This is awkwardness porn – uncomfortable like ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ but with very few laughs. The DVD cover, of course, has bright colors and cutesy chalkboard font with out of context quotes claiming it’s an “extremely entertaining” movie that “makes us feel” great.

This is a Noah Baumbach joint, so it’s very detailed and observant about all the ways Greenberg can be petty, arrogant and self absorbed. Unlike in Baumbach’s last one, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, there are at least some characters who aren’t assholes. Gerwig plays a more naturalistic version of a Zoe Deschanel type eccentric sweetheart. She’s kind of a space cadet but her worst crime is being forgiving of and wanting to spend time with this insufferable dickhead Greenberg. Same goes for Rhys Ifans as the overly charitable, screwed over friend and former bandmate who in my opinion puts up with too much of Greenberg’s bullshit. Greenberg insults this guy’s wife, endangers his hard-earned sobriety and doesn’t listen when he talks about things that are important to him, like his son. You’d think these nice characters might be some much needed sunshine on a rainy day, but instead it’s just depressing to see them get sucked into this miserable prick’s blackhole of negativity. They don’t deserve it.

I believe GREENBERG is the human GARFIELD. Garfield sits around calling everybody else stupid and being in love with his own thought balloons, so does Greenberg. Garfield gets completely unearned love and loyalty from his hapless owner, Greenberg from his drummer. Garfield mooches off his owner’s home and food without even performing his one expected duty of cathing a mouse, Greenberg stays at his brother’s house, eats his food and uses his assistant but doesn’t even finish building the lousy dog house he promised. Garfield is jealous of the cute kitten Nermal getting all the attention, Greenberg is jealous of his friends’ kids taking their attention away from him. Garfield binges on lasagna, Greenberg on coke. Garfield acts like he should get a congressional medal of honor for getting off his ass to try to save the dog from the trouble he himself caused, Greenberg does it because he makes a half-assed effort to care for the dog he’s supposed to be responsible for anyway and who it seemed like might’ve just gotten sick because Greenberg left him laying out in the sun with no water or food.

The only differences are 1. Greenberg is not orange or fat 2. He doesn’t specifically hate Mondays, just work, and 3. We know more of his backstory. The guy is obsesed with his relationships in the ’90s. One of the most effectively uncomfortable scenes is when Jennifer Jason Leigh, as his many-years-ago-now-is-grown-up-and-has-a-bunch-of-kids ex-girlfriend, agrees against all better judgment to go to lunch with him. He makes a big production of apologizing to her for some small thing he said to her like 15 years ago or something. Even though she doesn’t remember it or care he keeps talking about it. As the Jacksons once said, it’s torture. It’s obvious that he isn’t even sincere about apologizing, it’s just yet another bullshit way for him to draw attention to himself, trying to be a sensitive guy. Later he makes an even more painful fake apology to Florence which sounds phony and forced, then turns into fingerpointing, and he doesn’t even back down when called on his bullshit.

Greenberg when he was younger

Just like Garfield I want to punch this guy in the face but I feel like the movie wants me to put him on a t-shirt or at least suction cup him to the rear window of a mini-van. But I don’t know. Maybe we can learn more about Garfield by studying Greenberg. Maybe Garfield also needs to get beyond things that happened to him when he was young and showed promise. But if Greenberg is any indication he’s just gonna stay fat and bitter his whole life anyway so I’m not sure it’s worth spending the time to understand him.

Most people I know who saw GREENBERG loved it. I have to agree that it’s interesting and well made. Great casting and acting all around, observant and uniquely Baumbachian. It really wasn’t until the end that I knew for sure I didn’t like it. You watch these innocent people get shit on by this human Garfield, this reverse Focker who instead of absorbing humiliation just spits it out at everyone around him, and for what? At the end of the day all I was left with was “Yep, there was a real fucking asshole right there.” It even made me feel sorry for his rich brother having to put up with his shit from the other side of the planet.

Baumbach is also known for co-writing movies with Wesley Anderson, but they seem like opposites to me. Anderson seems like he loves everybody, Baumbach seems like he hates everybody. Until  the one with the fantastic foxes my favorite Anderson was ROYAL TENENBAUMS. In that movie Gene Hackman is a total asshole, but you love him and believe he’s trying to do better and when he fails you can usually get a good laugh out of it. If Baumbach himself is Garfield I guess Anderson is Ziggy. Anderson’s movies are about “assholes are people too.” Baumbach’s are just about “people are assholes.”

[ratings]

Maybe you can help me out: the “gamepod” controllers are little lumps of flesh, like mutated breasts. They plug a tentacle into a “bioport” on your spine, but if yours is installed wrong (which it turns out can happen if you let Willem Dafoe install yours at the gas station) it can overload your game pod and it will have to be repaired, which is a surgical procedure. The pods are actually genetically modified amphibians. There are alot of those little guys around, two-headed mutant lizards that look like praying mantises, or little blobs that crawl into the hole on your back and disappear inside you. It’s hard to figure out if you’re playing or if shit is just weird, and they try to trick you with video games within video games and fake “waking up from the game” sequences. The game responds to your thoughts but also gives you the urges of a game character in order to advance the plot, so you better distinguish which is which because you end up fucking or killing and sometimes you’re wrong and you weren’t supposed to do that. And you want to be sure you’re in the game because outside of the game those things have more consequences, in my opinion. And Jude Law as Ted Pikul notices that reality and game feel so close to each other that it’s kind of fucked up to want to kill somebody even if it is just a game.

Basically, this is the movie they were trying to make with SUPER MARIO BROTHERS but they didn’t have the technology to pull it off then.

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Allegra Geller, mother of Sarah Michelle Geller and a famous visionary game designer who survives an assassination attempt from a “realist” who sneaks into a focus group with a gun made of lizard bones and gristle that fires human teeth. (This is based on something that happened to the creator of Dig-Dug, if I remember right.)

Then she runs off with Pikul, an assistant PR guy who she mistakes for a bodyguard, introduces this “newbie” or “newber” I believe they’re called to her video game and they have various thrilling reality-bending encounters and what not. You know, crazy Cronbergian shit. NAKED LUNCH for people who are more into first person shooters than shooting up.

As a thriller it’s not real strong. It’s hard not to assume from the beginning that everything is a trick, so the various twists and turns are fun but never actually a shock. The weird Cronenberg New Flesh shit is some of the best ever, though. Everybody is so accepting and matter-of-fact about little living skin lumps used as gadgets. It’s like some fucked up William S. Burroughs version of THE FLINSTONES, except the gamepods never turn to the camera and squawk, “It’s a living.” I love this kind of movie that authentically captures the weirdness of the subconscious. There aren’t too many of them.

There’s a part where Jude Law’s driving and he says, “Oh, it’s my egg phone” and pulls out a little glowing, pulsating rectangularish slab of living tissue. As I’ve said before I’m of Luddite-American heritage, I do not carry a phone or covet an iPhone or any of that shit. But I would consider an eggPhone. I guess it depends what kind of plan you gotta get on. You sign a contract and you literally get a pound of flesh. Anyway this type of weirdo business is constant throughout the movie – bleeding gadgets, tooth guns, mutant meals, all with top of the line effects work. Just very real-looking, detailed animatronics plus one of the more bizarre digital characters in a movie so far.

I think people forget that Cronenberg’s movies were a big part of advancing the art and science of makeup effects. There was that couple of years there where Rick Baker and Rob Bottin did AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, THE HOWLING, THE THING and VIDEODROME. So it’s great to see Cronenberg almost 20 years later working with the new state of the art. The effects on this were overseen by Jim Isaac, who later directed Cronenberg as an actor in JASON X.

(By the way, I wanted to mention that I think it’s funny when people insist on imitating the typography of a movie logo in their reviews, the biggest example of course being when people type the movie “SEVEN” as “SE7EN”. But in the case of this one the characters actually say in the movie that it’s lower case e, capital X, lower case i – s – t – e – n – capital Z. If Morgan Freeman said, “He’s following the seven deadly sins. S – E – the number 7 – E – N” then I would extend the same courtesy.)

(And as long as I’m throwing in random parenthetical comments I got a bonus random parenthetical comment for you. You ever notice how many challenging, maybe flawed or controversial but smart or ambitious sci-fi movies Jude Law is in? ‘Cause there’s this one, GATTACA and A.I. – THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. I don’t think I’d count SKY CAPTAIN and I haven’t seen REPO MEN. But at least he’s got a trilogy here.)

I think this was a good place for Cronenberg to stop with this type of shit and become the David Cronenberg who did A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and EASTERN PROMISES. The New Flesh was starting to smell like Old Flesh and he’d taken it about as far as he could. I mean, what is he really saying with all this in eXistenZ? That our devices become extensions of ourselves. That video games (or movies or TV shows) show us what we ask for, that they open up the darkest dungeons of our minds, and even though we know it’s not real, isn’t it kind of real? Because it’s our real desire, our real fantasy, it’s what we want. We’re some weird fuckin mugwump perverts, whether we admit it or not, and our technology does our filthy bidding. This is all pretty interesting themes, but not at all profound, especially since he had most of that in VIDEODROME. I’m not sure if he knew that, because he said he hadn’t watched VIDEODROME in 15 years when he wrote this. But in many ways it feels like an update and I think he did a good job of making the technology timeless here by making it all organic. He won’t need to do a new one to deal with the eggPad or flesh messaging.

So thank you for your brave service Freaky Chest Vagina Cronenberg, but for now let’s keep you retired unless you get a chance to do something that could do real damage, like a HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL sequel or a remake of FOOTLOOSE or something.

I still liked it though. I’ve heard there are alot of people who hate it, but I’m sure they’re just video game nuts who don’t want us to know the truth.

[ratings]

Ah, shit. I don’t know how it works. But EYES OF A STRANGER is a good thriller about a slasher. Miami is being terrorized by a rapist-killer who stalks women, makes obscene phone calls, then attacks them. Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes from LOVE BOAT) is a news anchor so worried about this that she keeps ad-libbing about safety and catching the killer, making her co-anchor look uncomfortable like Mike Meyers standing next to Kanye West, and making for an awkward segue to the wacky-costume-wearing weatherman. The real reason she takes it personally is because her younger sister (introducing Jennifer Jason Leigh) was once kidnapped, and though she escaped she was so traumatized it made her blind, deaf and mute. Jane blames herself and is paranoid about it happening to her sister again.

It could happen – there have been bigger coincidences. For example, if Jane’s hunch is right then one of her neighbors is the killer. She noticed him doing something odd so she started spying on him. Next thing you know she’s harassing him the way he (allegedly) harasses his victims before he attacks them. EYES OF A STRANGER is a good title because first we’re with a woman, scared of the eyes that seem to be out there spying on her, knowing things about her. Then all the sudden we become the stranger, intruding on this guy in his apartment trying to relax after work, suspicious of him but not really knowing if he’s the guy or not. Man, we’re gonna feel like assholes if he’s not.

The highrise setting reminded me of John Carpenter’s SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME! (which was a couple years earlier, so this might be a ripoff). The phone calls reminded me of BLACK CHRISTMAS. The stalking scenes reminded me a little of HALLOWEEN. But it comes together into a flavor of its own. Even without being graphic it has a very seedy, sleazy kind of feel. The killer just looks like a normal guy, not a monster, and somehow that makes him even more appalling. If he had an eyeball hanging out or was wearing human skins you’d think okay, something went wrong with this guy a long time ago, out in some woods somwewhere, it’s not surprising that he’s on a rampage. But when it’s a normal guy wearing his work suit you think shit man, you know how to put on a tie. You should be a responsible member of society. Life has afforded you luxuries and opportunities that Jason and Leatherface never had.

I was rooting so hard against this prick when he went after Jennifer Jason Leigh. Remember, she’s blind, and the guy toys with her, moving objects around so she can’t find them, getting off on it. What a fuckin creep. Too bad he doesn’t bite it harder. This would’ve been a good one for a stabbed-in-both-eyes, hurled-through-the-sliding-glass-door, bounced-off-three-balconies-and-run-over-by-two-cars-and-a-city-bus-before-being-shot-by-a-line-of-cops type of death. But oh well, even without that it’s a clever and solid movie. Also there’s a part with a severed head in a fish tank.

One of the writers is Ron Kurz, who in the same year wrote FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2, one of my favorite straightahead slasher movies. So let that be entered into evidence. The director, Ken Wiederhorn, also did SHOCK WAVES and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD PART II (not to mention MEATBALLS PART II and KING FRAT). In ‘93 he did another suspense thriller called A HOUSE IN THE HILLS, but I don’t think my video store has it, so let me know if it’s worth looking for.

special thanks to Roachboy for suggesting this one (and anyone else who might’ve mentioned it and I forgot)

[ratings]

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Here’s one from Cannon Films and our friend Albert Pyun, but I’m sorry to say this is the most boring one I’ve seen so far in my back-to-school marathon. The idea behind it, at least, is different from the other ones I’ve seen. This time the school is overrun with troublemakers spraying graffiti and what not, but they’re not the bad guys – that would be The Sentinels, a group of fascist jocks who patrol Vista Verde High School to keep people in line. Their main job at school is just painting over graffiti, but outside of school they actually track people down wearing masks, beat the shit out of them and make them think they’re going to murder them, then leave them crying out in the middle of the woods. Don’t you hate popular kids?

The leader of the Sentinels is Randy, played by John Stockwell (also co-writer). He’s a rich kid (we know from the modern architecture on his house and his Corvette). He’s trying to get the editor of the school paper (also his pool boy, and the wimpy protagonist of the movie) to cover the Sentinels in a more positive light, so he invites him over, offers him a drink, and introduces him to his parents. Then some other stuff happens, muddily photographed. There are some parts with people silhouetted against eerily lit fog. That was kind of cool.

These guys are such assholes they go after a guy at home for “vandalizing” the school. I think their plan is to spraypaint his house or car or something, but he sees them and then they shoot at him. I think they’re really going after him because he’s the only black guy in school. He’s played by Miguel A. Nunez, Jr. – “Demon” from FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING and “Spider” from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Don Michael Paul is in there somewhere too. Whichever character is “Ripper,” that’s the director of HALF PAST DEAD.

The hero’s best friend (Bradford Bancroft) is named Krooger, but he calls himself “The Kroog Warrior.” He has a mohawk and a Mustang souped up in the tradition of MAD MAX. Maybe the funniest part of the movie is when he’s driving to school and pushes a button on his dashboard that says “deploy” and speakers raise out of the top of the car to blast everybody with cheesy rock music.

I don’t know man, this guy looks like Rambo compared to today’s chicken-legged rock stars, but I still have trouble thinking of a dude wearing eyeliner and dangly earrings as a tough guy. I don’t care how fingerless his gloves are.

These characters are not very interesting, some of them I can’t tell apart very well, the action is rarely exciting and there’s just no momentum to the story. I will give it credit though for a twist at the end that I didn’t expect. (SPOILER.) It turns out that the Sentinels really aren’t the ones who killed the kids who have been murdered – it’s actually their asshole teacher Corrigan. And they get really upset when they realize they helped him figure out which kids to kill. I didn’t expect that.

The video cover makes a big deal about the movie containing Robert Palmer’s song “Addicted To Love.” So when this came out if you didn’t have the Robert Palmer “Riptide” tape yet, and you didn’t have a radio or MTV (which played the god damn thing every other video) then this must’ve been incredibly exciting, because they play part of the song quietly in the background of a scene where they’re driving around. What a great value.

I have no idea why it’s called DANGEROUSLY CLOSE.

Okay, so that one came out in 1986 and it was a bust, but in 1987 John Stockwell graduated from lead actor to director in an infinitely better Cannon high school thriller called UNDER COVER, written by his DANGEROUSLY CLOSE co-writer Scott Fields. It’s funny, I found these two titles doing a keyword search on IMDb for school themed movies, and happened to pick them up at the same time without realizing the Cannon/Stockwell connection at first. UNDER COVER even has a scene where the main character is watching DANGEROUSLY CLOSE on TV.

It’s called UNDER COVER because of the dark secrets that lie hidden in a school, dangerously close to the surface, under the cover of regular small town life. Also because the main guy goes under cover.

The lead is David Neidorf, kind of a Bill Paxton type. He convinces his boss at the Baltimore PD to make him a narc at some hick school in South Carolina, because his partner was killed while undercover there. Of the school movies I’ve been watching this is the only one to play with the idea of adults playing kids in movies. His boss doesn’t think he can pass, he tries to cover up his hairline, some girls think he goes to the state college and when he tells them he’s in high school they say, “you look so old!!” I wanted to use the German video cover above because it was kind of a cool painting, but here’s the American one just to give you a better idea of how old this guy looks.

I never thought about this before, but school movies used to be kind of like kabuki, where women were played by men. They didn’t used to trust actual teens to play teens in movies, but these days they usually do okay. In fact the way things are going pretty soon they’ll cast nothing but 20 year olds to play all the grown ups. You can’t get an actual elderly guy to play an elderly guy, that would be ridiculous. They can’t act. Not to mention all the old people welfare laws and union rules and what not. You’d have to find twins.

Anyway, UNDER COVER does fine – most of the kids look fairly young, and by showing a broad range of little shrimps to hulking jocks they make you realize why Mr. Receding Hairline is able to go undetected.

You gotta figure that would be hard, pretending to be a kid. This movie avoids the issue of what if some girl tries to date him and he’s tempted, or what if a great teacher or mercenary notices he’s distant and tries to butt in and make a difference in his life, or what if a really important election comes up and he wants to vote but somebody spots him and figures out he’s over 18? They do go through the trouble of having him stay with a lady who pretends to be his aunt, but he never really brings any school friends home, so he might as well have just had a cool bachelor pad with a Nintendo and shit.

He’s an interesting character because he seems kind of dumb, and desperate to prove that he’s not. He’s not a smooth talker or clever quipper or supercop. He’s kind of a reformed underachiever, a dude trying hard not to blow it because this is important to him.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is also in here. Never knew she did a Cannon Film. She’s undercover too and works as his partner. If I understood correctly they got a whole squad of narcs in this school, including Mark Holton (Francis from PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE) whose work I last observed in chapters 1-2 of the TEEN WOLF saga.

As a director Stockwell has a reputation for making movies that you think would be bad but are surprisingly better than expected. I’ve heard that about CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL for example and I thought that about TURISTAS. UNDER COVER is his directational debut and it’s surprisingly well done too, in fact spectacularly well done if you consider it’s a god damn Golan and Globus production. There are lots of little touches and qualities they could’ve and you would think would’ve gotten away with leaving out. The accents are good, not too cartoonish. Everybody’s always glistening with sweat, puddles forming on their shirts, but they don’t comment on it being hot. The dialogue isn’t too direct, they don’t explain everything with talking.

I think it handles race in a subtle way too. David Harris (who is Cochise from THE WARRIORS, but to be honest I mistook him for the gay guy from REVENGE OF THE NERDS) plays a tough car thief kid. A white kid fingers Harris for helping him steal an El Dorado that was connected to the partner’s murder, and casually drops the n-word when describing him. Harris ends up arrested, and without saying it you can tell that Neidorf isn’t convinced he’s guilty and seems suspicious of the chief’s rush to blame him. Why? I think it’s because Neidorf is from Baltimore, a city with plenty of segregation and racism, but at least his world is more integrated than here. His boss is black, for example. So he doesn’t go for this small town blame-it-on-the-black-folks business.

Ironically the chief here thinks of it as “the city” and taunts Jennifer Jason Leigh about coming from a smaller town, saying she’ll stay here because she’s becoming a “city girl.” I think Neidorf misses the real city though, and I love how clear that is in the ending. As he drives off he finds an Orioles game on the radio, and he laughs. You can tell how happy he is to be going home.

[ratings]

THE HITCHER starts off as a really good horror movie. Atmospheric shots of C. Thomas Howell driving out on the highway, drinking coffee out of a Thermos, trying to stay awake. Looks like he’s been up all night driving. It starts to rain. Maybe out of desperation to stay awake, maybe out of spontaneity, he picks up a hitchhiker, Rutger Hauer. He jokes about how his mom told him never to pick up hitchhikers. But when he tries to ask Hauer where he’s going the weirdo keeps not answering, changing the subject. Every time he does it it gets more uncomfortable. Then he starts talking about murder and dismemberment, making threats, pulls out a switchblade.

So it’s Howell vs. Hauer. Howell is in control of the car, but nothing else. You can understand why it’s not easy for him to make a move. He’s kind of a weiner, and Hauer is an intense guy. It just brings up all those feelings of being a young man, trying to be an adult but being afraid, not ready to handle everything yet. It was a big move for him to decide to move from Chicago to California by himself, he took the plunge and thought he could handle it but didn’t figure on this unstoppable psycho who may or may not really be named John Ryder.

I kind of thought it would be a confined-space threat, the two guys in the one car with constant driving threats, like SPEED. But actually he gets the psycho out of the car pretty quick. There’s a great moment of relief when he has shaken him out of his hair, will live, is a successful adult, can continue his trip relieved instead of in terror. He thinks. But Ryder has set his sights on him and keeps coming after him, and is supernaturally good at it. He’s successful enough in his stalking that I started to think maybe it was a PSYCHO deal where Ryder is this kid’s evil split personality or something.

Maybe the turning point though is when he gets arrested, interrogated, suspected of crimes he didn’t commit, wakes up and his cell is unlocked and all the cops are dead. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do that. And man, he’s fucked. What can you really do in a situation like that? I thought maybe I would go back in the cell and lock it and say shit, I was asleep, I don’t know what happened. But that’s not necessarily that much better than his plan of stealing a gun and running off into the desert.

I was a little iffy on Ryder’s abilities, it’s kinda ridiculous that he can kill all those cops and keep appearing wherever our weiner hero is. And to me it’s scarier if it seems like a real guy instead of some demon or x-man or something. Later on it turns into more of a straightup action movie as the cops are after Howell and Ryder starts killing the cops. There are great car stunts and a shot that literally made me say “How did they do that?” when it appeared that they crashed an actual helicopter.

This is a clever and well-directed movie that walks along the line between real and surreal, keeping you off balance and uncomfortable. But definitely its biggest strength is the performance by Hauer. He is so crazy and so pleased with himself and yet never goes over-the-top. His strangest moment is when he’s handcuffed and Howell spits on his face. He wipes it off but just sits there with a bit of a smile, like he’s happy about it, or proud of Howell or something.

By the way, do you guys think C. Thomas Howell could pass for a black guy? Not sure why that popped into my head.

The writer is Eric Red, who also wrote NEAR DARK but I guess is now best known for an unfortunate incident driving his car into a bar killing two people and then slashing his throat with a piece of glass (he survived and still makes movies). (and by the way I never knew about that until you guys mentioned it in my comments recently) I think this one is really well directed, but Robert Harmon didn’t do too many well known movies after this. He did do Van Damme’s NOWHERE TO RUN, the JESSE STONE movies with Tom Selleck and that Jim Caviezel movie HIGHWAYMEN which I plan to check out due to the HITCHER-esque subject matter.

I wonder about that remake too, did they make it a period piece? Hitchhiking is one of those things you can’t really hinge a modern movie on. It’s like how cell phones ruin everything in movies now, they always have to come up with the reason why the character doesn’t just use their cell phone to get help. In this case, kids wouldn’t understand why the hell C. Thomas stopped and let a stranger into his car. And they’re right. It’s not the same as other dying traditions like trick or treating or scary movies where you just shake your head in disappointment at today’s sissy, sheltered little kids. No, that’s one thing the new generation got right: you shouldn’t pick up Rutger Hauer. Let him get a cab. Shoulda listened to your mama, Howell.

[ratings]

Rutger Hauer plays Martin, the sort of leader of a rowdy group of soldiers who, betrayed by their captain, set out for revenge and riches. While burying a stillborn baby they find a buried statue of Saint Martin, so they take it as a sign from God and carry the statue around with them, travelling in whatever direction his sword ends up pointing.

Their revenge leads them to the accidental abduction of a Princess Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh, no relation to Jason Scott Lee) who’s arranged to be married to the son of the captain who betrayed them, so he and his inventor son come after the mercenaries, who are kicking it VIP style in a stolen castle.

In many ways this feels like the fantasy movies of the era. Even Basil Pouledaris’s score drops the usual Pouledaris bombast for some of that renaissance fair type medeival revelry type of shit, the magical tones that invoke images of dudes in stupid hats dancing around with a flute doing a jig and selling daggers and watercolor paintings of wolves. The difference is that this one never gets boring. Even without a typical quest or journey type of plot structure it’s just more captivating than so many bland movies of this type.

Part of the reason is Hauer as Martin. He’s clever and roguish, he gets out of some tight spots, he does things out of kindness, he’s casual in the face of danger. But he’s not some Pirates of the Caribbean type lovable scalliwag. A couple of the things he does you can’t forgive. For example he meets Agnes when his group decide to gang rape her. That’s not what they call “meet cute.” His idea of nobility is not to rescue her, but to first take his turn, then distract everybody else so they won’t take theirs. Real romantic. The two have a complicated relationship – she seems to start to care about him, but she might just be using him to protect her. She eventually goes back to her first guy, but you’re not sure who her heart is still with. The one guy is probaly a better person, because he’s not a rapist as far as we’ve seen, but as a movie character you don’t like him, he’s kind of an annoying priss.

Obviously this is more sexual than, say, BEAST MASTER or DRAGON SLAYER or even that part in LORD OF THE RINGS where they’re all jumping up and down on the bed. Agnes is discovering sexuality, experimenting, even seems attracted to her female friend played by the voice of Bart Simpson. Two of the knights are gay. Agnes loses her virginity under some rotting hung corpses, with a couple horses frollicking nearby. There aren’t co-ed showers like in ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS, but there’s sex in a bath. (Wait a minute – like the pool scene in SHOWGIRLS! That’s a Verhoeven motif I never picked up on. Robocop never fucked anybody in a pool did he? I don’t remember.)

It’s also pretty gruesome at times, but to be honest not as much as you’d expect from the equation of Verhoeven + swords. There’s a pretty good firework eye impalement. But I don’t think at this point Verhoeven was as interested in pushing the violence envelope. He was more interested in messing with sexuality and religion. In fact it opens with the knights taking communion before a battle, because then if they die they go to a Heaven full of booze and whores. In my opinion they are sort of manipulating the biblical text to fit the results they’re looking for. Their use of the statue is also theologically questionable although clearly a cool idea.

The story leaves a couple things hanging – apparently an earlier script was more about the relationship between Martin and the captain, less about Agnes. That explains why they sut up this whole thing about the Captain looking ofter a schizo nun. It seems crucial at first and then never really amounts to much.

I definitely prefer the American Verhoeven movies that came soon after this, but this is still a good one. It really had me wishing he did that Schwarzenegger Crusades movie he used to talk about. That would’ve been some crazy shit. Maybe if he thinks Schwarzenegger is too old or unavailable he could try to get CGI Schwarzenegger from TERMINATOR SALVATION.

[ratings]

From the cover you’d assume this is just some boring cop movie, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s something completely unique. Or don’t take my word for it. Let me explain to you a little bit about the plot, and see if that waxes your mustache.

See, Alec Baldwin (back when he was young and skinny, and made the gals swoon) gets off a plane in Miami, steals somebody’s luggage, and heads for the exit. At the bottom of an escalator he is approached by a hare krishna, who asks him what his name is. He says, “Trouble,” breaks the guy’s finger, and leaves.

So far he’s a petty crook, and kind of an asshole. Or maybe hare krishnas killed his father, I don’t know. The point is, breaking a guy’s finger for trying to push his religious beliefs on you is not usually a big enough crime to be the center of a movie plot. But we find out later that being a sensitive peace loving religious dude, the hare krishna went into shock after the attack and died. Of a broken finger. And maybe a broken heart. So that’s where Fred Ward, the homicide detective, comes in. He’s gotta find the perp, and even he doesn’t take it that seriously (him and the other cops laugh about the murder) but it’s a job, you know.

He doesn’t have much trouble tracking down Baldwin, but soon after he does he gets beaten up and wakes up without his teeth, gun or badge. And Alec Baldwin starts going around using the badge, pretending he’s cop. Committing crimes mostly against other criminals. But he’s not exactly Robin Hood. First of all, as he explains, he doesn’t give the money to the poor. He keeps it. And second of all, he does things like stop a guy from stealing a woman’s purse, then run off with the purse himself. Or stop an armed robbery, then take the money himself. In one of the best scenes he happens to be in a convenience store as it’s robbed, and he scares off the nervous gunman by threatening to throw a jar of spaghetti sauce at him. It makes no logical sense at all, and that’s why it’s convincing. I could see it really happening. You know that kid went through that robbery a thousand times in his head, thinking of all the possible outcomes, but one he never considered was some weirdo throwing Prego at him. So it threw him off.

So you know, this Alec Baldwin isn’t all bad, he’s a semi-likeable dude. But he’s using Fred Ward’s identity, and he has his teeth, so that makes it personal.

The goofy tone of the movie reminds me alot of Elmore Leonard, but the book it’s based on is actually by somebody named Charles Willeford. (Apparently there are 3 other novels about Fred Ward’s character, Hoke Moseley.) It is not a traditional thriller at all – it’s more about the personalities of the characters than some sort of serious plot, and everything comes out of the stupid or weird choices they make. The overall feel is lighthearted but it is punctuated by some brutal violence – in a fun way. Alec Baldwin receives some pretty horrible/hilarious injuries and deals with them more the way you or I would than the indestructible super heroes we get used to seeing in movies.

The lead actors are all great. Maybe I’m stupid, but I didn’t even realize that was Jennifer Jason Leigh as the naive Florida girl studying at Miami-Dade College. And it’s good to see Alec Baldwin getting a chance to play stupid and funny, something he usually only does when he hosts the Saturday Night Live show. My only real complaint is that it’s not believable how many crimes this guy happens to be in the vicinity of. It’s not like he’s out looking for crimes, but somehow he just happens upon purse snatchings and armed robberies everywhere he goes. If only Batman was that lucky.

The director is George Armitage, who is best known for Grosse Pointe Blank. He also did the second, supposedly not as bad (but still bad) version of Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce. He seems like a pretty interesting director, but most of his other stuff isn’t on video. The one I’d really like to see Vigilante Force with Kris Kristofferson.

So anyway point is Miami Blues is a good one, a different one, a one you should see.

[ratings]

Well here in the machinist he gives another great performance but this time with a special nauseating gimmick: the guy lost a bunch of weight for the movie. He looks like a fuckin skeleton with a pair of pantyhose pulled over it. You know how DeNiro and Del Toro ate a bunch of donuts for RAGIN BULL and FEAR AND LOATHING and that was supposed to be so brave? Well Christian says FUCK THAT, eats nothin but grass and grapeskins for like three months or something, turns his muscles into fuckin corn husks. When I heard about it I figured he gets skinnier over the course of the movie, but no, he looks like this from the beginning. That’s the character.

At first it’s pretty shocking because he walks around with no shirt on and, in my opinion, that is not something you want to look at. You feel like if somebody bumped into him on accident in the hallway they might snap his head right off the neck. But put clothes on the motherfucker and it seems more acceptable, he’s just a skinny, wirey, unhealthy dude. He even has relationships with women. They try to get him to eat more food but they don’t vomit when they see him naked. Later on as things go badly for him in the movie he starts to look worse, and you’re not really sure how much of it is makeup. Like, his right eye is so sunken in you can see the outline of the eyesocket. Which I am against. Keep your pants up, keep your shirt on, and keep your eyesockets covered, is what it says in the bible I believe. No shirt, no shoes, no eyefat, no service.

Okay so you knew about all this weight loss shit, what you probaly don’t know is what this movie is about. They don’t tell you that kind of thing, that’s the kind of thing you gotta learn by watching it or by reading my review. Well old Boney here is a machinist at a factory that makes some sort of item, I believe. Cars maybe, or machines. Not sure what it is. And he’s real skinny. Also he hasn’t slept in a year. He meets a weird bald dude named Ivan, who one day distracts him on the job – Bones slips up and causes an industrial accident which costs Michael Ironside his arm. (homage to Starship Troopers.) When he mentions he was distracted by Ivan, everybody is like, who the fuck is Ivan? There’s no Ivan here. THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

And a bunch of other, creepier shit happens too. As each day passes in the movie you know it’s another day where old Jack Skeleton hasn’t slept. So he starts to get more paranoid, thinks everybody’s out to get him, and keeps finding cryptic post-it notes on the fridge. It’s one of those deals where he doesn’t really know what’s real and he doesn’t remember things, so the audience doesn’t know what’s real and they don’t know what it is that he doesn’t remember.

Also did I mention that the opening scene is a flash-forward where he rolls a body off a cliff. Shoulda probaly mentioned that. So you know either’s he’s gonna be a killer or somebody really is after him. And he gets further and further away from reality so you can’t trust him to figure it out.

I’m probaly making the whole thing sound stupid, but I thought it was real effective. The thing about this type of thriller usually is until the end of the movie you are able to be bowled over by the spooky shit because of the mystery, the fear of the unknown and all that business. The moment of truth is when it gets to the ending. Then you have a solution and a reason and an explanation and then all the sudden sometimes it’s not so scary or believable anymore.

And as you could feel this thing was getting to an explanation, I was sure that was what was gonna happen. I figured any ending they can come up with is not gonna live up to the beginning and middle, it’s just gonna ruin everything.

To my surprise, the solution solid. It ties everything together. It makes you understand what’s going on but it turns out to be much better than anything I was expecting. And not something I remember seeing a movie about. This is a smart, subtle movie that puts you in the shoes of a skinny freak that you normally probaly wouldn’t want to spend your time with.

The filmatists are: director – Brad Anderson, writer – Scott Kosar. The writer previously wrote the indefensible remake of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Fucker. The director is innocent except by association. Together though they did good on this one. Next they are remaking George Romero’s THE CRAZIES, which is one that could stand a remake. Great idea but not one of George’s best efforts, in my opinion. And this seems like a good team to remake it, judging from THE MACHINIST. On the other hand, some commercial director and the guy who wrote SCOOBY DOO actually did a pretty good job remaking the perfect untouchable masterpiece DAWN OF THE DEAD, so all bets are off. They could totally fuckin blow it on this one, who knows. good luck though gentlemen. I’m behind you. Don’t fuck up though. Seriously. No pressure though.

[ratings]