational movies starring non-actors in their real home towns to be released in theaters, on dvd and on cable all at the same time. BUBBLE is the first in this ridiculous experiment and let’s be honest here. Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re getting into, you do know what you’re getting into. First motherfucker that watches BUBBLE and complains that it’s not INDIANA JONES gets a knuckle sandwich. This is not designed to entertain the whole world. It’s designed to be the type of movie you shoot quickly with a low budget on hi-def video and release on DVD at the same time as theaters.
In my opinion, this is a real good and unique movie. Of course I’m the guy who liked FULL FRONTAL so your mileage may vary, some restrictions may apply, professional driver do not attempt. In a way I think this one’s more accessible than FULL FRONTAL because it’s less pretentious and convoluted, more straightforward. On the other hand it is less accessible because instead of starring Julia Roberts and the dude from FRASIER, it stars the manager from an Ohio KFC who the casting director spotted while sitting in the drive-thru. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 14th, 2006 | No Comments »
Howdy fellas,
I’m only watching number movies this week. You saw my review of 2001 MANIACS. I’m planning on seeing THE THREE BURIALS OF (whoever it is, Miguel Arteta or somebody) but there was this screening of Walt Disney’s new picture EIGHT BELOW INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY, so I went to that first. This is a dog movie, and usually a movie like this would have a trailer set to either
a) “Bad to the Bone” or
b) “Atomic Dog”
and then the poster would say, “Every Dog Has His Snow Day” or some stupid shit like that, and the dogs would be wearing sunglasses and possibly giving a thumbs up, if dogs had thumbs. This one had a corny but serious trailer with no talking dogs, and the poster says “The Most Amazing Story Of Survival, Friendship, And Adventure Ever Told.” Well shit, I like most of those things. Especially friendship and adventure. Survival I guess I could take or leave, but when combined with friendship and adventure, and when it’s amazing, that might be pretty good. And they can’t say that in the ad if it’s not true, so how could it go wrong?
I’ll try to cut to the chase here because I saw that Master Worm already reviewed the movie a couple days ago. So I’ll back him up, this is actually a pretty decent adventure movie. Paul Walker plays Jerry, a guide for Antarctic expeditions who gets pressured into taking a scientist (Bruce Greenwood) on an unsafe journey looking for a meteorite. They’re worried the ice might crack so they take a sled pulled by eight dogs instead of a snowmobile. Jerry loves the dogs, he calls them his “kids,” he talks to them, and basically acts like he’s their coach. The section of the movie where they journey to the mountain to look for the meteorite is well executed, with lots of tense moments where it seems like a person or dog could go at any moment. In fact, the first time you even saw ice crack a kid in the theater started bawling. Actually, I think I would have to blame that on the general pussyness of the kid and not the movie itself. Come on parents, what the fuck are you doing with these kids, jesus. But it’s pretty suspenseful anyway. (read the rest of this shit…)
February 10th, 2006 | 3 Comments »
