BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

This is a tricky review to write because what I really want isn't for you to give two shits what I think about how well this movie is made or how entertaining it is or whatever. What I want is for everybody just to go out and see this movie, bring as many friends as they can, then go for food and discuss it. Then go to the vernanda group on yahoo and discuss it with me. You can have your own personal oprah book club with this picture. It's an interactive movie, it requires feedback. Because it asks a simple, very timely question - why in the hell is there so much violence in america? - and then it leaves it to you to answer it.

Now that's not what some of the reviews will tell you. But I mean come on, you don't trust those other assholes do you? Opinions about Michael Moore are like assholes, only assholes have them (or whatever mark twain said, I can't remember). Alot of people expect Mr. Moore to be preaching to the converted or telling you what to think or something. They expect it so much that they sit there and watch this movie that doesn't even come close to doing that, and then they leave and describe some non-existent movie that is not the same one ol' Vern saw.

For example, I don't think this movie argues for gun control. In fact there's a scene - pretty much the climax of the movie, so stop reading if you don't want it given away - where Michael Moore interviews Charlton Heston and asks him why he thinks there are so many gun murders in the US. But Moore points out that it can't be the amount of guns - he says Canada has just as much access to guns, but way less gun murders. Basically, he's letting Heston off the hook. But Heston is so programmed to defend the NRA principles that he doesn't seem to understand the question, he seems to take it as an attack on guns.

Moore talks to many people who offer many possible explanations for our troubles, but none of them are really supposed to be THE answer. One of the most interesting themes, hit on by both the author of CULTURE OF FEAR and Marilyn Manson, and then illustrated in a hilarious montage of news footage, is the way the media and the government constantly try to terrorize us with stories of maniacs on the loose, Y2K bugs, snake attacks, and non-specific terrorist threats from evildoers. So it's interesting that one of the top news stories today, the day BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE opened here in Seattle, was about the CIA and FBI heads both telling congress that al Qaeda will attack again sometimes somewhere somehow, and we won't be able to stop it.

In the tradition of great documentaries, Moore talks to many interesting characters along the way. It wouldn't even matter if the movie didn't have such a strong center, you'd still enjoy watching these people. But he doesn't really paint them as good guys or bad guys, as critics will tell you. Alot of them are nuts but they all make good points. You laugh at the nutty they say but you want to know where they are coming from. The people I talked to after the movie agreed that they kind of liked The Michigan Militia, and wouldn't necessarily be against having them as neighbors. And everyone thought the Charlton Heston scene was real sad.

Oh yeah, and this movie really is sad. Moore is known for his humor and this is a very funny movie, but I also felt like I was about to cry for half of the movie. Because it's really an unflinching look at our country's madness and it deals with so many horrible tragedies, from slavery to school shootings to 9-11. There is a montage of stock footage from a history of american invasions, covert operations and blowbacks. I knew about all this stuff but seeing it all lined up like that, to the tune of "What a Wonderful World," is kicked-in-the-nuts devastating.

Later, you see horrifying security camera video of the Columbine massacre. It's not clear enough to be graphic but it's a fuckin nightmare. Someone told me that showing this footage was going too far. I don't know, maybe she's right but I don't think so. Because one thing I think Michael Moore does is he takes things that maybe we all know, but he illustrates them visually in ways that you REALLY have to know.

For example. If you're an executive at K-Mart, you might get a letter saying look, these kids at Columbine bought their bullets at your store, and they killed 12 people. And you're going to feel bad, but you're going to be able to put that letter away and feel bad about it and then do nothing and forget about it and go on with business as usual.

But if Michael Moore comes in with two disabled kids who survived the Columbine massacre, and you shake these kids' hands and they say look, I still have your fuckin bullets inside me, here are the scars... that's another thing entirely. And as you can see, in this movie, that's something that can change the world.

To me it was harder to watch the video of a Columbine parent, holding up a photo of his son, saying that another kid shot his son in the face with an assault rifle. You have no choice but to picture it, and to face how horrible this is. You can't reduce it to a catch phrase and get used to it like we've all done. When it happened, it was a nightmare. Now it's just "Columbine." In 1999 we wouldn'tve believed that a studio would release a movie called BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE only 3 years later. And in 2001, we wouldn't've believed that in 2002 we'd all be used to 9-11. This movie somehow manages to be both entertaining and a profound reminder of the costs of our violence and how important it is that we figure out what in fuck's name to do about it. This is a movie that could really make a difference.

That's one thing that really pisses me off about people who completely write off Michael Moore. Have you ever seen the episode of THE AWFUL TRUTH about the guy who needs a kidney transplant? If I remember right the guy had diabetes, and he needed a kidney transplant or he was gonna die in a couple months, leaving his daughter orphaned. His insurance policy said it covered anything stemming from diabetes, but it also said it didn't cover transplants (or maybe the other way around). So they chose to honor the one that left him dead.

So Michael Moore brought this guy to the insurance company's headquarters, and he went around and invited everybody to his own funeral. The guy was real funny about it but at times his fury would show through, like when a secretary told him, "You have my sympathy" and he said, "I don't want your sympathy. I want a kidney." On one hand you feel bad for this lady because she's just a secretary, she has nothing to do with this policy. On the other hand, now that she knows this company she works for is willing to do something like this, what SHOULD she do? Should she really just shrug it off and say "I just work here?" Or should she take a stand for humanity? Where DO you draw the line? Can you really say you're not responsible for an atrocity even though you're willing to work for the company that commits it? I really don't know the answer, but it made me think about it, and I'm sure it made her think about it.

People write it off as an unfair ambush tactic, and a silly stunt, and I guess it shows that the technique is not entirely effective because these people are able to watch it and then allow themselves not to look past the surface and consider the issues that are going on here. It's not simplistic enough for them, so they ignore everything but the surface and then complain that it's all surface.

And what's more, the insurance company decided to reverse their decision. The silly stunt saved a dude's life. I was crying like a baby when I saw that episode. I got Michael Moore's back for life after that one.

(plus the one where a real pimp goes to Washington and tries to make all the senators his bitches. that was good shit.)

Another pain in the ass is the people who complain that Michael Moore's work does not fit their definition of a documentary. WHO THE FUCK CARES what section it goes in at the video store? The important thing is the movie itself. You could say it's more a visual essay if you want, made up of interviews and stock footage. I don't care, whatever it is it works.

You say that he's manipulative? This is true, in the sense that FILMATIC LANGUAGE is manipulative. It is a series of images sequenced to communicate ideas. Michael Moore is of the school, like Nick Broomfield, who star in their own movies. The movie is about the journey of them making the movie. But even my favorites, the Maysles brothers, who deliberately stayed out of the movie, refused to stage anything or ask questions and tried to use their cameras to milk The Truth out of the real world, are by the nature of the medium being manipulative. Listen to the commentary tracks on their dvds and hear how the editors took hours and hours of footage and figured out how to sculpt them into a story, manipulating time and molding it into a movie. That's what film is, there's no other way to do it, and there shouldn't be.

Of course it will never occur to the knuckleheads who make this argument that it's even a major theme of the movie, because it explores which stories the news decides to show, which criminals COPS decides to follow, etc. Of course this logically extends to movies and everybody who is watching this movie understands that Mr. Moore is making a conscious decision to show you certain images and soundbites in a certain order to convey a certain idea. But the more cynical critics like to pretend that everybody besides them is too stupid to understand what a movie is.

oh my god that man is pointing a gun at me! Oh wait, no, it's a movie. I forgot that a movie was only an illusion projected onto a movie screen.

I think, despite the undeniable greatness of BLADE II, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE is the best movie of the year. The fact that this movie is coming out RIGHT NOW is just astounding. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this movie, if it is seen by enough people, could potentially change the course of our country. Because it forces you to look at Columbine, and Oklahoma City, and 9-11, and miscellaneous wars not as spectacles or encounters with incomprehensible evil, but as an intersection of many complicated factors, some of them not pretty or easily explainable. Moore goes and talks to people on the sidelines of some of these events, people and stories that you've never heard before, that really make you think WOW, that's not what I thought was going on there. And what could be better than a Coloradan talking about the incomprehensibilty of violence on the scale of Columbine, while standing in front of the missiles he and the killer's parents manufacture for a living?

Please see this movie and tell me, what the hell IS causing this? This is a question our entire country must ask itself. If not, we can go fuck ourselves.

THE BRAVE ONE

I'm not totally sure why she's The Brave One, but Jodie Foster plays a public radio host who gets attacked in Central Park one night by some assholes. They steal her dog, beat her fiancee to death and leave her in a coma. All of which I'm against. Then she tries to get revenge. Good stuff.

Since the director is Neil Jordan, and especially since it stars Jodie Foster, I kind of thought it was gonna be a pretentious "serious" take on the vigilante genre, maybe even condescending toward it, looking down on these types of movies and trying to do the respectable version of them. But thankfully the movie doesn't have that feel, and if you check the publicity interviews on the DVD they all check out. Foster states that it is in fact a genre movie, and Neil Jordan drops names like Don Siegel and Sam Fuller. I guess I forgot Joel Silver was the producer, he's not gonna get all fancy pants on us.

So what's the twist, besides Charles Bronson is a lady? Well, I'm sure this must've been done before but I can't off the top of my head think of a vigilante movie where the vigilante feels this bad about it. For example in DEATH WISH Charles Bronson's character Paul Kersey feels so good about shooting people that he spruces up his apartment and listens to happy music and it freaks out his son-in-law who wonders "what do you have to be so high about?" Usually it takes a while to push them but the movie will stack the deck so that the bad guys are so bad and the system is so broken that you gotta applaud the Brave One's brave activities. Here you definitely get the feeling she might be going too far. One incident in particular, some kids are bullying people on a subway, stealing iPods. One of them does pull a knife on her, but does she really need to kill them? Both of them? And does race play a role in it? It's obviously meant to remind you of Bernard Goetz, and also of DEATH WISH, where Kersey sits in the same place on a subway, also gets a knife pulled on him by two African-Americans, and also shoots them both. But Kersey doesn't feel bad about it. The Brave One does and admits that she could've just shown them the gun and they would've left.

There's even a scene where she tries to turn herself in, but the police don't know what she's babbling about so she leaves. In a big city like New York and all the crazies they must deal with there I thought this was believable and kind of a scary thing to think about.

The movie does a good job of pushing her into this situation. Alot of times, like VIGILANTE or DEATH SENTENCE, the justice system is a failure so the hero immediately goes out to get a gun and kick ass. I guess they figure that's not as natural for a woman to do so she falls into it partly by coincidence. After the hospital she's traumatized, afraid to leave her apartment. When she does she's terrified, thinks everyone is following her (another thing straight out of DEATH WISH). So she decides to get a gun, but without a license they won't sell it to her. Another customer hears her conversation and outside offers to hook her up with an illegal gun. Later she's in a convenience store when the clerk's pissed off husband comes in and shoots her. So The Brave One ends up shooting this guy in legitimate self defense, but because the gun is unlicensed she takes the security tape and leaves. After that she doesn't necessarily go looking for trouble like Paul Kersey does, but she makes no effort to avoid it. And if somebody fucks with her, even a little, they're dead.

Jodie also develops a relationship with Terence Howard as a cop investigating the vigilante murders. But he thinks she's just interviewing him for her show. She could take advantage of their friendship to try to avoid getting caught - instead she finds out about a rich asshole he hasn't been able to bust and decides to show him some Brave One Justice. So that's the DIRTY HARRY angle where the system makes a dangerous guy untouchable so the only thing to do is go outside the system.

For me the aspect that pushed it the most was her radio show. I liked the idea that she's in love with NYC, and wanders its streets with a mic recording sounds. But when she's on the air it's pretty corny, especially when she takes callers. None of them sound real and it's a clunky way to show the public response to the Brave One's shenanigans.

After the shooting on the subway she lays on her bed and listens to a recording of it. Kind of a creepy thing to do. I figured this was heading to a Brian De Palma type situation where the recordings would become important. Most likely she would put together a crazy radio show about her murder spree, maybe get it played on the air as a confession, maybe after death. Even without that type of ending I figure it should be called N.P.R. - NATION PUBLIC REVENGE.

Between this one and DEATH SENTENCE, personally I'm more of a DEATH SENTENCE man. It's more ridiculous and therefore more fun. It has some good action sequences. Neither one taught me anything I didn't know about vigilantism, but I sorta dug the whole family vs. family theme of DEATH SENTENCE. And even though the bad guys are trying to be more real in THE BRAVE ONE they still feel like stereotypes. So you might as well have cartoons like in DEATH SENTENCE. Also I loved DEATH SENTENCE's visual depiction of the vigilante and the criminal being the same at the end.

But THE BRAVE ONE is a pretty good take on the subject, a little more confined to the real world, so if that's your style you might like it better. I think maybe its best point is about guns. Her decision to get that gun leads to everything else that happens in the movie. That's not necessarily an anti-gun statement, because if she didn't have the gun that guy in the convenience store probaly woulda killed her. But it shows that owning a gun also comes with the burden that you will have to live with yourself after you use it on someone.

On the other hand, if her cell phone didn't ring that psycho wouldn't have known she was there in the convenience store. So maybe it's an anti-cell phone movie. I wonder who was calling her anyway? Probaly that friend of hers who she kind of abandons after these life changing events. I wonder if she ever told her? "You know, I don't know if you remember this, but one time you called me and I didn't answer? Well, I didn't answer because I was hiding from a psychopath. So you kind of got me into some trouble there. Don't worry, you didn't get me killed, I killed the guy. You turned me into a killer. And it really changed my life, started this whole killing spree for me, fucked me up pretty bad. Anyway, I just want you to know I don't blame you."

BREAKFAST WITH HUNTER

I'm sure alot of you out there have that Criterion edition of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Yeah, me too. So you may remember a special feature on there showing Hunter S. Thompson filming his cameo for the movie, and that footage was actually an excerpt from this movie, BREAKFAST WITH HUNTER. The same movie I am now reviewing as we speak.

Well that was a pretty good special feature, but as a movie it's even better. What this is is a "cinema verite" or "direct cinema" or "not narrated" type documentary about the famous maniac/journalist. The directionist followed Dr. Thompson for several years, often acting as his road manager so as to get a chance to film him. Of course this is shot in recent years so there is a heavy emphasis on the making of the FEAR AND LOATHING movie. He celebrates anniversaries, receives honors (including a party from his old friends at Rolling Stone) and reunites with Ralph Steadman, who has come to support him and do some real high quality court room drawings as he fights a phoney charge of drunk driving.

Now you're probaly thinking the same thing I was thinking: sounds pretty cool. Pretty  cool. Like, some home video that you could watch once if you like Hunter S. Thompson. And then somebody would say, "How was it?" and you'd say, "Mm, pretty cool."

But I think this one's actually alot better than that, for two reasons. First, the guy happened to catch some real good stuff on film. Or, tape. Or whatever. Second, he edited it together real well, skipping around through time but connecting all the scenes logically together to tell the story.

The first time you see Thompson in this movie, he is pulling up to the Viper Room in a convertible, with an inflatable sex doll hanging out the side. He's accompanied by two cool lookin dudes with cigs hangin out of their mouths, and as they step out you realize they are hollywood actors Johnny Depp and Johnny Cusack. They go inside and do a reading/question and answer session where Depp (not yet cast in the movie) ends up reading the famous "wave" speech from F&L and Cusack to his surprise has to read a threatening surrender letter that Hunter had just written to his local sherriff.

Depp is in alot of the movie, hanging out with the doctor, trying to learn how he lights his cigarettes, etc. They shoot guns together, and later Depp tries to get Hunter to teach his bird how to talk. He tries to get it to say, "You won't be alone."

There's a real good scene where Dr. Thompson meets up with Ralph Steadman, who did those great squiggly, splattery drawings in so many of Thompson's books and articles. They talk about the anniversary of F&L and end up in a heated discussion where it comes out for the first time that Steadman has some resentment about not getting enough credit for the success of the book. And Thompson doesn't give him an inch.

Later this touchy subject becomes the theme of the most memorable scene in the movie. You may remember that Alex Cox (best known for REPO MAN and SID AND NANCY but also did the great WALKER) was going to direct the FEAR movie before Terry Gilliam took over, but he had some kind of creative type differences with Thompson. Well, in this scene we see those differences real clearly. Cox and his writing partner Tod Davies visit Hunter at his house to discuss their script. He says he hasn't read it and asks how they approached the two separate trips to Las Vegas that make up the book. Do they combine them into one trip? Do they just show him getting on a plane and coming back?

Davies tries to explain that they want to use a symbolic approach where an animated Thompson (like a Ralph Steadman drawing) is swept back to Vegas by a big animated tidal wave (referring back to the passage we saw Depp read earlier). This idea absolutely outrages Thompson. And he just starts flipping out, yelling about Mickey Mouse and Saturday morning cartoons and how they want to degrade one of the best pieces he's ever written. Apparently someone led Cox and Davies to believe that Thompson would like the idea of using animation, and they make the mistake of trying to convince him that it's a good idea. The scene must go on for more than ten minutes (on the director's commentary he says the actual incident lasted more than two hours) until Thompson is so mad he says, "That's two, you don't want to get to three." Cox laughs and he and his partner get the hell out of Dodge. As they're still leaving Thompson yells into the phone, leaving a voicemail to the producer about "poor Alex Cox just left here in tears."

Of course, you have to feel sorry for Cox and Davies in this scene. Their idea is wrong but they obviously want to make Thompson happy. But it doesn't seem like he believes that. And maybe because of his earlier conversation with Steadman he is being completely unreasonable about it, acting like he has no idea why anyone would associate the illustrations from the book with the book itself. Like he wants nothing to do with them. Every filmatist who has to adapt the work of a famous author should watch this scene, although it will give them nightmares. It is so tense that on the commentary the director says that he was genuinely worried for Cox's physical safety.

By the way when I say Steadman I'm still talking about Ralph Steadman. Not the dude Oprah is married to. I hope you knew that.

That scene is really amazing, the kind of thing us movie "nerds" read about but you never get to actually SEE it like this. So that's the most notable scene in the movie, but there's alot of other good stuff. Benicio Del Toro hangs out with Thompson (and actually watches the footage of his blowup with Cox and Davies). Matt Dillon, George Plympton, PJ O'Rourke and George McGovern make appearances. There are some peacocks at one point. And there's a real good scene where Thompson's mysteriously normal son speaks to the audience about what he's learned from his father. It's real touching and then Dr. Thompson jumps out and sprays his son with a fire extinguisher.

If you're real hardcore, there are some good extra features too. Lots of good deleted scenes, including one where Don Johnson (don't ask me) reads a story about fucking a cat. The director's commentary is very interesting, and it even has Thompson on the first 30 minutes, before he wanders off.

If you're not familiar with Thompson at all, I think this would still be pretty interesting. If you're already a fan, you should definitely see it. Good stuff.

I don't know why it's called BREAKFAST WITH HUNTER though. He cooks sausage and what not but I'm not sure why that's important. the end.

BRICK sounds like a good name for a blaxploitation movie about a dude named Brick, but that's not what it is. It's actually a detective movie starring all teenagers. There are only two grown ups in the whole movie, and one of them, incidentally, is Shaft.

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.

BRIDE OF CHUCKY

I don't know why it took me this long, but I've finally seen the most recent Chucky picture. This one came out on the tenth anniversary of Die Hard as well as the original Chucky picture so it is very special to me.

As some of you know, over there in Japan they are making cartoons for adults, and what they're doing with Bride of Chucky is doing the same thing for puppets. I think many adults have always wanted to watch a puppet movie but they were too embarrassed unless it had alot of blood and a respectable brand name like Bride of Chucky.

This is actually not as much a horror movie though as it is a campy comedy with occasional sadistic murder scenes. It is all very tongue in cheek. I don't know if the filmatists here realize that Chucky isn't scary anymore, but they definitely do know that there are some things that are just funny to see puppets do. Like shooting two guns at a time, or getting in a shovel fight, or making out in front of a fireplace. The best scene of the movie is when the girl doll Tiffany spectacularly mutilates and electrocutes a newlywed couple with the simple toss of a champagne bottle, and it impresses Chucky so much that he marries her and then there is a romantic love scene in silhouette. That is why the trailer (which is on the DVD) says "This October, Chucky gets lucky." I guess it came out in October.

I don't know what it is about the little bastard. His character is not as scary here and he's not really likable but he's still funny to watch. Tiffany has a little more dimension to her as far as killer doll characterization goes, because she is a homicidal maniac but also a true romantic. She offs a couple of swingers for tarnishing the sanctity of the marital institution, and she is genuinely moved by The Bride of Frankenstein which she realizes has strong parallels with her own monstrous type relationship. At the end she gets burnt up and she looks so cool, and you really start to feel sorry for her. I hope she stays burnt in the next one but you know how Hollywood is, stupid fuckers.

If you get the DVD, there are two different commentary tracks. One is Ronny Yu who is the Hong Kong director who did such a good job of making this crazy movie look real pretty. And that is really what is good about this movie, because the story isn't all that hot and the characters besides Tiffany definitely aren't very interesting. But there are some nice images like the burnt black Tiffany hobbling through the cemetery or Chucky looking into a gas tank or Jennifer Tilly with an eyeball in her mouth as she sews dead Chucky doll back together, and it's all very carefully lit and framed to look all beautiful and what not. And you don't usually get to see this type of poetic type visuals applied to some trashy slasher sequel about killer dolls, so my hat is off to Mr. Ronny Yu for making this all possible. But his track is kind of boring he just keeps talking about how hard it was to use the puppets. Sorry bud, that's how we do it in america, with puppets. Get used to it.

The other track is Brad Dourif (Oscar nominee, voice of Chucky) and Jennifer Tilly (Oscar nominee, voice of Tiffany) and Don Mancini (producer, writer, creator of Chucky an American institution). These motherfuckers really make it interesting, partly because they get to talk back and forth so maybe it's not being fair to Ronny. Anyway Jennifer Tilly is much more intelligent than I assumed from her acting and she seems to really like Chucky although she admits she's only seen part of Child's Play once on USA. And that in my opinion is what's wrong with America but that's another story.

Anyway I highly recommend Bride of Chucky if you like that sort of crap.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Can you believe that? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Has there ever been a better title for a film of Badass Cinema, because I don't think there has. Leave it to Sam Peckinpah, that lovable old drunk who spent his whole career fighting with studios and filming innocent kids standing by the side of the road watching as horrible atrocities took place in slow motion to come up with a title like that. I don't think that one will ever be topped.

I really like Peckinpah, especially one that I guess is not generally considered one of his best, The Getaway. I like that this is a guy who makes violent westerns and crime movies but instead of trying to dazzle the audience with explosions and car chases, he seems to pour his filthy old grizzled alcoholic soul into it. All of his frustrations, problems and paranoid delusions seem to end up in there somewhere. He knows that a good personal film is not necessarily about some dude reading poetry and being misunderstood by the ladies.

I never knew what this one was about, but I always wanted to see it because of that title. And people recommend it to me all the time as one of the greats of Badass Cinema. It placed #77 on the original Badass 100, but with its reputation and inevitable some day release on American DVD, I bet it will slip up a little higher if we ever revise that list.

But I gotta be honest, just to help out anybody that might be in that same situation. As great as this movie is, it is not as COMPLETELY FUCKING BAD as the title may imply. And I'll explain why but let me tell you what it's about first.

The movie starts out like a beautiful postcard in some Mexican villa somewhere. Ducks swim in a little lake while a young girl, obviously pregnant, sits at the shore. The girl gets brought inside to face her rich and powerful dad, who has his men rough her up until she will say who the father is: Alfredo Garcia. The old man is sad. "He was like a son to me." And then of course he tells his men there will be a million dollars for whoever brings in this Alfredo's head.

That's where Warren Oates (not from Hall and Oates - this is the guy from Cockfighter) comes in. A couple tie wearing white dudes come into his bar, where Warren's character Benny plays organ and entertains everybody, and they ask him if he knows where this Alfredo guy is, offering a good chunk of change to find him. Asking around later, he finds out where Alfredo has been the last couple days - shacking up with Benny's girlfriend Elita. God damn it. This makes it personal, so Benny becomes interested in the job. Especially when he talks to Elita and finds out that Alfredo has since died in a car accident. So now he knows he doesn't even have to kill anybody, just dig up a body. So yeah, he takes the job.

But you know, I don't know if this is gonna surprise you, but it turns out to be more complicated than just dig, chop, bag, collect money. First he has to convince Elita that it's a good idea. And this being Peckinpah, there is a long, serious, romantic talk under a tree as the two discuss the idea of getting married and spending their lives together. Next thing you know (again, this being Peckinpah) they're camping out and two random bikers - one played by the great Kris Kristofferson - come over and try to rape poor Elita.

Man, it would suck to be a woman in a Sam Peckinpah film. What did this guy's mother do to him, anyway? Every Peckinpah hero has to rough up his woman all the time. Benny pushes Elita around like he thinks they're those brothers in Gummo. And now this biker shit. And of course the worst part is when she starts kissing Kris Kristofferson and acting like she likes it.

That's fine, Peckinpah can have his mental problems as themes in his movies, but here it's a detriment. Because we already remember the title of this movie, and it is not Raped By Bikers. We don't want to hear about this shit, we want to hear about Alfredo and the bringing of his head. There is already enough craziness going on in this movie, we don't need an interlude about being raped by random passersby.

But after that it gets real good. They find Alfredo's grave, and all hell breaks loose. Different factions fight over the head including not only people trying to get the money, but the Garcia family themselves. And the further along Benny gets on his mission, the more people he has to kill, and the crazier he becomes. When Elita is inevitably killed, there is a long scene where he shakes her dead body, trying to get her to come to, then chews her out, blaming everything on her. Next thing you know he's driving around with the head in a bag, covered in flies, talking to it and calling it Al.

There's this one shot of him driving and if you look closely, you can see that there are real flies on the inside of the windshield. I wonder how they did that? Was he really carrying around a sack of rotten meat?

Anyway, he brings the guy the head of Alfredo Garcia, but the whole thing has turned into a big fiasco, so instead of letting all these scumbags get what they want, Benny decides to take out a quick revenge on all the parties he considers responsible. The end, hooray. Good cinema from Sam Peckinpah, aside from that biker rape shit.

But let me explain what I was talking about before. This is not a criticism, just a description. When I picture Warren Oates in a movie called BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, I imagine the baddest motherfucker of all time. I picture a guy gritting his teeth, sweat dripping down his brow, pistol whipping you in the nose with one hand, carrying a head by the hair in the other hand. A guy that makes Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson go "Oh shit!" and run off to hide in the bushes. "Is he gone yet, Lee?" "I'm not sure Charles, I'm staying down until it gets dark, at least."

That's not the guy he plays here though. Here he's kind of a gangly goofball that starts shooting people when it comes down to it, but he wouldn't know what to do if all he had was a head and no gun. MAYBE throw it at you, but he probaly wouldn't even think of that. You can't picture this guy punching somebody's teeth out. He could never be trusted to crush a guy's knuckles in a door or bite off any cheeks. He wears sunglasses for almost the entire movie. Not like Blade though. These are giant oversized sunglasses, like Stevie Wonder or something. And he's the MC at this bar. I think his character is kind of based on Peckinpah, but he reminded me more of Paul Schaffer.

Which is fine. It works. I just wanted to warn you though, just in case. thanks.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

For God's sake man, when I go to see a western there are certain things I expect to see, and certain things I don't expect to see, and one of the things I don't expect to see--

Nah, I'm just fuckin with you. Everybody knows that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is "the gay cowboy movie." Or that's the hype anyway. So first thing's first, I gotta tell you that the "gay cowboy" description is utter bullshit and if that's what you wanna see you're gonna be just as disappointed as I woulda been if I went in expecting THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Because this is not about gay cowboys. It's about gay sheperds. They herd sheep. They shepherd. They are gay shepherds. Get it straight, America. Cowboys are dealing with cows and cattle and whatnot. If they herd sheep, they are shepherds. In this case, gay shepherds.

Second thing to say is, this really is a good movie, they are not lying. Ang Lee knows his shit when it comes to gay shepherds in 1963 Wyoming, or giant green radioactive mutants contemplating lichen in the desert, or some guys in a tree fighting over the green sword of destiny, or whatever the fuck he wants to make a movie about. Ang Lee is a guy, you could just toss movie ideas at him and he would hit them out of the park with his eyes closed. Mafia epic. Opera based on the life of Malcolm Jamal Warner. Peewee football tragedy. HAMLET acted out by racoons. If you can describe it, this motherfucker can make a good movie out of it. Don't even try it. You can't beat him. It's like fighting gravity.

Now, I don't want to be one of those chumps that emphasizes "ALTHOUGH I AM STRAIGHT, I liked this movie, BUT I AM NOT GAY THOUGH" or that type of shit. So sorry if you think I'm a chump for saying this. But the simple fact of the matter is, I like vaginas. I don't like buttholes. The protruding butt area on a woman is an excellent area, I am not so interested in the actual hole, male or female. That's just the way I do things around here. And I'm not all that hot on romance movies anyway, or cowboys for that matter, let alone shepherds. (Although Joseph, Jesus's dad, was probaly a good guy, and a good shepherd.) What I'm saying is, I did not necessarily expect to like this movie on more than an intellectual level, even if it is Ang Lee.

But I did. This is a real effective movie with beautiful atmosphere and relatable human type emotions. It's a tragic love story between two dudes in cowboy hats. But in a good way. When they're alone up in the mountains it makes sense to be in love, but they're soon gonna have to face the fact that it's 1963, it's Wyoming, they are working with sheep and riding bulls and crap. Nobody's gonna let them just be themselves. In trying to live their lives the way they're supposed to, they both end up with wives and kids. But they can't help but 2 or 3 times a year get together for, uh, you know, fishing trips.

I'm man enough not to squirm during a gay love scene but I'm sissy enough that it sometimes makes me uncomfortable. That said, this is one of the least gay gay love stories you're gonna see. Sure you got your buttfucking, you got your men kissing and cuddling. But not all that much. You would have to be a real fuckin wuss to get "grossed out" by the love scenes in this movie. I only mention this because I checked out some of the talkbacks over on The Ain't It Cool and not only was the anti-gay squad in full force but you also had your "I'm not homophobic but I would never watch a movie about gay faggot cowboys." Well I am one straight man that had no problem watching these dudes fall in love. Also there was a whole lot of lesbians in the theater and they didn't seem to have a problem. (they also provided some applause for the boobs of the gal who I guess is from PRINCESS DIARIES. Not Julie Andrews, the other gal.)

Heath Ledger is the main character and the best performance. I had no idea this kid was such an actor. His voice, his posture, his whole demeanor are completely different from what I've seen him do before. Gylenhaal does fine, although just adding a mustache and some gray streaks doesn't make him seem 20 years older. But at least he looks older than Princess Diaries. So good job on that at least Jake, you showed her up. You at least looked like you could've been within 15 years of the age you were playing by the end.

Is this some kind of gay issue movie? Kind of, kind of not. I mean obviously the issues here are specific to being gay and in the closet. The tragedy is not just that these guys can't be together. You feel at least as bad for Heath's wife Michelle Williams (HALLOWEEN H20). The movie could have a long drawn out secret but instead she finds out at the first possible second what's going on with her husband and this "old fishing buddy" of his. So alot of the movie is about her pain knowing that this is going on. They can't be together, their wives are fucked over, they can't connect with their kids or their parents because of their secret lives, they lose work, they always gotta look out so they don't get killed by bigots, they gotta waste their lives and gas money driving back and forth to fuckin Brokeback Mountain, and they can't even completely connect with each other because they can't agree on how to approach their doomed situation. There's alot of tragedy in here to go around.

But of course you don't have to be gay to be interested in this story. Some asshole newsie was saying that 2% of people are gay but movies try to make it seem like it's common. Well first of all that number has got to be lowballin it like civilian casualty rates, but it doesn't even matter. How many fuckin hitmen do you know, man? How many undercover cops? How many ninjas, or vampires? I mean jesus, I think it would be okay to every once in a while have a movie about gay people. There's gotta be way more gay people in this country then there are sheep herders, but I don't hear your bitch ass complaining about the sheep herding. In fact I can say for sure, in Seattle at least, there are lots of gay people, and not very many shepherds. So if you're just going on percentages I think the gays are in good shape for earning an Ang Lee movie.

Hell, how many percent do you think care if Grito shot the ewoks first or what Spider-man uses to shoot his magic spiderwebs from? I'm betting there are more gay people in the US then there are people who can name all of the main characters in Lord of the Rings. To this talkbacker guy it's okay to glamorize the Nerd Agenda online but acknowledging a really well made love story between two men is "rubbing it in his face." I mean, think through these things you'll realize all these arguments you're making, you're just running around in circles trying to make excuses for something that's your own god damn problem that you just need to get over. You know what I did, I used to be against "fags" and "fruits" and "fairies" and what not, because that's the way I was raised. But it's fuckin 2005 now, almost 2006. Civilization is on the march. You gotta come to a point where you actually think the thing through and realize it doesn't make any god damn sense. How does it hurt anybody if some male shepherds are doing each other in a tent somewhere, or if there's a movie about it? I shouldn't care. Hey guys, come down from the mountains, we don't care if you're in love. Love is good. And it's okay if you don't really like to fish.

You know, I wonder if Ang Lee has a real sad love life. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, they can't be together. CROUCHING TIGER, they can't be together. HULK, if I remember right, they can't be together. RACOON HAMLET, if he made it, there would probaly be some racoons that can't be together, and I believe a ghost in one part. Man Racoon Lady Macbeth is such a fuckin ice queen. I love RACOON HAMLET.

But back to BROKEBACK. When you point out that this is a universal forbidden love type story, people will say "well then why should we care, if it wasn't gay guys the critics wouldn't be making such a big deal about it." Well, first of all the movie is so well made that I think in that magical world where you can create an exact non-gay equivalent to this movie, the critics would like it. More importantly though, alot of times we go to movies to see things we don't get to see that often. For example, SNAKES ON A PLANE. Everybody wants to see that movie because they never seen snakes on a plane before. Same thing here. If you can name another gay shepherd movie, good job. But I can't. And how many GREAT or even REALLY GOOD gay love stories can you think of in the films of cinema? I guess I'm not an expert, I'm sure there are many of them but I don't know of one other than BOYS DON'T CRY. (Don't fucking say BOUND, that was made for us straight guys and you know it.)

But this really is a universal story. It could be two gay guys, it could be Naomi Watts and a giant gorilla, it could be a cat that falls in love with a mouse. The important thing is the dramatic angle that this cannot possibly work in this time and place, but what are they gonna do, just forget about each other? That's not working out. It's not as dark as BOYS DON'T CRY, it doesn't feel like it's mostly about hatred. It's more about societal pressure than straight up bigotry. It shows how not letting these two shepherds just be themselves we're just making it more difficult for everybody.

Including the sheep. The first night they sleep together, a sheep gets killed because they weren't paying enough attention. This scene could even work as an anti-gay argument, you could use it as an argument against gays in the military or in the shepherding industry. Or at least, against any stripe of horsin' around on the job. So homophobes, come see BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, you will love it as much as anybody. It's a good movie for anyone interested in love, sheep, mountains, etc.

If that's true Chevy Chase must be having a shit fit these days cause Bill Murray is the only one of any of those guys that figured out how to still have a career with integrity. I guess there aren't too many guys left from that era of comedy, and I'm not sure if Chase even counts because I can't remember the last time he made a movie. But let's use Steve Martin as a symbol. That's what you're supposed to do now, you're supposed to make shitty studio comedies with no style or imagination that nobody will ever remember. You're supposed to be considered funny on the basis of distant memories. Not current reality.

Well ever since that movie RUSHMORE you gotta figure Bill Murray doesn't need the studios anymore. Now he's the muse to all the best independent directors. Instead of playing a wacky old white guy doing hip hop slang or some silly shit like that, he makes movies that are mostly about the sad, tired look in his eyes. Jim Jarmusch (who I love because he directed GHOST DOG and looks like Lee Marvin) wrote BROKEN FLOWERS just for Bill Murray. I guess that means he wanted to make a movie about Bill Murray sitting around thinking about shit and being sad.

What I'm trying to say is, if you are one of those people who thought LOST IN TRANSLATION was boring and overrated, or if you even thought about watching BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE, then don't ever watch this movie. But if you like Jim Jarmusch then quit fuckin around and go see it.

The premise almost could be a studio comedy. Bill plays Don Johnston, an aging ladies man whose young girlfriend walks out on him and on the same day he gets an anonymous note saying that he has a son who is coming looking for him. His Ethiopian neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright, one of those individuals who is always great) is kind of a wannabe detective, so he convinces Don to write him up a list of every former girlfriend who fits the clues given in the letter. Then he plans out a trip so Don can go visit each one of the girlfriends and figure out which one he has a son with. And dry, understated hilarity ensues.

This is a Jim Jarmusch movie all the way so don't expect obvious laughs or a straight answer. It's about the journey, man. There's three different scenes in this movie where the poor bastard has to knock on the door of a strange house, not knowing for sure who's gonna answer or how they're gonna react. What's he supposed to say, "Hi, I'm your wife's boyfriend from 20 years ago, do you happen to have a son that's not yours?" And then you experience his awkward moments with these old girlfriends, not really knowing what to say, maybe feeling like an asshole. It definitely makes you think about people you used to know, how things change, what kinds of things don't matter anymore years later, what kind of a bond you have just because you used to know each other, a long time ago. So yeah, teens should love it.

Like Ghost Dog, it feels very simple and minimalistic, but then at the same time there's alot of detail in there that somebody like me might end up obsessing over in future viewings. Like, every house he visits has a basketball hoop that a teenage son might enjoy, and something that's pink, the color of the anonymous letter. Every kid who could be Don's son wears clothes similar to his. Everywhere he goes, there's something going on with younger women who flirt with him or say something that would make him think about his old Don Juan days. Like the scene in the airport where he has every chance to flirt with a flight attendant sitting next to him, and you don't know if he doesn't because he's too old for that shit or if it's because of this trip he's on. And there's alot of detail to Winston's trip preparations, which were all done on the home computer. The itinerary is printed from his msn email account, the maps are from mapquest, he even made Don a mix CD with a personalized "Winston Records" cover.

There's a couple little scenes at the beginning where Don talks to Winston's little kids, and you think wow, Bill Murray really is great with kids. It wasn't until later in the day it occurred to me they didn't just put that in there to be cute, it was to emphasize how sad it is if this guy really had a son and missed out on 19 years of raising him. Because he would've been so good. So it's deliberate disguised as casual.

Also there's some kind of motif going on with the names: Don is compared to both Don Juan and Don Johnson, a young lolita is named Lolita, a dog has the same name as Jeffrey Wright's character. What does it all mean? I don't know yet. I don't know.

And I guess that's the best quality of this movie is that it lets you figure it all out for yourself. Get to work, you lazy fuck. It's surprising how rare it is that you see a movie like this, where the camera will sit on a character as they're thinking. And you got a pretty good idea based on the situation what he is probaly thinking about. But the movie's not gonna insult you by telling you for sure.

To: harry@aintitcool.com
From: outlaw_69@my-deja.com
Cc: moriartyaicn@yahoo.com
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 00:35:48
Subject: Vern sees BROTHER

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Harry and the boys,

My name is Vern and I am a scholar of the Badass Cinema. I take my job very seriously and I would stake my entire academic reputation on this here claim: Takeshi Kitano is a Badass Laureate.

For those of you who are not familiar with Badass theory, the Badass Laureate is the highest category of Badass. There are many Badass individuals who have proven themselves through their works. I'm talking about gentlemen like Jet Li, Dolemite and Chow Yun Fat. Like Lee Marvin and James Coburn and Toshiro Mifune.

I'm a fan of the Bruces (Willis, Campbell and Lee). I enjoy asskickers of all types and nationalities. But none of these guys are Badass Laureates.

Because to enter this category, you must be more than a great screen Badass. You must also be a powerful filmmaker in your own right. To both kick ass and to express the kicking of ass through the language of Cinematics.

That doesn't mean you are an action star who directs a movie or two. I love On Deadly Ground as much as the next guy - hell, even more - but Seagal doesn't qualify. Van Damme definitely doesn't (his only truly great work, from an artistic standpoint anyway, was during his surrealist period with Tsui Hark). I'm not sure about Vin Diesel because I haven't seen the short films he did, but I doubt it. It is even debatable whether Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan qualify, although arguments could be made.

But let me tell you, Clint Eastwood is a Badass Laureate. He has a strong directorial style and in pictures like Unforgiven he speaks powerfully to the Badass condition. That is probaly the first and last academy award winner for best picture about that classic Badass dilemma of not wanting to kill a motherfucker, but god damn it I really want to kill a motherfucker. Billy Jack, for example, did not win best picture (although if he had a longer filmography, perhaps Tom Laughlin would qualify for Laureate status. PERHAPS.)

Clint Eastwood has proven himself both a great Badass and a great artist. And so has my man Beat Takeshi, the writer/director/editor/star of the great new crime thriller Brother.

I'm not sure how they're gonna advertise this picture. It's a Japanese picture but it co-stars Omar Epps, the guy from Dracula 2000. It mostly takes place in the US and at least half of it's in English. There's alot of subtitled japanese but there's also alot that has no dialogue, it's just images. I think it crosses most cultural type boundaries, but if you come in looking for a mainstream "from the producer of The Matrix" type action picture you will probaly be disappointed. Not as bored as you were in Ghost Dog (last year's best movie, and don't you forget it) because there's alot of good jokes and murders but please understand, this is not a shootemup or a karate flick.

If you don't know Beat Takeshi let me explain. He's a different type of Badass. He doesn't do karate or run around hanging from helicopters and jumping away from explosions in slow motion and what not. Even without a language barrier hedoesn't talk much, so he doesn't really talk tough. And he definitely doesn't spend alot of time trying to look tough. He mostly sits there in sunglasses with an indecipherable type look on his face, like he's probaly smiling at something but you're not sure. When he takes off his glasses his eyes don't help at all, they are a total blank. He is mostly a friendly, jokey kind of guy, like a friendly old neighbor, but he's also really good at stabbing people all the sudden, or hiding guns in places so he can pop them out and shoot a room full of people before they can think what to do.

What this one is about is the similarities and differences between american and japanese criminal underworlds. After his yakuza boss is killed, Takeshi decides to leave for america to live with his little brother. The brother turns out to be dealing drugs with some small time hoods. Takeshi hangs out with them and quickly finds himself beating up their supplier, then killing his whole gang. He
uses his brutal yakuza methods to eliminate the rivals and build this little gang up until they are in competition with the mafia.

And this is all very funny. Little brother and his friends are so wet behind the ears, they just follow Kitano around and look uncomfortable while he kills people.

If you like Takeshi don't worry. This is a Kitano picture all the way. He doesn't make a single compromise to our pathetic american culture. In fact he not only doesn't tone down his style, he tones it UP. This is just as quiet and deadpan as his other pictures, it is even funnier, and it is WAY more violent. At first that seems to be his way of reaching out to americans - look fellas,
guns, like in your culture. But eventually the violence gets so sadistic and horrible that people started walking out of the screening I went to. The yakuzas and the mafia mean business, and they prove it in many different ways. It is touching to see how people are disemboweled and dismembered in all different cultures. It's a small world after all.

Was that really you in monkeybone harry, christ that was just about the worst movie I ever seen. You could probaly make a movie about a guy possessed by a cartoon farting monkey and it would be better than-- whoops, Monkeybone IS a movie about a guy possessed by a cartoon farting monkey. Who is also a penis. Everyone give a moment of silence for the poor sap Paul Berry who was the top animator guy on that one. He died way too young last month and word is he was one of the best.

Anyway you may have heard that Kitano's movies are violent. One of his trademarks is to lull you with a slowly flowing narrative and then suddenly kick you in the metaphoric nuts with a burst of quick, brutal violence. Out of the blue somebody is just getting their ass beat, or worse. (In Boiling Point, Takeshi just starts assfucking a guy all the sudden. But that's a different movie, it doesn't happen in this one.)

There's alot of that violence in Brother but there's alot of his comedy too, which is why this works so well for americans. He's like one of them silent comedians. Most of his jokes are not in what he says, but in the dumb look on his face after he does something. And there are some real funny physical type scenes that don't take words at all. Like the scene where his henchmen play football on the beach. There's no way I could explain how funny it is, you just have to see it. Takeshi edits his movies, and that is very important. His stye
is all in the timing. He knows exactly how long something needs to be shown. Sometimes it's just for a second. Usually, it's for a long, long time.

Brother is the best movie I've seen in a while. Now okay, that's not saying much because the last movies I saw were Jurassic Park part 3 and Final Fantasy. I got one question about Final Fantasy: what in fuck's name is it about? I missed the part where they explained that, 'cause I was so distracted by Steve Buscemi's voice coming out of Jason Priestley's character.

Oh yeah, but about Brother though. Unlike his supporting role in Johnny Mnemonic, I think Brother will help build a bigger american audience for our great Badass Laureate Mr. Takeshi Kitano. You get a strong taste of his humor, his poetic cinematism, his admiration and revulsion at the fanatic/sadistic/masochistic yakuza ethic. Omar Epps is real good too - funny and vulnerable. this is not a buddy movie. Even if you've seen all of Kitanos other movies, you've never seen anything quite like this. I hope you like it.

If not, well, fuck you then. I still love you but fer crying out loud, agree with me for once why don't you.

Your friend,

Vern
outlaw_69@my-deja.com

Then fuck you, jack: the life + Art of Vern
http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern

The box'll get you expecting some weird french version of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, but I say it's a 2000s Hammer movie. So you got a period piece with a mysterious beast eating people in a village, and the townspeople are trying to hunt it but they're on the wrong track, and some colorful experts come to town to get the job done FOR REAL.

All that, but it's the 2000s so they all do karate. Just like Charlie's Angels, Mission: Impossible, X-Men, Superman, Charles In Charge, anybody that's resurrected in the 2000s, they're gonna do karate. Why? The Matrix. When? The 2000s. Where? A big screen near you. This includes not just americans, but also the French. The Musketeer did karate and Vidocq did detective style kung fu, and this movie introduces until-now-unknown traditions of French and Native American martial arts. Those scenes are kind of tossed in there, but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds. If you like the movie like I did, it will probaly be due to the classic story of the monster eating the villagers, and the dudes trying to track the monster. Not the karate.

Because it's not all about punching and kicking. There's a whole shitpile of mystery in there. Because nobody knows what the monster is, how it got there, how it chooses its victims. Most of the town thinks it's just a big wolf. But the protagonists think it's something else. And I mean obviously they're right. Because why would the movie be following the one guy that's totally wrong? Although that would actually be a pretty fuckin good idea for a movie. Get to work boys.

Apparently the story is inspired by actual events in french history. They shoulda said "BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS!" to promote it, like on that Richard Gere movie, THE MOTHMAN DIARIES. Or like that one killer bee movie on tv where they go, "This will BEE a true story."

Anyway there really was a beast of some kind that killed over a hundred people, and nobody seemed to know what the fuck it was and the king sent out people to try to catch it. So I guess this movie is kind of like FROM HELL and other movies like that, that come up with a fanciful theory to explain a historical mystery. Only good. They also use that old routine where the hero is a modern man, looking like kind of a heretic because he uses his fancy rationality and new fangled scientific ideas instead of the old fangled superstitions that everybody else has. For example he tells them that he has studied wolves, and wolves don't really attack people. That's an old french wive's tale. At the same time Mr. Rational French Dude has a deep understanding of Native American philosophy and this is part of why he doesn't want to just kill all the wolves in the area in case they are the beast.

The director is Christophe Gans. Remember, I told you about this dude a while back. He's been threatening to sneak across the interesting–filmatist border for a while now. His other best known picture was never released in the US, but it was the somewhat interesting CRYING FREEMAN, about a Badass potter who cries every time a secret yakuza cult uses mind control to force him to kill somebody. It was a John Woo ripoff, but a well done one, and filmed before that shit caught on. I'd sure watch it again before BROKEN ARROW.

The crybaby was played by Mark Dacascos who also teeters on the edge. One of the few times he made it theatrical was as a leapin leopard man in the late Mr. Frankenheimer's embarassingly underrated ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. Usually Dacascos is straight to video but he shows above average action star skills. According to inernet movie database, he is Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, Irish and Japanese, was considered for the role of Bruce Lee in DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, only drinks water and tea, and will soon appear in another Gans movie called THE ADVENTURER and CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE with Jet Li and DMX. (Despite all the electronic nerd outrage when that one was announced, it looks like I was right that it wouldn't really be much of a remake of 'M.' Dacascos kidnaps the daughter of a gangster during a diamond heist, so the gang helps the police with the search. Sounds more like a very special episode of Miami Vice than a remake of 'M.')

Anyway here he straps on a quill and a longhair wig to play Mani, the frenchie hero's Native American sidekick. Like all Natives in modern Cinema, he communicates with nature and hates guns. Pretty standard, but Dacascos has a creepy, haunted look in his eyes and gives a strong physical performance that would probaly be overacting if he talked much at all. Not sure about his line readings - on the dubbed screener I got, he spoke in broken english in somebody else's voice. But he steals the movie.

Alot of people said this one was too long, but with the possible exception of a love subplot that doesn't amount to all that much, I think it all works. There's a little bit of a witty dialogue but I like the overall humorlessness of Gans' style. Very melodramatic, taking its characters and concepts very seriously, lots of slow motion and quiet and atmospheric noise. It gets real creepy and grim sometimes, especially when they find the body of one of the beast's victims laying in a puddle in some grass somewhere, in broad daylight. And you just see the poor gal laying there, white and wide eyed, while they figure out the jaw size from the bite mark.

When the movie REALLY kicks in is when you catch up with the beast and get a couple glimpses of it. This is one of the "coolest" ideas for a monster I've seen in a while. When it's running around it's got that computery look, you don't think its a real animal like in ALIENS or YODA. But the design is very clever and creepy and they do a good job of not giving you too good of a look at it so you're not completely sure what exactly it is.

Also this is one of those movies where before you see it you think the title means one thing, and afterwards you realize it means something else. Which is always a plus in ol' Vern's book because it shows they put at least a little bit of thought into the thing.

You probaly heard what Vincent Gallo's THE BROWN BUNNY is all about, and so did I. I'm not gonna pretend I didn't know what I was getting into. Obviously I've heard alot about this movie since its notorious debut over there in the Cannes. Most people said it really sucked, it sucked the big one. They said Academy Award nominee Chloe Sevigny really blew it by being in this one. Doesn't matter if she did a good job, they said, because this movie really blows. They had a real hard time swallowing it. A real long, hard time. Also there is a blow job at the end I guess.

Gallo plays Bud Clay, a streetwise motorcycle racer who has just finished a fierce competition in New Hampshire. Now he has to get back to L.A. to have his bike tuned up by Renaldo (sort of his Q or Whistler), and only one thing can stop him: pining. He misses his former girlfriend Daisy (Chloe Sevigny) and he's on a mission to find her. The mystery leads him on a deadly trail from Daisy's parents house, to a pet shop, to a gas station, to a hotel, to another hotel, to Las Vegas, to another hotel, etc. Mostly down streets though. When I say "deadly," by the way, I mean "boring."

There is alot of driving. A whole lot of driving. Don't worry though, he's in a van, not on a motorbike. The motorbike is in the back of the van. So his ass probaly doesn't hurt as bad. He does have a hole in the ass of his jeans though, because that's the type of individual we're dealing with here, a guy who has a hole in the ass of his jeans. You know the type.

There's one scene where he does a little gumshoe business. Daisy's parents say they haven't seen her in years and don't know where she is, but they have her pet bunny. He throws his weight around in a pet store and finds out that a bunny can only live for 4-5 years. The bunny proves that Daisy has been at her parents' house within 4 or 5 years, probaly less. The trail hasn't gone cold.

I guess I'm exaggerating to make it sound more Hollywood. He's not exactly pulling a Charles Bronson on this pet shop, he's just politely asking some questions about bunnies. The dumbest question: "Are these the bunnies?" I mean come on Bud, I think you can figure out whether or not these are the bunnies. There are ways of looking at different types of animals, examining their characteristics and discerning whether or not they are bunnies.

And by the way, yes, Daisy's pet bunny is brown. That's the brown bunny. It's not some shit like he is the world's deadliest bounty hunter, on a cross country trip to the edge of the world. Those who know him call him Bud Clay, but those who cross him know him only as... THE BROWN BUNNY.

I mean, we're not talking a situation where this guy passed out on the salt flats and discovered the brown bunny was his spirit animal. There is a pet bunny in the movie, and it's brown. (Though Mike D'Angelo of New York, USA swears that in an earlier cut of the movie he crashes his van and it blows up and a bunny hops out. No shit.)

I kind of liked Gallo's first movie as a director, BUFFALO 66. In that one he played some asshole who just got out of the joint but has to piss real bad, and then you can imagine where it would go from there. Some of it's real pretentious and I could understand why people would hate it, because Gallo's character is such an asshole and it's a good performance because, let's face it, playing a whiny, sleazy, egomaniacal asshole is not the hugest stretch for this guy. In that movie there's a ridiculous scene where he's pissing at a urinal and some guy starts looking at his dick and freaking out saying "it's so big!" That was the most embarassing scene in the movie and in this one Gallo takes his "I have a big dick" tendencies to the next level by actually showing his dick being sucked in the movie. (There are some theories that it's a prosthetic johnson, because he keeps his pants on and clutches onto the thing the whole time, but I think if it was fake he would've gone for more of a John Holmes size. In fact, considering who we're talking about here, he probaly woulda had it three feet long with the girth of a tree trunk.)

Gallo's whole schtick could be called Asshole Chic. He's always gotta be unshaven and scraggly haired and dirty lookin with an oversized belt buckle and '70s shirts, getting in arguments and whining and shit. In fact the whole movie is made to look like the '70s except that they have modern Coke bottles and McDonalds wrappers and shit. So it doesn't take place in the '70s, it just takes place in a world where everybody likes to dress up like they're from a different era, like that dude from the Stray Cats.

In BROWN BUNNY you're probaly supposed to feel sorry for him too, although in this one he loses sympathy right at the beginning when he convinces the young clerk at the corner market to drop everything and go to California with him, then ditches her while she's packing. The poor girl has already abandoned her post at the family store and left a note to her aunt and uncle explaining why she decided to run off with a stranger. Now you gotta figure she has to explain herself without even getting to go on the trip.

The movie is basically a series of awkard encounters with women like this. It is probaly only a coincidence that the writer of the movie is also the actor who gets to make out with Cheryl Tiegs and get a blowjob from Chloe Sevigny. I'm sure he probaly wrote it figuring some other actor would play Bud but then there was some mix-up and at the last minute he had to fill in. Anyway, in between the encounters you mostly get driving shots with an occasional hotel stop. Then he combs his hair or lays around on a hotel bed in his tighty whiteys. There's not alot of dialogue. The only real back and forth conversation is with Chloe at the end, and half of that she has to talk with his dick in her mouth. (A cinematic first I'm pretty sure, at least for an oscar nominee.)

At one point you're watching an extreme closeup of Gallo as he's driving, looking intense, his long bangs blowing around in his eyes. And it occurred to me, I mean just as one possible theory, that this motherfucker is pretty fond of himself.

The Asshole Chic aesthetic extends to the actual filmatism of the movie. Gallo's character spends most of the movie being sensitive and mopey, so it's the movie's duty to be an asshole to the audience. The very first shot of the movie is faded and handheld, a motorcycle race as seen from the stands. At first it seems like kind of a cool shot, and then you realize that it is gonna show you the whole damn race. Like somebody's expensive home movie. Even if it was your home movie, you would never go back and watch it. This guy actually put it in a movie released in theaters. At least half of the shots in the movie are like this, specifically designed to test your patience and taunt you. Picture a camera sitting on the dashboard of a car, filming the highway through a dirty windshield while a Gordon Lightfoot song plays. The whole Gordon Lightfoot song. That is alot of this movie.

He stops to get gas and it's pretty suspenseful because you're really not sure if he's gonna squeegie the windshield or not. It turns out he doesn't, because then the driving shots wouldn't have all those bug splatters on them and it would really cut down alot on what makes the movie so interesting. In Roger Ebert's famous review of the movie he talks about how at one point Bud pulls over and gets out of the van to change his jacket, and the audience applauded. That scene must've been cut out of this version though because I didn't notice it. Not sure why he'd cut out a real INDIANA JONES type crowdpleaser like that.

A reasonable person, specifically me, could also argue that BROWN BUNNY has kind of an anti-porn style. You ever see that cool '70s style movie poster they had, with the old fashioned XXX logo on it? I'd like to think some perv somewhere watched this really thinking it was an old porno. If so, that perv got Punk'd. It's got this amateurish blown out '70s look to it, and this greaseball goes around hitting on cute girls he never met and they are always into him. Every one of these scenes could lead to wah wahs and erotic moaning, but they don't. It's just one interuptus after another. At the end it finally turns into hardcore porn but as soon as he cums he calls her a whore and then rolls up into a fetal position and starts crying.

You know what it is, it's a fictional porno you'd see a poster for in a movie, but somehow it's crossed over into our world.

You might remember back when I reviewed LAST DAYS OF DISCO I maybe had sort of a thing for young Chloe Sevigny, in some people's opinions. Of course I never figured I would see her doing hardcore sex, so, you know, Merry Christmas to me. On the other hand you gotta wonder how the poor gal got talked into doing this one. It's not like he's taking a risk. He gets one free blowjob (and you fucking know this prick insisted on lots of rehearsals) and you know, nobody's gonna blame him. The double standard is in his favor. Or at least, it's not gonna lower people's opinions of him. Put it that way. But poor Chloe, in addition to having to perform the act and put it on Superbit DVD for all eternity, was putting her career and reputation on the line for a small and purposely annoying movie. I'm not sure what she was thinking but luckily she seems to have made it through. Since then she's worked with Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and David Fincher. And not one hardcore sex scene was required.

I don't think the blowjob is important to the story, but it is important to the movie. Because it's the carrot at the end of the stick of the Brown Bunny. Everybody knows about The Blowjob and without its golden promise alot of people aren't gonna sit through all this god damn driving. Without The Blowjob, we probaly never would've even heard of the movie. The same critics still would've hated it but they wouldn't have been interested enough to make a big deal about it. Without The Blowjob all they can say is "It's so boring! He keeps driving!" With The Blowjob, people want to listen.

I forget which review I read where it mentioned that all the critics would've walked out, but they kept watching just to find out how bad it would get. Yep, that's the reason you kept watching. For informational purposes. Nothing to do with The Blowjob.

Oh, this was the-- BROWN BUNNY was the one with The Blowjob? Yeah, you're right, I knew there was some talk about a movie with that, I didn't make the connection that it was-- I mean, ha ha, I just wanted to find out how bad it would get.

Why the fuck would a guy lie in a movie review? You're not on trial here. We don't blame you. Be honest.

On DVD the carrot at the end of the stick adds a new dimension to the endurance test. Because now you don't have to sit through the whole thing to "find out how bad it gets." There's even a handy chapter menu, you can skip to "Fidelity" and you're just about there. But if you're really tough, if you're really disciplined, you can watch the entire movie in order without even pausing. And I got no way to prove this but I swear to you, with my right hand on the Bible and my left hand on a biography of Steve McQueen that somebody gave me but I haven't read yet, that I actually passed the BROWN BUNNY gauntlet. I got all the way to the end in one sitting, without cheating. And it actually wasn't nearly as hard as I expected. Of course I am a veteran of GARFIELD but still, BROWN BUNNY is better than advertised.

I'm really not gonna recommend the movie to anybody, not as art and not as porn. But I cannot tell a lie and personally I did not think THE BROWN BUNNY movie was all that bad. Sometimes egomaniacal assholes can make good movies, and this sort of in a way almost is one. It takes a unique approach, it stays completely commited to its goals, it has a blowjob scene at the end, etc. And seriously, it does come to a, uh, climax that makes some sense out of the rest of the movie, it doesn't just fizzle out. THE BROWN BUNNY is an experience I will always remember. Well, mainly the part at the end, but still. I regret nothing.

Suggested alternate title: THE LONELIEST MOTOR BIKE RACER

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.

The story is about as minimalistic as you can find. It's about three employees of a doll factory in Belpre, Ohio. First you got Martha, a large middle aged woman, and you got Kyle, a shy kid in his early twenties she's attached herself to. She drives him to work, brings him to get donuts, takes his picture saying he's her best friend. It seems cool that this young guy would be friends with Martha but also kind of uncomfortable because you get a sense she has a thing for him or at least is possessive of him.

This becomes especially obvious when they meet the new employee Rose, a cute lady closer to Kyle's age. Martha watches Kyle look at Rose and you know something's up. They all eat lunch together but then the youngsters go in another room to smoke, and Martha obviously feels left out.

Later in the movie somebody gets killed and you don't get to see who did it, although you got a pretty good hunch, and a police detective enters the story trying to get to the bottom of it. It's kind of a mystery but not really.

What's great about this movie is its almost complete lack of Hollywood bullshit. Obviously the story is made up, this is a nice lady who's actually married and used her BUBBLE money to retire from KFC. But in so many other ways it's real.

I want to mention real quick, this choose your own format approach actually made it harder for me to see the movie. See, I prefer to see movies in a theater. Even a small time one like this. I saw FULL FRONTAL in a theater and I got no regrets. I saw BULLY. I saw JASON X. We've been watching movies projected on screens for a hundred years now, and not because we were waiting for some millionaire asshole to invent a different way to do it. We were actually doing it for the more simple reason that WE LIKE WATCHING MOVIES THE WAY THE LORD TOLD US TO WATCH THEM, ON A BIG SCREEN IN A PUBLIC PLACE. I can't remember one single time in all those years when anybody ever thought, "Shit, could some dickhead who owns basketball teams PLEASE hurry up and invent a way for us NOT to have to have this experience anymore, so we can start watching movies on our phones or watches while we do laundry and download MP3s and jerk off and eat yogurt and check the stock quotes and take a shit and walk the dog?" Not once, Mark Cuban. I'm looking at you, Mark Cuban. You fuck.

If it was a normal release I wold've gone downtown and seen it at whichever theater was showing it. But since they put it on DVD the theater chains obviously know they're not gonna make dime one off it, so only Landmark has it because Mark Cuban owns Landmark. The one Landmark showing it in Seattle requires an extra bus ride for me and since it's projecting digitally instead of for real, I'm not sure it's worth it. So the next option is DVD. Fine, I'll give in, I'll watch it on DVD. But then you gotta go in and discover that all the copies are checked out. And I don't have cable HDNET nor do I know what it is nor had I ever heard that combination of letters before this asshole decided it was how to release BUBBLE. So I went for my last choice, somebody burned me a copy. That turned out to be great so Mark Cuban, even though you're trying to cynically murder our nation's proud heritage of moviegoing (you no good ratsoup eating lowlife scumbag fuck) good job on delivering a high quality illegal copy of this fine movie right to my home.

(And yes I know it was Soderbergh who suggested this form of release, but he was just blowing smoke up the guy's ass to get some money to do a movie. If Mr. Moneybags had any integrity at all he would've said, "Here Steven, take the money, thanks for trying to charm me with that the-future-of-moviegoing-will-fit-in-a-thimble bullshit, but we're gonna go ahead and do it in theaters projected from film, and by the way would you consider doing another movie along the lines of THE LIMEY please, possibly starring The Rock if you're into it. Here's the budget for that one in this envelope, have a nice day Steve.")

Anyway, I'm glad I saw it on illegal DVD because as soon as you watch it you have alot of questions about how exactly it was done, and the illegal DVD has some featurettes and commentary tracks that are enlightening. You find out that the actors were given topics to discuss but no dialogue. Stories from their lives were added into the discussion points so that they could talk about themselves. With the exception of two scenes that needed special lighting effects, they just used the lights in the rooms so everything would look natural. And it's still beautifully shot - those cameras have sure come a long way. (Debbie, the woman who plays Martha, talks about how excited she was when she read on the internet that it's the same cameras they used for STAR WARS).

All these things are important because they make for a movie that feels so much more like real life than you're used to seeing. Martha especially is a character you never see in movies. And if you did it would usually be an actor doing a stunt, trying to Keep It Real. But this isn't a stunt, it's just a person. There are some other characters that as soon as you see them you know they're really who they're portraying. There's a scene where Rose has to explain to her daughter that she's going out and Martha will be babysitting her. Everyone who watches the movie will know instantly that it's her real daughter because of the way she cries and clings to her mommy. You can't do that with child actors. You probaly can't even do that with Andy Serkis or Tom Hanks in motion capture. You gotta get the real thing.

The most interesting example of this kind of thing is the police detective. You don't have to check the documentaries to know he's a real cop. He's not a tough guy either, he actually seems nice, even when he's interrogating Martha and trying to get her to confess to murder. I mean it's the old "I'm your buddy, you can tell me" approach, but you know it's exactly how he really does this kind of thing. When you see how he acts you'll wonder where all the fake tv and movie cops are getting this shit from.

The only thing in the movie that doesn't ring true to me is the reactions of some of the characters when they hear about the murder. They avoid overacting, good job, but I had a hard time buying that these people would really give so little reaction to this type of news. There's one amazing reaction though when the detective tells an elderly man his daughter has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Even after the DVD explained who the guy was and the circumstances surrounding his performance, I still have no idea how it turned out to seem so authentic. It seems like documentary footage.

The DVD includes an alternate ending that really changed my view of what exactly happened in the movie. I was kind of shocked. Soderbergh was smart to cut it out (see number one, above) because it's very contrived compared to the rest of the movie. It's a PSYCHO type ending where a doctor explains a particular medical disorder that could've been connected to the murder. And after you watch it as a deleted scene you have to question whether the scene being deleted means that's not what happened, or whether it still could've happened but it's just not spelled out. Hmmm.

Some people might think the movie is exploitative, because Mr. Bald Hollywood With Glasses has come in to document the plight of the poor manual laborers of Ohio and turned them into murderers. But I think if you listen to the commentary with the actors it's clear that's not the case. They're not stupid, they knew what was gonna happen and they had fun. Debbie doesn't seem offended that she had to play some uncomfortable scenes, and she doesn't seem embarrassed to talk to hotshot filmatists about her 24 years at Kentucky Fried Chicken (she says she loved it there). I'm sure everybody in Belpre knows about the movie, but other than that let's face it, a movie like this doesn't count as being held up to national scrutiny. I doubt anybody from SCHIZOPOLIS ever gets stopped on the streets.

If you ever saw that funny trailer for this (montage of dolls being made in a doll factory, cut to giant letters that say "ANOTHER STEVEN SODERBERGH EXPERIENCE") and you thought it was stupid, don't watch this movie. If you're into that type of shit though, I highly recommend the illegally burned DVD. Top notch. I can't wait until my friend burns parts 2-6.

BULLETPROOF

You know how I am, I get out to the real world, I make it my duty to try to catch up on what's going on in the culture and what not. And I have heard alot about this Adam Sandler, #1 box office star, funny guy, sings songs. Sounds kind of like my man Bruce Willis. Well I don't wanna be left in the dust so I decided to check the kid out.

I found several to choose from - you got golf, you got babysitting, you got kindergarten, etc. The choice was obvious, Bulletproof.

In this movie he plays Archie Moses, a car thief who also is the right hand man in a huge drug empire. He decides to introduce his partner Rock Keats to the big boss man, and even before that he keeps mentioning how he's his best friend, he's the only person he trusts etc. and holy jesus, I nearly wet my pants in surprise when the dude turned out to be an undercover cop. (sarcasm)

Well when the bust goes down Archie shoots Rock in the head by accident but Rock survives and then it turns out to be this squabbling buddy movie where Rock has to have Archie in protective custody. And they hate each other because one of them betrayed the other and the other shot the other. You know. And then the drug lords are trying to kill them and what not. But you get it, they're always bickering and insulting the other and what not. And fighting and everything, that's where the comedy is, when they argue.

Believe it or not I think this is going for a John Woo type feel. I mean think about it... Bulletproof, Hard Boiled. Similar titles. Then you got the whole undercover cop bonds with criminal and feels guilty deal. And you even got the guy who survived a bullet in the head which I understand is a theme in one of Woo's films, I believe it's Bullet in the Head that has that. But Bulletproof is done in a real crappy sub-Beverly Hills Cop sequel kind of way and it's all pretty much garbage. Nothing about it is original or very believable, especially this Damon Wayans who plays Rock. The guy just doesn't have it in him to seem tough and he really fumbles the ebonics as well. His anger at Archie never feels genuine and while I'm at it WHAT THE FUCK kind of name is "archie moses"? And they say it over and over. Thanks alot mister scriptwriter. You're fired.

Anyway Sandler is the best part of the movie because he has three or four funny lines I guess. But come on, this guy looks like the assistant manager at a grocery store or something, he is not the right hand man in an untouchable criminal empire. They work it into the script that he's a puss but they don't get that many laughs out of it. so I don't know HOW this motherfucker becomes a #1 box office star unless he's done some karate training or what not since this picture was filmed. Seriously bud, no joke here, I honestly think I could make this man cry just by staring him. And yes I am a tough man, but okay, I think some of you motherfuckers who maybe are fairly tough, but not as tough as me, I think you could also make him cry in this manner. In my opinion. He is nothing to Write home about.

To be frankly honest, I guess it's like the kids say "are you smoking crack?" I don't see what the big deal is about Sandler. I would definitely put him WELL below the Bruces, Jet Li, Jackie Chan as well as Van Damme and Seagal. Sorry Adam. Just tellin it like it is that's just what I do plain and simple.

You wanna REALLY outrage your parents, kids? Take them to see Bully. Don't ask me how you get them to go to the arthouse theater to see an unrated movie, that's your job.

"Mom, this movie is what my generation is about, and I want you to understand." Trust me, that's what you should say.

This kind of seems like a love it or hate it movie, except I'm not sure which side I'm on. It's an ugly, violent, nihilistic, pornographic, cynical story about unsympathetic, idiotic, pot smoking, acid sucking, trick turning, nymphomaniac, sadomasochistic teens in Florida who decide to kill their asshole friend.

This is supposed to be loosely based on a book that's based on a true story. Not sure what happened for real but this has the ring of mistruth to it. The director Mr. Larry Clark has a reputation for trying a little too hard to shock people, on account of his first movie Kids. I don't think I've seen that one but Another Day In Paradise was one of the few great crime movies of the late '90s so I was hopin to like this one.

I mean fuck if I know what kids are like these days but this seems a little exaggerated in my opinion. These kids are fuckin each other blind, rapin each other, makin gay porn, stabbing each other, playing violent video games, I mean god knows what.

And it's very graphic. Lots of young nude girls, even some peeing, in the tradition of the popular Barely Legal series. You got naked brad renfro mounting naked girls. You got puking and throat slitting. Even the crying is graphic, the guy can't stop drooling the whole time he cries.

Early on the movie has the feel of those Calvin Klein ads that had the feel of kiddy porn. The yuppie yahoos in the theater couldn't stop laughing every time there was a blatant crotch shot, which basically meant they were laughing from start to finish. Larry makes everything so crassly sexualized it's like you're seeing the world through adolescent eyes again. At first I thought this was brilliant cinematism, but then I remembered how in Another Day In Paradise he had Vincent Cartheiser wearing his pants so low his pubes were showing and I figured, no, Larry just likes to look at the teens.

Now I don't think those hyenas in the theater would agree with me, but as the movie goes on the rest of us realize that it's actually supposed to be funny. And you're not supposed to have any sympathy for these little fucks. There are alot of good lines like, "I have a little son. It's no big deal, my mom takes care of him," and "There's one more thing. The hitman needs a ride."

By the time you see a kid walking around with clothespins on his nipples you realize that the "this is what your kids are doing behind your back" angle is a joke.

What I like about Larry's work here is the extremism with which he paints his ugly portrait of american youth. The bully of the title is a rapist, but he doesn't seem THAT much worse than his brain dead assassins. Most of them don't even know the bully, and keep forgetting why they're killing him. When they say they're killing him because he's a rapist they say it like it's an excuse.

All of the kids here have parents, and they keep popping in saying things like, "Have you kids had supper?" and "Drive safely." They have no idea that their kids are doing gay phone sex for money and playing Mortal Kombat on acid and gettin blow jobs every night and dumpin hot wax on each other and fucking a guy to lure him to where they want stab him to death and throw him in the water to get eaten by alligators and crabs.

It's a one joke movie but you get so beat over the head by the maniac pothead mentality of the kids that it's a satisfying punchline when they're all sitting in the courtroom yelling "motherfucker!" at each other and their poor moms and little brothers are just sitting there wondering what the hell happened here.

This is a lesser Larry Clark work, for sure, but worth seeing for completists. It would make an excellent slumber party double feature with any of the recent Freddy Prinze, Jr. pictures.