Director Christopher Nolan first made his mark on cinema with the black and white
nah, don’t worry, I’m not gonna go over all that shit. Also I figure all of you have already seen INCEPTION three more times than I have so I’m not gonna worry about spoilers. To be honest it would take alot of effort to spoil this one because it’s so complicated to explain what’s going on in order to give it away. But still. Don’t read this until after you’ve seen it. Goofus would read this before seeing the movie, but Gallant would wait until after he saw it and then come back and read this.

INCEPTION is a thought provoking movie, a story full of ambiguity, of possible interpretations, of ideas and questions. The main question it makes you ponder, judging from most of the reviews and comments I’ve seen, is “is this a full-fledged masterpiece, or is it just a really fucking good movie that’s only partially-fledged and therefore not technically a masterpiece although very close in my opinion but it depends on the definition of masterpiece you’re going by which of course varies wildly but if you ask me it’s like obscenity, I know it when I see it?”

It’s funny when that’s the biggest disagreement. Yes, it’s a super fucking excellent film, the best I’ve seen in ages, one that made me shiver and break into a cold sweat and thank the Lord for giving me eyeballs… but a masterpiece? Come on. Let’s not go very slightly overboard here. Again, I want to reiterate it’s a great, great movie that I love and cherish.

It seems most everybody really digs this one. That doesn’t really fit established patterns. Nerds eat their young, they gotta destroy what they love. I thought DARK KNIGHT was so popular there had to be a huge backlash against Nolan on his next one, but I don’t see it yet.

I guess part of the masterpiece debate is whether or not a masterpiece needs to say something profound or emotionally relatable (can it just be a masterfully crafted piece of entertainment?) and then if applicable whether or not it does say something profound or emotionally relatable. I’m leaning toward “yes” on the parentheses part and “probly not” on part B.

I love that it’s based around an idea being a weapon like a bomb or a poison. You sneak in and plant it in the right spot and boom. Consciousnesses maimed. This concept of the idea changing the world, or changing lives, just by being thought is more cool than deep, I think. But I also don’t think that matters. Deep is better, but cool is acceptable. (Deep and cool is the best, see THEY LIVE or ROBOCOP or THE MATRIX.)

If the movie’s a masterpiece it’s because the script is a work of genius. It’s constructed more meticulously than the “dream levels” in the movie. The first hour throws you in, sets you up and lets you flounder a little trying to understand what’s going on. Then as you feel you’ve caught on it turns into a heist and it’s the best of both worlds: the beloved familiar of the classic caper movie structure meets the fresh and new of this weird “sneaking into people’s dreams to give them ideas” concept. I always love a good Assembling an Elite Team and of course what kind of an asshole doesn’t get a kick out of a good Going Over the Plan? You always see this in a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE or an OCEAN’S movie, you got the mastermind giving a big speech about what all the obstacles are to get past and how they’re gonna do it and you’re excited about how clever their idea is and suspensed about knowing it’s not all gonna work as planned and they’re gonna have to come up with some new shit on the fly.

The Assembling an Elite Team and the Going Over the Plan are like Parliament-Funkadelic vamping for 10 minutes before setting off The Bomb. They’re establishing a rhythm and a groove and you’re nodding your head along with it and you’re into it and part of the reason is because it makes you anticipate what’s coming next. You smile bigger and bigger the longer the groove goes on because you know eventually it’s gonna explode. And in INCEPTION it explodes into what must be pretty much a straight hour of action and suspense scenes.

You know what, let me switch analogies on you. I know it’s kind of sudden but if you’re smart enough to follow along with INCEPTION then you can follow my rambling. INCEPTION is like that board game “Mouse Trap.” Nolan takes his time setting up that complicated Bill Goldberg device and it’s worth the time it takes because when it’s all finished he lets that metal ball roll and you just sit back and watch all the contraptions do their thing.

I gotta admire that this movie can cut between three sets of characters existing simultaneously in three dream worlds where we understand that time passes at different speeds… but we can pretty much follow what’s going on. Also, I’ve given Nolan some shit about his action direction before, because especially in BATMAN BEGINS I think some of those fights should be better choreographed and shot. But once again the guy proves that he does know his shit when it comes to the vehicle chases.

Also there’s some spectacular effects in here that are so well done I honestly don’t know how they did it. I think I heard they built a giant rotating hallway (like the bedroom in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) for the incredible fight scene where they fight on all the surfaces, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like Joseph Gordon Levitt really did that shit. (He doesn’t rewind it and tell us he really did that shit like THE HUMAN TORNADO does when he jumps naked off that ledge, but it sure looks real). I was even more impressed by the weightlessness, that whole DePalma style suspense scene where he had to tie up a bunch of people and float them into an elevator to provide the feeling of falling without gravity (!). I haven’t been an astronaut for a long time but that looked authentic to me so until proven otherwise I’m gonna assume they actually went into space to film all that stuff.

And there are plenty of smaller things that are impressive. The whole cast is great. One character that was more interesting than expected was Ellen Page as Ariadne (was that really her name? That’s what IMDb says). I like how she starts out as the newcomer, the one used as an excuse to explain to the audience how things work. But she’s so smart she quickly gets ahead of the explanations and figures out things that the other characters haven’t picked up on yet.

(Ellen Page’s character fills in a job vacated by Lukas Haas, and then you got Levitt and DiCaprio… it’s some kind of War of the Babyfaces.)

Tom Hardy steals alot of the movie as the, I don’t know… dandy badass master of disguise I guess we’ll call him. I’m happy Hardy did it ’cause I feel much better about him playing Mad Max now. I mean of course he was good in BRONSON but it’s impossible for me to think of that movie, character and performance without being tainted by my feeling that it’s a poor man’s CHOPPER. So when he got the Mad Max gig I couldn’t help but think wait a minute, Bana’s the rich man’s Bronson, he’s actually Australian and in real life he drives the same car from MAD MAX in dangerous high speed races. And you’re going with Tom Hardy? But now that I’ve seen this I get it, I believe he can pull it off.

Also great to see Ken Watanabe in a bigger role than I expected. And at first you think he’s some corporate asshole, but he’s part of the team so they respect him and you like him. Glad to see Tom Berenger on the big screen again too, though I gotta admit I was kinda surprised how he looks now. I guess he was already an older gentleman when he was playing all those badass roles in the early ’90s. Time had to catch up to him eventually. Anyway hats off to Nolan for continuing his DARK KNIGHT crusade to put our DTV heroes back on the ol’ silver screen.

As for DiCaprio, he’s great as always but I do think he should try to mix it up soon. He’s so good at being the intense star of big expensive movies by great directors, but those roles are starting to blend together. You can’t help but notice this guy’s not totally different from his character in SHUTTER ISLAND who’s also dealing with some reality bending and is haunted by memories of his wife’s death. It’s not a problem for this movie at all and I’m sure he’s worried he’s gonna dilute his power if he tries to loosen up and do an Adam Sandler movie or something. But I do think he’s a good enough actor it would be interesting to see him in a goofy comedy or playing a show-offy supporting nutball character or of course a despicable villain. He did try to play AMERICAN PSYCHO right after TITANIC but somehow he’s never ended up getting a role like that. I can’t help but think of a different world where it was him playing the Joker in DARK KNIGHT.

Nolan really won my respect with DARK KNIGHT, to the point where I almost forgot he was the guy who did MEMENTO. That’s a movie I only saw once a long time ago. Back then I thought it was plenty good but a little overrated. I thought it was a clever idea executed well, nothing more, nothing less. Some day when I watch it again maybe I’ll feel the same, maybe I’ll discover new depths that everybody else was seeing in it that I was missing. Either way, it makes sense that INCEPTION is the movie that guy would make ten years later. He gets more skills, more money, more ambition, he comes up with this crazy, complicated shit and gets a studio to bankroll it. Everybody’s making phony stories now about the Riddler being in the next Batman movie. Maybe it’s true though, because this guy is the Riddler. These are some crazy fuckin puzzles he’s making through the medium of the movies. And making it the movie of the summer.

I mean, let’s not lose track of the fact that this is a big summer blockbuster about a world where CEOs are specially trained to secure their subconscious so that corporate spies can’t break into their dreams to steal their ideas and a team of dream thieves uses this fact against one CEO so they can pretend to be part of a security force he’s dreaming so that they can trick him into having an idea that another CEO wants him to have in order to prevent a monopoly on alternative energy so they have to bring him into a dream within a dream within a dream to make him think he thought of the idea himself. (SPOILER.) I mean, some summer movies are about trying to survive an earthquake or finding a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. This one requires some paying attention. Even if you compare it to the greats like ALIENS, JAWS and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and what not… I wouldn’t say it was better or even quite as good. But I think it’s kind of more challenging. It asks more of you, requires you to be attentive.

I will admit, I got a pretty good brain but not the fastest processor. So maybe it’s easy for most of you but I did have to work the ol’ brain muscles to keep up, I felt like I was running along behind it. Not as out of breath as Clint following the president’s limo in IN THE LINE OF FIRE, but not that much better. But I felt like I kept up pretty good and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the script for helping me out with that. I felt like they had the Goldilocks-approved just right amount of exposition. Every once in a while a character says one sentence or so of explanation of what’s going on, but no more. It’s kind of like a talk radio guy resetting when he comes back from the commercial. He reminds you what the topic was but he doesn’t get into all that “22 after the hour, showers expected tonight” and all that bullshit. Just enough to keep you up to speed.

But I like to think I’m a pretty adventurous moviegoer. I like Brian Bosworth but I also like to be challenged. I like weird shit and alot of times I like movies that everybody else hates, including but not limited to various Matrixes, Star Warses, Hulks, Crystal Skulls, Brown Bunnies, etc. We, the ladies and gentlemen of the internet, seem to fall in love with movies like CHILDREN OF MEN that aren’t necessarily gonna catch on with the type of people I was watching INCEPTION with. Alot of teens, alot of text messaging going on as the movie started. I thought I was gonna have to break some bones and phones. During the movie there was alot of shifting around in the seats. I remember this sound from the remake of SOLARIS. I was being one of those elitists I guess, I was thinking man, it’s great Chris Nolan got to cash in his DARK KNIGHT check to make this one on a big budget, because this is asking too much for normal people to follow along with.

But then in that last scene, the moment when it cut away (even though come on, you knew that had to be where it was going, right?) I heard about 150 simultaneous gasps across the theater, and some laughing and clapping. I guessed everybody was bored and waiting for it to be over, but in fact they were riveted. The only time I ever remember an audience reaction like that was when I saw BATMAN BEGINS at a preview screening. I really liked it but I convinced myself everybody else was bored with the exploration of Bruce Wayne like they were with all that psychodrama I loved in HULK. But then when Gordon pulled that Joker card out it was like a bomb went off the response was so loud.

By the way, good one Nolan, putting the title right at the end again. I don’t know if it’s his touchdown dance or his “that’ll do, pig.” But he get everybody riveted and then drops it on ‘em. Bang. Fade to black. INCEPTION. Yeah, that’s right, that’s the title of the movie that just knocked your socks off. Now you know who to complain to if there’s any damage to your socks.

The other complaint I’ve heard besides “by my definition of ‘masterpiece’ it doesn’t quite qualify” is about the dreams being so normal. It definitely occurred to me too – for a movie all about dream worlds it’s sure not very surreal at all. It could use some of the ol’ Cronenberg lumps of technology. Or it wouldn’t even have to be that weird. If it were my dream I’d use my flying powers, there’d be creepy weird animals who know how to talk and alot more fuckin goin on.  But as Mr. Majestyk pointed out it’s important to the plot that the constructed dream worlds pass for reality. And also the dreamy shit been done many times before. All kinds of filmatists have had their hand at weird dream shit – which themselves don’t usually remind me of actual dreams. I kind of like that his dream worlds are normal until they become unstable. It’s avoiding the obvious approach.

In conclusion, masterpiece I guess. I don’t know, I’d have to see it again I think.

[ratings]

I’ve seen a few interviews and things with Daniels, and he seems like a nice, normal guy. Based on these movies alone, though, you’d have to assume the motherfucker is nuts.

SHADOWBOXER is a very serious crime drama. It has some colorful characters and intense violence, but it’s not an action movie at all. It’s focused on the characters, and with its lush colors, weakness for soft lighting and classical music it’s a similar style to PRECIOUS. It’s the story of a male-female team of assassins who, when hired to take out a crime boss’s pregnant wife (Vanessa Ferlito from DEATH PROOF) decide instead to deliver the baby and take mother and child into hiding.

The two killers have a strong attachment, they take care of each other, and they are lovers. And, uh, they’re played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Helen Mirren. Hahem.

(See, you’re thinking “actually this sounds pretty generic” until I got to the part where the guy from BOAT TRIP is banging THE QUEEN.)

Their first scene together goes something like this:

MIRREN: I’m so embarrassed. I was thinking about God today.
CUBA: Of course  you were. You’re dying, Rose.
MIRREN: (something something)
CUBA: It’s just cancer, Rose. It’s just cancer. (pause) Will you bathe me?

(CUT TO Helen Mirren sponging off Cuba Gooding in the bath tub.)

See, that’s the kind of party this is. At first it seems like Gooding and Mirren are lovers, until you find out she dated his dad and has taken care of him since he was 7. So maybe they’re just affectionate, I got the wrong idea. But then there’s a scene where they listen to Nas and striptease for each other (this is the first movie I’ve seen that has Academy Award winner Helen Mirren swinging on a stripper pole) and yep, turns out they’re lovers. More than once during this movie it turns out that they are lovers.

Stephen Dorff, the motherfucker that’s always tryin to ice skate uphill, plays the crime boss. I’m not even sure what line he’s in, just that he’s constantly having everybody killed for crossing him. We first meet him sticking a pool ball in a guy’s mouth and half a pool stick up the ass. The guy claimed to have fucked the boss’s wife, which is why he wanted her killed. Just in case this guy’s not lying. Just to be safe.

That’s how he is, he just kills everybody. The witnesses in the pool hall: killed. The people talking in the hallway while he’s fucking: killed. The guys he pays to guard his wife when he’s paying other guys to kill his wife: killed. Several other characters played by celebrities: killed. This is not a safe movie to be in.

One of the big motifs in the movie is ass. Gooding and Dorff both show their ass during sex scenes. Another guy bends over and presents his ass for Cuba-in-drag-pretending-to-be-a-prostitute. Three different heterosexual sex scenes are from behind. Ferlito fingers herself while staring at Gooding’s ass while he’s taking a shower. I guess this makes the movie stand out, it’s not a bad thing. It just loves asses. That and older ladies.

You know, ever since AMERICAN PIE you always hear about “MILFs,” which seems to be any naked girl above the age of 26. And now they’re always talking about “cougars,” which for some reason is a positive term for older ladies who partake in the younger men. Maybe this movie was meant to tap into the zeitgeist on that one. Cuba and Helen aren’t the only mismatched couple either, there’s also the sleazy doctor and nurse pair of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mo’Nique. You know what Mo’Nique’s character is named? Precious. Isn’t that a damn shame if this is the same Precious? Poor girl grew up to look just like her horrible mother. And now she’s stealing pills. Plus she walks in on her boyfriend going down on a patient, and he doesn’t even try “I slipped” or any of the obvious excuses.

It does kind of seem like the same world as PRECIOUS. The apartment where the young version of Cuba’s character Mikey was abused could be in the same building where  Precious was – same dingy walls and colorful lights. It has a similar disorienting feel because the violence is off screen (Daniels says on the commentary that he’s too disturbed to shoot men committing violence against women because his dad was abusive).

And like PRECIOUS it’s about this cycle. Mikey’s dad abused him, killed his mother. It seems like the movie might think Mikey and Rose’s relationship is romantic, but I think most of us will agree it’s abusive too. You can’t fuck somebody you’ve raised from the age of 7, come on lady. You know this rule. This is not an obscure one I’m pulling out of a hat. Mikey is basically turned into a killing robot. He does whatever Rose tells him, unquestioningly. The few times his emotions get to him he curls up like a baby. He only seems like an adult when he’s killing or exercising.

That’s one thing I should mention: whenever they need a transition they cut to him training on a punching bag. You get it? He’s the shadowboxer! You thought it would be some kind of corny metaphor, but it’s only a metaphor for him practicing boxing. He’s not a fighter or anything. But at the very end he takes on the bad guys using the power of punching. When people need punched, there’s only one man for the job: SHADOWBOXER.

Gooding's blue-tint period: If I had to guess which one of these was interesting enough to watch I would've gone with the Rowdy Herrington/Tom Berenger joint

In all fairness I must say that Gooding is good in this. He doesn’t talk much (IMDb says 37 lines total) and does no mugging. He’s 100% of the reason I never considered watching the movie before – a new DTV Cuba Gooding Jr. thriller seems to come out every month (LINEWATCH, THE DEVIL’S TOMB, HARDWIRED, etc.). I can’t think of an Oscar winner who ever fell off as hard as him before. He even replaced Eddie Murphy in a sequel to DADDY DAY CARE! How the fuck does  a man look himself in the mirror and take that job? Did they have to hide all his mirrors to get him to sign on?

The truth is that as ridiculous as SHADOWBOXER is his performance is good and it gave me some respect for him. But that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh when he’s disguised as a transvestite hooker and he executes his john but then he notices the blood splattered on a birthday card with little kid’s handwriting saying “I love you daddy” and then it cuts to him in his dress and makeup looking sad in the rain. Or when (ENDING SPOILER) he tells his adopted son that more bad people might come after them some day and the fresh-faced little boy says “We’ll kill ‘em!” and Cuba’s overwrought face of torment seems to just barely hold in a scream of “NOOOO!!! THE CYCLE IS REPEATING ITSELF! HE IS ME!” Daniels knows how to get a really good performance out of him, but then sticks him in a context where it’s hard not to laugh.

There’s a funny making-of thing on the DVD. The producer, not amused, talks about his fight with Daniels over the zebra. Everybody thought it was not worth the expense to put a real zebra in the movie, but Daniels insisted on his vision. And he’s there to personally feed it a carrot when it arrives on set. Where in this movie could there be a zebra, you ask? I wasn’t sure either. Turns out they show it in front of Dorff’s house for about 2 seconds. I missed it the first time.

(Okay, admittedly that’s kind of cool that he has a zebra.)

I think Kent was right, this was a good idea to watch this, it makes me feel like I have a better grasp of where PRECIOUS is coming from. This poor guy is stuck on his bad childhood, and it’s probly therapeutic to make these movies. It’s not exploitation. I think he’s perpetuating the cycle of abuse through movies instead of putting it on the next generation. So that’s good. But just because he went through it doesn’t mean it’s always a good thing to put on screen. I hope he’ll get to a point where he can make movies that are meaningful to him without having to rub the world’s face in horribleness every time.

The movie seems very serious, and I don’t think I was supposed to be laughing. But the craziness that makes it laughable also makes it interesting. I’ve never seen a movie quite like this. I’ll give it that. I’ll remember this one.

[ratings]

At first I thought it was like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: THE ADAPTATION where a bunch of kids made the movie but they didn’t know very many grownups who would hang out in the backyward with them so they just got their friends from class to play adults. But then I realized no, it’s just a gimmick. It’s kind of like those movies like BUGSY MALONE and HAWK JONES where it’s kids playing adult type characters. Or like that episode of M.A.S.H. where a magic genie turns them all into kids but they have little kid-sized army uniforms and they build a tree house and do combat surgery in there. Or what about Veggie Tales, it’s like that only instead of vegetables as the Bible it’s teens as hard boiled noir type characters.

Basically they take a mystery story and set it in a high school. Joseph Gordon Levitt from TV plays a dude who gets a mysterious call for help from his ex-girlfriend, and tries to figure out what’s going on. Next thing you know she’s dead floating in a sewer and he decides, as many teens do, to hide the body and try to track down the killers himself. In noir you don’t worry about the cops finding your hair fibers on the corpse you didn’t kill but hid in a sewer anyway.

So some of the elements of the mystery story are made to fit into the high school world. There is alot of talk about who somebody eats lunch with. There’s cryptic notes put into lockers. There’s a drug kingpin called “The Pin” (get it, pin is short for kingpin, it’s like a whole new language) but he’s a 26 year old dude who lives at his mom’s house. He has hired muscle but it’s just some ugly kid who probaly does steroids and therefore always wears a tank top. And drives a Mustang with a spoiler.

There’s alot of fast talking and lots of made up slang, it sounds like a beatnik trying to paraphrase dialogue from Clockwork Orange. The kid goes around getting information from sources and making inquiries, gets beat up and blacks out an awful lot. Also it’s kind of like the Peanuts where kids can run around all day without ever even catching a glimpse of a passing adult. Except the Pin’s mom and Assistant Vice Principal John Shaft, who stands in for the police since this is Teen World. But you would think maybe the real police would be interested in drug running and murders. I guess they’re busy doing grown up business somewhere far away from the cameras.

This is not a realistic movie in any way. I mean obviously it’s not supposed to be. But it’s a little unbelievable to watch a bunch of teenagers go around, and all of them are pretty smart and none of them ever once mention American Idol or Scary Movie 4 or some stupid shit like that. There is no text messaging whatsoever. In fact, nobody has cell phones except one guy that borrows his mom’s. And in the scene where there’s a party, they listen to jazz. Can you believe that shit? No fucking way. Come on, man. We wish.

It’s refreshing to get away from the pop culture, and it wouldn’t fit in with the noir template. But it’s one example of why I just couldn’t accept this movie. I think teens are not always as dumb as alot of us old people assume they are, but they’re not this smart. Even when you’re a teen and the whole world seems more dramatic, you know for sure that you’re not as cool as these kids with their criminal underworld and private investigations. So it has kind of an embarrassing role playing or playing dress up kind of edge to it. To me a real good teen movie is like CARRIE or HEATHERS, it doesn’t have to be at all realistic but it does have to speak to some essential truths about what it’s like to be that age, so everyone can relate to it. But as far as I could see this has nothing to do with teen life, literal or figurative. I didn’t feel like I had any way of connecting or relating with these teens and the fancy code words and symbols they use to describe the dark underbelly of high school life.

They got all these tough guys that are willing to work for a 26 year old dude who lives with his mom and walks around with a fucking duck cane. I mean my reaction is partly because I’m old, and I’m sure I’m out of touch, but in my day a dude walking around with a duck cane was in for a serious ass beating, he would not be running a drug empire. Even if he got rid of the duck cane he would never live it down, his nickname would be Duck Cane, not Pin. These guys not only accept his duck cane, they treat him like Keyser Soze.

These are teenagers who think and talk fast, who don’t have parents or siblings or friends or school or jobs or hobbies or iPods or TVs or computers, who never do stupid shit but do fall deeply in love or use their femme fatale wiles to ensnare each other into dark traps. But not in a fun silly way like WILD THINGS. That’s another thing, it’s a little too serious for me. I mean it shouldn’t be a comedy, the straight faced approach is smart. But even THE MALTESE FALCON has alot of laughs. In BRICK there’s one scene where he makes some smartass comments to a football player, and another scene where he uses a funny trick to defeat a guy that’s trying to knife him. But other than that it’s all deadly serious and since the whole world of the movie is so absurd that was kind of a bad combo for me.

So I don’t know, maybe you guys will like this, and I sure tried. But the premise is too corny for me to swallow. That’s just too big a spoon of disbelief to ask a guy like me to suspend. I know it’s all about stylization but it was too much for me to get very involved. Teens with turf and plans and shit, playing one side against the other… I guess it’s a good fantasy for a kid, it’s hard out here for a kid, but I’m not a kid. And by the way it’s not SPY KIDS, it’s Rated-R. You have to be over 17 to see it but you have to be under 17 to be in it.

Now, I should disclose one thing. This movie has gotten alot of really great advance reviews, and I heard raves from multiple real life people I know who saw it before me. But then I saw it and I personally didn’t like it and felt like alot of the people in the theater truly hated it. I base this partly on the observation that a woman behind me whispered “I hate this movie” to her boyfriend during the movie. She was kind of dumb though and also kept asking him what was going on in the movie.
Anyway it’s possible we saw a defective print where the movie was not very good.

I gotta say this though, it is an original premise and an original feel. The score was good. It was well acted and directed, and I have to admire the dedication they had to treating the premise seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if the director went on to make better movies. His next one I guess is about conmen, but I will wait and make sure that it isn’t about baby conmen or animal conmen or conmen inside a retirement home or underwater or something gimmicky like that.

I read an article one time about “fanfiction,” which is where weirdos on the internet write stories about Spock fucking Buffy the Vampire Slayer or what would happen if Police Academy arrested the A-Team or perverted shit like that. I think the article was in Wired and it was by that guy Neal Pollack, and he mentioned some woman had written a fanfiction novel about what would happen if the characters from CHICKEN RUN were humans. And he wanted to write to her and say that he thought she had missed the point of CHICKEN RUN.

Good point, but I’m gonna have to be that lady because to me, I would rather see an actual hard boiled story than a hard boiled story told through the medium of teens. A good pulp story is like a jazz standard, you just gotta play it well. You don’t gotta play it on a didjiridou to add a new twist.

Still, they should do a sequel about 15 years from now with all the same actors. So they will be adults but they will act like kids. It’s a high school prom movie but set in a mortgage firm or a hospital or something.

[ratings]