You might find this shocking. But I like Michael Moore. Fuck it man, I love Michael Moore. Not that I ever met the dude but I love his pictures and his TV shows. I think he is a great satirist who finds goofy ways to illustrate his points and make them sink in better (like the time on The Awful Truth when he hired an actual pimp to turn out the bitches and hoes of congress, or the time he handed out fluorescent orange wallets to black New Yorkers so they wouldn't get shot by cops like Amadou Diallo did).
I have heard this story on the internet and what not about how Michael Moore is a dangerous dude, his movies are big scary manipulative propaganda lies. And he has these legions of loyal zombie followers who don't understand humor, irony or the art of motion picture editing. They watch his movies and they think they are a direct uplink from objective scientific reality into their brain. They don't know how to process the information for themselves. They take it all as literally as these numbskull republicans do, and they don't ever read or hear about the topic again. They are permanently brainwashed to unquestioningly believe Michael Moore's crazy, bizarre, venomous hate filled extreme left wing conspiracy theories. Like the one about how everyone deserves affordable health care, or that one from Bowling For Columbine about - get the tin foil hats ready man - I mean, this is almost too crazy to even say out loud - we should try to figure out why our society is so violent.
The only problem with this theory about people being so susceptible to the danger of Michael Moore is that I am having trouble tracking down any of these fuckers. The weird thing is I live in Seattle, one of the most liberal cities in the country and proud of it. I hardly even know any republicans. And I find myself CONSTANTLY trying to defend Michael Moore. From people who agree with him completely, but don't like his movies. They have soaked up this media created reputation and they are afraid to embrace him. Even on Air America, the one existing outlet that could legitimately be called "the liberal media," I heard a positive review of the movie that was full of hedges about Michael Moore, how you always have reservations about a Michael Moore film, basically portraying him as some crazy extreme nutball like the right wing chapter of the liberal media does. And that's all over the place. Everybody doing "fact checks" where they have partisan republicans examine the movie with nobody representing the movie. (And they still don't come up with anything, but try to spin it like there was some reason to be very suspicious of the movie.)
I mean at least be fucking honest. Stop pretending like you are the underdog who has to argue against the juggernaut of Michael Moore and the leftist bullies. Yes he has the money of Harvey Weinstein, but he's still going up against the entire "news" media, a republican president, a republican congress, a general lack of interest in documentaries, a number of right wing PR groups, and a whole bunch of bitchy sometime liberals that have to prove their street cred by showing that they are above Michael Moore and his baseball hat.
And I know what's coming up next too. The Christopher Hitchens piece on slate.com. The one that every right wing asshole in the world carries around in his pocket as proof that there is a one-time liberal who hated Fahrenheit 9-11. Like it's a big fucking surprise. (Skip this paragraph if you don't care about that article.) I was curious what there was to even argue with this movie, so I read the article. I think the guy is being as unfair as he accuses the movie of being. He plays dumb, pretending to not understand the arguments Moore is making, so that he can then argue against a different point that Moore is not making. For example, he pretends that he thinks Moore contradicts himself by saying that Bush ignored warnings about terrorism, then issued too many. When in fact Moore is just saying what most anybody else would, that they should stop issuing fake terror warnings for political reasons. Obviously it is okay to both heed actual terrorist warnings and to not issue fake ones. That is not a contradiction. Then Hitchens talks about the segments about poor security at airports and the lack of police guarding the Oregon coastline, saying that Moore is contradicting himself, asking for more harsh security conditions. But Hitchens is a smart guy so I'm going to assume he is bright enough to understand the actual point of the segments: If you go past the speeches and the headlines, and look at the actual world of reality, you realize that the "war on terror" is a phoney political stunt being cynically exploited in many ways, not an actual serious attempt to stop terrorism. I mean this isn't the fucking Cremaster series, it's pretty straightforward, and I expect that an intelligent dude who writes books and editorials all the time knows how to watch a fucking movie, pay attention, etc. At one point Hitchens shamelessly over-literalizes Moore's narration that Iraq was not a threat to us, and scolds him as if he genuinely believes that Moore thought Saddam was a great guy and "not a problem." And he goes on (and on and on and fucking on) to compare Moore's documentary to the more serious-toned documentary based on his book The Trials of Henry Kissinger. As if to say that there is only one legitimate approach to a political documentary: his. Everything else is "lies" and even "crap." If a guy as knowledgeable and experienced as Hitchens can write an article that long and insufferable and bitter and not come up with any convincing arguments against the movie then I would have to guess that it is a pretty solid piece of work.
The most ridiculous attack on the movie though has to be from Ray Bradbury. I don't know how a guy who was once such a genius could now turn out to be a complete moron. If you haven't heard, he is saying that Michael Moore "stole" his title, and has hinted of a possible (completely groundless and embarassing) lawsuit. It is amazing to me that the guy who wrote Fahrenheit 451 could be so dumb to not even understand that the title is a REFERENCE to his title, acknowledging its important place in our culture. If you don't know that 451 is about a government burning books to destroy dangerous ideas, then how would you know what "Fahrenheit 9-11" even means? Fine Bradbury, go sue Michael Moore. And Sam Peckinpah can come back from the dead to sue him for saying that his book "Stupid White Men" could have been called "Bring Me the Head of Antonin Scalia." Meanwhile, George Romero can sue that guy who made SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Sergio Leone can sue Robert Rodriguez for ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO. Scorsese and Welles can have a joint lawsuit against Troma for LAST TEMPTATION OF TOXIE and CITIZEN TOXIE. Bram Stoker can go after the makers of BLACULA, BUNNICULA and GAYRACULA. And everyone will stop making references to everyone else, art will stop building off of other art, society will stop growing, Ray Bradbury will be happy, and the world will be a better place. Good job Bradbury, thanks for fixing art. Good one.
Anyway, I guess I should talk about the damn movie. The first section of the movie (after a great opening) is mostly a list of facts about the long history of the Bush family's relations with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, we should worry about this. That maybe it is suspicious that our leaders are making so much money with these people and at the same time, are being so god damn easy on them. This is the least involving part of the movie and the part that all the attacks focus on, because it's the part that they can nitpick at. It's mostly stuff you've heard before if you follow these things, and it's all well documented. In fact all the facts in the movie were carefully fact-checked by an all star team. But of course they'll find something to try to pick at (Hitchens' solution is to say that it's all a "lie" because the 9-11 Commission's final report didn't state an objection to the bin Laden family members being flown out of the country without being interviewed.)
When the movie really gets rolling is when it gets more into the Iraq War, and further away from the Michael Moore style. There are a couple amusing scenes with his trademark guerilla theater style (trying to recruit the children of members of Congress for the war gets one priceless facial expression) but they are short and sweet. The real good stuff is when he stays out of the way and lets a mother talk about her dead son, or goes to a veteran's hospital to talk to soldiers who got their arms and legs blown off, or especially when his second unit is "embedded" with some soldiers in Iraq. You see these kids talking about what CDs they listen to while they kill. You even see them putting bags on civilians' heads, pushing them around, calling them "Ali Bab" and laughing at them. Busting into houses in the middle of the night, scaring the crap out of innocent old ladies. Saying why they "hate this country."
What scared me most about this stuff was that I've never seen it on the news. How many fucking hundreds of hours of news have I seen since this war started, and I have never seen one shot of a soldier missing a limb. Or criticizing the war. I've seen a few grieving parents, but rarely criticizing the war, and if so in a half-sentence sound bite, played once and never repeated or mentioned again. And the way the soldiers are treating these random civilians? I'd read about the shit but not in american papers. And I've never seen it even discussed on TV. And when the Abu Ghraib photos came out, everybody acted shocked. And yet somehow it was Michael Moore's camera crew, happened to be the only ones they did this in front of? Sorry media, you're fucking liars. You guys saw this shit going on all the time. And you were too caught up in your embeddededness to report on it honestly.
That's the thing - if the american news media had been doing their job, there would be no Fahrenheit 9-11. There'd be nothing new to report. So you fucks in the media, stop complaining about this movie. It's your fault it even exists.
There is some funny shit in this movie. Clever uses of music, a few pop culture references (using clips from Dragnet to show how the notorious Saudi flights out of the country don't match up with the american idea of law enforcement). There are also alot of good arguments made in the movie, but it doesn't even matter. What you will remember will be the horror of the war, the tragedy of the relatives who have lost their loved ones. How the fuck do you argue with that? How is he misleading you?
I want to see these anti-Michael Moore crusaders tell me how those scenes were lies. Yeah, actually, that lady wasn't THAT sad that her son was killed in a war that he had concluded was a lie. They left out that part. And those soldiers in the hospital that lost their faith in George Bush along with their limbs? What about all the parts they still had? Like their ears and noses. They still have some parts. And I mean he should show both sides of the story. He should show how there was that one guy without legs who runs real fast in the olympics. That would be more fair and balanced.
I hope Moore isn't moving away from the kind of satire he did on his TV shows, but it's also good to see him having such success with this more straightforward style. This is the first movie that really seems to have captured the vomit-in-your-mouth feel of the Bush II era.
I don't know whether it's hilarious or infuriating when people say that the movie is unfair because it doesn't show both sides of the argument. Why doesn't he show the OTHER side of the argument, the one about how Saddam Hussein and democracy and freedom and p.s. terror? Why doesn't he show THAT one, huh? AMERICA!
I'll tell you why, you fucking retards. Because we've had that side of the story rammed down our throats, up our asses and into our underwear drawers for later by every Bush speech, every sunday morning talk show, every fucking cable news network, every Judith Miller story, every embarassing bumpersticker, every tasteless country music hack... for two fucking years. Maybe it's okay to assume that people who see this movie might have eyes and ears, and might be familiar with that argument. Maybe. It's possible. In fact, maybe their need to hear more of THIS side of the story might have a little tiny bit to do with the movie's huge record breaking opening weekend. Just something worth considering there for you pal. thanks.
And by the way, since when did you fucking conservatives decide that you need to explore all sides of an issue? I thought the whole idea was that conservatives know there's a right side and a wrong side, and liberals waste their time trying to consider every possible viewpoint. Now all the sudden conservatives are shocked and outraged that Michael Moore isn't exploring every color on the rainbow, every raindrop from the sky, every facet of the diamond of America? Give me a fucking break. You're embarassing yourselves.
By the way, you will notice a catch phrase being used alot lately by the right wing: if you are a reasonable american concerned about what these criminals are doing to our country, then you are part of "the blame America first crowd." This phrase even made it into a Disney press release for some "pro-American" documentary being advertised as an antidote to "Michael Moore's blame America first documentary Fahrenheit 9-11." I'm sorry, I like that fucking mouse with the red pants as much as anybody. I love the pirate ride and the splash mountain and everything. But I wouldn't take that kind of bullshit even if it came from animatronic Abe Lincoln himself. This is a movie defending American ideals from those who are happy to wipe their asses with them. And I'm sorry, if you consider that to be "anti-American", then you are a fucking retard. I know, I know, I promised to stop using that word. But I conferred with various retarded people and they all agreed yes, please Vern, call these people retards, because that's what they are.
But I guess you're right, I WOULD have to first blame America for invading Iraq. Second I would blame Britain, and third I guess I would blame Marilyn Manson? Gangster rap? Violent video games? I don't know. But yes, America would have to get the first blame for what America did. That is true.
But let me tell you a reason why I am proud of America. I believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice, Powell, and company are liars, profiteers, war criminals. Some of them are religious nuts, others are possibly insane, all of them are scumbag assholes who have cynically exploited americans' natural instincts to believe in their country, and they have used it to commit atrocities around the world and earn money doing it. They have destroyed our reputation around the world, made us (and many other countries) less safe, and have done damage to our laws, our constitution, our media, our judicial system, our elections and our political discourse that could take years or even decades to fix. They are real good at starting wars and real, real, REAL bad at fighting them. Imagine that. It's like a serial killer who ISN'T EVEN GOOD AT MURDERING PEOPLE. Complete depravity and ineptitude rolled up into one.
AND YET, here's where I get to the proud part: even this criminal regime will not overpower the american system. They are trying, they are succeeding in some respects, but they cannot completely overtake it. They have to sneak around and try to find loopholes. Even under the most tyrannical and corrupt american regime in anybody's memory, we still have a country where a movie like FAHRENHEIT 9-11 can be made and released. It is that freedom, still built into our system despite everything, and the spirit of people like Michael Moore, that will throw these assholes off their seats of power and... well... probably into multibillion dollar weapons contracting corporations. But hopefully into a big pile of shit.
In 1940 the Walt Disney animation company unleashed a bold new experiment, Fantasia, a collection of animated pieces inspired by classical music. Unlike say a Bambi or a Pinocchio this is a movie with no dialogue or traditional feature length narrative story. In a stunning display of craftsmanship and artistic achievement the animators listened to the music and created stories, sometimes retelling a fairy tale like The Sorceror's apprentice or riffing on some goofball premise like dancing hippoes or mushrooms. At fantasia's best moments it triumphs in bold flourishes, splashing abstract type shapes across the screen or depicting evolution and the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. My favorite is the night of the bald mountain king sequence in which a demonic demon comes out of the mountain and all the ghosts fly up, and then afterwards a whole bunch of people are marching along with candles I believe.
This film fantasia was Mr. Disney's attempt at respectability for the Artform of the funny cartoons however everyone pretty much told him to go fuck himself on that one. The movie received poor reviews, was cut down to 81 minutes and used as a b-movie on double bills, and even 22 years later Igor Stravinsky described it as "unresisting imbecility." But I mean the dude's name is Igor how do you expect him to behave, go get me a dead body Igor you piece of shit.
Anyway it wasn't until the 1960s that LSD hit the market and people were more willing to sit through the movie. Today many film academics and grown adults who watch cartoons everyday believe that Fantasia is the best of the Disney cartoons. They recognize the uniqueness of the concept, the way it respects the cartooning as an Artform and seeks to elevate its craft, as well as the fine work done by the animationists and the musicians on the many great sequences. However I think the whole idea of this being the disney movie they most enjoy to watch is a HUGE load of shit, i mean tell me do you have more fun watching the pinocchio movie or watching this fantasia. And how many times have you watched it all the way through without falling asleep, pal, seriously I'm asking.
Anyway it was with this new acclaim for the fantasia that roy disney, who I believe is Walt Disney's uncle or brother or son or something related to him at least, suddenly "remembered" that they had always planned to release fantasia with new sequences. And that is what they did with the fantasia 2000 and here is my review.
Anyway this movie is very low on plot and characterization but has a lot of music. What this is about is a bunch of triangles that fly around, and they look like butterflies and flowers and then they look like bats. Then there are some flying whales and some sad people walking around New York having trouble and a flamingo with a yoyo. Then there is a flashback to part 1, where Mickey Mouse does magic and kills the shit out of a broom with a fucking ax! Which is crazy but I'm not sure what the relevance is here, there is nothing in there you need to know in order to understand what is going on in the sequel. This is basically a standalone with a whole different set of characters, you do not need to see the first one to understand what is going on.
The thing really gets rolling at the end when Donald Duck helps Noah to load all the animals on the boat, I guess so Mickey doesn't ax them I'm not sure but this is the climax of the picture. This is basically a ripoff of the old titanic movie, except also the bible. Donald gets separated from his girl duck and they think each other are dead, but at the end they find each other and it is pretty sweet. Although the donald I remember is a total prick and this is kind of out of character I think it is the second best.
The best scene is the very end, which is reminiscent of the japanese piece the Princess Monononoke. A couple of europeans are responsible for this one and it really doesn't look like the disney drawings. It is about a beautiful nature spirit gal who flies around spreading the nature. By this I mean flowers, trees, plants, etc. She flies around and dances always changing shape, sometimes she is a little nymph sometimes she stretches into a might pair of wings. There is so much detail in this drawings it is incredible and hypnotic, so many tiny lines. Then she faces down this firebird but she survives and she is made of ashes and then she renatures the world again and there are millions of tiny flower petals shooting all around this gal and there are gooses everywhere although I think that may have been a flashback from the time I watched Fly Away Home on shrooms. But anyway it is really beautifully beautiful and it reminds you of the power of Positivity and the way the Universe is in control of all the elements and the powers of wind, water, etc. plus it is the one that most reminds me of what I like about Part 1 except taken to a new level of beautiful beautiful poetic beauty. whoah man let me get a glass of water.
There are real action parts where famous celebrities like Bette Midler and the dude from the jerk introduce the cartoons. I think the idea here is to keep the focus off of the animation so that disney can lower their wages for the animationists. It kind of makes it feel like a tv special instead of a movie when bette midler comes out and starts talking about the making of the movie. I have had enough of this postmodern self referential crap anyway, how about a movie without a movie within the movie please thanks bud.
The best idea about this movie is to release it for Imax which is a special movie theater with the biggest god damn screen you've ever seen. I guess the film is also big so it projects bigger and better or who the fuck knows, something about it is good, I guess. The screen is so huge and it goes so far down to the ground below you that as soon as it turns on, you feel like you are going to fall out of your seat and plummet to your death. I must admit I am not afraid of many things, I am not afraid of a severed arm or a Samoan with a butcher knife but there is one thing I am afraid of and that is heights. And spiders. But mostly heights and I gotta admit the Imax is fucking terrifying at first.
This was a good format to release Fantasia Part 2 in because I gotta be honest in a normal theater it would be fun but not nearly as impressive. According to my research they experiment with some technology and what not, using computer generated characters, coloring and effects. But for the most part the drawing still isn't as impressive as the first one in my opinion. There is no consistency in the drawing style for the noah's ark sequence, and Noah is not as noble as you expect for a biblical dude. Only the last sequence, the firebird, has the sense of awe inspiring spectacle that part 1 had with the dinosaurs and bald mountain.
Still, I would recommend fantasia part 2. It is not one of the better sequels however as a retread of the original it is a unique experience of artsmanship and music, not available anywhere else. Video or DVD could never recapture the magnificence of this theatrical experience, especially with the overwhelming visual and audio power of the Imax theater. And there is MUCH to admire here in my opinion - a colorful sequence based on the style of celebrity caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, the striking abstract triangles and firebird sequences, and even the weaker sections have subtle moments of acting or vivid, poetic images.
The whales are fuckin stupid though, jesus.
note: I don't watch cartoons. the above review was written under duress
FANTASTIC 4 2: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER 1
Man, I don't know how this
works, but somehow just putting a silver guy in a movie brings me in. When
FANTASTIC 4 PART 1 came out I had no interest, but when they started advertising
part 2 I thought, oh, who am I fooling? Nobody can resist a silver guy.
So I rented part 1 to catch up. And I gotta say, as bad as I pictured that
movie being, it was actually alot worse. Definitely in the lower tier of comic
book movies, which puts it in the lowest tier of movies overall unless you
include immoral material like child porn, snuff, crush videos or TRANSFORMERS.
Basically the first one is the story of four unappealing dorks who get in
a space accident that gives them magical powers so they put on shiny blue
scuba suits, make bad puns in a big cheesy laboratory set and fight some prick
that shoots lightning. The makeup on "The Thing" looks stupid, the
digital effects are surprisingly terrible for a big budget movie and any attempt
at turning this ridiculous shit into actual drama or excitement is immediately
undermined by the constant stream of groan inducing "jokes."
The whole thing feels unfinished and kind of brain damaged, I don't know what
the fuck is wrong with the people who wrote this thing. They don't seem to
care about making one line of dialogue or scene have any connection to the
next one, or for anything to evolve or develop throughout the story. Their
approach to storytelling is to have a character announce their conflicts at
the beginning and then at the end to announce that they have grown. They leave
out the middle part where stuff happens.
Let me tell you about the craziest scene to give you a taste. Michael Chiklis
plays the grunting tough guy who in the accident becomes an orange rubbery
marshmallowy rock monster called The Thing. And he's not cool like the monster
in the movie THE THING, so don't get your hope up. In this scene, I forget
how it happens exactly but The Thing is standing in traffic on a bridge and
he causes some kind of terrible accident. But then he rescues the people involved.
So a crowd forms to applaud him as a hero. Okay, so already this is making
no sense. Then his wife shows up in her bathrobe. She looks at him in disgust,
takes off her wedding ring, kneels down and places it on the ground.
I should specify that they have not yet discussed his accident. It just happened
recently. He revealed himself to her briefly but they haven't talked about
it. No "Oh my God, what happened to you?" No "Are you okay?"
not even a "Will the orange ever go away?" or a "Let's be realistic,
I'm never gonna get over this rock monster thing, so let's not try it."
So this is not a mature way to end a relationship. But the biggest thing for
me is: who the fuck takes off their wedding ring and gently places it
on the concrete to represent the dissolution of a marriage? Is that a
real custom I've just never come across? No, it's just a set up for the orange,
rubbery pathos of The Thing not being able to pick up the ring with his silly,
blubbery, fake looking fingers. They came up with that tragic/hilarious image
and said Now all we gotta do is come up with some explanation for why
she would put her ring on the cement. If there's time. If there's not time,
just have her do it for no reason. Who cares? It's a comic book! It's fun!
Well, RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER is the same type of "comic book fun."
It's clearly made by the same boobs that made that first horrible piece of
moronic garbage, but the silver guy is actually kind of cool. The result,
I am happy to report, is a slightly more tolerable piece of moronic garbage.
See, that's all it really takes is a silver guy, it turns out. You get alot
of mileage out of a silver guy.
In this one Mr. and Mrs. Fantastic Four (played by Jessica Alba and some guy
who got white spraypaint in his hair on accident) are trying to get married
but the wedding keeps getting interrupted by a comet that freezes lakes and
turns off the power. Johnny the Fire Guy chases it and later describes it
to the gang as a silver guy riding something that looks like a surfboard.
Mr. Fantastic 4 then refers to it as "this silver... surfer" and
his fiancee rolls her creepy blue-contact wearing eyes.
That's a mild example of that audience-insulting phenomenon I've been noticing.
The movie is called RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER. The advertising is all about
the Silver Surfer. The box doesn't even show the Fantastic 4 on it, because
who wants to see that shit? It only shows the Silver Surfer.
Hey everybody it's the Silver Surfer. Don't you wanna see the Silver Surfer?
Come pay us to see the Silver Surfer!
So you say, hey, that's pretty cool, a Silver Surfer, I'll see that.
And you go see it and you're sitting there in your Silver Surfer t-shirt they
convinced you to buy, sipping your Silver Surfer Slurpee, all excited to see
this Silver Surfer, and then when they finally utter the words "silver
surfer" they're embarassed. The movie looks you in the eye and says,
"Pffffttt... 'Silver Surfer'? What the fuck? What kind of moron takes
that shit seriously? Jesus."
Despite that, the Silver Surfer comes out smelling like a rose in this thing
because he is the only character, including extras, who has any dignity whatsoever.
He's from space, he's here to help something called "The Destroyer"
suck the life out of Earth, he says he has no choice because he made one o'
them Faustian type bargains to save his girl. He doesn't mention if she's
silver too, or gold or what exactly. He doesn't have to explain that shit
because he doesn't have to talk much. And more importantly he doesn't have
to deliver any of those terrible jokes. When he does talk he has the dignified
voice of Laurence Fishburne.
He's CGI at the beginning
(not as bad as the rest of the CGI in the movie) but then when he falls off
his board and loses power he becomes a guy in makeup. Specifically, the same
guy that plays the monsters in PAN'S LABYRINTH. I honestly thought that was
really cool, he becomes a creepy unpolished statue man with weird eyes. Actually,
he looks like Vin Diesel mated with an Oscar. And let's be honest, we all
have our suspicions about Vin Diesel. I'm not saying Vin Diesel did
mate with an Oscar, I'm just saying I'm almost positive that he did, even
if I can't prove it in a court of law, although I probaly could prove
it in a court of law, I'm just not saying for sure I could until I have done
it, which I will soon. Anyway if I'm wrong I shouldn't be. It's not like he's
gonna get an Oscar, so it's the next best thing. He might as well
hit that and have a baby and teach it to surf and catch missiles and shit.
The other characters could learn alot from Silver Surfer. Shut the fuck up,
look cool, don't be in the movie all that much. If the other characters would
follow that example, especially the part about not being in the movie very
much, it would be a far better movie. Poor Andre Braugher, playing a general,
can't carry them. Jessica Alba, let's be honest, is not an actress. They hire
her for her looks, and then in this one they paint her up so you don't even
get that anymore. She looks so much like a porn star with that fake blonde
wig and blue contacts. Especially when she's in the lab, they put glasses
on her so she looks like one of those secretary themed pornos, or somebody
from the Specs Appeal series. But we know she's not really a porn actress,
because in SIN CITY she played a stripper who never takes her clothes off.
Man, even the parole officers in that movie are naked for most of their scenes,
she plays a stripper on the job and keeps her clothes on. An actress who doesn't
act playing a stripper who doesn't strip.
And once again they have that "point A to point C but let's not bother
with B" type of writing. I am angry that I saw you dancing with some
hoes at your bachelor party, I am not angry that I saw you dancing with some
hoes at your bachelor party. I am hitting on you, you hate it when I hit on
you, we are in love now all the sudden. We have to give up being super heroes
so we can live a normal life, we don't have to give up being super heroes
to have a normal life. etc.
I'm not sure who these movies are for. They're clearly not aimed at adults
who eat any food more solid than applesauce. But I'm not sure they're for
kids either because don't kids prefer Spider-Man and X-Men and other movies
that don't act like they're stupid? I don't know how to really explain movies
like this. It would clearly be better for our society and culture to make
movies that are, like, good. If you are a studio executive and you
have a choice between giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a guy who
might make a good movie that will make billions of dollars, and giving it
to a guy who definitely will make moronic garbage that will also make billions
of dollars, wouldn't you pick the first guy? The only reason to go the FANTASTIC
4 route is if you are some kind of sociopath, trying to give a big orange
rubbery middle finger to the values that our civilization was built upon.
Thanks guys, we appreciate it.
Respectfully, Human Civilization.
I don't know if they plan to continue this charade or not. I do know that
the world does not require another Fantastic 4 movie. I would watch a movie
about the silver guy, provided that nobody from the Fantastic 4 is in it,
nobody who worked on the Fantastic 4 movies is writing or directing it, and
is not allowed in the building while they are filming it, and as long as he's
still silver and they don't change him to gold to try to prove that they are
breaking new ground.
But there is one circumstance that I might consider watching another Fantastic
4 when it comes out on DVD if I have a coupon or if somebody else pays for
it or if the money goes to an anti-Fantastic 4 charity of some kind. I had
forgotten about this until now, but when RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER was playing
last summer I went to some other movie at the multiplex and on the way in
I overheard a little kid asking his dad "What would happen if the Fantastic
4 went to Jurassic Park?"
Now, that's a weird question to ask, and a stupid idea for a crossover movie.
But I could not help but imagine how great it would be to see that asswipe
Mr. Fantastic 4 get eaten by a t-rex. He would stretch his arm out of the
mouth, pathetically trying to grab hold of something solid. But the t-rex
would just keep swallowing, and he would keep stretching. The more the arm
stretches the more the t-rex swallows. Eventually he would run out of stretching
energy. He would lose physical integrity and turn all gooey like a bad batch
of taffy where they fucked up and put too much liquid in there and it just
drips off the stretching machine. For the rest of the movie his clothed porn
star wife would try to clone him out of dinosaur shit but then right before
she succeeded she'd get eaten by raptors or sat on by that fat guy that stole
the embryos in the shaving cream can. Did you ever notice that Pete Postlethwaite's
dinosaur hunter character in part 2 was supposed to be gay? That is just a
side note that really has nothing to do with this topic.
anyway, my point is that ONLY if one or more Fantastic character gets eaten
and shitted out by a dinosaur will I watch part 3. Bring it on hollywood,
let's make magic happen.
FAR FROM HEAVEN
FAR FROM HEAVEN is the lovingly crafted new film from Todd Haynes (VELVET GOLDMINE), about an upper class socialite house wife (the great Julianne Moore from JURASSIC PARK PART 2 and ASSASSINS) dealing with the shameful prejudices and social pressures of the time. When she discovers that her husband (one of the Quaids, I think Randy) kissing a man, she tries to be loving and understanding about it. Her friends joke about her liberalism and call her "Red" but she naively deals with it as a medical problem, and brings him to a doctor to be "cured". Soon she strikes up a friendship with her black gardener (the president from that stupid tv show 24) and again tests the limits of her liberalism when she finds that both whites and blacks scorn their innocent relationship.
Part of what makes it work is that the styles of acting, the dissolve-heavy editing, and the music by Elmer Bernstein are all taken directly from the films of that time period. It's as if Haynes had travelled back in time and created a movie that he wishes they could've made back then, dealing with issues no one wanted to face, ones that are still embarassingly relevant today. It's all a perfect re-creation of the melodramas of Douglas Sirk.
Oh, who am I fooling. I would never have known that if everybody else didn't already say it. I don't even know what that means. I've never seen a Douglas Sirk movie. Have you? I don't even know which ones he directed. There is a scene where the Quaid goes to see THREE FACES OF EVE in a movie theater. Hey man, I've seen that and I can prove it, I reviewed it a long time ago. So I figured hey, maybe that's a Sirk movie. But no luck, I looked it up. I haven't seen any of those movies, and haven't even heard of most of them, or remember what they were now that I am not on imdb anymore.
To be fair, I bet half of these other clowns don't know who Douglas Sirk is either. They probaly just read it in the press kit and then wrote it like they knew what they were talking about. At least I had to read other reviews to find out, I don't get the press kits.
But shit, that doesn't let me off the hook. How did I get to this point anyway. I used to specialize in the FILMS OF BADASS CINEMA, now here I am giving my opinion on a '50s style melodrama about racism and homophobia. The new one from the director of SAFE. I haven't even seen SAFE man. Although somebody did show me that one he did where the Barbie dolls act out the life of Karen Carpenter, and that one was good. The point is, I used to talk about guys getting their faces shoved through glass, not Julianne Moore struggling with her feelings for her gardener. And to be frankly honest, I probaly have more interesting things to say about those kind of movies. God damn it Hollywood, why have you forsaken me? Keep making this intelligent business but give me the hard shit too. I'm begging you man I need you.
Anyway I thought it was a good movie. I like how it shows that white liberals aren't exactly as great as they think they are, but at the same time it is sympathetic towards them. You right wing nutballs don't take that the wrong way please, the point is that liberals aren't liberal ENOUGH. They're well ahead of you though. You can't expect her to do more than what she does, but you sure want her to. At times it's frustrating because she really can't do the right thing without making the movie phoney.
Anyway all of the actors are great in their retro way and so is the attention to detail in re-creating this old style of filmatism. And I like the fact that there's not alot of irony about the time period or laughing at their archaic customs, at least I don't think there's supposed to be. I saw this at a nice new place they got in Seattle called The Big Picture. They serve drinks and deliver popcorn to you personally in champagne ice buckets. They even got wicker ottomans in the front row. I mean I never felt so underdressed in the lobby of a movie theater before. It's a nice place, unfortunately it attracts them yuppies and if I can make one or two generalizations about yuppies - well, no, it would be too hard to limit myself to that. But this particular group of them was not appreciative of Mr. Haynes' sincerity in using '50s filmatic language. The ending is very sad, but as soon as "The End" pops up they all laughed, like it was some kind of joke. "Ha ha, those stupid '50s fuckers used to write 'the end' at the end. What a bunch of neanderthals."
I mean come on man, when you saw the opening credits, with that font and that music, how could you not have known it would end with "The End"? This is not a surprise, unless you're a dumb fuckin yuppie rotting your brain away with cell phone radiation.
other helpful tips for cancerous cell phone brained yuppie fucks:
1. for crying out loud, don't run me over on a fuckin crosswalk. I don't care if you're talking to one of your clients on your cell phone, that's no excuse.
2. why do you need a cell phone anyway? nothing is sadder than seeing two friends walking side by side talking on cell phones to two other friends. Are you together or not? why bother being together if you're talking to some other asshole?
3. And hey it's cool that you decided to use the bus to commute to work, but again, ditch the god damn cell phone. I don't want to hear you narrating your whole journey. "Yeah, we're right by Larry's Market..." And even more than that I don't want to hear about work today or your vacation to Europe. God damn it, just sit down and shut up.
There are many arbitrary ways to divide filmatists into two groups. Today I'm gonna separate out the ones who have an obvious vision/theme/style/obsession (good or bad) that can be seen throughout most of their works. For example you can look at your Alfred Hitchcock or your David Lynch or your Roger Vadim and you can usually tell who is responsible for this business. I mean even a Michael Bay or a Kevin Smithee, the lowest of the low, has a signature style. Or you can at least see what the dude was going for there.
Then in the other group we have the commercial or "hack" filmatist who goes from one project to the next just looking for something that might be successful, or that seems cinematic, or that might capture that fuckin zeitgeist thing the germans are always so interested in. Some of these guys might even be decent at the directation of films but they just don't put that strong of a personal stamp on them. For example you got your John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, Dracula [1979], Short Circuit, Point of No Return) or your Randal Kleiser (Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Grease, The Blue Lagoon, Big Top Pee-Wee, Honey I Blew Up the Kid). Occasionally they make a good picture like Saturday Night Fever but you still have no idea what these clowns are trying to do artistic-wise. They're just doing a job, like plumbing or washing windows or passing out pizza coupons and gum samples on the street corner. They punch the clock and then they go home.
I like Rob Cohen better than I like those individuals but I think he's in the same category. He even produced three of John Badham's movies. His best movie was DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY. That one's about Bruce Lee. But he followed it up with crap like DRAGONHEART and DAYLIGHT. The ONLY thing these three pictures have in common is that they have the letter A in them. And MAYBE the letter D but even that's being generous.
Now this dude seems to have suddenly hit a stride making commercially successful PG-13 movies with up and coming actors that are widely considered to be surprisingly entertaining at least on an unintentional level. The first in this series was THE SKULLS, and he hopes to continue in that vein with the Vin Diesel bungee-jumping-James-Bond movie XXX and of course THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS PART 2: THE FASTER AND THE FURIOUSER.
I haven't seen any of those but I have seen THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS PART A and this is my essay about it, one of the most important film Writing works of the 21st century so far, in my opinion. (If it turns out as planned anyway. I am only on the fifth paragraph here. Those of you who can count will back me up on this one).
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS is a hollywood vehicle about "the underground culture of street racing". Basically, in many urban and especially non-urban (i.e. boring) areas there are groups of rich kids who spend thousands of dollars jacking up their mom's car and then they have drag races for money, which if they win they will spend on new engine parts. Somebody Wrote an article about it in Vibe or Cigar Afficianado or somewheres so Hollywood said "It is our duty to exploit this."
They did it with breakdancing, they did it with skateboarding. They did it with BMX, lambada, pirate radio, cockfighting, snowboarding, "extreme sports", rollerblading, hacking, low budget filmmaking, nintendo, rave, grunge, rap, "the cocktail nation", karaoke, luge, solar car racing... Basically, if you're young and you have a wacky hobby, it's gonna be a movie some day, most likely about 3-6 months after everybody you know stops doing it. If Hollywood had been on their game, they woulda had Unicycle: The Movie and Pogo! and Hula Hoop Nation. They woulda had animated pet rocks and tamagotchis and one about "wilding" in New York or collecting star wars dolls and selling them on e-bay. I'm sure they came inches from making movies about Tai Boe and country line dancing and your momma jokes, or even made up fads like street yoga or freestyle bowling. If you do some stupid shit, Hollywood wants to know, so they can dress it up in neon colors and spiky hair and call it a phenomenon.
Cars. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but alot of men love their cars. Kids grow up with their hot wheels cars and model cars and go carts and posters of Ferraris and Corvettes. Some of them even watch race cars on tv or watch kids on tv with beds shaped like race cars. There is even a cartoon based on NASCAR racing. There are kids with subscriptions to Motor Trend magazine and Hot Rod. When they get older they still like pictures of cars, especially with women in bikinis next to the cars or, better yet, on top of the cars. Riding them. The cars are bigger than men but they know what to do. Cars will take good care of their women. Car commercials fill magazines and play on tv all day and sometimes equate the quality of a car to the size of a man's dick.
On TV, it's all about owning expensive cars. Rappers want their Lexuses or their lowriders with hydraulics. They mention them in their lyrics and they rent them and show them in their videos and pretend that they own them. This goes back a long ways. You can read in Iceberg Slim why Cadillacs were an important status symbol to people who couldn't afford to buy a house. But the bar has been raised and now you can't have just one solitary car as a status symbol. I don't care if it's a gold plated Knight Rider, you need a fuckin armada to be really impressive. Many actors and music stars collect armies of expensive cars, or give them away, or ask for them as payment for doing movies. You know, like we used to use cigarettes inside, or marbles or sandwiches on the playground. The heroes on TV shows and movies always drive expensive sports cars no matter what. Even the cops drive sports cars instead of cop cars, like cops drive. The only time their cars don't work is if they are being chased by a maniac. Otherwise their cars are perfect and they don't have to wait five minutes for them to warm up or for the windows to defrost and they don't have that problem that they can't drive on the freeway because the old piece of shit can barely make it above 40.
I have not driven in a while due to lack of car type difficulties. What I mean by that is, I don't have a car. I don't even ride anymore. And I want to say right now that I have decided to abandon cars altogether. This will not decrease the size of the penis and I encourage all men and women with penises and breasts of all sizes to do the same.
Fuck cars. All you do in cars is take years off your life. I live in Seattle and we have some of the worst traffic in the country. Alot of people spend half as much time in the car to and from work as they do actually at work. If they don't give themselves high blood pressure they might get that road rage shit. It's like mad cow disease but on wheels. One time a guy took somebody's poodle and threw it across a couple lanes of traffic. Another guy crashed his car through the side of a Jack in the Box, got himself one hamburger and took off. Another guy in a car chased the hamburglar but got his car rammed. Even if you're a good car guy like the guy trying to catch the hamburglar, it's too much trouble.
And that's the thing, people feel like because they have a car they are entitled to something. Entitled to not get cut off in traffic. Entitled to not stop for somebody to cross the street, even at a crosswalk. Entitled to just be a big fuckin asshole, just because they're wearing what amounts to giant mechanical pants.
If they almost run over you on a crosswalk they don't apologize or even look embarassed after they slam on the breaks. They won't even make eye contact. One time a guy actually hit me on a crosswalk while talking on his cell phone, and his first reaction was not to gasp or apologize, but to honk at me! If you step out into the road before your light turns green, then decide not to cross and get back on the sidewalk, they still honk at you, because you gave them an opening. If the cars are way down the street, so you jaywalk, thirty seconds later they pass you on the sidewalk, and they honk (I've seen this happen especially to young black men). They live 2 blocks from the grocery store, they still drive there, even if it takes longer when they have to find parking, because why the fuck would you walk? There are young people that use a car like an old dude uses a Rascal.
Riding the bus to work in Seattle is expensive because of this fucker from Bellevue named Tim Eyman. He's some Lexus driving asshole who got rich selling engraved watches to fraternities on the internet. Then he started a company that creates initiatives to lower the taxes on expensive cars, taking money away from transit. So there are less routes than there used to be and the buses come less often and the schedules at the bus stops are not up to date, if there are schedules there at all. After this year's initiative the city announced that they'd have to close the Seattle Public Library down 2 months out of the year. Which is more important to you - low taxes on expensive cars, or reading? Washington had to make that choice, and they chose cars.
That was before the recession. Yesterday I read that they're closing down alot of the parks too. So I guess these nice little parks will become overgrown weed patches piled up with garbage, fenced off and occasionally combed with flashlights at night to make sure people aren't buttfucking in the bushes. Pretty soon I think they'll shut down the animal control department and we'll have wild dobermans roaming the streets like in Suburbia, getting into Westlake Mall and eating people on the escalator. If an elephant escapes from the zoo and starts hunting for elephant trainers, we'll have to wait for a team to come up from Portland. And they better take the bus if they want to make it through traffic.
(In a happier note, Tim Eyman will be shutting down too now that the newspapers found out he had taken more than $150,000 of donated money and put it in his own account. On the list of things his supporters paid for: car repairs, a donation to the Republicans, and "stuff".)
Despite all this, the bus is still better than driving. You almost never get stuck in traffic. You don't need insurance. You don't buy gas. You don't even have to drive. So you don't risk damaging your car or somebody else's car or getting a speeding ticket or a parking ticket. You don't have to find a parking space. You don't have to pay exorbitant parking fees to some asshole entrepreneur that bought a square and put cement on it, some lines and numbers and a metal box (what a fuckin scam!)
You can doze off on the bus. You can read Iceberg Slim books. Sometimes you can meet real pimps on the bus, or crack dealers, or punk kids straight out of Larry Clark movies, holding skateboards, talking about crystal meth and blowjobs. You can stay in touch with youth culture or see a man suddenly pull a stack of quarters out of his mouth.
You meet interesting people on the bus. Like the young man from Alaska who, high on life, told me I was "sucking Bill Gates's dick". Or the gentlemen the other day who suddenly announced, "Okay - trivia time!" and quizzed no one in particular about the history of professional boxing.
When a cop gets on the bus he's not there for you, unless you're on the nod or knifing somebody or something. It's not like when you get pulled over - then you know it's you they want.
When you're riding the bus, you're not contributing to traffic congestion. Unless your bus drives off a bridge, but that's not regular. One time a guy shot the bus driver and the bus drove off a bridge into a small artist's community. But most of the passengers survived.
Then there's the whole moral thing. I'm not some "tree hugger" or "flower child" or "cocksucker" but I think every one of us has to admit we're really fuckin pushin it as a species. There were only so many dinosaurs and there is only so much oil. We are polluting our air. If you have air conditioning (not that I ever did, you luxury car owning fucks) you're eating away the ozone layer. I know it's easy to forget about but I read that thing is 3 times the size of europe now. And you europeans can testify, that's pretty, you know, that's pretty big in my opinion.
If a climate that'll fry us like beer battered onion rings doesn't do it for you, what about the political climate? George Bush (both of em in fact) came from oil. They would not be in office if they didn't make money off of all you fuckers buying oil. Cheney comes from oil. Most of Bush's regime comes from oil. The troubles in Venezuala recently are about oil. The short-lived military coup that the White House praised as a victory for democracy, that seems to have been at least partly about oil. Bush part I's war in Iraq was mainly about oil. The FBI was pressured not investigate bin Laden or the Saudi royalty for terrorism because of oil. Cheney threatened to go to invade Afghanistan if they didn't let us build an oil pipeline through their land, next thing you know we got planes crashing into buildings.
I mean, fuck oil. I know we can't escape it yet but as much as we can, shouldn't we? I'm not saying that just because it's morally reprehensible to drive if you don't have to, that you HAVE to stop. I'm just saying that you SHOULD. Remember when black people stopped buying gold because it was funding apartheid in south africa? How about everybody cuts down on oil because it's fucking up the whole world?
Anyway, this movie doesn't explore those issues, really, at least not on a literal or metaphorical level. It just explores racing cars. Sort of. I don't know if the filmatists would admit it, but racing is not inherently cinematic. They try hard but the racing scenes in here are not that exciting. You got two cars driving in straight lines, trying to go the fastest. That's not exciting. Why do you think in the olympics, they ski somewhere and then they pull out a gun and start shooting targets and shit? Because racing is boring. I mean think about it. If regular racing wasn't boring, why would they have invented Wacky Racing? If racing was worth watching then the Wacky Racers would be out of a job. People would just think, I like the way they race, but they are too wacky. There would be no need to spice things up with hot air balloons and contraptions and tying ladies to train tracks and teaching dogs to drive. That would be seen as a distraction.
I mean how many examples do you need here? Nothing that goes in a straight line is exciting. In skiing, you got slalom. In rollercoasters you got loopty loop. Water skiing only makes it on tv if it's a squirrel. What would you rather watch? A toad race or a chicken fight? And even toads hop. They could hop high or low, long or short. They could hop crooked and go off the track. Who knows how they'll hop? Nobody. But there's no room for this type of variation in this straight-line style of racing because the cars don't hop. They just go fast and the two people try to go faster than each other. It's all about who has the most money and knowledge to build the most powerful engine and maintain it. And the only thing more boring that a movie about driving a car really fast in a straight line is a movie about people preparing their cars to be able to drive really fast in a straight line.
But anyway this is not about actual driving skill. So there's not much to depict here. The race itself is so boring they have to have buttons on the wheel that make the car go faster. Uh oh, the other guy is in the lead. I know! Push the button that makes it go faster!
Because of this, they had no choice but to make this car racing movie not really about car racing. So the exciting scenes are the police chases, where you actually get to turn corners and crash through stuff and maybe even jump. Throw some motorcycles in there and they can really jump, and do little sideways kicky things. A few machine guns can pepper things up too. Also you gotta throw in a whole plotline about an undercover cop and some robberies. This bothered some people but I mean, at least they're not driving in straight lines the whole movie is all I'm saying.
I think I've established that theory but you can e-mail me for more information on why racing in straight lines is boring. At least let's see some side wheelies!
Mr. Cohen depicts this racing world as a multi-cultural underground dressed up by Urban Outfitters, painted neon green and orange with purple stripes. It is inhabited by a charismatic cast who we will call the chassis, because they are the only thing holding this shit together. Most notable is the promising new Badass Vin Diesel, from the robot cartoon and Pitch Black.
There are many reasons why Vin Diesel is popular and why that will only grow. First of all, he's a deep-voiced muscleman who broke into the industry by directing short films. (Please refer to my THEORY OF BADASS JUXTAPOSITION, which has never ceased to be relevant.) And then there's this whole multi-racial thing. In Pitch Black I thought he was black. He sounds like it and he looks like it at a glance. On closer inspection he could just be some italian guy, who knows. He could play a number of races believably and he refuses to reveal his true origins.
He's also got a machismo that you don't get much these days. I'm not saying I want everybody in Hollywood to be some fuckin self obsessed oaf but let me relay to you this anecdote about his work on John Frankenheimer's REINDEER GAMES, where he was cast as some kind of supporting thug. Mr. Frankenheimer asked Vin Diesel to take his shirt off to show his muscles in a scene. Vin Diesel refused, saying, "I only take my shirt off in a Vin Diesel film."
So Frankenheimer fired him. I don't know if Vin was saying that he'd be headlining movies soon (which was true) or if he was saying he would only take his shirt off in a movie he directed. Either way, good story.
Another good story, which I think is probaly phony, is about how he got started acting. Supposedly he and his friends were caught vandalizing a theater as teens, and the owner agreed to drop charges if they would come in and study acting.
Also, remember, we're talking about a guy who named himself VIN DIESEL. I mean that pretty much explains him.
Diesel's character here is typical of his roles so far. He is basically a cult leader - an egomaniacal asshole who has some kind of charm that makes everyone gravitate to him, and always want to please him. And it's convincing. He is the best racer, the best mechanic, and the ringleader of illegal enterprises. And he's Vin Diesel. In one scene, Vin zooms along the highway right next to a truck that his friend happens to be clinging to the front of, in mortal danger. Things haven't gone as planned and the buddy really needs to get into Vin's car somehow. So Vin, one hand on the wheel, flying down the road at maybe 100 mph, pokes his head out the window like a dog, holds out one muscular arm and yells, "JUMP!" And you look at the guy, and you look at Vin, and you look at Vin's arm, and you really believe that he thinks this will work. That the buddy can jump, and maybe Vin will hug him against the side of the car and be able to pull him in, and Vin's arm won't break off or anything.
Luckily, Vin's friend doesn't do it. But you gotta admire Vin for offering.
But Mr. Diesel is actually not the main character here. Neither is Outlaw Award Winner Michelle Rodriguez, who still acts tough, and fights to belong in a male dominated world, but mostly is just the girlfriend character except in one scene where she gets to punch a dude in the face.
The star is actually Paul Walker who worked with Rob Cohen in THE SKULLS PART 1 and who was surprisingly good in JOY RIDE. He's racking up a big collection of roles as whitebread hunks wearing tight shirts. He has that quality of the football player who is so nice you can't hate him as much as you hate the other football players. He sounds kinda slow and stiff but has some kind of weird hidden charisma that makes you like him anyway.
Like all the fad movies alluded to above, this one pretends to show the gritty reality of the underground street racing culture. Mr. Cohen did manage to get real street racers and their cars as extras in the big tournament at the end. But somehow I can't imagine the real people who do this are much like the people in the movie, wearing the same designer tank tops every day, exchanging Freudian stories about the first time they drove, making little speeches about the gasoline that runs in their veins.
On the other hand maybe I can imagine it, because this is a hobby that only the richest of the rich could ever get involved in. I mean there is some major equipment involved in this one. Like for example, CARS. In the movie, Paul Walker bets away an $80,000 car the first time he meets the other racers, and nobody thinks it's suspicious.
You stupid rich fucks.
At least they're out there on the streets, though, instead of in the board rooms and the white house.
thank you
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT
This third picture in the FAST AND THE FURIOUS trilogy saga is pretty different and at first doesn't even seem to be connected to the other ones. I never saw Academy Award nominee for best director John Singleton's 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, but I know Paul Walker returned and Vin Diesel didn't. And I believe Tyrese showed up. This time around we lose everybody and start over with a new character played by Lucas Black (the kid from SLING BLADE who I last saw in a small role in JARHEAD).
The first section of the movie, which is also the best section, is all about Lucas Black getting into macho confrontations with dudes and then having a race. In the opening he's leaving school, getting into his junker car when he exchanges words with a rich asshole jock dickhead (HOME IMPROVEMENT's Zachary Ty Bryan, still wearing a letterman's jacket at 24). You can already tell this is gonna be a worthwhile movie when it starts playing western style music and showing closeups of their faces as they stare each other down. They're about to get in a wrench fight when the jock's girlfriend suggests a peaceful solution: a fast and/or furious race. Lucas Black says, "I only race for pink slips," (he doesn't mention whether or not he lives life a quarter mile at a time) but since the HOME IMPROVEMENT guy's Viper is worth $80,000, the bet is not agreed upon. So the girlfriend suggests herself as the prize. So you know the western music was not lying about this movie being awesome.
Now, maybe it's the girl who uses her bra as a starting flag, or maybe it's Lucas Black's strategic decision to crash through an unfinished house as a shortcut, or maybe it's the girlfriend turning to her boy and saying, "I thought you loved me!" when they start to lose and then the boyfriend pulling that one lever they have in cars that makes them go faster that you only think of using late in the race. It could be alot of things but something about this scene is even better than the rest of the movie. At the end of the race both cars are destroyed and all three drivers and passengers are bloody. Black smiles with bloody teeth and winks at the girl he has supposedly won in the race. What a charmer.
But it turns out this guy is a troublemaker and this is his third strike so to avoid going to jail his mom sends him to his Navy dad, who lives in Tokyo. He crashes in dad's shitty little apartment, and the next day has to go to a Japanese school where he meets another American, Twinkie, played by regular sized Bow Wow (ROLL BOUNCE). Twinkie (who drives a weird green car with three-dimensional Incredible Hulk fists coming out of the sides) introduces him to the world of underground "drift racing," which means you skid around sideways alot. And again he gets into a macho confrontation with a dude (this time a weird looking wannabe Yakuza with a flat nose named Drift King). A stranger lends him a fancy car and there is another race. And you realize wow, so far all that has happened in this movie is this guy has gone to one day of school on two different continents and both days led to a car race to prove his manhood.
Unfortunately, for the rest of the movie he is able to leave the house without getting in a race, but it's still pretty good stuff. Han, the guy who loaned him the car, is pissed because it turned out he had no idea what drifting was and scraped the car all up and down every cement surface available, completely destroying it. So he ends up doing some jobs for Han and they become buddies sort of like undercover cop Paul Walker did with street racer/armed robber Vin Diesel in the first movie. Only one never has to betray the other. He has to learn how to drift through a variety of training montages and what not. (He doesn't seem to ever have any problem adjusting to driving on the other side of the car and the street.)
The racing scenes are pretty cool. You can't always follow what's going on but they're much less artificial than the races in the first movie. This is because it's mostly real. There were two obvious digital shots but both were pretty cool, one was an overhead shot of "drifting" through hundreds of pedestrians in downtown Tokyo and the other was a fancy digital camera move over cliffs during a big race. Well, you had to be there.
But as important as the racing is the Tokyo setting. We Americans are suckers for all that Japanese shit, and they get alot of it in there. They got rotating garages, those little bunker apartments, pachinko parlors, Japanese retro garage rock, Japanese cowgirls, Yakuza pop star dudes with fancy hair and suits, etc. Pretty much everything but karate. But instead of karate they have Sonny Chiba himself in three or four scenes as the bad guy's Yakuza uncle. His way of karate has no end.
There's this new trend in movie advertising called Lambading. It's where they try to shove some fake trend down your throat and pretend that everybody is excited about it. For example the ads for DISTRICT B-13 (the American release of that old movie the rest of the world calls BANLIEUE 13) have three critical acclaim quotes that casually drop the word "parkour." The idea is that you're supposed to go, "Parkour? What's parkour? How come this critic says it and doesn't explain what it means? And this one too. Oh shit, everybody else knows what it means and I never heard of the god damn thing. Now I have to see this movie so I'll know what it is otherwise people will find out I don't know and nobody will think I'm cool anymore."
TOKYO DRIFT takes kind of
the opposite approach, they pretend that "drifting" is a huge phenomenon
but instead of dropping it casually they have a definition, history and glossary
on the back of their promotional posters.
If you read my 3,901 word review of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS you probaly don't
remember this, but I pointed out that drag races are not at all cinematic
because they just go in a straight line and it's boring. I don't want to brag
but let's admit it, my review was the inspiration for this movie and for the
entire fictional sport of "drifting." So Vern doesn't want it
in a straight line? they asked. Then we'll have 'em drive sideways
and spin around in circles and shit. Also they drive on curvy roads and
on parking garage ramps and various twisty things. My point is, this type
of racing is a little more interesting to watch than the old "zoom down
a street and pull the nitrous thing to go faster" shit.
In fact the filmatists are so confident that dipshits in the audience will be excited about "drifting" that when the movie ends the agressive techno comes on but instead of the credits right away you get a long disclaimer about how the driving in the movie was performed on closed tracks by professionals and if and when you dumb little rich brats kill yourselves trying to do it at home it will be your own god damn fault and not Hollywood's. I think JACKASS has something like this but this is the only non-documentary I know of with that kind of disclaimer.
To me though it wasn't the racing that made the first FAST AND THE FURIOUS watchable, it was Vin Diesel. In this movie there is no replacement for Vin Diesel's macho charisma. The character Han sort of takes his place in the story, because he's a good guy criminal. Late in the movie we even find out that he knows Vin Diesel's character and they're "like family." (Remember, at the end of part 1 Vin drove off into the sunset to have racing adventures all over the world.) But whether you like Vin Diesel or not, Han is no replacement for him. I can't make excuses, the guy sounds like a dork. He's a likable enough character but his squeaky voice is the opposite of Vin's.
But I happen to think Lucas Black makes a great anti-hero. My bud Laremy will disagree, he said on his podcast that Black is "horrible" in the movie, but he's wrong. Black is cool because he doesn't seem to have an ounce of Hollywood bullshit in him. In fact, this is his first Hollywood bullshit movie after doing little independent movies since he was a kid. I don't know how he got the lead in this movie without having to hide his Alabama accent, but when have you seen that before? It seems like Mathew McConaghey's about the only guy with a real accent. It's like from a distance they thought Lucas Black was another buff pretty boy like Paul Walker and he was already signed on before they got close enough to realize he had a little Warren Oates in him.
Black's character Sean is an age old movie tough guy type. A guy who delights in causing trouble, but has a deep sense of honor. And also is incredibly stubborn. He never backs down from a fight or a challenge, and in fact always backs into them. Nothing scares him. It's not just that he's doing these dangerous races and that he's messing with the Yakuza and stealing their women, and that when the shit gets really bad he decides to go find Sonny Chiba and talk to him man-to-man to straighten things out. He's the same way with less life threatening challenges. How many dudes from Alabama would just walk into a Japanese school, not knowing the language, and try to go to class without complaining? It doesn't matter how many times you see these type of characters, they're always fun to watch if the challenges they face are amusing enough. And involve race cars.
So the first half is definitely better than the second, and I'm not saying I didn't get bored at times. But TOKYO DRIFT is a fun, ridiculous movie. Not as asinine as the original, but in many ways more entertaining.
FAST
AND FURIOUS
You take the "the"s out, the title becomes more aerodynamic. This
unlikely THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS part 4 combines elements of the previous
3: the characters and tone of part 1, the video game plotting and drug kingpin
bad guys of part 2, the director and improved visual style of part 3. Combining
all the technologies they've developed into a new model.
Part 3 might still be my favorite, with its comprehensive visual tribute to
everything that looks cool in Tokyo and its charismatic lead performance by
Lucas Black (plus Sonny Chiba bit part, Incredible Hulk car and stupid cameo
at the end). I was surprised how much I liked that one and even more surprised
how many people I know who have no interest in the series liked it too.
Ah fuck it, I can't really choose a favorite though. Each one is a beautiful
snowflake. The first one I felt like I was laughing at it more than with it,
but I gotta admit I fell for Vin Diesel's performance and Swayzian dedication
to macho philosophy. The second one is the funniest and by far most ridiculous
and there's no way John Singleton didn't know it was hilarious to pimp the
Universal logo. The third one is just the most interesting to look at and
most likable. The hero is a scrappy well-meaning tough kid instead of some
rich boy, cop or thief, and he doesn't really seem like a part of that whole
ridiculous neon car culture from the first two. He's just a troubled lower
class car guy on his third strike who gets into some scuffles. In Japan.
So maybe I'm not coming from the same place as all the people I've seen giving
this one negative reviews. I really enjoyed it. For me it actually is kind
of exciting to see all four original leads return (has that ever happened
before? They leave after part 1 and return in part 4?). Diesel doesn't do
as much funny philosophizing, but he's cool because he's meaner, he's out
for revenge this time. He keeps his words to a minimum and, unlike in xXx
he keeps his outlaw cred intact from beginning to end.
I get a kick out of these movie's religious faith in cars. They worship their
cars and believe they can do magical things. In most movies where a guy is
out for revenge, he might chase a guy down in a car but then he's gonna get
out and shoot the guy or whatever, to make it more personal. In a FAST AND
(the) FURIOUS movie you stay in your car and run him over, because that
is more personal. At one point Diesel uses his car as a bomb, which to a guy
of his belief system is a very severe sacrifice. At first I thought his nitrous/dashboard
lighter improvised time bomb was a little farfetched. Then I realized he could
have planned ahead and optimized the car for that purpose when he prepared
it for the mission. But then on third thought I remembered that he lives life
a quarter mile at a time, so he's not allowed to plan that far ahead. So that
was some good improv there, Vin.
Because of his strong faith he has some new powers, which is maybe the test
of whether or not you're gonna like the movie. If you roll your eyes at the
scene where he investigates an accident site and we see him standing in the
middle of the car crash as he pieces together what happened, then this movie
is not for you. If that gives you a big shit eating grin like with me then
you will like the movie.
Paul Walker is better this time than in the first two. He looks and acts much
tougher, like he's been through more. (He does not mention if he misses Tyrese.)
He even has a couple of the best moves:
1. in a foot chase a guy gets over a fence before him so he just rams the
fence to knock the guy on his ass as he tries to gingerly climb down the other
side.
2. when one of his fellow agent comes up to threaten him about tampering with
his case, Paul starts bloodying the dude's face without even saying a word
It's especially cool to see these characters return in Justin Lin's jurisdiction.
I know he's a young guy but he shoots it like he's some Bruckheimer disciple
who refused to take part in the black magic ritual where they all vowed to
destroy the language of action cinema and declared war on human brains and
hearts. He splintered off and went down a good path, so he's got all that
'80s action movie stuff that Michael Bay and those guys like - tons of dramatic
shots looking up at the heroes posing, nice sunsets, crowds of super hot babes
in colorful, tight clothing, shiny cars, busy seemingly-realistic law enforcement
bureaus doing their jobs... but then he doesn't have the Avid farts and jarring
cuts and dizzying closeups. He keeps it pretty controlled. He pays homage
to part 2 with a ridiculously detailed GPS animation of a race and to part
1 by ripping off POINT BREAK with a great foot chase.
I read a review that complained that the opening action sequence is the best
one (fair enough) and that it doesn't make sense to shoot high speed car chases
in a dark tunnel. That second one seems like it would be true but I don't
know, I got a kick out of the unnecessary dangerousness of several cars hauling
ass right on each other's tails in a place where one false move could cause
a deadly pileup. Maybe a little more TEMPLE OF DOOM mineshaft theatrics would've
been even funnier but still. I thought it was a worthy entry in the FAST AND
FURIOUS catalog of stupid places to drive cars fast.
I'm not a car guy, but I like them in movies. In this one you get good helpings
of cars flipping, rolling, jumping, smashing, sliding, skidding, drifting,
exploding. You get people jumping out of cars, onto cars, you get even more
high speed backwards driving than in any previous entry. There is less emphasis
on the flashy neon colored import cars (Walker's weapon of choice) and more
on the American muscle cars Diesel prefers, which is maybe less hilarious
but definitely more pleasing to the eye.
At this point Walker's character Brian O'Connor has gone undercover as a street
racer three times. Once to catch Vin Diesel's character Dom (failed), once
to catch some drug kingpin (successful), and now he's going after a heroin
smuggler. The racers in these movies (with the exception of Lucas Black) piss
me off because they can just pour money into their cars and don't give a shit
that they seem to go through them faster than underwear. O'Connor has an excuse
though, he has the backing of the government, and in this one he gets to look
at three screens full of impounded drug dealer cars, and choose his favorites.
I think at this point it would be a good idea to set up a special Car Ops
division that would take advantage of his talents as well as other experienced
street racing agents like his friend Tyrese or the two reggaeton stars with
bit parts in this one (in place of Ja Rule and Ludacris).
Speaking of Tyrese, I thought he was supposed to have a cameo, but he doesn't.
I would've liked to see Lucas Black in there too, but at least they have his
friend Han, who implies (I think) that the events of TOKYO DRIFT have not
yet taken place. So maybe there's a chance for FAST/FURIOUS: RETURN TO TOKYO
DRIFT.
By the way, I don't usually have much
interest in the ol' box office, but I was pretty impressed that this thing
made 100 million dollars worldwide in its first weekend. Just imagine how
much it could've made if I would've posted my review earlier. It woulda beat
TITANIC already. Anyway, the sweet justice is that my fellow movie nerds made
fun of Vin Diesel for coming back to the series that he left, saying it was
desperate and pathetic. But I looked it up and it's his biggest opening ever
by a margin of about $25 million. Doesn't prove it's a good movie (that's
what this review is for), but does prove it was a good move. Looks like Mr.
Giant Pecs won that particular game of Dungeons and Dragons. His prize is
he gets to keep talking about doing another Riddick movie, and nobody is allowed
to say the usual snarky shit about it.
4/8/09
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS
This is a movie where Ichabod from Sleepy Hollow teams up with a fat Mexican dude named Benicio Del Toro, and these two drive to Las Vegas on 700 different types of drugs to cover a motorcycle race for a magazine. I believe Bill Murray played this same Ichabod character back in the '80s based on the real guy, Hunter S. Thompson who wrote the book.
Now as you know I'm sober as the Pope during Lent, but I can still appreciate a good drug movie at least as long as it's this good. The filmatist behind this one, Terry Gilliam, creates a nightmare Las Vegas world where hallucinations of dripping floors and cocktail drinking lizards and nippled buffaloes becomes reality. And the real trip is in the last act of the picture when suddenly Ichabod wakes up in the most trashed hotel room of all time - it looks like a junkyard on top of a lagoon - and tries to remember what happened. All the sudden he has an alligator tail and he's dictating to a tape recorder duct taped to his mouth. I mean I think we can all relate to that type of morning in my opinion.
The reason this picture works is because of the two actors, Ichabod and Benicio, who are both funny and crazy but likable. Well, at least Ichabod is likable. My favorite scene is when Benicio pulls a knife on some people in an elevator and later declares that the woman fell in love with him, he could tell by the eye contact. "It's serious, man." I mean these are two crazy motherfuckers, you can't believe the shit they are doing, and it seems like they just don't know how to be any other way. I like the part where Ichabod walks into a police convention and the movie does an x-ray number on his suitcase to remind us that it is filled with every illegal drug ever invented.
But I guess what I really liked about this one is the spirit behind this guy trying to cover a motorcycle race in true Outlaw fashion. I mean this motherfucker is not looking for the same thing the other reporters are. He doesn't even know shit about the bikes and he doesn't watch much of the race, all he knows for sure is that it started. He puts himself into the story and tries to learn something about people and American culture and how the times are a changin and what not. In other words if this dude was a film critic he would NOT be allowed in the OFCS.
I admire anyone who wants to approach something from a new angle and comes out with a halfway decent product. And this book the dude wrote is an American classic thank you very much.
This is the end of the review now sorry
FEAR-ANXIETY-DEPRESSION
Remember that motherfucker that made Happiness? His name is Todd Solondz and you might think he's some hipster that came out of nowhere with 1996's Welcome to the Dollhouse and then hit it big when he was Outlaw enough to refuse to cut Happiness, brought it to a different distributor who would release it unrated or whatever. Well, that's what I thought but then I found out about this, his first picture from 1989, one year after the release of Die Hard.
And I gotta be honest this movie is a piece of shit. It is only worth watching as a curiosity for fans of the other two Solondz works. What is weird is it has all his themes of loneliness, hopelessness etc. except in the context of a more goofy mainstream comedy. Solondz is actually the star of the picture playing a struggling playwriter named Ira. And this Solondz, I mean to be frankly honest, this guy is what they call a nerd. I mean seriously. He's a skinny, scraggly haired, overbited weirdo with gigantic glasses, a squeaky, whiny voice and weird affectations. He would be right at home in one of his other movies. But here he is cast as a Woody Allen type stuttering neurotic Writer character. And he is in a functional lifestyle with successful friends, he even goes on dates and gets laid.
What's more Solondz wrote the lyrics to some of the songs on the soundtrack and performs one of them, "A Neat Kind of Guy," an intentionally bad song about his character.
The acting is more cartoony here like The Toxic Avenger or something, so you think of them as movie characters and not people in your neighborhood. And with the whole struggling-in-the-New-York-art-community story this just doesn't have that unique-vision-of-humanity's-filth-and-ugliness feel of Happiness, it's more of a cliche. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is wrong with these New Yorkers that they think they're the center of the universe. Every other movie takes place in New York or is about New York. Scorsese and Spike Lee and some of these guys, they try to use New York as a character. Letterman and O'Brien always talking about taxi drivers and subways and Rudolph Gulianni like he's the empereror of the world and everybody is supposed to give a shit what this jackass does over there. Kubrick puts his last movie in New York, except filmed on a set, and every New Yorker on the internet has to complain about the sign on the third store from the corner of 3rd and Wino Street was actually the wrong shade of red and had a sans serif font whereas the actual sign is more of an algerian font. What an outrage!
Well fuck that man. I'm sure it's a great place but get over it. There are plenty of other motherfuckers in this world, motherfuckers from places like LA, New Jersey and Arkansas. I'm talking West Coast, South Coast, middle American, middle Eastern. I'm talking London, France, Japanese, Chinese, Icelandic, Puerto Rican. There are many, many places in the world and almost none of them are New York. I need another movie about the New York art community like I need another TV show about lawyers. Which means I don't need any. I mean you can make another Fear-Anxiety-Depression, you can make a show about undercover cops posing as doctors and lawyers. Do as you wish pal but you better not be proud of it. I mean jesus, why not make something new. Look at what Jarmusch is doing, making urban samurai flicks. Now that's something new. Find something new you piece of shit I mean jesus.
Anyway that's what Solondz did, he left the picture industry for six years or whatever and then he came back with some works that were more his own. Thanks bud you did the right thing. In this one, there is just too much jibber jabber trying to be clever. If Todd's character would just shut up more often it would be a better movie. The best moments in Fear-Anxiety-etc. are just where something bad happens, and then there is a long shot of Todd with a stupid look on his face. That stupid look on his face is more the type of movie he is doing now, thank christ.
FEMME FATALE
Brian De Palma has gotta be one of the most controversial directors there is. Not because of the content of his movies but because of the reactions to them. It seems like anybody who knows who he is either hates him or loves him. Mostly hates. But they're wrong.
The reasons for hating him: the movies are too good. I'm sick of seeing movies that are so clever and well made. Why does every Brian De Palma movie have to be a masterpiece or an interesting failure? Why are his movies so stylish? It gets old after a while. De Palma has a recognizable style, I'd rather not be able to tell the difference between one movie and any other movie. His style is too fetishistic, thrillers aren't supposed to be personal. It's too hard to tell where the movie is going, it makes me uncomfortable. How DARE he surprise the audience with the beginning and ending of a Mission Impossible movie? I wanted to get exactly what I expected and nothing else. His camerawork and editing is distracting because it is too inventive. If he's such a great director, why hasn't he done a movie about world war 2 or retards? Also why is he so into Hitchcock. It's almost like he admires Hitchcock, he does so many homages to him. I noticed part that was like a Hitchcock movie. Since I spotted it I have every right to be angry. I hope I get a ribbon.
Well if you hate De Palma then you hate him, this movie is not for you. (It is directed by Brian De Palma.) But otherwise you're gonna love this movie because this is him back at full strength. I never saw that Martian movie. To be safe, I'll assume it really is bad. I did see SNAKE EYES which is great until the end when the big ending it's all carefully leading up to suddenly doesn't happen, because the studio made him change whatever it was. I'm still waiting for a director's cut.
FEMME FATALE doesn't pull any such shenanigans, it's just pure De Palma self conscious, sexy, indulgent, clever, contrived thriller. From the first shot to the last you know it's all deliberate and calculated and you just know De Palma knows exactly what he's doing with each detail and each move of the camera. Even the score is on the verge of being cocky. The score knows where the movie is going and knows that you don't. There are times when there is a twist that makes you go "Whuh?" but if you just keep watching you will find that even this ridiculous turn of events was carefully set up from the very beginning. Just close your eyes and De Palma will catch you.
Although it's all made up of traditional thriller elements (diamond heist, seduction, betrayal, misdirection, mistaken identity, voyeurism, revenge, suicide, blackmail, kidnapping, fraud, Paris) it doesn't follow the template of the usual thriller. The structure is very complicated but doesn't feel wobbly at all. It starts with a team of thieves pulling off a lesbian seduction/diamond heist in the bathroom during the Cannes Film Festival (did I mention Brian De Palma directed this movie?) and you quickly find that the seductress is more the protagonist than the femme fatale of the title. Played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (one of a handful of ridiculously exotic supermodels in the movie), she is the one crook who seems to have a little bit of a conscience. She is offended when the caper turns violent so she tries to take off with the jewels herself. As she plans her escape to America you root for her to get away with it, even though you don't know anything about her background and she barely talks. It takes a while to even figure out whether Romijn-Stamos is faking a French accent or playing an American faking a French accent.
Romijn-Stamos is a great De Palma protagonist. She has the unattainable beauty and aggressive sexuality, and she doesn't have to say too many lines. (When she does, she does them well, though.) She looks great wearing a variety of disguises, expensive outfits and lingerie. In movies, she has an aura of mystery and exoticism, like when she played the naked blue chick in X-MEN. If you see her on talk shows she seems like a goofball, though. I think she's even married to one of the dudes that raised the Olsen twins.
Then after falling into a huge coincidence that even makes her character say "Holy shit!", we cut to 7 years later and she's living a different life and we don't see her for a while. Instead we focus on the leatherjacketed photographer Antonio Banderas. We know he's a good guy because 1) he's Antonio Banderas 2) he is out of money and 3) he used to be a paparazzi type photographer but now is an artist type photographer. He went straight, man.
So like when Janet Leigh died in PSYCHO (wait a minute, isn't that a Hitchcock movie? god damn it De Palma) you shift your identification over to Banderas and when he gets involved with Mrs. Romijn-Stamos, she really does become the femme fatale. So now you're rooting for him to get out of it instead of her to get away with it.
And then as things get more sleazy and they're fuckin on a pool table in a bar you start to wonder if you even side with EITHER of these scumbags. And then things get alot more complicated than that.
I wouldn't want to give away any of the tricks of this movie, so I won't say much more. But it's good shit. It's nice to feel like you're in good hands watching a sexy thriller. You don't get that too often anymore. And I like De Palma's fetishism. He is fascinated by voyeurism and you become fascinated with his fascination as you watch Gregg Henry watch Antonio Banderas watch Rebecca Romijn-Stamos who it turns out wants to be watched anyway. (So maybe it's exhibitionism?)
FEVER
As you know I can enjoy a good neo-noir type picture every once in a while. It's almost not fair to include THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE in this pantheon because it's so spectacular and successfully retro that it makes the other ones look kinda lame. But other than that one it's been a while since anyone succeeded at the modern film noir. I guess most independent filmatists trying to start out with a low budget crime movie have moved on from trying to make a BLOOD SIMPLE or a RED ROCK WEST to trying to make a RESERVOIR DOGS and then a PULP FICTION and then a LOCK, STOCK AND ET AL.
What makes this one surprising is that the director is Alex Winter, best known as Bill from BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE. Or possibly Ted. The point is, he's not Keanu Reeves, but he is one of those two, Bill and Ted. I believe he is Ted come to think of it. Or he may be Bill. One of those.
If you are a youngster who doesn't know what BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE is, it is the original version of DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR. So imagine one of those goofballs, only with curly hair, and directing a serious neo-noir type thriller. Starring the kid from E.T.
Henry Thomas plays a young art teacher living in a slum, who overhears his landlord having a loud argument with a drunk who lives in the building. The next day the landlord is dead. Things are bad for Henry. He gets sick, he has money troubles, he meets some weird people, he doesn't get along with his dad and the cop investigating the landlord's murder, played of course by Bill Duke, obviously has some suspicions about him.
Sometimes I think Bill Duke really is a cop, living in the alternate movie universe, travelling from film to film solving crimes with a silent, intimidating glare.
The story here is pretty straightforward with all the classical elements. Don't look for clever twists or surprises, it's just the good execution and serious tone that make it work. I listened to the commentary track and Alex Winter claims there is a certain dark humor underneath, but I don't think anyone besides him will notice it. What I liked was that it WASN'T funny, it's just kind of grim and sad to see what happens to this poor dude.
And the reason why is because of a great performance by Henry Thomas, who seems to have something dark and burning behind his eyes ever since he was abandoned by his pet alien. He is very convincing as his fever gets worse and his grasp on reality starts to slip. There is one flashback shot in here where for some reason he remembers himself standing in a hallway in the dark with shadows on his eyesockets like Michael Meyers or something. I don't know what the hell it means but it's creepy.
And the apartment building, where
most of it takes place, is dark and weird. The movie is very slow and quiet,
with very little music, lots of non-verbal scenes, just the broken heater
chugging away somewhere else in the building. And you can almost feel it.
Turn that damn thing off.
FEVER PITCH
Usually even if I see a movie like this I wouldn't review it. Because you know, light-hearted romantic comedy is not my area of expertise. But if a movie critic is a bear then FEVER PITCH is a big pile of fish slathered in a barrel of honey, and I think you know why. Because it's easy as shit to write baseball puns and metaphors. It's fuckin tee-ball for the hack headline writers of the world. Sometimes they wonder how the fuck they gonna come up with a pun for a movie headline, but with a baseball movie you hit control-A for "strikes out," control-B for "swings for the fences."
Actually I don't think either of those is true, FEVER PITCH is more like a double or a triple or maybe a real good double play. They never use defensive plays in metaphors but double plays are obviously important, also triple plays but those don't happen enough to be a common phrase. I don't think there is such a thing as a quadruple play but it would be cool though. Anyway this is a cute romantic comedy deal but what makes it worth mentioning is
1) an observant premise that speaks to many people in ways most movies don't
2) a likable cast, crucial to this kind of crap
III) subtly avoiding some of the usual crap you would expect in this type of movie
In the movie Jimmy Fallon (young guy that would always fuck up and start laughing when he was on Saturday Night Live a couple years back) is a math teacher who asks out yuppie businesswoman Drew Barrymore (girl from E.T. and the Charlie's Angels dulogy). Jimmy is such a sweetheart that when he shows up for the first date and she's puking her guts out from food poisoning, he not only nurses her back to health but cleans the bathroom and rents ROADHOUSE for her.
So Drew and her fitness club buddies start to suspect there must be some catch. Not a metaphoric baseball catch but like, something wrong with him. They figure it out when baseball season starts and he turns out to be an obsessive freak about the Boston Red Socks. One of these guys with the season tickets, an entire apartment made out in a Red Soxx theme, goes to spring training to "scout players," etc. At first she gets into it and tries to learn about baseball. But of course it gets bad, she wants to go to family events and friend's birthdays, he doesn't want to miss games, etc. I mean, you ever have a friend invite you to some fuckin social event or other and you know you oughta go but you were already planning to go see the new Bruce Willis movie or whatever? And you gotta weigh your own personal priorities against normal human priorities? That's what it's about.
Then suddenly the movie throws you a curveball. Actually that's not true, it doesn't throw a curveball. But that is a metaphor that they use in movie reviews alot though. What I would like to see instead of the movie throws a curveball is a shirtless father and son run on the field and attack the third base umpire. But I couldn't figure out how to work that one into this review. Maybe by the time of Fever Pitch 2 I'll work it out.
I liked this premise because I think most interesting people have some retarded shit they are into and if you're gonna be close to them you're just gonna have to accept it. For example, I'm gonna watch every single god damn Steven Seagal picture that ever comes out, I don't care how bad it is. And then I'm gonna tell you all the best parts, whether you want to hear it or not. That doesn't make me cool or uncool, that just makes me Vern.
The movie was made by the Farrelly brothers, who are such huge sports nerds that on KINGPIN they were excited to have "famous" bowlers make cameos. They portray the obsession just right because first of all they know it's them, and second of all they know it's still freaky. So even though they obviously relate to this lifestyle they make it clear that it's just as freaky as the guys who wait in line for STAR WARS or the weirdos in TREKKIES or CINEMANIA or AMERICAN PIMP. It's a movie for obsessive weirdos and those who love them.
I don't understand these sports freaks. I went to opening day for the Mariners this season, I had one of these jokers behind me talking about the salaries of each player as they went up. Like anybody should ever know that shit. I bet they don't even know their own salaries. Plus I got a couple questions for baseball fans. Number one, why do you yell "Easy out, easy out" when the other team hits a pop up fly? Then if your guys catch it you are diminishing their accomplishment, if they don't catch it you're making them look like chumps. That is not supportive in my opinion. Number two, what's this bullshit about "THROW IT BACK! THROW IT BACK!" when the other team hits a ball in the stands? Some poor kid catches the ball, he's never gonna catch another one in his life and a bunch of fifty year olds got him practically in tears telling him to throw it back. Like it's some big insult to you that the other team had the fucking nerve to operate under the rules of baseball in order to score a run. How dare they? We can't let them get away with this. We must punish them with poor sportsmanship.
Anyway what I'm saying is I can't relate to these freakos, but in the movie I'd rather be hanging out with them than with Drew's yuppie friends. One side's obsessed with baseball, the other side with working and working out - both are a waste of time, so take your pick. But the good news is, they don't make them into bad guys either. You think the friends are gonna think Jimmy's a loser but they're actually very supportive. Same thing with her parents. Before you get a chance to wait for Jimmy to have to prove himself to her parents, he's already done it while she was at work.
I mean honestly I'd rather have KINGPIN but I'm still willing to give the brothers points for subtlety. For example Jim Fallon's got a filthy sweat-stained hat that he wears to all the games. But not once do they point it out or have him give a speech about it being his lucky hat. Most movies, especially this type of movie, they think they gotta tell you that. This movie treats you with the respect you deserve. You work hard, you pay your dues, you don't need some asshole explaining shit you already know about sweaty hats.
Most of the Farrelly movies have some asshole friend who gives bad advice, like Chris Elliot in THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY or Jason Alexander in the fat suit movie. In this one all the friends look out for each other, they even help Jimmy take a shower when he's sad. And not for the wrong reasons I don't think.
And that might be too much sweetness for some people to take. At this point the Farrelys could bobble the ball or the pitcher could balk. They could walk in the winning home run, who knows. But I think what makes it work, the movie is injected with the steroids of two charismatic lead actors (or players). Their names and reputations may shrink the testacles of critical credibility but they get the job done. I've seen some people talk shit about Drew Barrymore every time a new C's A's comes out, saying Hollywood tries to shove her down their throats as "hot" but she's realy not. I think that's her appeal though, she's cute but not some supermodel, and she's so giggly and goofy. She seems very sincere. In this movie, you really believe she loves Jimmy Fallon, just like I really believed she loved Adam Sandler in that movie I LOVE THE '80S. She really knows how to stare and smile like she has the biggest crush in the world. She's the Edgar Martinez of romantic comedies. Reliable, even if she has a bum leg. (I don't know man.)
And I think real life kind of helped out to give the movie an excuse. One of the crucial scenes involves that game where they were down 7 to 0 in the bottom of the ninth and then still won. If we didn't know it really happened it would be Hollywood bullshit. Same with the very end. In the original script and the Nick Hornby book it was supposedly based on, I guess it's important that the team always loses. But we all know that last year the Reddies finally won the world championship belt or whatever, so we are able to excuse the phoney hollywood ending where they finally win.
anyway enough about that, I admitted I liked it, what more do you monsters want from me?
afterword: A note about the ending (BIG ASS SPOILER). I was willing to accept that she would be able to run all the way across the field because it was a touching moment and all that crap. But I hate when movies have to put the rest of the world on pause for a romantic speech. No way these security goons would just stand there and wait for closure. I think the scene woulda been more touching and funnier if she just blurted out not to sell the tickets and then got tackled and dragged away. I mean completely knock the spit out of her. That woulda been more of a sacrifice on her part. Maybe some pepper spray in the face too. Always good for laffs. Also it's been pointed out to me that if you go on the field, you are banned from the stadium for life. So this is actually a brilliant plan on the part of Drew. She is able to declare her love and also avoid going to baseball games ever again. Two birds with one stone. (the game after that is a dream sequence)
The Fifth Element
is your usual Bruce Willis movie that starts out in Egypt in 1934 and ends
up in some fancy space hotel in 2334 with this blue skinned space opera lady
singing opera and then busting off dance moves. Bruce is introduced down on
his luck, pretty much like in the Die Hards - his wife left him, he's trying
to quit smoking, his mom won't stop hassling him and he's "5 points away"
from losing his job as a flying cab driver in space age New York.
In fact this is a lot like a Die Hard movie except in a cartoony comic book space world instead of a building. Instead of talking to a cop on a walkie talkie, he just talks to his mom on the phone, and instead of terrorists there's this big ball of fire hurtling toward the earth that turns light to dark, life to death, sometimes has a giant skull for a face, eats missiles and sattelites, and calls himself Mr. Shadow during phone calls.
It's a pretty simple plot. There are these four stones that combined with a perfect being called "the fifth element" can stop the ball of fire. These stones are in Egypt but then these fat robot guys come down from space and take them away for safe keeping. But then 300 years later they try to bring them back but their ship gets blown up by these muppet dog men. But the government finds a glove inside the ship and they use it to construct the perfect being, a hot orange headed gal named Leloo. So then she and a priest and Korben Dallas have to pretend they won this contest and go to the space hotel and the rocks are inside the belly of a singer so after she dies they take them out of the belly and there is a shoot out so they bring them to Egypt and do the whole ritual and whatnot.
The appeal of this picture is mainly visual. It's a real spectacle like some artsy fartsy comic book some frenchy would do. Bruce doesn't joke too much and he gets some corny lines like, "There are some very good words in V: valiant, vulnerable, very beautiful."
But let's face it the man looks cool even if a little gay. He's got blond hair and he wears arm warmers. Later in the movie after the space opera there is a big shootout, so he is right at home in space.
Now this Leloo is a pretty young gal with freaky ass hair like Lola in Run Lola Run. She's played by 1999 Outlaw Award Honorable Mention for Best Badass female Milla Jovovich from The Messenger and she seems completely real, hopping around like some kind of animal blurting out crazy japanese or some shit. See she's this "perfect being" reconstructed by scientists, so she has to use computers to learn about earth culture, and she only speaks "the divine language."
Now I might be imagining this but I seem to remember hearing a story about how this movie was made, I believe this girl was a wild child that they found out in the jungles of south america or something, they dressed her up and let her loose on the set and just filmed whatever she did. Now some would say this is cheating as far as acting like an alien goes and that's probaly why she wasn't eligible for an oscar for this piece. However if you've seen The Messenger story I think her english has improved quite a bit after being out in civilization for a while and she seems to be learning all the social rules, how to stand up straight and eat food properly and what not, although you can still see she's a little crazy, a little wild. But I hope she is happy living out in the concrete jungle. Kind of a shame really, I think like Tarzan or King Kong this will inevitably lead to tragedy but what the hell, the little jungle girl makes a damn good Leeloo in my opinion.
There's a lot of comedy type shenanigans in the movie that I don't think are very good. There are three different parts where people faint, if that gives you an idea. At the end the president tries to talk to Bruce's mom on the phone but she doesn't believe he's the president, and it's just awful as far as being funny. But Leeloo is funny. And there is this scene, Leeloo has just been created in the lab but the scientists and soldiers are just busting her balls so she decides to just haul ass out of there, and the cops chase after her. Funny thing is, they know she's this alien being just created in the lab two minutes ago, but they call her "lady" and get mad at her for not having an ID. Fuckin pigs man. Nothin changes in 300 years.
The casting in this movie is good. Not just Bruce and jungle girl, but they got this HUGE motherfucker Tommy "Tiny" Lister playing the president. This is a dude I would vote for in my opinion. There's also this goofball playing Rhuby Rod, a superstar dj that dances around, sings, rhymes, and dresses like a lady. When he's reporting live from the scene of a terrorist attack all he says is "Omigod, omigod, omigod, omigod." Rest of the time he's spinning around, going "bzzzt," "super green super green." I don't know WHAT the fuck this freak is blathering about but I'm not surprised that shit is popular in the future. I mean look at Pokeyman.
There's also Emannuelle Jean-Baptiste Zorg, right hand man to the evil ball of fire. This guy's such a prick that when his adviser tells him they're worried about the economy and want him to consider laying off 500,000 workers, he says, "Fire one million." He has a hitler type haircut and wears a fancy plastic thing on his head, but he talks like Andy Griffith. This guy turns out to be a puss, though. His big scene where he almost dies - and I'm not joking about this - he's sitting at a table flapping his big yap and then he chokes on a cherry. Like a true super villain he just barely survives that one by the skin of his teeth. But then he gets blown up by muppets before he even meets Bruce. And I mean why should Bruce have to bother with this pansy anyway.
It's a goofy movie, but it's a beautiful movie. It's like if you take Die Hard, plug it into a wall, paint it blue and red and teach it how to fly, that's the fifth element. You know what I'm talkin about.
FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN
(working title: BORING: THE MOVIE)
All right, you computer nerds have fucking done it. You've spent millions of dollars and years of research and god knows how many man hours of animation, and you've created the closest thing yet to photorealistic, computer generated, human-type individuals. And then you've put them in the most boring sci-fi movie since the extended director's cut of Wing Commander.
And both of these are based on fucking video games, come to think of it. I'm starting to notice a pattern here.
What this is about is a bunch of people, who are trying to find eight "spirits". This will save the world from something, I believe. When it ended, I wasn't sure if they had done it or not. I may have missed whatever happened because I was so busy praying. Please oh lord, I know I haven't been the most moral person ever, but I swear I will straighten up if you just give me this one break, and let this action part here be the climax so this god damn movie will end and we can all go home. If there is one more part where they talk about spirits or have that same boring dream about aliens or if there is another spirit they have to find inside a bird or a tree or something I'm gonna turn my red vines into an improvised noose.
It's not like it's really that dumb. There's not too much bad comic relief or moronic plot twists. Well, there is this whole thing about the "phantoms." These are these ghostly, transparent alien bug things that inhabit the cities. They look like ghosts and the people call them "phantoms" and the movie is called "The Spirits Within", so I figured they were ghosts, right? But then the characters also refer to them as alien invaders, so I started thinking that they were actually aliens, but since they looked like ghosts the humans had nicknamed them "phantoms" and "spirits."
But then there is a big turning point in the movie where they say wait a minute, what if these aren't aliens? What if, in fact, THEY'RE GHOSTS?
Other than that the plot isn't all that dumb, it's just dull. There is no reason why anyone in their right mind would choose THIS story to use realistic computer animation for. Video games are a bad influence. I doubt they really make people shoot up schools. But they DO make people make movies like this. And then people end up having to sit through them. Innocent people like me, who don't know pac-man from donkey man.
The people in this movie don't do anything to take advantage of not being real. They don't morph or flip or even run fast. They try to look just like real people, and just stand around and talk about boring stuff for loooooong stretches of time. And you can't help but thinking, these aren't real people. Real people don't walk like that. What the fuck is wrong with these people? They can't even move right. What a bunch of weirdos.
The most distracting thing about this movie, the one thing that almost makes it worth watching, just as a curiosity, is the voice casting. All of the main characters have celebrity voices, but then their bodies are based on different celebrities. So Alec Baldwin's voice is coming out of Ben Affleck. James Woods comes out of Casper Van Dien. Steve Buscemi's comes out of Jason Priestley. And with his character there is this gimmick where whenever he says something, his face has an expression that does not match whatever it is that he says.
The most weirdly appropriate is Donald Sutherland's voice coming out of Donald Pleasance's mouth. At least they're both named Donald, so it wasn't as distracting. And Donald Pleasance died when he found out he was in Halloween part 6, so it's not like they could've got him to do the voice if they wanted it to match.
If you ever think about watching Final Fantasy, I pity you. Please people, learn from my mistake. It's not worth it. Don't be a hero. Just get the fuck out of there.
You nerds thought you could get away with it, didn't you? Well let me tell you something. Nothing can replace the human soul. And more than that nothing can replace the human walk.
You can try and you can try, but you will never be able to make a non-human that can walk better than a real human. It will always look all slow motion and weird.
That's what you'd like, isn't it? To replace real, walking actors, with animated fake people, who don't do anything except walk exactly like a real human actor, thus making them obsolete.
Well you can forget it. This is what you get when you try to play god. You get abominations and what not.
Stop it,
guys. Just stop it.
FINDING NEVERLAND
FINDING NEVERLAND is one of those movies that feels kind of like a remedial imagination class they force you to take on Saturdays because you fucked up. You may not know this, it tells you, but it turns out imagination is important and magical and all that kind of crap. Johnny Depp plays J.M. Barrie, the writer of Peter Pan. The movie starts the same as ED WOOD, he's the writer of some flop play that the audience already hates literally about 2 seconds after it starts. It's the first line of dialogue and a dude is already asleep.
So J.M. needs to imagination up his life somehow to inspire him to write Peter Pan, and luckily he runs into a widow (Kate Winslet) and her spunky kids (a bunch of kids) while he's walking his novelty oversized dog. Next thing you know he's hanging out with the kids, dressing up in silly costumes and imagining stuff with them. They're still pretty bummed about their dad dying so he has to teach them to have a childlike sense of wonder, etc.
I mean it's a good sentiment but I think the whole thing is too broad. It's one of those movies where it's supposed to be real life but they got Darth Vader style villains. Both J.M. and his new surrogate family have to deal with a crusty old bitch who just doesn't understand the power of imagination, et al. J.M.'s always gotta put up with his social climbing wife, and Kate Winslet's gotta deal with her rich old bitch of a mother bossing her around. There's no need to argue, parents just don't understand.
When J.M. imagines stuff it appears on screen, but usually in play form, since he's a playwright. I got pretty confused at first because he's dancing with his dog and telling the kids it's a bear. Suddenly he's in the middle of a fake circus with a painted audience, dancing with a guy in a fake looking bear costume. So the kids are imagining that the dog is really a guy in a bear costume? What kind of a fantasy is that?
For a movie about the power of fantasy, most of the fantasy sequences are pretty light on the visual imagination. One exception is a scene on a pirate ship that has some pretty nice looking theatrical waves and sharks around it.
Maybe this will illustrate what's wrong with this movie. There's one part where J.M. and his wife both walk through doors at the same time, and the wife's door leads into a room, while J.M.'s leads into an imaginary beautiful outdoors. They oughta just leave it at that and it would work, but the movie doesn't trust you to understand how magical it is. So they put an orchestral twinklety-twinklety-twee on the soundtrack for you. Listen up class, it's magical imagination and dreams and everything, that's what's through that door, that's what it means.
Also there's a scene where Kate Winslet coughs, and I thought oh shit, it's gonna be that kind of movie. Why is it that nobody ever just has a cold in a movie? If you cough even once, you're dead meat. I wonder if anybody knows of movies that have coughing in them where the person who coughs doesn't turn out to have cancer or pneumonia or some other horrible disease? Let me know if you can think of any.
This isn't a terrible movie. It has its moments. All the main actors are real good, and especially the kids. This kid Freddie Highmore plays Peter (not Peter Pan, but the kid Peter Pan is named after) and he gives the best performance, very believable as a smart and angry kid dealing with the loss of parents and the fear that the adults are hiding things from him. He also has an interesting goofy looking face with big ears, he's not some little hollywood test tube baby. Next he's gonna play Charlie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame, so it might turn out this movie was worth Johnny Depp's time just as a scouting mission for that one.
And it's an interesting story if this is really what inspired that play. You want to like it. It's not that bad.
What I'm saying is, I can understand why people would like this movie, but it ain't even close to one of the top 5 movies of the year. No way this would be nominated for best picture if somebody besides Miramax released it. I mean it's pretty mediocre in most respects. How do you even make a movie like this without having beautiful photography? They even got this awkward part after the opening credits, it tells us "London, 1903" so we think we're into the actual story now, but after that, "inspired by true events." This is not a masterfully crafted movie.
I gotta be fair though. I can't fault the movie for getting oscar nominations it doesn't deserve. But I still want to because for Johnny Depp to get a best actor nomination for this almost proves the movie wrong. If imagination and following your dreams were so damn important and powerful then Depp wouldn't get a nomination for a square role like this. Not that he's bad - he'll probaly never be bad in his life. But when he's been so original and spectacular in so many movies without a peep from the awards people... I mean think about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, even Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Sleepy Hollow. It was huge for him to get a nomination for Pirates of the Caribbean, a movie based on a Disneyland ride, a movie made popular because he followed his weird brilliance even while the executives were telling him he was ruining the movie. But now that he broke that ground, he's being rewarded for settling down and doing a normal role. In most of his roles, he is living it, in this one he's just talking about it. Go out there and live your dreams, but preferably with a nice suit and Irish accent.
I mean I agree with the pro-imagination message of this movie. I'm for it. But that's what everybody would say. I can't help but picture people watching this movie and siding with the weirdo, wanting to stick it to the man Miramax style and take the starch out of the collars of those old rich ladies always bossing us around and telling us not to imagine stuff. Then the credits roll and the second the lights turn on, they don't believe that shit anymore. They work in an office and they know for sure Michael Jackson is a pervert because why would he be so weird if he wasn't raping children. They drive by some people holding up signs about something they believe in - first they lock the doors, then they crack the window and yell "Get a job!"
Like that Chocolat movie (a bigger waste of Johnny Depp's talents) this is the grown up equivalent of those movies where kids paint the principal blue. Remember in the Police Academy movies they would trick the commander into super-gluing his hand to his dick or something, and you're suppose to go ha ha ha, take that you crusty old asshole, but the real pleasure is not in his humiliation but in watching his reaction. Because he's so uptight. Ha ha ha, get it? This and Chocolat are kind of the same thing, where you watch the reaction of the grandma to J.M. coming into the house wearing an indian headdress, or the wife when he hangs a spoon on his nose during a formal dinner. Ha ha ha J.M., you showed those old uptight broads.
And then at the end the grandma watches Peter Pan and is magically and instantly transformed, and she claps the fastest and hardest to bring Tinkerbell back to life. She is the ballbusting sergeant who plays mean before he breaks into a smile and gives the maverick cop an unexpected break. She's the old white lady that starts to use hip hop slang, or the mean old dean who pulls the stick out of his ass, puts a pair of panties on his head and parties down at the wet t-shirt contest.
So anyway, if you're too bland to figure out where Neverland is at on your own, this movie will give you detailed instructions.
FIRESTORM
This is a pretty enjoyable, totally forgettable action movie directed by Dean Semler, a cinematographer who also directed Steven Seagal's historic first DTV picture THE PATRIOT. The star is Howie Long, formerly of the Oakland Raiders, currently of the Radio Shack commercials. After a supporting role in BROKEN ARROW they tried to give him the football-star-to-action-star transition like they did to Brian Bosworth. The Boz never caught on big, but he was able to continue starring in DTV movies for several years after STONE COLD. Things didn't work out that way for Howie, and this is his only starring role. I was gonna say he was more comparable to Lyle Alzado, but I just looked up Lyle and he's starred in more than I realized. So I don't know who he's comparable to.
Anyway, Howie's movie career was not a success, that is if you define success as "the ability to make enough money that they can keep making action movies starring this particular football player." That never happened, but as far as I'm concerned he is successful in this movie. He's square but likable and I guess it's just nice to see a capable hero you haven't seen a million times before.
Another thing that makes the movie unique is that it's about fire fighters instead of cops. It makes for a movie somewhat less violent than you might usually want (his talent isn't for killing, it's the opposite), but it works. Howie is part of an elite team of fire fighters who parachute into the middle of forest fires. The overly serious text at the beginning tells us that there are 400 of them total and that "These elite men and women are called smokejumpers." They don't have water hoses or anything (too bad, I wanted to see an action scene where he blasts people with water) but they have axes and chain saws and they just run around and help people who are trapped. Or they start other fires to strategically control the already burning fire. Or whatever. I suppose they are colleagues of Seagal's character Forrest Taft from ON DEADLY GROUND. But they can fly.
In the movie, the great William Forsythe (ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, OUT FOR JUSTICE, STONE COLD) plays a robber/murderer who has a forest fire set as part of a prison break plan. He gets onto a crew working the fire, then escapes and leaves all the prisoners but two (one of them being Barry Pepper) locked in the bus to fry like ants under a magnifying glass. So you know he's an evil bastard. He and his buddies disguise themselves as Canadian firefighters and head for the hills. They encounter a female ornithologist (also former Marine, it turns out, of course) who they take hostage. Howie later ends up saving her and since she has discovered the fugitives' escape plan, they chase after her and Howie trying to kill them. So I guess you could stretch it a little and say it's DIE HARD in a forest fire.
By the way, he hates water, at least he says he does. I think this means that he is actually one with the fire. He fights fire because he is fire. And water is his opposite. On the other hand, they might've figured Indiana Jones hates snakes, you gotta hate something to be an iconic movie hero. You could hate cats, you could hate germs, you could hate cilantro, this guy happens to hate water. But not that much. He is okay with it enough to have one of those awesome underwater shots where he's swimming and you can see fire glowing above the surface.
At first you might think wait a minute, firefighters are at least as heroic as cops, but they don't carry guns, so where's the excitement? That's when I gotta remind you that carrying an ax is WAY cooler than carrying a gun. The action scenes are pretty cool because they usually involve either a fire ax, a chain saw, or a parachute. The funniest part is when they jump a motorcycle off a cliff and then parachute to safety. He also does an excellent chain saw throw, but sadly doesn't hit any meat.
The fighting, when it happens, is pretty basic pro wrestling/bar fight type stuff which is nice, they don't pretend firefighters have a martial arts background. Although that would've been cool also.
William Forsythe gets a pretty good death. First he gets axed, then his head is rammed through a boat and his head catches on fire. Pretty decent way to go out. I would've liked to see him running around screaming and waving his arms in the air while his head was on fire, but you can't have everything.
The fire imagery is pretty nice, although sometimes obviously digital. But it mostly looks real, same with the parachuting.
Apparently the real smokejumpers criticized the movie for being phony (duh), and one of the stuntmen died making the movie. That's a real bummer for a small time movie like this, but I had a good time. I suppose I would rather that guy still be alive than have the movie, but since I can't do anything about it at this point all there is left to do is watch the movie and enjoy it. And that's what I did. Rest in peace.
FIRST BLOOD
Some video association recently named Sylvester Stallone "Action Star of the Millennium." Well nobody knows where the fuck that's coming from, mainly because there are about 999 years left on this millennium and about 900 on the previously millennium where nobody had figured out how to make action movies yet. But also there's the sorry state of Sylvester Stallone's career.
Now by that I do not mean that Entertainment Weekly shit that he is not making hits. There are many actors who are not making hits who are still completely respectable, such as our friend Mr. Eastwood. But Stallone is in the Arnold category, he's done so much worse than making less money. His good days are so far behind him you almost don't even associate him with them. First he turned Rambo into an icon and became the symbol of everything that is wrong with our country, our culture, our movies, and our clothes. (I mean that headband looked fuckin ridiculous.) Then he started makin shit like COBRA and DEMOLITION MAN and etc. etc. He fell so hard that even HE started noticing it after a while. So he went through a stage where he was fighting for critical respectability. He tried to go the Travolta route and lobbied for the role of Max Cherry in JACKIE BROWN. When that didn't pan out he got fat for the role in COPLAND and america was under his spell until, you know, the movie came out. Soon he became so desperate he tried to revive both the Rocky and Rambo series, but luckily that hasn't worked out yet.
I mean the dude is so easy to hate and laugh at now that you forget that he once was pretty decent. For cryin out loud he was in DEATH RACE 2000. The first Rocky was pretty good too and he Wrote it.
And the one thing I never had the chance to forget, because I never knew it, was that the character of Rambo was actually, at one time, a good character. I never saw FIRST BLOOD until recently and it's pretty hard after all that came after to go back and admit it but, you know, this is actually a pretty fuckin good movie.
This movie starts out in classic Badass fashion with this Vietname vet John Rambo - dirty, hairy, probaly smelly - strolling into a small town to visit one of his platoon buddies. But the wife tells him that his buddy is dead, died of cancer from the agent orange. He died in the war, he just didn't know it at the time.
So John turns around and starts walkin for who know where, when wouldn't you know it the fuckin sherriff strolls up and starts givin him shit about being a suspicious stranger in town, with the nerve to not be driving a car or especially a truck. And to make matters worse the sherriff is Brian Dennehy.
So John has done absolutely nothing, and the sherriff is bein an asshole, and John is real stubborn so he doesn't take no shit. First the sherriff drives him out of town and drops him off. Then he starts heading back into town.
Thing escalate. Next thing you know he's arrested. And the other cops start beating him. Except for David Caruso, because he was young and innocent then, and didn't quite agree with that. But before you know it John fights his way out, steals a motorcycle, drives it up into the mountains, accidentally kills two people in a police helicopter by throwing a rock at them... things escalate like this until he's skulkin around covered in mud with a knife between his teeth, or gettin eaten by rats, or who knows what.
And then this colonel comes in and starts braggin about what a badass John is and he says, "He's trained to eat things that'll make a billygoat puke."
What's pretty amazing considering the Reagan era symbol of american brutality that Rambo became, is that this actually started as an anti-war story. The dvd has a real interesting commentary by the author of the book, who explains that the book was written as a way to "bring the Vietnam war home." To show that when you turn someone into a ruthless killer of civilians, then abandon them, you are asking for trouble. Although the movie was notoriously violent at the time he says the novel was alot more violent, an attempt to accurately portray how vicious the war was.
It's also interesting that the author doesn't seem all that upset about what the character later came to stood for. He just mentions that it's interesting.
As long as you're able to forget about those other Rambo movies, or all the horrible one-man-army movies that it inspired, this is really a pretty great picture. Despite all the bloodshed the actual climax is at the end when, finally coming face to face with the fucker who trained him and then sent him off into the shit, John gets a chance to really vent. I'm not talking about killing people as a release. I'm talkin about he starts telling the colonel about things he saw in vietnam and then he just starts blubbering. This is actually real, authentic, topnotch acting by Mr. Stallone where he shows his vulnerability, and it kind of makes you uncomfortable.
Like I said I always avoided this picture before and I never knew it would be so emotional.
Warning: If you get the original dvd release of this, don't expect much out of the extra feature "DOCUMENTARY - FIRST BLOOD: A LOOK BACK." It is a bunch of clips from the movie set to cheesy dance music. There is no documentary involved.
FLY AWAY HOME
First of all I want to
thank this news group for the way you guys are pretty nice to me. To be frankly
honest a lot of the people I've bumped into since getting out have NOT been
exactly COOL about it. Although not everyone especially people that don't
know about it, they are nice. But point is you guys have not given me too
much shit as far as I'm concerned. Quite honestly it means a lot to old vern.
It really is a fucking beautiful world out there in my opinion but a lot of
people are too wrapped up in evil and especially negativity to really breathe
it in
Thanks especially to my bud who gave me some writing tips and movie ideas
to rent. Tonight I rented fly away home on account of the "posting" here about
it. Yes, it was a good movie although it is about geese. In fact in my opinion
the movie is god damned beautiful both as far as the look and as far the story
plot.
Now I know what you're saying old vern went and rented a pussy movie. Yeah
you can say it all you want but fact is a loved this fucking movie and I am
not a pussy. There are guys that could vouch for me as far as stabbing, lifting,
hitting etc. my speed is not what it used to be due to my age but however
I'm not as bad as most guys pushing the big six. I still have a healthy sex
life as many young ladies could tell often still in their early twenties or
late teens. Anyways as far as the movie, I know a lot of the guys in my cellblock
would bend me over for saying this but it really in many ways is a poem of
nature and beauty. The glint of the son across the water, the black shadow
on the wing of a flying goose, the joy and blissfulness in the eye of a young
girl acting as mother to orphan birds of nauture. These are many of the shots
to offer in fly away home.
I know I know I know but yes, this is what I think about it. In my opinion
there is the earth and there is man and machines, however, the earth is the
one natural part of the universe. Nature is a motherfucker if you think about
it. The dirt, the plants, the air and wind and water is what god created for
man. The animals are part of the beauty and geese are a beautiful animal as
far as I'm concerned. It's amazing amazing amazing and the one proof of the
holy god. The fuckers in this movie that are trying to shoot them or destory
their home, these symbolize the sick little pricks that are creating the machines
devouring mankind and nature with the SICK evil metal teeth and blanket of
smog chewing across the green land.
Another important element is the poetry of flight, man building man made wings
to conquer the air and fly like angels. This is how they lead the geese to
freedom. The acting of the actors is one thing as well as the way they talk,
but really the photographers are the stars of this movie. Imagine national
geographic and wild kingdom on acid that is what it is like.
Although some scenes toward the flight scenes of the movie lose the high quality
impact of earlier parts there are some moments such as people yelling "hey
it's the goose girl" that aren't actually true to life. Although at this point
you are so wrapped up in the girl's mission to save the geese that you really
don't give a flying fuck as far as I'm concerned. I know it is not common
for me but you start to imagine what it's like fo rthis little girl who lost
her mother and wishes extremely for something to call her own which, in fact,
brings her together with her old man. it is a movie full of emotion and hope,
human nature and not cliches. This is not a jean claud van damme movie or
anything like that. Not to talk shit about him because i love him but i'm
just saying there is a difference between these two. I don't know if it won
any oscars or anything but it better.
Finally at the end when the birds land in their home marshlands there is a
breath of relief, I can only speak for myself but for me there is. As the
birds splash around in the water you feel the way they feel, that the long
journey is done. It's a real kick in the balls in my opinion.
I really am so glad I saw this movie because it takes the man and the machine
out of you and reminds you of the birds, the lands around as and saving the
environment. I know a lot of guys and including me have been sinking and sinking
into the sick mud of negativity and darkness - robbery, murder, raping, violence.
As a christian I know that god and the angels prefer this message of flying
the geese to all that kind of shit. I know it is partly the shrooms I am using
but I think even tomorrow I will remember this is a hell of a fucking movie.
thanks guys
--vern
Here's a movie I always meant to see just because it was directed by Ronny Yu (BRIDE OF CHUCKY), but I skipped it because I never heard a single good word about it. Until the day Paul wrote to disagree with my MUNICH review and then, possibly to avenge me for the review, recommended I watch this one.
Okay, so the movie's not terrible, it has it's moments of inspiration, but to me it was a big mess and a little on the cheesy side. When it was over I realized that a better score would've gone a long way toward making it more acceptable. Ronny Yu does the whole thing in a goofy, frinetic style and then the cheeseball dance music done by some guy named "Headrillaz" makes it seem like some out of touch commercial trying to be cool.
If I describe what the movie's about though, it might sound cool. Samuel L. Jackson plays Elmo McElroy, rogue pharmacologist. Batman started when his parents were killed in an alley, and Elmo McElroy started on graduation day 1971 when he was pulled over smoking a joint while still in his graduation robe and lost his right to practice medicine. Skip forward to the 2000s when he works for an overacting Meat Loaf as "the Lizard," who always refers to himself in the third person and somehow passes as a feared crime boss. He's supposed to meat with The Lizard and various other kingpins to demonstrate his new super drug POS 51, but instead he sets up a fancy Rube Goldberg contraption to blow them up. (There's a nice shot of Meat Loaf laying in a giant pile of dolls, maybe a reference to BRIDE OF CHUCKY.)
Elmo heads to England where he meets Robert Carlyle, who is supposed to take him to a chemist and the boss who wants to buy his formula. On the same plane with him is Emily Mortimer as the Lizard's hired gun Dakota, and this is probaly the first and last time Emily Mortimer will ever play a sexy assassin. At the airport is the villain from MONEY TALKS as a cop trying to catch Elmo.
So he's kind of like the Willy Wonka of drug pushers. He makes drugs in the form of colorful candy and the things he says about them are impossible - 51 times more powerful than cocaine, made entirely of chemicals that are legal in every country in the world, etc. You know this reminds me of a news story I read yesterday about some hippie candy factory that was busted recently because they were growing pot and using it to make elaborately packaged parody products like Pot Tarts and Rasta Reeses and stuff like that. Isn't it amazing that there are people who really believe the government shouldn't fund health care or programs for the poor or save people dying in hurricanes, but they're okay with their tax money going to militarize cops so they can raid factories that make candy bars and soda for stoners. It's good to see we're making the world a better place.
Anyway don't bother raiding Elmo, his drug is all legal. Not sure why he doesn't explain that to the cop that's after him but oh well.
A whole lot of not much happens between the setup and the end, when he goes to sell his formula to Rhys Ifans and confronts the Lizard again. But like I said there are moments. There's a shootout with a bunch of mobsters where one guy is shooting bad so his own cohort puts him down. There's some well cast ugly skinhead fucks who confront Elmo in a hotel lobby, and he just beats the crap out of them with a golf club. He even does a little twirl on the golf club just like he did in the Star Wars pictures. Later he faces the skinheads again and I was expecting a good comeuppance but instead he uses chemicals to make them all shit their pants, and there's a variety of farting noises. Unfortunately that is not a whole lot worse than the rest of the jokes in this thing.
The thing that is good about this movie though is Samuel L. Jackson. I don't think I have to explain the power of Sam Jackson, you already know about it. He does the full intense yelling treatment and uses motherfucker probaly more than any other role. (The dialogue is pretty bad. Even I started to think Meat Loaf was saying 'fucking' too much.) The thing that makes this character stand out from his others is that for no reason at all he wears a kilt for most of the movie. This seems to attract the attention of Emily Mortimer, who tries to look up his skirt while he's asleep on the plane, and later is underneath him on a ladder.
By now you've probaly heard how Jackson signed on to SNAKES ON A PLANE without even reading the script, because he knew he couldn't pass up that concept. Well on the cheesy making of featurette on this DVD, it seems like this movie was a similar deal. He personally chose Ronny Yu as director and told him "You have to do this movie because I'm wearing a kilt."
Come to think of it, Ronny Yu was the original director for SNAKES ON A PLANE, but he later dropped out.
When Paul recommended THE 51ST STATE he said that even if I hated it I would have to watch the end to see what happened to Meat Loaf, and sure enough it's a pretty good death. Makes no god damned sense at all (just like the twist about the true nature of POS 51) but it's worth watching. Also, the only part I really loved in the movie played during the end credits. In this scene Elmo is sporting a huge afro playing golf at a castle, and he explains that he has used the money he earned in his drug scam to buy the McElroy castle - reclaiming the land of his slave master. Now that's some badass shit, and if that's why he was trying to get the money all along it makes the rest of the movie seem more interesting. Then he takes his clothes off and walks off butt ass naked, I didn't really understand that part.
I guess one thing this shows is that if Sam Jackson ever stops getting good acting roles, he works well in dumb action movies. I think he could do better though, especially with this director. As far as Ronny Yu pictures go I'm afraid I gotta put this one in a class with the one about magic kangaroo people doing kung fu. But I've seen worse.
A saintly old white lady gets killed during a liquor store robbery in Detroit. She has four adopted sons that return to town for her funeral - Mark Wahlberg from Boogie Nights, Andre Benjamin from Be Cool, Tyrese from Baby Boy, and... some kid in a leather jacket. See, this dead lady was some kind of pillar of the community, bein a grandma to all the disadvantaged kids in the neighborhood, bringing people free turkeys on thanksgiving, teaching important moral lessons and what not. But these four kids, these were the worst motherfuckers anybody ever saw... out of all the kids she helped, these were the only little shits she couldn't get anybody to adopt, because they were too bad. The dirty dozen of juvenile delinquents. Except there's only four of them, I think I mentioned that already but I don't want anybody to get confused. The dirty four brothers.
So now Motown's Most Infamous are back in the neighborhood like blaxploitation stars, and somebody out there killed their mom, and they aren't quite as forgiving as she is so holy shit is somebody gonna have all hell brought down on them, in my opinion.
If that isn't a good hook, I don't know what is, but unfortunately Mr. John Singleton doesn't really hang too much meat on it. This isn't a bad movie, it's a mediocre one, which is probaly worse. The cast is good, there's some good moments, I like the basic outline, but it just doesn't fly.
One big mistake, they didn't do enough with the problem child angle. We hear alot about how these were the baddest kids on the block, but we pretty much have to take their word for it. Wahlberg is pretty mean and grizzled, has apparently lived a life of crime, etc. He passes the test. Tyrese has muscles, but he's mostly a fuckup like he gets into trouble screwin somebody else's girlfriend and that kind of garbage. Not one of the top four worst kids in Detroit. Benjamin isn't a bad guy at all, he's a family man with a conscience, and even Terence Howard, the cop who explains to us the premise of the 4 brothers at the beginning, admits he's an okay guy. And then the kid in the leather jacket, they just tell us that something bad happened to him when he was little, and the brothers pick on him and call him a fag all the time. So he's a bad motherfucker, I guess.
Don't get me wrong, they got the brothers shooting some guns and occasionally they do something crazy like pour gasoline on somebody. But I wish there was more of this. I wish we believed these guys were born out of satan's ass. People should run and hide when they come down the block. They should be the devil's rejects with heart.
I mean this is the guy who remade SHAFT so I think it was fair to hope for an updated blaxploitation style revenge movie. And that might've been sort of what he was going for because the soundtrack pillages half of Marvin Gaye's classic Trouble Man soundtrack (and various other Motown tunes, since it's Detroit). These are good songs but I wish somebody would come out with a new classic blaxploitation score. David Holmes is the only guy who ever even gives it a shot. It's not like you can't have funky horn sections anymore. They still exist. Let's get to it boys. Some fresh new badass music would have gone a long way toward making this fucker pop.
One part in the movie that made me laugh, they chase a guy into his apartment and for some reason he has a bunch of rope in there that he uses to climb out the window. What's this guy really into sailboats or something? I didn't get why he had so much rope.
I don't want to give away the big revelation at the end about why they killed the old lady. Luckily, I didn't really understand why they killed her so there is no danger of slipping and giving it away. If John Singleton or somebody will explain it to me, I promise I will not give it away in this review.
I guess the best thing you can say about the movie is that the cast works well together. I like the chemistry between these guys, always sniping at each other and getting in wrestling matches in the living room, but also having that macho brotherhood bond. It probaly coulda worked with a little more elbow grease in that script.
In this
movie Bruce plays Leo, a drunk rich dude calling his wife on a cell phone.
It's a small part but this is Bruce we're talking about and he makes it fucking
SOAR. He's hanging out in a hotel room with this spoiled celebrity jerry lewis
fan and they decide to re-enact a bet from an alfred hitchcock episode and
if they lose the bet a man loses his finger which is kind of a dumbass bet
to make in my opinion but hey man, free country.
Well Bruce doesn't have a whole lot to do with all that, he mainly has this conversation with his wife he's going to be home late and it's funny. But this is only the last of four "rooms," little stories about what goes on in this hotel even when Bruce is not there.
First room: a bunch of witchy gals cooking up a brew to resurrect another witchy gal. Madonna is in this one. Cute but kind of lightweight.
Second room: Bellboy gets involved in some kind of shenanigans, tries to climb out the window and whatnot.
Third room: This is a real funny one about the bellboy babysitting two kids for a slick gangster played by the same guy who played Desperado. Well this bellboy is not a good babysitter and next thing you know, everything is on fire and he's holding onto the leg of a dead hooker when Desperado gets home.
Not much to this movie
but there's some funny parts. If you admire Bruce as I do or if you're one
of those people who loves any movie with four different stories about hotels,
then this is above average.
FRIDA
This is the story
of Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican modernist known for her great painting and
sexy monobrow. This is a gal who means many things to many people. An important
artist, but also a feminist, a revolutionary, an unashamed bisexual. And you
could probaly guess, since there's a biography movie made out of her, that
the poor gal had to be either alcoholic or disabled. In this case she was
disabled, unpleasantly impaled in a bus accident, sporadically confined to
a full body cast. But since she's an artist she paints pretty butterflies
on it.
You know Salma Hayek will get an
oscar nomination for this, mainly because of the bodycast. I gotta be honest
though, 'cause that's my job. I don't think she's necessarily doing great
work here. She's just doing pretty good in a role that she is good for, that
happens to be real Important because it's a real person, who was a brilliant
artist, who was disabled, and had some kind of political context to her life
that can be simplified into movie form. I'm not saying Salma is bad, especially
not compared to her embarassing improv role in TIMECODE. And I can't think
of anyone better for the role. But she didn't exactly blow my mind either,
especially not during the scenes where she wears a schoolgirl uniform and
tries to pass for a teen.
But who the fuck cares about that
shit. The strong woman I saw this movie for wasn't Salma or Frida. It was
actually the director, Julie Taymor. This gal is so talented I'm scared of
her. If you've seen TITUS you know what I'm talking about. Or if you've seen
the making of TITUS on the dvd. They show her during rehearsals. She knows
all the dialogue, and substitues for actors that aren't there. Even sitting
on the sidelines she gets so into it she looks like she's about to cry, or
she starts singing how the music is gonna go.
I mean she's intense. TITUS was
her first movie, but before that she travelled the world staging huge award
winning musicals and operas. Usually I don't approve of that type of shit,
but hers had all kinds of giant freaky ass wooden puppets and masks and what
not. She made alot of the puppets herself. She once did an hour long Edgar
Alan Poe movie for pbs starring two dwarves and a bunch of giant puppets.
She grew up between Boston and Sri
Lanka. She joined the Theater Workshop of Boston when she was 15, and when
she was 16 she graduated high school a semester early and moved to Paris to
study mime. When she was 21 she moved to Japan to apprentice with a master
puppeteer. On the way there though she stopped in Indonesia, became a choreographer
without knowing the language, and enjoyed living in "a small compound with
a dirt floor and a well, with no electricity or phone."
In Bali she took a chunk out of
her leg climbing a live volcano. Instead of going to a hospital she camped
out for the night and, hidden in the shadows, was able to witness a a baris
war dance ritual performed under moonlight for the gods.
Wanting to make a film, she went
to live in a hotel that never opened because Coca-Cola had built it on a sacred
cremation ground. She met an american vietnam vet who thought her volcano
leg wound would get gangrenous, so she let him perform surgery on it with
no anesthesia. Later she got hepatitis, split her chin and mouth in a truck
accident, got malaria, and won six Tony awards for The Lion King. She saw
a tree full of roasted pigs, a pile of skulls in the woods, a mutilated bull
that escaped a sacrifice ritual to roar into a microphone and then run through
the side of a house and have it collapse on top of him.
I mean Julie Taymore has seen and
lived 100 times more than anybody you will ever know or hear about. Holy fucking
god damn shit, man. Seriously. You think of all these goateed hacks in sports
jerseys that go to film school, make a couple shitty fisheye lens rap videos
and then get to direct multi million dollar movies. Then THIS woman comes
in. SHE ALMOST LOST HER LEG TO A VOLCANO, just so she could watch a ritual.
She ran a puppet theater out of a shack in Indonesia when she was 21. She
might be a little over qualified.
So wait a minute, why don't they
make a movie about Julie Taymor, then? Well, the problem is, how do you sum
up an entire life of artistic adventures and puppet carving in movie form?
It's pretty fuckin fascinating in the big coffee table book, but if you turned
it into a movie it would just seem like actors reading off a book report.
And that's the problem with FRIDA. For TITUS, Taymor had a real good script
to work with. She wrote it with William Shakespeare. They knew what they were
doing. Pretty good dialogue, in my opinion. Words of shakespeare.
But here you got a script by some
guy who's not William Shakespeare, with an uncredited assist by FIGHT CLUB's
Ed Norton. I don't know how they could've done it much better, but the script
really doesn't work. I mean I enjoyed watching the movie, seeing the simplified
story of some of the great things this gal did or the bad things she suffered
or what have you. But I didn't enjoy all this dialogue where the characters
have to briefly summarize in conversation what they are trying to do with
their painting or what their entire political philosophy is. In movies, all
important people ever do is sit around drinking and making speeches about
their politics. It's corny, man.
Later Geoffrey Rush plays Trotsky,
wearing community theater old man makeup. He kind of looks like one of those
guys who dresses up as Mark Twain, with maybe a touch of Colonel Sanders.
And she still fucks him.
Maybe what they need to do is just
pick one period of Kahlo's life and focus on that. Instead they try to go
from childhood to death and tell us about her mind, her politics, three different
relationships, plus the politics of Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky. They do
try to focus mostly on her relationship with Rivera, but this is sometimes
a problem too. When he refuses to remove Lenin from a mural in the Rockefeller
building and the mural gets destroyed, it seems like one of the most important
scenes of the movie, but it has nothing to do with Frida. Sometimes it feels
like the most beautiful tv movie you've ever seen.
Still, Julie Taymor does get several
big chances to shine, and she shines the shit out of those chances. There
are some very obvious JULIE TAYMOR SEQUENCES. The first big one is right after
the accident, we see Frida's surgery from her point of view, and the doctors
are animated puppet skeletons. The credits reveal that she even hired those
creepy american twins with british accents the Quay brothers to animate that
scene.
Then there are other scenes where
actual Frida Kahlo paintings are created in three dimensions or in animation
or with Hayek in makeup. This is really where Julie Taymor jumps into action.
I can't think of a better portrayal of the artistic process. That's the problem,
Julie Taymor is a master at communicating visually what can't be expressed
in words. But in between these communications, she gets saddled with a bunch
of asshole words. Who needs that shit? Not Julie Taymor of the Indonesian
volcano. Most words are a big waste of her time.
Honestly, I wish this movie took
place entirely inside Frida's mind, instead of occasionally. I wish it was
a silent movie about her thinking and painting. I don't need this book report
shit.
I still think the movie is worth
your time. It's just not worth Julie Taymor's time. I mentioned the part about
the volcano, right? If we don't give her something better to work with, and
fast, she's gonna carve herself a canoe and paddle off to some country somewhere
and immmerse herself in their traditional puppet theater. And we'll never
get another TITUS again. Let's not fuck this up, people.