THE READER
or
I WAS A TEENAGE NAZI-FUCKER (spoilers)
THE READER is the story of Michael Berg, a rich and successful German lawyer who is tormented that he cannot be emotionally open with the beautiful women he has sex with because when he was a kid he got sick and puked and a lady took him home and later he went to thank her but he accidentally saw her bush so he started to spy on her and then he helped her shovel coal and she gave him a bath but he got a boner so she got naked and they started to have sex every day and she liked him to read books to her but then she abandoned him and later when he was a law student he saw her in a war crimes trial and it turned out she had been a Nazi concentration camp guard who locked 300 people in a church and let them burn to death because she didn’t want them to escape and she took the blame for writing the report on it but he realized she didn’t know how to read but he was too afraid to speak up about it and she got a life sentence which made him feel guilty so decades later he started to send her tapes of himself reading books and she used those to learn how to read and then they were gonna let her out early anyway and he was gonna help her get a job but she hung herself so he took his daughter to her grave and started to tell her about it. the end. Best picture nominee, too. (read the rest of this shit…)
The third and final episode of the original Shaft trilogy is a little less classy without the direction of Gordon Parks, but it’s a hell of a fun sequel. After you’ve done one chapter that’s a good variation on the first one, might as well get crazy and fly off to another continent for part 3. You know Shaft has really earned his black James Bond stripes when he gets to go on an international adventure.
APPALOOSA does have a little post 9-11 political relevance, but for the most part it’s a straight ahead western. I’ve talked to some people who thought it was too slow or needed more gunfights, so if that’s what you’re looking for, beware. It’s a character piece about two gunmen who’ve gotten real good at dealing with assholes and cleaning up small towns overrun with bandits and bullies.
After seeing Paul Not Thomas Anderson’s remake of DEATH RACE 2000 and finding it surprisingly enjoyable, I decided to finally go back and see that Kurt Russell movie he made more than ten years ago that I wanted to see but didn’t because everyone said was garbage. And maybe the lowered expectations helped, but I thought SOLDIER was a good one.
Wrestling is so weird. It’s boxing, circus sideshow, cheesy stage play and soap opera all in one. The big time wrestling leagues try to drown the show in pyrotechnics and flashy computer animation on giant screens but alot of the appeal is still very old fashioned. It’s the circus. I went to a match one time and saw Andre the Giant. It wasn’t so much like seeing a star as like seeing a Greek god. Or maybe a sasquatch. There was a reason they called him “The 8th Wonder of the World.” These guys are not human, they’re super heroes.
MAX PAYNE is the story of the conveniently named Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg), a burnt out shell of a man working as “a glorified file clerk” in the dark caverns of the cold case department of the such and such police department. (IMDb says New York, I thought it was supposed to be one of those New York-like nameless Every-Cities, but whatever.) But actually he doesn’t work, he just spends his days gloomily trying to find out who killed his wife and baby an unspecified time period ago. (Long enough ago that his wife’s co-workers don’t recognize him.)
I believe there are different levels of slasher movies. There are the masterpiece ones like HALLOWEEN and TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE – ingenious, masterful works of art that happen to be about weirdos on murder sprees. Below that there are the perennial favorites, not necessarily on the same level but that I like to dig out every few years: FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels, 
In these trying times it’s hard to have any faith in a lowbrow movie delivering on a good high concept or even a classic standby. There’s just too many ways to fuck it up. You see all the wonderful explosions in the trailer for THE MARINE and you know it’s a pro-wrestler playing a soldier saving his fiancee or somebody from kidnappers, that seems like it should be easy to pull off. And then they fill the movie with lame comic relief and have the wrestler spend most of the movie walking around a field trying to track the bad guys before his brief stints of PG-13 revenge. It’s just boring.
The first Shaft sequel has a very similar feel to the original, except that it turns more action packed in the last act. Once again it’s more of a straight detective story than the crazy blaxploitation movie Shaft’s reputation might imply. It all begins with a distressed phone call from an old friend. Next thing Shaft knows his buddy is dead and he’s caught protecting a lady in the middle of a fight to find 200 grand gone missing from a numbers racket.
Okay, first of all, there’s no foolin here. You and I both know there was no way in hell I was gonna like David Zucker’s right wing satire about how liberals hate America and Michael Moore stuffs his face with food all the time. So this is not a review, this is more like a report for other people who, like me, were curious as hell what this movie was like, but unlike me could not stomach sitting down and watching the whole thing.
