M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN'S LADY IN THE WATER
a bedtime story by M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan
produced by M. N. Shyamalan
written by M. Night Shyamalan
co-starring M. Night Shyamalan
inspired by the true adventures of M. Night Shyamalan
dedicated to M. Night

The movie I really wanted to watch this week was WASSUP ROCKERS, but for some reason it went straight to the second run theater in Seattle. That theater's a little out of the way for me and today I just wanted somewhere nearby with some air conditioning, so instead of seeing Larry Clark ogle Hispanic skateboarders from Compton I got to see M. Night Shyamalan ogling Ron Howard's daughter. I'm not sure which one's freakier.

The advertisements say that LADY IN THE WATER is "a bedtime story by M. Night Shyamalan" which is a nicer way of saying "he made this shit up as he went along so it doesn't make any god damn sense and it doesn't matter because the whole point of it is to put you to sleep." And now that I think about it there actually was a dude snoring in front of me (no lie) so Shyamalan must know what he's doing.

I actually think Shyamalan is a real good director, at least when he's working with Bruce. SIGNS was a little too goofy for me, and I didn't see that last one (maybe that's why I still like him). But I like his filmatism - his pacing, his deliberate camera moves, etc. On most of his movies he has this very serious tone and you feel like he's in total control of what's on screen, showing you the best angle to watch things from, making the right part of the screen be bright red or whatever, getting good quiet acting performances out of Bruce and that little Haley Joel Osment dude. But those movies were directed by the old "guy who got lucky and got to work with Bruce" Shyamalan, this is the new Shyamalan who thinks he's a fuckin rock star, makes credit card commercials about his brilliant imagination and casts himself in this movie in a major role as the savior of humanity, wearing a hip shirt. Rock Star Shyamalan doesn't seem to have the same control over the movie, he's too busy making googly eyes trying to look sensitive to give as much of a shit about a story and characters and where to put the camera as he used to.

The characters are all wacky gimmicks or bordering on racist stereotypes. Paul Giamatti, as the hero/building superintendent, is the only one with any kind of humanity to him, but it's all Giamatti doing his best with a formulaic character. Even the backstory that's supposed to give him depth kind of pissed me off. At the beginning the movie seems to be saying, "Look at this schlubby, lonely, stuttering apartment manager... now watch as he helps do something extraordinary!" But then later the movie says, "actually he used to be a respected doctor with a family but they were murdered so now he's sad and he doesn't give a shit about being an apartment manager because it's a loser job that anybody could do." And then at the same time they keep saying that "everybody has a purpose." (As long as they are a doctor or brilliant writer.)

That shit pissed me off because WHY CAN'T he just be a schlubby apartment manager who lives by himself and still be a hero? We have to find out that he used to be upper class in order to truly accept him? Shouldn't we acknowledge that going around fixing people's toilets and light bulbs might be a pain in the ass job and a perfectly acceptable purpose in life because somebody's gotta do it? Seems kind of insulting, Shyamalan.

By the way, please note that I am spelling Shyamalan's name correctly. None of that "Sham-a-long-a-ding-dong" or "Shymalawhateverthefuckitis what a CRAZY name it's not American!" xenophobic bullshit. I'm not one of those type of jokers. I am treating the man with dignity and respect. However in the next paragraph I might accuse him of betraying his wife for a girl spawned by the dude who directed "The Grinch".

Probaly the most distracting element for most people is gonna be Shyamalan's appearance in the movie as a Writer who is writing "some thoughts about society" which it turns out are destined to inspire a child who will go on to become president and make the world a better place but the writer won't be able to see it because his ideas are so dangerous he's gonna get assassinated like Dr. King. Shyamalan's acting is passable but you can't help but be distracted because there is a large ego that keeps blocking the view of the camera. People were bothered when Spike Lee cast himself as Malcolm X's buddy, this is kind of like if he had played Malcolm X himself. Or at least Elijah Muhammed. And because this is a Shyamalan movie alot of his role involves long shots of him staring meaningfully or with awe. And by far the most uncomfortable scene for me is when he talks emotionally to Story the Sea Nymph about how they have a connection and she inspired him and changed his life, and I couldn't help but start to wonder if this movie is actually about how he fell in love with Bryce Dallas Howard while filming THE VILLAGE but he doesn't want to admit it because he's married and that's Ron Howard's daughter so instead he rationalizes her as being a Muse sent to him by the destiny of the universe to inspire him to make a movie about her walking around with no pants on.

This is a bit of a tangent but has anybody else ever watched that fucked up "Dateline NBC To Catch a Predator" series? I saw one of them a couple weeks ago, it's this show where they somehow lure pedophiles in chat rooms to come to a house where they are supposedly gonna have sex with an underage kid but instead they get humiliated on TV and then arrested. And the worst part is that they are able to do these stings all day, they got an appointment every two hours or something, so apparently it's not that hard to find a whole bunch of these fuckos in one area.

Sadly, I can't turn away from creepy shit like that but the stuff that really fascinated me on the episode I saw was actually the unnecessary touches of flair they add to the sting. The guy comes in the house and the police officer posing as a teenager can't show herself so she yells something about how she's in the other room changing her shirt so wait for her out there. They already got this guy but for some reason they have to throw in this touch where she's supposed to be naked in the other room. Maybe they're hoping he can't control himself, he'll run in there and get a beatdown, but they never take the bait on that one. And the weirder part is they always have chocolate chip cookies there and she says "I just baked cookies." For some reason, part of the storyline is that she just made chocolate chip cookies. Why is that in there? I got no idea. Maybe thinking of delicious snacks gets perverts to let their guard down. Who knows?

Then all the sudden a TV personality in a suit walks through the door and says, "Hi!" sort of menacingly and then, "Have a seat." And then the horny internet pervert tries to play it cool so he sits down and allows himself to be interviewed about what he's up to. And we already know what his current project is so the idea is now we hear it in his own words. Usually they rationalize for a minute, then they admit that what they did was wrong and promise never to do it again and the whole time you wonder why they are doing this interview anyway. Sometimes the host guy reads back things the guy said in the chat room and in one case (I swear to you I'm not making it up) it involved a sex act with a cat.

When the interview is over, what the "journalist" fellow could do is say, "Sorry to tell you this freako but we can't just let you go, that would be unethical, so we got cops here to arrest you." What they do instead is tell the guy he's free to go and then they show hidden camera footage of him walking out the door and taking a deep breath, walking a few steps before a fuckin SWAT team jumps out blocking his escape. And THEN the crowning touch: a dude disguised as a bush (or "an officer wearing a special type of camouflage" as the narration calls it) jumps out of nowhere and tackles the dude. This is so awesome because the pervs always give themselves up peacefully and they easily have enough officers to stop them IF they tried to run. But this is television and they want to entertain - er, I mean inform - an audience, so BAM! Pervert broadsided by bush.

I'm only bringing this up because I wanted an excuse to share my fascination with that show, but coincidentally the show does illustrate something of relevance here. Number one, people got weird fetishes, and number two, people do stupid shit when they hear voices coming from their crotch. Now, I don't mean to compare acclaimed director M. Night Shyamalan to TV cat molesters and I don't mean to be judgmental. If Shyamalan was indeed obsessed with Bryce Dallas Howard as I'm theorizing, she is well past 18 and, equally important, doesn't look anything like her father. She is kind of cute in a freaky alien kind of way. So if he really does think she's his muse and made a whole movie about it, it's not a crime against society, only against moviegoers.

Shyamalan is an American, so he is innocent until proven guilty. But the point is that the scene made me seriously consider the possibility that a respected filmatist made an entire movie as a confession of his love for Ron Howard's daughter. And that's fucked up, man.

The part of the movie that actually made me lose respect for Shyamalan, though, was this whole subplot about a movie critic played by Bob Balaban, the director of PARENTS. I'm not stupid, I know what Shyamalan's doing, he's criticizing the critics for not liking his last movie and at the same time making an excuse to say why critics won't like this one. Well played, Shyamalan, well played. To me this comes off as petty and childish, but more importantly, the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. This character is not an intelligent criticism of criticism. He's just an asshole who makes speeches about the different formulas for movies, and they turn out to be wrong (because get it, this movie is SO UNPREDICTABLE! because he MADE IT UP AS HE WENT ALONG!) This character would've been a good guy in SCREAM but here you're supposed to hate him (in fact, he even states that he is the character you are supposed to hate, in case you don't get it) and he is the only character who gets killed, and nobody even finds out that it happened or cares.

You guys know me so you know I'm not getting defensive on account of being some kind of critic. I actually agree that alot of critics are stupid. In fact because I've spent these years striving for excellence in reviewing I've thought this shit out a hundred times more than Shyamalan and I probaly hate some of those critics more than he ever could dream of hating them. Obviously you got your Gene Shalit types with the puns and shit. Hell, you got all kinds of punsters out there who are more respected than Shalit but they still think if they review PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN they gotta work in a thousand boat and grog and bottle of rum and yo ho ho references. Then you got your "quote whores" or your Peter Travers with his "EXPLOSIVE! The summer's best whiteknuckle thrill ride!" hyperbole. You got Larry King (if that counts) saying that every other movie he sees is "FINALLY a movie to get excited about!" or "THE FUNNIEST MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN!"

That shit's obvious, but for me it gets deeper, the actual writing style pisses me off. You write these things over and over again you start to find yourself using the same phrases and words to describe movie after movie. So then either you settle in to a predictable formula and you're boring or you start coming up with the corniest shit to describe movies, words nobody would ever use to describe a movie unless they were writing a review. I got hearing like a dog for this shit so I see phrases that probaly wouldn't bother a normal person but for me I wince when I see these magazine writers with the corny phrases like "whizbang" and "crackerjack" and "hangdog" and using "meta" whenever possible and talking about whether or not a movie has "crackle" or "verve" or whether it "pops" and then they have to work in some reference to The Sopranos or Lost or whatever TV show they are currently obsessed with.

"Like the island inhabitants of LOST these apartment dwellers are trapped in their own world while mystical beasties creep and crawl in the shadows just beyond the cabana room. But alas, LADY IN THE WATER doesn't have the crackerjack sparkle or verve of J.J. Abrams. It's as flat as the carnivorous 'scrunts' become when they camouflage themselves in the courtyard foliage."

And yes there are more pretentious critics who look down on "entertainment" which I guess is what this character is supposed to be, but in modern society those type of critics are few and far between, they have almost no power over who goes to see Shyamalan's movie and they are marginalized members of society who are only respected (or even known of) in an insulated subculture of film buffs that 99.99999% of all earthlings will never even know about, let alone encounter. So who the fuck cares?

What I'm saying is, Shyamalan takes cheap shots when I thought he was a guy who could take dead aim between the eyes. Back when he made UNBREAKABLE I woulda figured he was a really smart guy, if he chose to go after critics he would have a smart way to do it. But this movie is telling me that the guy is not actually that smart.

If you're around movie discussions for long you eventually run into these chuckleheads who claim "I listen to what the critics say and then I do the OPPOSITE - ha ha ha that's how cynical I am I blew the lid off this whole thing with my unique iconoclastic stance." I always wonder what those people do when they read the reviews for, say, almost any movie ever made, and discover that critics disagree with each other. Or do they just wait until the cases where the critics are unanimous, and then show those fuckers by going out and enjoying CATWOMAN and CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS and shit? There's this idea that critics don't know how to enjoy "a good popcorn flick." But you look on that silly "Rotten Tomatoes" sight you see a 93% for DIE HARD, a 92% for FACE/OFF, a 100% for ALIENS. Hell, look here you can see that about half the critics will even go for a shitty one like fucking INDEPENDENCE DAY.

There are so many deeper, more accurate points to make about a critic than "they think they know everything about movie fomulas." So if that's all you got and then you kill the guy you look like a fuckin whiney baby, especially when you're a filmatist who's a had a better track record with critics than most. And by the way, Joe Dante did it better when he killed the real Leonard Maltin 16 years ago in GREMLINS 2. But only a critic would say that.

I guess maybe the critic part is supposed to be funny. Stranger things have happened. But that's another problem, Shyamalan knows how to do deadly serious melodrama but when he starts trying to make you laugh he's out of his element. This one is so cartoony that you figure it must be supposed to be funny, but if there was a good joke in there I must have missed it. There's a character who works out only the right side of his body as "a scientific experiment" which I thought was a really funny idea. And then that's where he left it. A funny idea, nothing happens with it. And that's the best he's got in the whole movie.

So that's alot of complaints there but I honestly think he could get away with all that if he had a really good dramatic story here. Which he doesn't. It all comes back to this bed time story gimmick and the fact that bed time stories are something you make up on the spot to put a kid to sleep. They are not something you spend a hundred million dollars on and make a person pay money to watch for 2 hours. I know Shyamalan is into this idea of the magic of storytelling and storytellers and he even has the lady in the water be named "Story." But bedtime stories, by definition, are half-assed bullshit with no effort involved that are considered more successful if they are boring. So the idea of a feature length bed time story is an insult. They don't make feature length versions of the sketches on that "Who's Line Is It Anyway" show, do they? I mean it's kind of like if Walt Disney Studios made an animated movie about bathroom graffiti. "You don't get it. The drawing is bad because IT'S BATHROOM GRAFFITI. It's not SUPPOSED to look good. It's a shape scratched into linoleum, possibly a dick. You snob critics don't understand the magic of a dick carved in a door."

Look here Shyamalan, you wanna tell us a bed time story, then come to our house and tell us a bed time story. We'll be thinking, "Oh shit, I can't believe M. Night Shyamalan, the famous movie star, came to my house and told me a story!" We won't hold it to a high standard of entertainment and storytelling. We'll think "that's cool that he would do that." When we pay money to see it on a big screen, though, we'll expect you to put a little god damn elbow grease into it. Please.

This is the story: Giamatti's whimsically named character Cleveland Heep spots somebody in the pool at night, but he slips and hits his head. He wakes up and Story the Pantsless Sea Nymph has rescued him. She wants to go home (the pool?) but when he tries to carry her out there he gets chased by a wolf made out of grass. Instead of asking her "what's up with that?" he goes and asks one of his tenants, whose mother knows a bed time story about the world of the Sea Nymphs but she only speaks Korean. So throughout the movie she keeps translating to him the rules of the magical sea world: the nymph appears to inspire a writer to change the world, then she has to go back and get picked up by a giant eagle but there's a wolf that tries to eat her but also there's three evil monkeys who try to stop the wolf. Various apartment tenants have parts in bringing her to the pool to get picked up by the giant eagle, he just has to figure out who's who for it to work. then he figures it out and a giant eagle picks her up and BAM! WRITTEN, PRODUCED, AND DIRECTED BY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN, GENIUS.

I don't know why Cleveland doesn't ask her to explain what's going on until halfway through the movie. Then when he finally does she says she's not allowed to talk about it so instead she answers questions in sign language. Then later she starts telling him stuff without sign language and nobody seems relieved or surprised at this development. I also don't know why, if she comes from the magic world of the sea in the swimming pool, the way to get home is to fly into the sky with a giant eagle. Shouldn't she just jump back in the swimming pool?

Maybe that's the big M. Night Shyamalan twist ending. She needs to get home to the swimming pool... BY FLYING AWAY FROM THE SWIMMING POOL. Look at that man, M. Night just blew your mind like a fuckin balloon.

The last time I saw a giant eagle in a movie it was LORD OF THE RINGS PART 1 I believe. And that was a movie where you could tell they weren't making it up as they went along. They planned out the world in intricate detail. They knew what this world was and it all made sense and seemed like reality and sure as fuck didn't use half-assed fantasy creature names like "narf". I mean come on man, "narf?" That's really the best name you could up with for magic pantsless sea nymphs? I had faith in you Shyamalan. I think you're due for a Bruce intervention.

You know what this is, this is one of those half-assed fantasy movies they had in the '80s, like, I don't know, LADYHAWKE or some shit like that. I'm sure some kids will see it and kind of like it because it's corny as hell and talks about magic. And then years later they'll remember it fondly because of the wolf and the monkeys. But then they'll catch it on TV and realize that's about 5 minutes of the movie and the rest is about people explaining things to Paul Giamatti. And they'll say, "Huh, I remembered that being alot better. Oh well," and then they'll never think about it again. It is possible that one of these people will then go on to become president and change the world. But if so it would probaly be a coincidence.

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THE LAST BOY SCOUT
starring Bruce Willis

So let's say instead of being John McClane or somebody, Bruce was Joe Hallenbeck, a washed up, slightly overweight, cigarette loving, booze-sucking, wife-and-daughter-arguing, disgraced secret service agent turned low-life asshole private detective. Also, for the sake of argument, let's say that Damon Wayans is Hallenbeck's one-time favorite football player but his career was ruined in a gambling scandal and now he's a drug addict dating a stripper (Academy Award winner Halle Berry, in a step up from her role as a crack ho in JUNGLE FEVER) who Hallenbeck was hired to protect by his former friend who he just found out was screwing his wife then saw get blown up by a car bomb and now Halle Berry has been murdered because she knew too much about a football team owner trying to blackmail a senator that Hallenbeck used to protect but punched out because he was torturing women and now they're trying to legalize gambling. Also I forgot to mention that Hallenbeck once saved the president's life, and some dudes are gonna set off a bomb at the football game, and there was this fucked up part at the beginning where an NFL player pulled out a gun on the field and started shooting everybody then said "Ain't life a bitch?" (to be or not to be, that is the question) and blew his brains out.

Well shit, I really don't know WHAT the fuck is up with this movie, but let's just go with it. The director is Tony Scott, who you can always count on to make a movie that's either not that bad or, more often, actually that bad. But the real auteur in this case is Shane Black, the disgraced former hotshot screenwriter who was the first to make $4 million just for writing a Renny Harlin movie. I feel like an asshole even bringing this up, but it's probaly relevant to mention that this guy was between 26 and 29 when the movie came out (depending on which articles you trust) and he got paid $1.75 million for the screenplay. In other words, more money than you and I together earn in 15 years. In his twenties. For this.

The movie goes on Tony Scott's not that bad shelf, mostly due to Mr. Black's attempts to push this kind of crap in weird new directions. In many ways it's just the same old crap but then he tries to make it darker and more fucked up and more smart assed. I'm pretty sure he was thinking '80s action buddy movie meets hardboiled detective noir. Bruce doesn't do any voiceovers, but he's got the down on his luck, alcohol swilling, desperate for a case, in over his head private eye shit down pat. And he's got the sometimes-witty dialogue going at 300mph from beginning to end. If anybody ever says anything, I guarantee you the other guy will have a smart ass answer to that, except in one case where Damon Wayans just says "fuck you," and then Bruce says, "Nice comeback." It feels pretty forced and self conscious at times but you get used to it and every once in a while there's a pretty good one. Like when a bad guy uses the word "exuberance" and Wayans says, "Ah shit, we're gettin beat up by the inventor of Scrabble."

Black has the most fun when he's beaning action movie formula in the back of the head with a curveball. (that was a metaphor I believe) For example, Hallenbeck doesn't have your usual romance here. In the first scene with his wife, he pulls out a gun and shoots their family portrait. His wife is a crazy bitch who cheats on him with his best friend and then blames him for it. But in the twisted world of the movie, he's still able to love her and reunite with her at the end, while saying, "Fuck you Sarah, you're a lying bitch and if there weren't cops around I'd spit in your face." And they put that in a context where it's genuinely supposed to be romantic.

Hallenbeck is ironically "the last boy scout" because deep down he actually has some small sense of honor, etc., but the guy really is an asshole. Insulting people, even his family and his heroes, is his number one skill and passion. He gets trapped by "bad guys" as he always calls them (this was the '90s, everybody was a postmodernist) he starts doing a whole routine of fat jokes and I fucked your wife jokes to both distract and entertain them. Shane Black must've kept a journal of one-liners and snaps and dumped them all into this screenplay.

I don't get some of em though. Like, "I'm trying to figure out which one of you looks like my dick." What's that mean? And there's a part where somebody asks Damon Wayans if he's alone and he says, "No, I got the Vienna Boys Choir with me." They always got jokes like that in movies, but why is that a joke? In my opinion that is some weak sarcasm. Totally random and meaningless. It would make the same amount of sense to say, "No, I got a class of ESL students with me," or "No, I got two meter maids and a dog catcher with me," or anybody. It might as well be The Harlem Globetrotters or the Missouri State Senate or Run DMC or the surviving cast members of The A-Team. I mean what the fuck does Vienna Boys Choir have to do with anything? I don't get it man. I wish there was some way I could return that line to Shane Black. It's defective.

Another reason Hallenbeck is an asshole, he hates funk, rap music, and specifically Prince. But to be fair the only Prince song you hear is "Gett Off" which is not exactly his masterpiece. Still, this guy should be thanking the lord he found a strip club that plays Prince and not 2 Live Crew or fuckin Warrant Cherry Pie type garbage. Plus, I don't know if the characters in the movie are privy to the music played during the opening and closing credits, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. There is a song about football games on Fridays that makes the song on PUMPING IRON sound like Beethoven's fifth in comparison. (or whichever one was beethoven's best. I'm not up on that information.) It kind of seems like a joke but I don't know for sure. Whatever it is I'd rather listen to "Gett Off" for three weeks straight than hear that shit again.


Anyway like I says, despite being such a fuckin prick, Hallenbeck's got a code of honor. (that's how Americans know he's the good guy. Also, because he's played by Bruce Willis.) They have him risking his life to save the guy who ruined his career and avenge the death of the guy who fucked his wife and tried to have him killed. Because it's the right thing to do, like in that movie DO THE RIGHT THING. Unfortunately, they have to have Damon Wayans explicitly point out that Hallenbeck is risking his life for the people who fucked him. Because we're retards. And later on there's a bit where the bad guy steals the wrong suitcase, which is fine, but does Damon Wayans have to fucking SAY OUT LOUD that he got the wrong suitcase, five to ten minutes after we already figured it out ourselves? I guess if you're payin a screenwriter millions of dollars, you're not gonna want subtlety. Somebody might miss something and you won't get your moneys worth.

Hallenbeck is a pretty good character. You sort of gotta like a hero who's introduced passed out in his car, neighborhood kids putting a dead squirrel on his head. Damon Wayans doesn't get that type of topnotch entrance though, and it gets kind of iffy when he learns from Hallenbeck's tough guy ways and starts pulling phoney action hero maneuvers. When they're at gun point he stages an escape that's pretty hard to swallow. I'm not the king of action movie scripts like Shane Black was at the time, but if I was, I woulda made a declaration that no character is allowed to perform an escape that involves knowing for sure that throwing a bullet in a fireplace will cause two people to catch on fire. And if some Wayans brother or other DID pull that one off, they would at least be surprised and amazed that it actually worked.

Also the ending is kind of sad because Bruce and Damon walk off into the sunset talking about how they're gonna be partners now, and you get the strong, uncomfortable feeling that Shane Black and company assumed America would fall in love with these characters and beg for more of their adventures for many years. I mean shit, I woulda taken a Next to Last Boy Scout before Bad Boys 2 any day, but still. It didn't happen, and Shane Black disappeared after a couple years and only recently came back from the brink trying to face the demons and prove himself against great odds, just like one of his characters. But with less guns.


In a way I think Mr. Black's screenplays were one a them self fulfilling prophecies the Lord sometimes tosses at a motherfucker. A Chinese finger trap. Shane Black was always writing about these middle age burnouts, alcoholics and suicidals, people who hate life and worry they will never recapture what they once had, before the movie started. IMDb says the guy wrote Lethal Weapon when he was 22 years old, but if I'm doing my math right he was more like 25. Either way the bastard's just out of college, should be workin at a record shop or something, instead he's richer than shit, getting flown around to meetings, people with fancy offices telling him he's the future of Hollywood. Probaly doesn't even know how to do his own laundry, let alone understand how a real police department operates. He doesn't know what the fuck he's doin, he just does it. And I think with this movie and The Long Kiss Good Night he was trying to sort of rebel against the MILLION DOLLAR ACTION MOVIE KID slot that the Joel Silvers and David Geffens were shoving him head first into, maybe trying to justify it all to himself. So he makes the main character all fucked up and throws in some weird business like the NFL shootout, the hateful romantic climax, a little girl telling a guy to "eat shit," etc.

Well none of Shane Black's movies are an ingrown hair on DIE HARD's shaved nutsack, but that don't mean they weren't influential. I think it's safe to say that most non-kung fu Hollywood action movies today are poured into the jello mold of DIE HARD and LETHAL WEAPON. (At least, from what I remember. I haven't watched that movie in years. That's the one with the black dude and the white dude, right? The white dude's all crazy and the black dude's all uptight and you're like come on black dude, be more like white dude, he's crazy he's gonna shoot everybody, why can't you be more like him he plays by his own rules, don't get tied down by the red tape let's let the bullets fly and see where they stick, but seriously though you have a great family let's be friends though I got all kinds of black friends I'm totally down bud.)

Anyway, I'm glad I went back and filled in this hole in my Bruce-watching. Not a great one but an interesting one anyway.

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THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO

First of all I want to point out I don't think this picture is really about disco. I mean it gives a different view of the phenomenon, showing it only in the early '80s when it was taken over by a bunch of yuppies and it tries to explain what it meant to those people. This is not the young and exciting working class disco of Saturday Night Fever. This is at the point when you had to look a certain way to get in. For one of the main characters jimmy the club is his life, but not because he loves to dance. Because he works in advertising and he brings his clients there to impress them. That's the kind of bullshit scene we're talking about here.

But even though it makes that point it's not a disco movie, it's not one of these movies about dancing and partying and what not. What it is about is a bunch of young rich kids fresh out of college talking endlessly about a bunch of pretentious bullshit about their generation or relationships or which is the best cocktail for their image or what is the true meaning of Lady and the Tramp.

And that probaly sounds pretty fucking awful, but I still liked it. What this is about is characters and although most of these characters are a bunch of fucking pinheads I still enjoyed watching at them and laughing at them. But at the center is this Chloe Sevigny who plays Alice and she is what makes the picture work. I don't know of another young actress with this kind of soul in her eyes. She doesn't have to say much but those hypno jewels of hers staring out from under heavy eyelids, I mean this gal has it. She has an unconventional beauty and glamour and I believe an aura is like a radiant glow around the body right? If so she has an aura of intelligence and what not. There are scenes where she is deliberately playing dumb to get laid and it seems so wrong for those eyes, it is funny. Hell man this young lady is a born star give this gal an award please.

Now I wouldn't have thought this would be a movie I could get involved in, but see it is important to understand how movies work. A good movie can put you in a world you don't know with people you would never hang out with but make you understand what they're about, make you care. So I mean no, on the surface a motherfucker such as ol' Vern does not have a whole lot in common with this Alice, a young Harvard graduate sharing a small poorly designed apartment with two other women while she spends her days as an underling in the publishing world and her nights dating several different pretentious college boneheads and dancing to donna summer or whatever. But a good movie can cut through all the surface an make you recognize the universal. When it comes down to it i DO know this lifestyle. I mean I don't like to bring this up too often but in the joint there is a dating scene with a LOT of similarities. I mean there are no women, but there are the weaker dudes and they are always trying to hook up, trying to find the one - the one who will be the least cruel to them, will protect them from other jockers etc. That is what most of the characters in this movie are trying to do, hook up, play it safe, settle down. But there are other punks in the joint who would rather take a risk, play the field, not make a commitment and hope maybe they are tough enough to escape relatively unscathed. And that is what the disco scene is all about.

Also I hope I don't need to mention that i have experienced living situations more awkward than a railroad apartment. And kitchen duty and some of the other jobs are pretty similar to working at a publishing company in my opinion. By the way if there is anyone who would like to publish my memoirs or a collection of my film writing please let me know

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LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO

During my recent two-week TEXAS CHAINSAW binge I learned of the existence of this movie I'd never heard before. It was written by Kim Henkel (co-writer of the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, writer/director of part 4). It also stars Lou Perryman two years before he played the lovable loogie-spittin' sidekick L.G. in TCSM part 2. (He was also assistant cameraman on part 1.)

But this is not a horror movie by any stretch of the imagination, in fact if I was gonna compare it to any movie it would have to be CLERKS. Because this is a low budget, 16mm black and white slice of life movie about some regular people hanging out in a bar called The Alamo. It's the last night before it's gonna get demolished, and almost the entire movie takes place inside, in the parking lot, or at a house right across the street. (The opening scene is the farthest you get from the Alamo, it shows one of the characters driving to The Alamo in real time.)

But these characters are regular working class Texans circa 1984, so instead of STAR WARS they complain about their wives and their bosses.

The three main characters are (in order of appearance):

Ichabod (Steven Matilla), a kind of whiny Owen Wilson type. He opens the movie in a huge fight with his girlfriend and ends up in much worse trouble with her after he gets drunk. And he hates being called Ichabod.

Claude (Lou Perryman) comes in swearing about his wife and beating the shit out of his hat. He has just been kicked out of his house and spends about half of the movie on the payphone alternately arguing with and sweet talking his wife. He thinks she cares more about their house and their carpet than about the family, and he worries she's gonna want a condominium some day. So you can see that the closing of the Alamo sort of represents the constant changes in our culture and the death of these people's way of life, but it's never heavy-handed.

Finally you got Cowboy Regan (Sonny Carl Davis, who apparently was in THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA). He just walked off his job but is the only lead character who's not pissed off all the time. He's a smooth talker who brags that he's going to use his connections to stop the bar from being closed down. Everybody seems to idolize him, so you hear about him long before he shows up. He also talks about moving to California to be a movie star, because he thinks he's John Wayne. But one guy, Steve (J. Michael Hammond) is jealous of him and when they get in a fight you find out about Cowboy's insecurities. Steve keeps pointing out that Cowboy is bald beneath the cowboy hat he always wears, but it never gets a reaction out of anybody. Still, Cowboy's image starts to fall apart as the night goes on, and his schemes for saving the Alamo seem almost childish by the end.

Kim Henkel also has a part as Lionel, a dude with a huge mustache who doesn't talk much.

The movie is just as small and sentimental as it sounds, but that's a good thing. These are great characters because they have all the faults of real human beings but are very likable. They feel like your friends who you are still loyal to even when you know they're being assholes.

The acting is really good, especially Lou Perryman. If you like him in CHAINSAW 2 you gotta try to see this, because he gets to take it further. You've never heard any movie character say "got-damnit" so many times or in so many different ways. Of course, he doesn't get to give anybody a pep talk after having his face cut off, but you can't do that in every movie. I didn't realize that he plays the sheriff in BOYS DON'T CRY. But it looks like that's the most significant role he's gotten in a while. This movie makes me think he really oughta have a resurgence. Somebody please remind the Tarantino/Rodriguez Austin Movie Cartel about Lou Perryman and this movie.

Unfortunately, as of this writing you're gonna have a hard time finding this movie. It's not on DVD and judging from the oversized porn type box for the VHS it's probaly been near twenty years since it's been in print. But if you ever come across it it's a nicely done little movie, definitely worth checking out.

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LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III

As you've probaly figured out by now, I love THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Hell, I'd go so far as to call it the DIE HARD of horror. The Mohammed Ali of horror. The Bruce Lee of horror. I also love part 2, not as fond of part three, hated part 4, fucking DESPISED the remake.

This week they got the prequel to the remake coming out. I'm sure I'll probaly hate it, but who knows. In some ways it doesn't sound as bad as the remake, and since it's not a remake you can hold it to the lower standards of a sequel. And lucky for it, there have been two not so hot sequels already to lower the bar. So I came up with a plan. First, I devised a method by which I will see the prequel without Michael Bay getting any of my money. Then I rented parts 3 and 4 so I can have them fresh on my mind while watching the prequel. That way I will have the maximum possible open-mindedness when I see the new one and might be able to appreciate it. The only problem is I watched Part 3 here and it's not as bad as I remembered.

LEATHERFACE (which is a dumb fucking title) is not really a disaster. More like a small accident, a minor fenderbender. Nothing to be proud of, but we'll get it fixed. The beginning of the movie has Leatherface creating his mask, shot exactly like the opening of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET where Freddy constructs his glove. This is important because that's the context this movie was made in. New Line Cinema had the rights to make a Texas Chainsaw sequel. They had just released A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD and it had done only okay. And they probaly knew that NINJA TURTLES shit couldn't float forever, so they had to come up with a new Freddy. That's why the title puts the emphasis on Leatherface. Leatherface is Freddy, the mask is his hat I guess, the saw is his glove. Give us money.

The extras on the DVD for LEATHERFACE repeat what director Jeff Burr said in the documentary THE SHOCKING TRUTH, that Peter Jackson (who had only done BAD TASTE and MEET THE FEEBLES) was New Line's top choice for the movie. That sure would've been a weird alternate reality if he had taken the job, but after he and others turned it down they went back to Jeff "STEPFATHER 2" Burr, who they had rejected before, and gave him only a couple weeks before he had to shoot the script they had already developed. Then when it was done New Line made them cut stuff out because they were worried about the ratings, and when they submitted it to the MPAA (11 times) they had to cut out even more. If you take all that into account you can understand why it doesn't work but you can admire the little bits here and there that Burr managed to pull off.

The main characters are a couple driving from L.A. to Florida. They stop off for gas in some Texas-themed part of California where they have signs that say "Don't Mess With Texas" and "Texas Road" but the landscape still looks like California. The gas station is run by Alfredo (Tom Everett), a weird mumbling pervert with a novelty skull toy, a peephole into the gas station restroom, and a weakness for the ladies. He has a polaroid camera around his neck, so you know he's supposed to be the substitute for Edwin Neal's hitchhiker character. This guy is definitely the most CHAIN SAW character in the movie, he does a great job of mumbling crazy shit to himself, having that Edwin Neal balance of creepiness and black humor, but with an added edge of misogyny and general hostility.

But then Viggo Mortensen shows up. His name is Tex (after the state that California is supposed to resemble in this movie). He sort of rescues the girl from Alfredo while her sissy boyfriend is in the bathroom, and they flirt. Alfredo gets jealous and pulls out his shotgun, Tex stands between them, the couple make a run for it. And from that point on their road trip is fucked.

First they get a flat tire. Which is bad enough. But then to make matters worse, Leatherface comes after them in a huge truck with the brights on. This is sort of what happened in part 2, but this time they added the new touch of a truck-bra made out of stitched together human skin. He saws up their car and magically tears the trunk lid off, but they get away. Then they almost collide with a Jeep, which happens to be driven by the great Ken Foree (Peter from DAWN OF THE DEAD, later Charlie Altamont in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS). He turns out to be some kind of survivalist, which explains why he has some weapons. He mentions having a ranch or compound or something with a couple of buddies - I wish the end of the movie was him going and getting his buddies and then come back with a fuckin arsenal and declare a civil war against the Sawyer family. That would be a different movie from all the other ones. It would be the ALIENS of the Chain Saw series, maybe. But that's not to be.

But the three of them get attacked together so they sort of become a team. At one point, Foree runs into the crazed last survivor of a previous chain saw massacre, an idea that was used again in the remake.

After various horror and etc., the boyfriend and girlfriend both end up in captivity at the new Sawyer house, where we meet the all new family. I guess maybe Leatherface somehow survived his stomach-sawing and hand grenading in part 2 and went to live with some cousins or something. (Actually I think his squeaky legbrace is supposed to tell you this is a direct followup to part 1, where he saws his own leg.) This time there's a little girl (possibly Leatherface's daughter) who plays with a doll made out of a baby skeleton. There's a mother in a wheelchair who talks through a tracheotomy deal and looks at Leatherface with the eyes of a proud mother. There's sort of the macho uncle with an earring, Tink, who builds "Junior" (Leatherface) a badass tricked out chrome chainsaw with "THE SAW IS FAMILY" engraved on the blade. Also he is responsible for the new headpounding contraption they use to make their lifestyle more convenient in the more technological age of 1990. And then there's Tex, who you would have to be an idiot to not expect to end up in the family, even though he was really good at passing himself off as a respectable member of society. Viggo does a good job with a couple good lines like "How you like Texas?" and "If you need anything... just twitch." But his character is a little too standard-issue evil to live up to the legacy of the first two films. He's no Chop Top, for example.

Oh yeah, and Grandpa is still there. He looks just like in part 2, but he's dead and mummified. The one really brilliant cinematastic touch by Burr is that he keeps cutting to reaction shots of the dead Grandpa. It sort of gets you in the crazed Dinner Scene mindframe of the characters. The poor gal has her hands nailed to a chair, her boyfriend is hanging upside down dead, there's a family of weirdos talking about "Junior loves them private parts, he sure knows what to do with them parts," and the director is interested in what the mummified body thinks about all this. Perfect.

In the original and the other sequels, the girl manages to excuse herself from dinner, but this is the only one where a survivalist shows up and fires a PREDATOR-sized barrage into the window, massacring most of the family. He shoots off two of Tink's fingers and (somehow) one of his ears. He even kills Grandpa. But eventually, obviously, he's gonna run out of bullets and there's gonna be a final battle with Leatherface, etc. Maybe a car chase, but probaly not. I have never been clear why the girl doesn't seem to have any problems with her hands after having them both impaled on railroad spikes and pulling them off.

I have mixed feelings about this Leatherface. The mask looks stupid. The hair looks stupid. The first time he attacks he just seems like a macho evil guy, like in the remake. But when he's in the house he seems more like the frightened retard from the first two movies. He is in sort of a teenager phase, so he listens to shitty heavy metal and puts headphones on his victims. He plays with a Speak 'n Spell type game but is not very good at it. The other characters are decent but not on the level of a Cook, a Hitchhiker or a Chop Top. (The cook apparently went down in the gas chamber, at least that's who I think they are talking about as "W.E. Sawyer" in the Laroquette-less opening crawl.)

The newer version of the DVD has some good making ofs and what not. It supposedly has both the R-rated and unrated versions, but then when you watch the ten minute montage of stuff they had to cut out to get an R, you find out that it's not in the unrated version. So I don't know what the deal is. But it seemed like it would've made the movie a little more intense.

I think the biggest problem with the movie is the style. It just doesn't have that realistic feel of the first one or the relentless insanity of the second. This one feels like exactly what it is, a scripted Hollywood sequel, shot in California. It just doesn't have the art or the authenticity or the muggy Texas atmosphere of the other two. It looks cheap, but still too polished, and the two leads are pretty bland. That combined with the fact that it's part 3 with a storyline not hugely different from the other two, and you get a pretty weak movie. But they have the family dynamic down, they tried to make some new characters and bring Leatherface a little further, and they were smart enough to cast Ken Foree. At least their hearts were in the right place.

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LEPRECHAUN, LEPRECHAUN 4: IN SPACE, LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD, LEPRECHAUN BACK 2 THA HOOD

I don't know why, but I never saw a LEPRECHAUN picture before. You guys know I got a taste for straight to video trash, as well as little bastard killers. Nobody is as good as Chucky, but I had fun writing about THE GINGERDEAD MAN. Plus, the Leprechaun made it into space 4 years before Jason did, and I loved JASON X. (HELLRAISER won the space race, after false starts from HALLOWEEN, give credit where credit is due. But Leprechaun was there second.)

More importantly, it was St. Patrick's Day, and I'm not Irish, and I can't drink, so what the fuck else am I supposed to do on St. Patrick's Day besides watch some Leprechaun pictures.

The first one is the one that stars Jennifer Aniston playing a Jennifer Aniston type. She's an L.A. city girl who has to come with her dad to a barn out in the boondocks somewhere. Little does she know that the old Irish immigrant who used to own the place once went back to the motherland, trapped a leprechaun (Warwick Davis, RAY) and stole his gold. The leprechaun came home with him in his luggage and tried to kill him, but the old man used a four leaf clover (like a crucifix to a vampire) to trap him in a box. In Jennifer Aniston's barn.

Mark Holton (Frances from the PeeWee Herman movie) plays a reta-- I mean a lovable manchild who accidentally opens the box. And because he's a lovable manchild, nobody believes him that he saw a leprechaun. Also they don't believe him because he said he saw a leprechaun.

The lovable manchild and his actual child friend find the leprechaun's gold, and the manchild accidentally swallows a piece of it, and then the leprechaun uses evil magic to try to get the gold back. etc.

Now, the idea of a movie about a killer leprechaun is pretty funny, but I didn't enjoy this one all that much. There's not enough absurdity to fuel it. It gets pretty boring. But I'm glad they treat it seriously and it seems like a real movie.

Because I didn't really get into that one I decided to skip parts 2 and 3 and go straight for part 4, LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE. Unless maybe part 3 has a crazy EVIL DEAD 2 type ending there is no explanation of how the leprechaun got into space. He's just in a space cave somewhere with a space princess who's using him for his gold. He wants to marry her so he can become king of some galaxy or something, then have sex with her and kill her. He is not exactly the most enlightened leprechaun you're gonna come across when it comes to gender issues, in my opinion. I mean maybe there's stories I never heard about the Lucky Charms guy being a pig, who knows, but as far as I know this particular unnamed leprechaun is the Ike Turner of leprechauns. Minus the musical talent. (More on that later.)

Unfortunately for the leprechaun, his marital coup plan is interupted by some ALIENS-style space mercenaries brought in by a cyborg mad scientist working on an experiment to regrow his damaged body. I forget exactly why he was there but unfortunately I don't think he knew about the leprechaun or that he was impervious to bullets. As long as they're ripping off ALIENS it would be great if they said they were trying to get the leprechaun's DNA for their bio-weapons division, but no dice.

What happens instead is the marines see the leprechaun and blow him up, but then one of them (the Bill Paxton type) pees on the corpse, and some (green?) electrical beams come up into him. Later, when he gets a boner the leprechaun busts out of his crotch. This might be an homage to A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 where a dog pees fire onto Freddy's corpse to resurrect him, but more likely it is just a half thought out idea that these guys thought might seem to make sense. They never explain what happened to the corpse that he peed on. Are there two leprechauns in space now?

There is all kinds of ridiculous shit that happens in this movie. A guy gets his DNA spliced with a spider. A tough guy cyborg marine has to wear a dress. The leprechaun turns himself giant, and gets blown out into space just like the Alien. The whole thing is so ridiculous that it seems like it would have to be enjoyable, but I really didn't get into it. I think there's two basic problems. One is that they make it really jokey, they are not really taking it seriously, and the acting is about porn level. The second is that the production values are so fucking shitty. There aren't even TV shows that look as crappy is this, the sets are more like a school play. They don't even bother to use green screens to put realistic stars in the space ship windows, they just have black felt with a bunch of identical white lights poking out of it.

If this had good production values, and it if it had a more serious tone, if it felt like a real ALIEN sequel, but had a leprechaun in it - that would be a classic right there. That is the movie I want to see. But not this shit.

Now, by the time of part 5, and especially since it's called LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD, you would expect it to be even shittier. Or at least I was. But I was happy to find that IN THE HOOD is actually one giant leap for mankind compared to IN SPACE. The production values are way better - pretty good photography, shot on location instead of shitty sets, and even the acting is alot better (although iffy in spots).

The opening scene is in the '70s, and Ice-T (with an afro) discovers the leprechaun's gold, a magic flute and a statue of the leprechaun wearing a gold necklace. Of course, when his friend takes the necklace it brings the leprechaun to life. And it takes about 5 seconds to realize the leprechaun is a complete asshole, because he quotes Dr. King's "Free at least, free at last, God almighty I'm free at last." Man, talk about inappropriate. Ice-T should call him a racist but instead calls him "you midget Midas motherfucker."

Luckily Ice manages to get the necklace back on him and escape with the goods. It's weird because this mostly seems like a serious scene, but there's a part where Ice pulls a baseball bat out of his afro.

Skip ahead to the '90s and our protagonists, a "positive" rap trio trying to make a name for themselves. Ice-T (not playing himself, by the way) is now a very powerful rap mogul who could put them on the map. They manage to get a meeting with him, but it doesn't go well.

This is the scene where I first realized I like this movie better than the other ones. I knew Ice-T was in this movie and I figured it was one of those half-assed roles alot of rappers do in DTV movies, he is just fuckin around trying to be funny. But that's not what Ice-T is doing - he plays it just as seriously as he does that role on whichever LAW AND ORDER show he's on. He plays it like it's an actual menacing villain. In the middle of the meeting he makes them wait while he makes a phone call:

"Hey you, you listen to me. You don't wanna fuck with me, okay? I hope you had sex last night, 'cause I'ma come over there and cut off your dick, then I'ma feed it to my pit, then I'ma burn the shit when it comes out of my god damn dog's ass, you hear me? DON'T FUCK WITH ME, BITCH!"

Then he turns back to the kids and asks them more questions about their music. This could be dumb but all the actors treat it completely deadpan. Even when they're doing broad jokes (they find out how to kill the leprechaun from a "Leprechauns For Dummies" book, they stick four leaf clovers in a joint to try to kill him, etc.) the actors seem like they don't know it's supposed to be funny, which is the complete opposite of most of these types of movies. They don't even have wacky music on the score pointing out the jokes.

The rappers get in trouble with the leprechaun when they decide to rob Ice-T's office. He has the leprechaun statue in a trophy case and they make the mistake of stealing his necklace, bringing him to life. They also steal his magic flute which they find out has hypnotic powers, and they use it to help their rap careers.

It keeps seeming like Ice-T's gonna die, but he survives throughout the story so he is a threat to the rappers and a possible victim for the leprechaun. And that's good because Ice-T is the heart and soul of LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD.

You know who could really learn from Ice-T is that fuckin leprechaun. Like in most of his movies, his dialogue is all rhymes. Horrible, stupid rhymes. The guy is just a complete jackass. I don't know if you've seen this but Ice-T had a reality show called ICE-T'S RAP SCHOOL where he tried to teach white prep school kids to be rappers. The leprechaun could really benefit from going to this school. He thinks if he just makes a rhyme that says "Tiger Woods" in it that counts as wit. Leprechaun, you suck.

Different people have different reactions to seeing a monster leprechaun. One guy thinks he's a kid and says, "I'm not gonna buy any Halloween costumes, so leave me alone." I guess in the hood there are kids who go around trying to sell Halloween costumes. There's a transvestite prostitute who has a different reaction, he's horny so when the leprechaun shows up at his crib he tries to fuck it. That's one thing that doesn't usually happen to Freddy, let alone Chucky.

This one has even more crazy shit that goes down than IN SPACE. Not one but all of the heroes have to dress up like women this time. Maybe the weirdest scene though is where the rappers have to help out at the church in order to get sanctuary, but their song offends the congregation and everybody starts to leave. Out of desperation, one of the dudes blows the magic flute, and all the churchgoers get hypnotized into coming back in and sitting down. And then they notice two guys standing at the back of the church.

"Yo, that's... Coolio?!"

Then they perform a horrible rap song. There are 2 or 3 shots to show that Coolio stands there and listens. Then you never see or hear from him again. Apparently, the magic flute is not only hypnotic, it also has the power to summon Coolio. That's pretty cool but at least in this particular situation it didn't really help, Coolio did not offer assistance or anything. Still, it's good to know. If you ever need Coolio, blow the magic flute.

By the end of the movie, the leprechaun has an entourage of babes with glowing green eyes who he calls "me zombie flygirls." And luckily he doesn't rap until the end credits.

That would be my one complaint about this one other than the general annoyingness of the leprechaun: the music is terrible. And that's a problem because it's practically a musical. The rappers have this corny old school stytle and they're just not very good at it. And the leprechaun doing a song called "Lep in the Hood"? Jesus. Even Ice-T's song on the soundtrack is pretty terrible, he actually keeps saying "Straight shootin, darn tootin." I don't know how the fuck they got Ice-T using the phrase "darn tootin" but I'm sure it involved the magic flute. Otherwise though, an admirable leprechaun picture.

I figured part 6, BACK 2 THA HOOD, couldn't be as good, but actually it is at least on par with IN THE HOOD. It even starts out Disney style with a big fancy book that opens up to LEPRECHAUN: CHAPTER 6, and the pages come to life with animated drawings as a female narrator gives us the (never before explained, at least in parts 1, 4 or 5) mythology of the leprechaun. It's like the beginning of LORD OF THE RINGS 1. Turns out some ancient king summoned the leprechauns to protect his gold and punish the evil people who tried to steal it. But when the king died they all went back to nature except for one asshole who stayed behind and turned evil from being in the human world. So he's one of those stubborn individuals like the old man who refused to leave Mt. St. Helens before it erupted, or one of those guys that was still fighting the civil war years later.

I only mention that backstory because it brings up some complex questions. There doesn't seem to be any continuity in these movies. The place the leprechaun is at in the beginning of a movie is never connected to where he was at the end of the last one. At the end of 5 he seemed to have died but then all the sudden he was alive and wearing sunglasses and was the manager to a famous rapper. In part 6 he doesn't have that, he doesn't even have his zombie flygirls, and he's after some priest who stole his gold to fund a community center for the children.

So I had decided these were actually different leprechauns, they weren't the same dude. But now we find out there is only one leprechaun in the human world. So it is the same dude. I don't get it.

This one has a comic relief type character, but otherwise it's even more deadpan than IN THE HOOD. The lead is Tangi Miller (Felicity) whose performance is just as serious as she would give if she was in, say, MUNICH. They also got Kirk Sticky Jones (TV's Blade) in the cast but he's just the villain's #2 in charge so he doesn't get much to do except get hit by a bat and get his throat slashed by the leprechaun near the end.

There's alot of good scenes in this one. The leprechaun tries to explain to the cops that it's his gold they found on some guys, but they don't believe him. So he starts fighting them, and one of the officers starts doing kickboxing moves on him. But he tears off the cop's leg and uses it to reach the gas pedal when he steals a cop car.

For some reason the leprechaun doesn't use magic powers like shooting fireballs anymore, so a guy is actually able to punch the shit out of him. But he can take it, because of magic. He can even take being burned to the bones in a furnace. Our heroes unfortunately don't have the Leprechaun For Dummies book, but a psychic tells them about four leaf clovers. I have noticed that for some reason these movies never acknowledge that four leaf clovers are hard to find. In this case it was already established that (for reasons I do not understand) one character's weed supply had been contaminated with clovers. And luckily they are four leaf clovers.

Anyway, point is, they put four leaf clovers into the tips of hollow point bullets. So this is a pretty good movie.

 

Based on the ones I saw I would definitely have to say that the two HOOD movies are the best of the series. Those are the ones I can endorse. I gotta say though, I am not a fan of the leprechaun in general. His rhyming is obnoxious, his sense of humor is worse than Freddy's, and his accent and forced archaic language just makes him seem like a prick. Sometimes Warwick Davis's acting is pretty good (for example, his reaction when a guy who interrupts his threats to answer his cell phone) but this character is no Chucky.

Part of the problem might be his motive. Usually when a slasher has some thing they're getting revenge for there is at least a grain of truth to their moral outrage so that the victims feel guilty. Freddy was burned alive by his victims' parents, the chainsaw family's property was disrespected, Vincent Price got fucked over by various people, etc. But the leprechaun's complaint is so fuckin petty. I know, "don't steal shit" (paraphrase) is one of the ten commandments, but come on. This leprechaun leaves gold laying around, most of the time the people don't even know they're stealing it. If Bush is a bastard for executing retarded people (and he is), then the leprechaun is the same for going after a mentally disabled lovable manchild just because he found some gold in a pickup truck. There is just no validity to this leprechaun's killing spree.

Still, I hope they keep making these movies. I would like to see the production values and almost-seriousness of the HOOD duology, but obviously it's time to move on to some new settings and premises. Here are a few suggestions I got.

LEPRECHAUN SQUAD: Fed up with the bad reputation this leprechaun is bringing to the larger leprechaun community, an elite squad of good leprechauns come to the human world to hunt the fucker down. These would be some real badasses as far as leprechauns go. All kinds of scars, eyepatches, tattoos, and they have high tech equipment. They rapell in with their infra-green goggles on and go to work.

LEPRECHOPALYPSE: Some time after LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE, the leprechaun returns to earth to find that civilization has been destroyed in a nuclear war. Now he wanders the wasteland on an awesome green motorcycle trying to find mutants to steal his gold.

LEPRECHAUN IN IRAQ: This one is kind of like LEPRECHAUN meets THREE KINGS. It turns out that Saddam stole the leprechaun's gold, and it was actually the leprechaun that hung him. (they could incorporate him into the actual camera phone footage of the hanging.) But the gold switches hands from Iraqi looters to American soldiers, making them all targets of the leprechaun. This would be more of an action movie because the soldiers would have even better ammunition than the drug dealers in BACK 2 THA HOOD. There could also be some wacky FORREST GUMP style humor where the leprechaun is involved in notorious incidents like the Abu Ghraib scandal, etc.

LEPRECHAUN IN DOUBT: This is more of a character drama about what the leprechaun does when nobody steals his gold. At the beginning he puts his gold in the bank. Then he gets so bored he starts to wonder if maybe he really wants people to steal his gold. His life has no meaning otherwise, he is defined by the theft of his material goods. We know from the other movies that he knows how to drive a car ("Well he was doing very well last night!"), answer a phone, smoke a joint, etc., so he must have non-gold related interactions with humans on occasion. But judging by his horrible personality and annoying habits those interactions must not go well. This is a sad story about loneliness and alienation, but also about self discovery and, ultimately, redemption. Definitely the most emotional of the LEPRECHAUN franchise.

LEPRECHAUN UNDER SIEGE: After the box office failure of LEPRECHAUN IN DOUBT, the Leprechaun will go back to what he does best: killing people who steal his gold. But this time it happens in an action movie context. At the beginning of the movie the Leprechaun goes to withdraw his gold from the bank, but he happens to get there just as a team of highly armed and skilled mercenaries are taking hostages as part of a plan to rob the vault. Now, using magic and sneaking around in small vents that nobody else can fit in, only the Leprechaun can rescue the hostages, or at least kill the guys who stole his gold. I guess probaly not rescue the hostages, but who knows.

LEPRECHAUN IN CONGRESS: After becoming a media hero for his heroic rescue of the hostages, the Leprechaun makes a successful bid for Congress and becomes chairman of the ways and means committee, where he learns to not only protect his own treasure, but that of the American people.

LEPRECHAUN IN THE SPACE HOOD: After the box office failure of LEPRECHAUN IN CONGRESS, the Leprechaun returns to more familiar territory.

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LETHAL WEAPON

I meant to see APOCALYPTO this week but I was too god damn sick to haul my ass to the theater. So I figured what the hell, it's December, I'm Vern - might as well revisit LETHAL WEAPON. Haven't seen that one since the '80s. One of my buddies swears by it.

Well, it was interesting to watch this movie again, and I had fun, but I can't say it has aged too well. I know it's not fair to compare everything to DIE HARD, but LETHAL WEAPON is no DIE HARD. Bruce knew to keep the hair conservative, it will be timeless, no problem. His hair in that movie is so not dated that today, when the LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD teaser debuted online, everybody was pissed that he didn't have the old hair do.

Not so Mel Gibson's do in LETHAL WEAPON. That fuckin thing better be in a vault somewhere covered in ten feet of lead. What is it about the fuckin '80s man, where even a ridiculous hair do can be so toxic as to not be cool years later? I mean, you find some silly flip hair do girls wore in the '60s, or an afro from the '70s, hell, the fancy high top fades from the '90s even fair better than pretty much anything these people were trying to do in the '80s. You cannot look at Mel Gibson's lion mane of a mullet and take him seriously. Everything else is fine. He's still lean like MAD MAX, he looks young but he seems grizzled, like life has tossed him through a few windows. He walks with a swagger, he dangles a cigarette from his mouth, he is completely nuts. But still, the fuckin mullet.

(not that the blonde girl who kills herself at the beginning is any better. What the hell was wrong with us, is what I'm asking.)

And then the music. DIE HARD knew what it was doing. Sure, Argyle listens to the Run DMC song in the limo, that's dated. But the score is all classical. Some of those songs are hundreds of years old. Timeless. LETHAL WEAPON goes the opposite route. It asks, "How can we make a score that will make this movie seem ridiculous as soon as possible?" They called upon the same man who would score DIE HARD, Michael Kamen. Obviously he could not do it on his own so he sub-contracted it out to two experts: Eric Clapton and David Sanborn. (Kenny G was busy holding that one note forever so he couldn't do it.) Now I know, I know, I don't mean to insult Eric Clapton, I got nothing against Eric Clapton's career as a whole. But that does not excuse him for the invention of the Cop Movie White Man's Blues Guitar style. At least that's my guess is he invented it and the success of this movie is what started that whole debacle. If he didn't invent it then it's almost worse that a man of his stature would come in and play this style. If there is one thing that does NOT make the action more intense for me it is the occasional guitar noodling of a white man trying to sound bluesy.

And you know what, Mel Gibson's character could sure sing the blues. His wife was killed in a car accident. He lives in a trailer. He carries a hollow point bullet which every day he considers firing into his mouth. Only his job keeps him alive, but while on the job he carelessly risks his life, because he doesn't care if he dies. Save a bullet, I guess. So if they had a real blues guitarist on here it might even work. A Howlin' Wolf or a Muddy Waters or somebody. Not an Eric Clapton. And if so don't saddle him with fuckin David Sanborn.

I'd like to make a movie called GUITAR COP. It is an '80s style cop buddy movie about a white cop who carries around a guitar and noodles on it while trying to break the case. There is no score, he just plays all the music live while the story unfolds. Every once in a while his partner pulls a saxophone out of the trunk and blows some cheesy late night cinemax softcore porno bullshit like David Sanborn would play. I think it would be pretty good.

Apparently Shane Black was 22 when he sold this script, so it's funny that he's telling a story about two Vietnam vet cops, one who's dealing with his 50th birthday and the other who's suicidal due to the loss of his wife and everybody at work thinks he's faking it to get disability. I guess that's what 22 year olds are into. I really like the premise of the movie that Riggs is suicidal and uses this for his police work. This leads to a couple funny scenes, like when there's a sniper shooting kids and he figures out that the guy's not a very good shot, so he walks right out into range of the window and shoots back at him.

You would think maybe Riggs is a "lethal weapon" because he doesn't give a fuck, but Murtaugh states that he is "into martial arts" and asks "should we register you as a lethal weapon?" and I'm afraid that even in 1987 America should've known better than to consider Mel Gibson a martial arts expert. They wouldn't have let him get away with that in his native land of Australia, so we should never have accepted it here. He does a good job though. He's charming, and gets to go off his rocker in a way he doesn't do in many other movies (no, I will not make an anti-semitism joke here). He doesn't entirely hide his Australian accent either, so you can tell this was a long time ago.

Danny Glover (PREDATOR 2) is good, Gary Busey (PREDATOR 2) is the villain, so you got some good stuff in here, much like the movie PREDATOR 2. There is the surprising scene where the house explodes out of the blue, and the funny scene with the neighborhood kids afterwards. But to me, this only stands out a little bit from all the other stuff that copied it. The mystery is not all that fascinating. Gary Busey doesn't get as much to do as in UNDER SIEGE, etc. As far as action, well, I will not say how it compares to DIE HARD.

Not bad, but let's not be building any monuments or anything.

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LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Dear Friends,

Last year we all heard Clint Eastwood, who I still consider the greatest living human, was directing this World War II movie produced by Steven Spielberg. Not really my genre, but with Clint directing obviously I was looking forward to it. Things got more interesting during filming when he announced that he realized the story of Iwo Jima needed to be told from the Japanese perspective too, so he was doing another movie straight after FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, originally titled RED SUN, BLACK SAND. And that sounded more interesting to me. Way to be ambitious, Clint.

But when FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS came out it was underwhelming enough that, to be honest, I lost some of my interest in LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA. That first movie's not terrible, and I really like what it was about - the complicated feelings of some guys who are declared war heroes for bullshit reasons and have to go along with it in order to raise war bonds and help out their fellow soldiers who are still fighting. But the way the story was told was just not Clint enough. Usually when he directs the stories are pretty spare, pretty bare, and the emotions are raw. The score of FLAGS was about the only thing that was the usual laid back Clint. He had to jump between the present day with the son of one of the flag raisers interviewing the survivors, the actual battle of Iwo Jima, and the war bonds tour after the battle, and then all of those are jumbled up so they're in even less order than it sounds like.

So at the very least you gotta keep track of these 5 guys who raised the second Iwo Jima flag, plus you will need to remember some of the other guys who raised the first flag and figure out which parents are theirs, and you have to figure which young character corresponds to which old man in the present day, all this while trying to figure out which of the identical looking grey helmets got killed during chaotic shaky cam battle. And with all that you don't really attach to the characters like you did, say, the 2 or 3 characters at the heart of MILLION DOLLAR BABY. And when the emotions come out sometimes it comes across corny instead of powerful.

Well I'm a little surprised and alot happy to say that LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA is about a hundred or more times better than FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. I'm not good at math but that figure sounds about right. It's funny that this is the one he did as an afterthought. Maybe he overthunk the other one. This story is much more intimate and focused, the characters and performances are more impressive and, as much as I liked the exploration of propaganda there, this is a story that is more groundbreaking and profound for an American movie about World War II.

Obviously this isn't HELL IN THE PACIFIC, there are a bunch of characters, but it focuses mainly on two of them. One is a relucant young soldier named Saigo(Kazunari Ninomiya) who had to leave his pregnant wife and his bakery behind to go to this war where he's not likely to come back. The other is General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who has just been assigned here after another general turned down the job. He used to live in the U.S., which raises suspicions in some of his men but also gives him some insight into the enemy and some different ideas about the battle and about life.

The story is much more straightforward than FLAGS. It's told in a direct line, from the preparations for the battle to the end, occasionally going into flashback to explain more about each character, but then quickly coming back to the same story. No jumping around otherwise.

A big part of the story is the sense of hopelessness and impending doom. The beginning of the movie is spent digging trenches and tunnels, complaining about the heat and the bad water, waiting for the invasion. Once the Americans arrive it becomes an underdog story. You're attached to this group of characters and even though they're on the wrong side of the one war most of us agree on, we have to root for them. Maybe not to win but at least to get out alive.

And that's what's so brilliant about it. These guys aren't nazis, but they're on the nazis' side of the war. But it turns out they also happen to be people. The way they get involved in this war is not that different from people in other countries, it's pretty normal. They're not being brainwashed exactly. This could be almost any war, almost any country, there are going to be citizens who believe in their country, or feel they should believe in their country and they will feel that fighting for their country is their duty. This is a humane movie. I can't think of many movies that so clearly show the humanity of the "enemy." Even the "good war" is a god damn shame. Everybody knows that I'm sure, but you see a movie like this and you FEEL it. All the human beings who died on that piece of shit island for something as dry and technical as control of a strategic location. What a fuckin waste.

I don't think I've seen another WWII movie completely from the point of view of the Japanese. In FLAGS, you barely even saw the faces of the Japanese soldiers. Here it's the other way around. The weird thing is that when the few American characters do show up they aren't as good of actors as the Japanese stars of the movie, so it almost seems like one of those Godzilla movies or martial arts movies where they have a guy speaking English and the acting is bad because the director didn't speak English. But Clint does speak English, and not Japanese. I'm not sure how he did it.

There are themes here that are universal and there are themes that are pretty damn Japanese. One problem they keep facing that you don't see in all cultures is that everybody keeps wanting to commit ritual suicide. The baker doesn't want to kill himself, he wants to get out of this alive. But not in a macho way. Everybody else makes him feel like he's a coward for having a survival instinct. He has to try to convince them (and maybe himself) that it would be better for the Emperor if they kept fighting from the corner they're painted into. You guys and your ritual suicide, jesus. Let's cut that out. Don't jump.

These two lead actors are both great. Watanabe is so charismatic and heroic, some kind of Japanese John Wayne, but more thoughtful. And the other guy is more of a goofball, he seems like the guy that would be the comic relief in most movies. But it makes you feel more for him, he's out of his element. He should be baking bread, not fighting an unwinnable war.

When I think about the movie now I remember it as being in black and white. This is probaly partly because the colors in the movie are so muted and partly because it reminds me of one of those old Japanese classics, like the early Kurosawa pictures. Less swords, but that same kind of quiet seriousness and involving characters. These guys seem more like real people than the guys in FLAGS.

I'm glad this got nominated for a bunch of oscars and FLAGS didn't. It seems like the obvious better one to me, but you never know what those people are gonna fall for. I don't know many people who have seen LETTERS. One of my buddies said it was only okay and he mentioned a scene later on where the characters start talking about their feelings about war and they sort of say straight out the ideas that they've already expressed without words. It's true, he's right, this is what you gotta assume is the Paul Haggis contribution. Haggis helped the new writer Iris Yamashita with the story, so he probaly got some shots in there.

It's handy. See, whenever Haggis is one of the writers on a movie you can blame him for whichever parts you didn't like. So I blame him for the part in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS where the guy says his father was "the best father a man could ever have." And the part in CASINO ROYALE where Vesper has communicated everything that needs to be said through her posture and facial expression and the fact that she's sitting in the shower, and then she states out loud how she's feeling. Also, I blame him for those parts during the poker game where the dude has to explain how the poker works. In fact, I have decided to extend Paul Haggis blaming to movies that he didn't even have anything to do with. For example, he did the scene in HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE where the character "Big Brain" makes a big speech about why the mutants are fighting the humans. He did the twist ending in HIGH TENSION, and the scene in WOLF CREEK where one of the victims finds the killer's collection of camcorders and watches and finds out that the killer uses poison, like anybody who is watching the movie already figured out. Any time there's a good movie, Paul Haggis flies around and tries to put a Haggis scene in there so you can't love it unconditionally.

But I'm not gonna let Haggis win this one. This is a great movie. Not flawless, but great. The movie had me way too tightly in its grip for me to slip away over a little thing like a conversation we didn't need. They coulda done the HIGH TENSION twist, at that point I still woulda thought it was pretty good anyway.

Respectfully yours,

Iwo Jima

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LIONHEART

LIONHEART is Van Damme circa 1991, and his best up to that point if you ask me, which by reading this you agree to do. As a matter of personal taste I think competitive fighting is one of the squarest action subgenres. You got less room for chase scenes and explosions, the rules and locales of the fights are too rigid. I mean nothing against a good pre-fight jitters locker room scene or a spooky ancient temple with torches and mystical snake statues, but I prefer a more urban style of action movie. One with crooks and creeps, alleys, fire escapes, car windshields.

LIONHEART is a smart compromise because it continues the competitive fighting of BLOODSPORT and KICKBOXER but in a cartoonish underground fighting circuit in New York and Los Angeles. This is another subgenre that gets old fast, usually because you get sick of looking at the same dimly lit arena with a fence or barbwire, maybe a strobelight. This one avoids that pitfall by having a new location and crowd for each fight: a circle of cars (with people rollerskating around), a swimming pool with all but the deep end drained (crowd in bikinis like it's a pool party), inside somebody's mansion (a black tie event) and (my favorite) a racquetball court. Brian Thompson is there but never fights. The real villain is Cynthia (could've sworn the credits just called her "The Lady," but maybe I imagined that) the stereotypical L.A. rich bitch of the '80s: short hair, expensive clothes, sexually and capitalistically aggressive.

The story begins with brother Francois set on fire during a weird West Side Story style drug deal. He survives, but burnt to a crisp, and cries out for his brother Lyon (Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme). Lyon doesn't get word for weeks because he's in Djibouti doing forced labor for the French Foreign Legion. He escapes, stows away on a boat, gets money fighting in a parking garage, goes with his new self-proclaimed manager to L.A. to find his brother. Of course he gets there right after Francois dies. The widow blames Lyon for Francois's drug problem so she won't accept any help from him. So he does more fights and gets the money he wins to her, pretending it's from some non-existent life insurance policy.

Van Damme seems way grittier in this one, way less boyish and more intense. He has that forehead bump now but maybe I just missed it in the last one. He wears jeans and a blue work shirt for most of the movie, he's literally blue collar. Then The Lady burns his clothes while he's passed out drunk, so he's forced to go suit shopping with her. (We can only assume he walked into the store wearing only a hotel bathrobe.)

He has many scary opponents. The last one is Attilla, a bushy-sideburned dude who gets out of a limo sporting a black suit and white cat (bad combo if you think about it). During the fight he reaches into the crowd to pet his cat. Also he borrows a dude's pocket square to wipe blood off his mouth (you know what, just keep that). So he's a pretty good character.

By the way, remember Tong Po, who was such a scary Muay Thai fighter in KICKBOXER? He's actually Moroccan and was made up to look Asian in that one. Here he has a less menacing part as one of two guys from the French Foreign Legion trying to catch Van Damme.

This is a better character than the previous Van Dammes because he's a fugitive, but he really took a fall for his brother, he's homeless, and he's only trying to get money to get his sister-in-law out of debt from hospital bills. (If we had universal health care LIONHEART would never happen.) The cool thing is he's not even trying to get revenge! Just trying to make up for his failure to escape from custody and travel around the world fast enough to see his Darkman-looking brother one last time. He feels like he blew it so he wants to help the widow and daughter.

By the way if you're wondering where the hell you've seen that niece before I'll save you the trip to IMDb. Turns out she was the little sister they added in the later seasons of Growing Pains.

The director is Sheldon Lettich, co-writer of KICKBOXER. I think he did a great job on this one, which I never would've expected. One thing I noticed in particular was a wide shot of sister-in-law and niece coming out of their apartment and walking down the street. They move into the distance as the camera very slowly pulls back, showing you the neighborhood. Doesn't seem like the shot has any other purpose than that... but then suddenly it hits the apartments on the other side of the street and looming in the foreground is one of the trackers from the French Foreign Legion, hanging out of the window, spying on them. It's like a Brian De Palma shot! Remember that when shots used to be designed to look careful and deliberate instead of shaky and unplanned? Those were the good old days. But even then you didn't expect a shot like this in a Van Damme movie. I'm about 17 years late here, but I'm gonna keep an eye on this Sheldon Lettich.

12/8/08

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LIPSTICK & DYNAMITE

Well I should get this out of the way upfront, there is no actual dynamite in this movie, or explosions of any literal kind. What this is is another wrestling documentary. It is not nearly as good as BEYOND THE MAT or my favorite, HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS, because it's done mostly in that tv special kind of way with talking head interviews and Ken Burns style photo montages. (There is not all that much footage of the era they focus on.) But it's a different and interesting angle on the wrestling topic. This one is all about lady wrestlers, told through interviews with a group of elderly women that used to do the deed back in the golden age.

Most of these women looked like b movie stars when they were young, but they were tough ladies with names like Gladys "Killem" Gillem, and as we know from the other wrestling documentaries, even if it's fake, it's a dangerous sport/artform/opera that destroys the body of pretty much anybody who does it long enough to be successful.

These are real interesting characters and they tell real interesting stories about the old days. They would have one guy in charge who sounds almost like their pimp, who would try to screw them both figuratively and the other figuratively. They talk about the days when it was actually illegal for women to wrestle and what it was like to go out there and do it anyway. Raging against the machine. And there's a tragic story about a young girl who actually died during a match. Her opponent is still around to be interviewed in the movie and even though it wasn't her fault, she seems to still feel guilty about it.

One thing they're frustratingly vague about is the actual workings of a match. They talk about not being able to beat the head of the league's girlfriend because they would get in trouble - so are they pretending the matches were real? Or were they fake but the outcome was improvised? I mean wouldn't they already know they were gonna lose the match? It's not really clear.

I know the name of exactly one female wrestler, that's Fabulous Moolah, and she's one of the main focuses of this one. Apparently she took it farther than anybody else, becoming a real business woman about it, and to this day she makes occasional highly paid cameos in the WWE wrestling events. You know, for the moolah. The other wrestlers talk alot about her property she owns and how she plans to make a retirement home for lady wrestlers, but they definitely don't admire her. At least one of the wrestlers, a feisty old grandma who tells stories about getting her eyes torn out, seems to hate Moolah.

Moolah has alot of proteges, and she lives with a former midget wrestler. This is a middled aged woman but Moolah acts like it's her little daughter. It's not really clear but it seems like there's some kind of bitterness going on there that Moolah hasn't caught on to. I got a hunch that could be a whole spinoff movie right there.

To me the payoff in the movie is at the end when all the interview subjects go to a lady wrestlers reunion. So you get to see them all interacting instead of just talking to the camera. And they don't all like each other.

I almost never think this about a documentary, but with this one I kept thinking this would make a real good non-documentary. A period epic about the time period they're talking about. It's usually a bad idea to re-enact a documentary with actors, but here would be a way to see these great stories and this world they're talking about playing out around you like you're really there, instead of hearing it told as a story decades later.

It's a good movie though, and I think anybody would enjoy having a mom or grandma that can tell you stories like that. But since we don't, we have LIPSTICK AND DYNAMITE (original title: LIPSTICK AND DYNAMITE, PISS AND VINEGAR: THE FIRST LADIES OF WRESTLING).

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LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

Nobody told me the Brits knew how to make a crime picture. I mean I know the Limey is a limey and all but that one is American made on American soil. Here's one those Brits can be proud of in my opinion.

People probaly compare this to Pulp Fiction and what not and I do believe it's somewhere up there. It uses an even greater mastery of cinematismic languaging with maybe a little less substance as far as most people are concerned but then what the hell do those bitches know. Anyway it's a fun as hell movie about four Londonese dudes about 30 years old each who invest in a big card game. They come out in the red for $500,000 and have one week to pay it back if they don't want to start losing fingers. They owe the money to a guy named Harry the Hatchet and this motherfucker means business so they will stop at nothing to get the money they need. What follows is a complex game between these four kids, two other gangs, a house of pot dealers, and Harry the Hatchets horrific henchmen.

The henchmen are probaly my favorite characters in this picture. These guys are very authentic, ugly motherfuckers who look like they'd chew you through to the marrow if they needed a transplant. One of them Big Chris is cool because he's bad as hell, but he brings his little son with him on all his jobs. See what did I tell you in that Hard Boiled review? Big Chris and Little Chris are more proof for my Theory of Badass Juxtapositionship. But my favorite one in this movie is The Baptist, given that name for drowning motherfuckers and this dude is played by a famous bare knuckle boxer who looks exactly like Tor Johnson from the old horror pictures.

This guy who made this is named Guy Ritchie and he's what you call a first time director according to the DVD. But he's one of these slick ass young guys, techniquewise, like maybe he grew up in the same neighborhood as David Fincher, Run Lola Run and some of these motherfuckers. He's not a Poet like Peckinpah but he is a born cinematist, I guess more along the lines of what the magazines call a wonderkind or an infant terrible. What I mean is there is all kinds of slow motion, freeze fame, whooshing camera funky music whiz bang look at me mom type of shenanigans but in a way that seduces and intoxicates you instead of just pissing you off like Armageddon. It is fun and it is beautiful to look at and if I might add the photographic worksmanship is exquisite. You know how Payback is blue? Well this one is brown and there is alot of texture in the walls and man does it look sweet on a DVD. In my opinion.

So it's good characters and slick direction but what I really loved about this deal is the philosophy. You see I feel that this story very much represents the world of crime as I see it and I feel like kind of a schmuck laying it down right here because I wanted to save this for my memoirs but what the hell man you guys are my buds. You see in crime circles I was well known for my opinion that if you go down, you go down for a reason. And that reason is of course, The Universe.

You see, there are two sides to some things, the good and the evil, the yin and the yang, the salt and the pepper, fire and ice etc. And there are the cops and the robbers.

But do you think the Universe wants the cops to be the sole representatives of the good side? HELL NO! They're cops for christ sakes! Nobody wants them on their side especially a supreme power of eternal existence such as, for example, what I have labelled for these purposes The Universe.

Therefore and pursuantly, heretofore there are many fucked up things that happen to a criminally inclined individual such as myself and my colleagues whilst mid-crime. For example have you ever gone to rob a bank, your get away vehicle is a good car, you've had it for a long time but not too long, and you've never had a problem with it at all in the past, even took her in for a tuneup recently and everything checked out - but the second you got the boys in blue on your tail it starts sputtering or the transmission goes out or the god damned engine won't turn over?

That is the Universe throwing shit at you and that is what crime is all about and if you plan to make a career at a criminal you have to be prescient of that fact that it is not just you against the pigs, it is you against the pigs AND THE UNIVERSE. And in my opinion only once you admit that scientific philosophical fact to yourself are you ever going to be able to dodge the shit that She throws at you and make it through with relatively few scratches.

That reality is sort of what this picture is about because this is a relatively straightforward job that goes very fucking sour in a very fucking entertaining way in my opinion. I suppose that could describe many crime pictures, things always go wrong, but this one is more extreme and heightened and over the top and coincidental. This is a world of weird coincidences and mistaken identities and stupid mistakes that chain reaction and draw together various factions and set them upon each other and it gets very complicated and very funny and very bloody. It is like the old playing one side against the other business except it is not some con man or lone drifter doing this, it is Her. The Universe. (For these purposes.)

Maybe it's a good thing I was inside when this came out. It is nice to watch it on DVD cause to be honest I had to rewind it quite a few times and even put the subtitles on at one point because lets face it these English sure talk English funny. And there are a lot of characters to keep track of but it is worth it I recommend this picture thank you very much for your time signed your friend vern.

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LONE WOLF AND CUB #1: SWORD OF VENGEANCE

Way back when when I first compiled THE BADASS 100 there were alot of individuals recommending for me to watch the LONE WOLF AND CUB, aka the BABYCART series. I sort of vaguely knew what they were talking about. Something about a samurai and a baby. I've seen the boxes before and they got kind of ugly design with some black and white pictures. I felt like, you know, I'm sure it's good, I'll get it some time, probaly. The truth is I get alot of recommendations and I always want to follow them but you know how it is. There are so many movies out there. You never get to watch all of them.

I gotta confess that it was the SHOGUN ASSASSIN reference in KILL BILL V.2 that finally reminded me to watch these fuckers. I knew SHOGUN ASSASSIN was a good old american style assfucking of the first two pictures in the LONE WOLF and I decided to pick up the first one, known here as SWORD OF VENGEANCE.

And right away the first question I had was MAN, what the fuck was I waiting for? It's not what I imagined at all. This is not some cheesy martial arts type picture, it is real good filmmaking and epic storytelling and as so many of you knew before me it is absolutely classic grade-A Badass Cinema.

For all you ignorant fuckers out there let me explain what this is all about. It is the story of Ogami Itto, who was the shogunate's personal executioner. A motherfucker so amoral that in the opening scene he chops off the head of an adorable child. Just doin his job, man. Pimpin ain't easy. You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.

You know Ogami plays by the rules and everything but next thing you know his wife is killed and he gets framed for some dishonorable type shit and he's gonna be executed. So he decides it would be a good time to "live the life of a demon" by becoming a hired killer. And he gives his baby Daigoro a choice - take this toy ball, or take this sword. If you take the ball, I'll kill you and you'll go to heaven. If you take the sword, you'll come with me and we'll be hired killers together and who knows maybe we will have a babycart that has many cool weapons hidden inside it. Not to give anything away.

So then he wanders around with the adorable Daigoro in a babycart and he takes on jobs as an assassin and this asshole Yagyu keeps giving him guff. Ogami will get down to business with some other ronins or ninjas or somebody and without fail this old bastard Yagyu is out there whining about some stupid shit. But not doing the fighting himself.

My favorite scene is when Ogami is having a duel with a samurai. They are running straight at each other in the field and Yagyu is bragging about how Ogami is weighed down by the baby strapped to his back, but the other dude only has the sun on his shoulders (meaning that the sun is behind him and will get in Ogami's eyes). Well at the last moment Ogami ducks his head down, revealing that his baby Daigoro has a mirror attached to his head, which reflects the sun into the other guy's eyes. And then SHHKKKKK, suddenly the guy has no head. And then the blood sprays out, and then the body falls to the ground.

The actor who plays Ogami is kind of a latter-day Seagal-type fat dude, and his hair is unkempt. He is not a real friendly type of dude. He always looks like he's sleepwalking and half the time when people talk to him he seems like he's not even paying attention to them at all. And then he keeps pulling clever murders like that.

And he has a baby! What better illustration could there be of Vern's Theory of Badass Juxtaposition? Here is the baddest, shinobi–killingest motherfucker you've seen, who has a cute little baby with him at all times.


LONE WOLF AND CUB #2: BABYCART AT THE RIVER STYX

 

 

[some day I will finish this review and it will knock your damn socks off]

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THE LONGSHOTS

Limp Biscuit singer Fred Durst, who makes his directorial debut with THE LONGSHOTS, turns out to be a natural born director. I was surprised when I read somewhere that David Fincher was mentoring ol' soul patch, bringing him on the set of ZODIAC and showing him the ropes. I think Durst almost took over for Fincher on LORDS OF DOGTOWN before Catherine Hardwicke did. There were a bunch of false starts but now that he's finally made one it's clear that the man has some serious directational chops, it seems he was born to direct movies. Let me be very clear, this is what Fred Durst was put on the planet for. This much is certain now.

Now that I've said that I'm just gonna talk about what the plot is and stuff, things that Fred Durst already knows, so if he is reading this he can stop now.

Ice Cube plays Curtis Plummer, the un-employed brother of the loser deadbeat dad of a shy, unpopular high school girl named Jasmine Plummer (Keke Palmer). Jasmine's mom is worried about her so she pays Curtis five dollars an hour to hang out with Jasmine after school. Curtis makes no effort to make it fun, doesn't even bother to make her dinner the first time. She doesn't like him hanging around and tries to run away.

But then one day Curtis gets her to throw a football. Much to everyone's surprise she Okay, do you think Fred Durst has left yet? I hope so. Okay guys, I apologize for lying to you. Fred Durst is not a great director. Not that he's terrible or anything, but this is not a very good movie. But I think Fincher was on to something with this "teach Fred Durst how to direct" scheme. Movies take a long time to make, like about a year. And that's only the ones that get made, some directors spend years on movies that never even start filming. Fincher knows that more than anybody. That's why he knew that by tricking Fred Durst into thinking he was a movie director, the world would be spared his unique brand of backwards hat rap rock. The more time he's concentrating on setting up shots the less time he's jumping up and down screaming "YO! YO! YO!" while some assholes go wocka wocka wocka on their guitars. This is an important service to America's airwaves. I'm sure Fincher probaly did it for selfish reasons - no way he could've finished BENJAMIN BUTTON if he had to worry about a new Limp Biscuit song playing on the radio - but to my mind he is still a hero.

So anyway, she's good at football, her uncle convinces her to try out for the team, etc. The team is so bad that they sort of have to admit she's good and let her be the quarterback, even though they are afraid of cooties. She ends up inspiring the team into victory and they make it to the Pop Warner Super Bowl in Miami, Florida.

This is based on a real girl, really named Jasmine Plummer, who really did play football and lead her team to the Super Bowl. The rest is probaly made up. But the best part of the movie is Ice Cube as her uncle. Ice Cube has gotten alot of well-deserved shit for switching over to all these garbagey movies like ARE WE THERE YET? when he was once an iconic gangster rap pioneer and promising new actor. This doesn't exactly restore his respectable status, because he produced the movie and apparently didn't notice how weak the script was. But it is a great role for him and he does it well. He's a simple guy who only dreamed of playing football, but then was injured, so all he knew how to do was work at a factory. And then the factory closed down.

So now he's the apathetic guy who shows no interest in anything except the box of money he's saving to get the hell out of this town, who rarely speaks in more than a mumble. Once his niece is on the team he finally has something to be passionate about: yelling at the coach to put her in. Helping teach her to play sort of brings him back to life. And you will not be that surprised when out of the blue the coach has a heart attack and Uncle Curtis takes over as coach. If that does happen. I won't give it away. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

A s a fan of Ice Cube it's great to see him playing a different type of character. And Keke Palmer is very likable as Jasmine. The photography is nice. Also, the basic emotions of the story are hard not to fall for a little. It reminds me alot of watching GRIDIRON GANG. The Rock is charismatic as usual, the story tugs the heartstrings a little, and not a single moment does not feel like the most generic thing you ever saw a thousand times in your life. Both are based on true stories but come across like they could've been invented by the marketing team at Walt Disney Pictures.

I think you can take a story like this and make it work better than this if you can make it feel real. And Ice Cube does his damndest, but it's got pretty bad dialogue and lots of generic character types (the school bullies, the wacky comic relief dudes) that don't really earn your trust as viewers. I'm prepared to be moved by the meanest girl at school redeeming herself by apologizing to Jasmine, but when it just happens out of the blue with no build I'm not sure what to take out of that.

The worst aspect of the movie by far is the score, which is absolutely inexcusably horrible, pretty much the worst possible. By that I don't mean it's a guy sitting on a keyboard and blowing a kazoo, it's a very professional orchestral score that makes every moment seem phony by layering it on thick like a condescending car salesman. Listen up composer Teddy Castellucci: I don't need some prick who scored HOME ALONE 4 and WHITE CHICKS telling me what emotions I'm supposed to feel. The more you try to tell me how triumphant this is the less I believe you. If this entire score was removed and set on fire the movie would be alot better. It could use a much simpler or more soulful score, maybe some twangy guitar, or some more Ray Charles like the opening scene, something. But even no music at all would make the movie play way better than it does with this shit on here. Teddy Castellucci, you are a liar and a scoundrel. You have disgraced the legacy of N.W.A. and stained the city of Compton forever. Haven't you ever witnessed the strength of street knowledge? Clearly you haven't.

What a surprise, by the way, that the guy from Limp Biscuit would be terrible at using music in his movies. I gotta say man I am truly shocked by this development.

THE LONGSHOTS is a somewhat competent, somewhat likable, completely generic, fairly lazy football true story movie. Because there just aren't enough of those available. If you love mediocrity I would recommend you pick it up at your local video store, but they might not have it anyway because it's an exclusive to one particular chain. So fuck it, just see if any football movies are on cable tonight.

Confidential to David Fincher: Please launch Operation Kid Rock's Directorial Debut immediately.

12/2/08

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THE LONGEST YARD

Damn, I can't believe I forgot about this one. They were showing it on cable and it is a real fitting coincidence that they happen to show it when the super bowl deal is coming up this sunday. But hell what the hell do i know about what is going on in the world of football these days, that is why it is more exciting for me to root for this movie where Burt Reynolds has to lead a team of inmates in a game against the guards.

Remember when Burt Reynolds was cool? He was just this cocky motherfucker doesn't give a fuck. All he wants to do is get laid and be a smartass and back then you didn't expect a big star to be so open about it. He also had that mustache but in this one he shaves it off as soon as he goes to the joint.

The part with the mustache is pretty great though. We open on Burt asleep in a big mansion. This real hot gal is trying to get him to do her, but he's tired so he just pushes her off. Next thing you know she wants to break up, so he drives away in her car.

So there Burt's drivin along drinkin a beer when the cops try to pull him over for stealing the car. He kind of shrugs and then leads em on a big chase. When he gets away by jumping a drawbridge backwards, he just laughs, gets out of the car, smokes a cigarette and then dumps it in the ocean. When the pigs finally track im down at a bar, what he does is pick a fight with them which, you know, he ends up in the joint.

Turns out Burt is an ex pro football player disgraced for point shaving, blah blah blah, anyway ends up he's the quarterback and sort of the coach putting together a team of inmates against the screws who have a semi-pro team. What's cool about it is that all the inmates are able to come together, even whites and blacks, because they all want a chance to crash the shit out of these guards. I am not a big fan of sports movies but when they take place in prison I am all for it. And this is the perfect setting to show what football is really about, societalistically approved violence against prison guards.

Alot of the movie is getting the team together and training, learning all the dirty tricks, looking up the guards medical records so they can figure out which bones are ripe for breaking. The game seems impossible to win cause the guards are more experienced, but luckily the prisoners have far more resources at their disposal being that they are in prison, you can get just about anything in prison if you know the right people. So they even get nicer uniforms.

So you got the preparations for the game and then the big game, which has lots of split screens and a theme about Burt having to decide whether he can sell out his team again or go all the way. It's pretty enjoyable stuff.

This is not a perfect picture though, or one of these Poetic '70s pictures like Mr. Peckinpah did. Just about all of the acting besides Burt is pretty bad so it's harder to take all that seriously except as a light comedy. This is also kind of what I call a Stick It To the Man picture which in my opinion is not really a good thing. I mean yes, I am DEFINITELY in favor of sticking it to the man, but a Stick It To the Man picture is a picture where they try to manipulate the audience into shouting out "Stick it to the man!" but they don't really earn it. Like at the end, the leader of the Guardsmen football team, who has been on Burt's ass for the entire picture, conveniently turns against the warden and supports Burt. Same thing with a little turtley looking geek who is the warden's assistant. He is there when shady dealings go down and you can tell about a half an hour in advance that he is going to smile when the cons win the game.

These sticks to the man are not earned, they are contrived. We just don't buy it bud, sorry. You gotta make believable characters and situations and THEN when you stick it to the man, when we BELIEVE you are sticking it to the man FOR REAL, it will make us smile and maybe even give us shivers. Hell man I'm going to put it on the line and say I WILL CRY if you can do it for real. You hear that, a grown man offering to cry in exchange for 100% genuine sticking to the man. Attention hollywood the offer is on the table ladies and gentlemen thanks.

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THE LOOKOUT

They got a real unique advertising campaign for THE LOOKOUT, they are trying this new thing where you don't promote the movie at all, and nobody knows it even exists. So there is this mystery around it. I don't know why it hasn't blown up yet but so far this playing-hard-to-get approach does not seem to be capturing the public consciousness.

About the only thing I knew about THE LOOKOUT was the reason I wanted to see it: it is the directivational debut of screenwriter Scott Frank, who wrote many movies but most importantly OUT OF SIGHT. He also wrote GET SHORTY so it's easy to expect Elmore Leonard if you know this is a movie involving a bank heist. But the feel is very different, it's not really fun or jokey, it's actually a little sad. But it is a real good and tightly-written thriller.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the kid from whatever sitcom it was that he was on (not WEBSTER or MR. BELVEDEERE, this was in the '90s I believe), plays Chris Pratt. Somehow that is the perfect name for a popular high school kid who in the opening makes a big mistake that causes the deaths of two friends and the horrible injury of his girlfriend and himself. The movie takes place 4 years later when Chris is still in head injury rehabilitation trying to figure out how to live a normal life. Not only is he wracked with guilt but his brain is messed up, he can mostly cut it but sometimes screws up at simple tasks like remembering to take his car keys out of the car. And he has a tendency to blurt out thoughts that he should keep to himself, like telling his case worker Carla Gugino "I think about fucking you all the time." Whoops.

The thriller aspect of the movie comes in when he's at a bar trying to enjoy an O'Douls and "happens to" run into this guy Gary (Matthew Goode) who was 3 years ahead of him in high school, and this cute girl now known as Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher) who lovingly tells him a story about watching him play hockey in high school. Chris starts hanging out with Gary and his friends but doesn't realize the real reason they're interested in him: he's the night janitor at a small bank.

I suppose I should probaly specify - they don't just have alot of questions about what it's like to clean a bank at night. They want to rob it, is what I'm getting at. That's why they want to be his buddy.

I've read a few mixed reviews of this thing and I've seen mention of "plot holes," but I didn't see any. In my opinion this is pure Scott Frank you-wouldn't-want-to-be-hit-in-the-face-with-it-because-of-how-solid-it-is writing. I mean this movie is undeniably writerly. It has voiceover narration structuring alot of the story around Chris's struggles with a class assignment to list everything he does in a typical day. He has trouble with sequencing so his blind roommate (Jeff Daniels, BLOODWORK) shows him how it works by having him tell the story of Goldilocks and the 3 Bears backwards. And you can clearly see how Scott Frank built this screenplay the same way, starting at the end. There are no twists, only turns, but all the pieces just come together naturally and fit right into place. Things are discussed or happen that need to happen for the story but they always come out naturally. Organic, free range exposition.

But I think Scott Frank makes a good director too. It's not flashy but it's not one of those writer-turned-director joints that falls flat. Most impressive to me is that he put together a real good cast and got good performances out of them, with subtlety. This could've easily turned into a bunch of asshole actors showing off, and it didn't. The closest to over-the-top is Daniels, but it fits the character's personality. JGL (pronounced Jiggle) deserves the most credit because he doesn't do a single Oscar clip scenery chewing in the whole movie. He is a disabled protagonist who doesn't want to be seen as disabled, he's not some victim or hero or acting showcase. And the way his disability is written helps out. Alot of this movie really is about the struggle to get past his injury and his guilt, not to mention the loss of the charmed life that is no longer his destiny. Not to trash talk MEMENTO which I thought was a pretty good movie, but this head injury thing is not a gimmick like that, it seems more like a real problem that gets in the way of his goals. Anybody would be out of their depth dealing with these dangerous men with guns, but he has the added difficulties of his brain injury, like accidentally blurting out his plan when he has a gun pointed at him.

The red ribbon for second place best performance goes to Isla Fisher. She was the crazy nympho in that horrible "WEDDING CRASHERS" movie that everybody likes, and I believe she is married to Ali G. But in this movie she becomes the adorable high school sweetheart you never had. Her residual teenage worship of Chris Pratt seems so sincere that you havr faith in her character even when she is clearly betraying him. Also she's gorgeous and makes a habit of walking around with no pants on.

And I gotta give credit to Matthew Goode as Gary, because he makes him cold and scary without being too outwardly villainous. I looked him up and realized he was the preppy husband guy in MATCH POINT. Holy shit, even thinking of it now I can't square that as being the same guy. In this movie he's intense and American and looks alot like David Blaine.

And the other guys in the robbery crew are well cast too. There's a guy named Cork who has the face of a snowboarder and the arms of the Incredible Hulk. He seems like a real colorful character but a real guy, not a movie actor. And the rest of this paragraph is kind of a spoiler, this is more for people who have seen the movie. Didn't you like that character Bone? I love how he is so out of place with these other guys, he looks more like a movie version of a Euro-trash criminal, he is older than the other guys, he's like the depraved uncle who hangs out with the teenagers and gives them pot. But he just sits there with those sunglasses, never once smiling, barely moving, I don't remember if he even talked. Until the shit hit the fan and suddenly he switches on and starts shooting people. That guy was scary. Good job on that guy.

I should note, by the way, since I mentioned Carla Gugino, that she's only in that one scene. I thought it was cool though because I've really liked this gal since she played Karen Sisco in the TV show of the same name. And of course Karen Sisco is the same character Jennifer Lopez played in OUT OF SIGHT, which was written by Scott Frank. So it's appropriate. Maybe now Jennifer Lopez will star in a TV show called JANET, where she will play a model who gets a head injury and decides to become a counselor for other victims of head injuries. It will be a really good show and get great reviews but will get cancelled without really being given a chance to build an audience, and then it will never come out on DVD.

But before we get too bummed about the cancellation of JANET lets talk more about THE LOOKOUT. I like that there is some ambiguity in the script. It doesn't insist on explaining every damn thing. They even leave it open to interpretation whether these people really knew Chris in high school, since Gary's only reference point is that he dated Chris's sister, and she doesn't remember the name. Gary refers to this guy Bone as his uncle, but my guess is he's really a guy he met in the joint who pushed him toward bank robbery. But I like that they never say this, they give you enough numbers to make the equation but they don't tell you to start doing the math. It's just there if you're interested.

I saw the movie yesterday and I really liked it, but thinking about it today I think it might be better than I realized at the time. I just keep remembering all these scenes, haunting little moments that add to the tension or low key conversations that reveal character. Scott Frank is a writer but he knows it's not just about the words that come out of the people's mouths. He tells the story with images, even with facial expressions.

The only thing I really have against Scott Frank is that I have to refer to him by his full name every time, otherwise it sounds like I all the sudden talking about some dude named Frank. Way to make it a pain in the ass, Scott Frank. Fuck you. Otherwise, good work.

I'm not gonna lie, this is not a mainstream crowdpleaser explosive white knuckle thrill ride type of movie. It takes its time getting going and it is about character more than thrills. But it's a hell of a thriller, I really liked this movie alot. I hope it will catch on. Richard Roeper already called it a "masterpiece," so I guess they don't need any more ridiculous quotes to promote it with, but here's one just in case:

"Look! It's out of this world! Keep a lookout for THE LOOKOUT! THE LOOKOUT will knock you out! Look out, here comes THE LOOKOUT!, etc." --Vern

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LORD OF THE RINGS PART 1: the FELLOWSHIP OF A RING

This is the story of some magical midgets called the hobbits (sort of like the smurfs except caucasian instead of blue). What they do is, one of them inherits a powerful magic ring created by an evil individual from the past. If this took place in america in 2001, the hobbits would just go ahead and use the ring, and everybody would be all for it. It might not even make the headlines, it might be buried on page 11 like the story I read yesterday about how the Bush regime is already developing "small" nuclear weapons to use in the caves in Afghanistan.

But this is Hobbitland or whatever so they do the right thing, they take the weapon, they REFUSE to use it because they know it corrupts them, and they travel toward the Mountain of Doom, the only place it can be destroyed.

But it's not easy to travel, because cars have not been invented, or jetpacks. They just use a horse. Also, there are 9 invisible guys in cloaks and about seven to eight hundred goblin monsters trying to kill them.

Meanwhile Ian Mackellan plays the mentor wizard Merlin, sort of Ben Kenobi with a more tacky beard. This guy is pretty wise except he smokes alot of weed and that slows his mind down, just like all you potheads that read my sight. In one scene he is so high he decides to go to Dracula's castle for advice. Christopher Lee reprises his role as Dracula and he does pretty much what Dracula always does when you go to his house, except instead of seducing and biting Merlin he just does a magic kung fu fight with him (my favorite scene).

You nerds were right though. Hobbits and dragons and shit are back in style. The terrorists have already won. Can you imagine if you were that sap that went up on the space station for all those months? You come back and all the sudden there's no world trade center, nuclear bombs are considered okay, people like George W. Bush, everybody's watching wizard movies all day and on tv they're trying to shove this magic scooter down our throats as a new way to revolutionize walking. "No more cumbersome right foot left foot garbage - with the magic scooter all you gotta do is lean forward and you've walked all the way across the room! AMAZING!"

I mean has the world ever gone so far down the shitter in such a short period of time? Not counting when all the dinosaurs bit it? You'd step off that space ship and say, "How long was I gone again?" You're thinking maybe landing on the planet of the apes wouldn'ta been so bad.

But really, I had no problem with the dungeons and dragons in this movie because it was a well made picture. A real 3 hour epic that happens to be about magical midgets. You got elves (in this world, they are tall instead of short and they live in the woods instead of the North Pole), you got dwarves, you got trolls. You got swords and bow and arrows and fighting. You know, that kinda shit. Except pretty good. The visuals are pretty amazing, especially since they used regular sized actors to play the small sized characters. With the power of computery technology, they gave them little stubby arms and legs. And it's completely seamless. I don't know how the fuck these kiwis did it but Warwick Davis's name was nowhere on the credits.

The director is the overrated but still pretty fucking great Peter Jackson. Some of his fans will be disappointed because there's only one decapitation, and no puppets fucking each other. But he treats it very respectfully, doesn't hollywood it up at all (since he lives in New Zealand, at least a two hour drive from Hollywood according to my calculations), just throws in a couple of pot jokes for the old stoners that loved all this fantasy shit in the seventies. Alot of it is very dark and violent and creepy, in between pretty shots of waterfalls and horses walking around in the grass.

And of course this is a timeless story that happens to be extra relevant in this time when the ol' US of A here thinks it's okay to blow up, spy on, capture and torture everybody that stands between them and building an oil pipeline in Afghani- er, I mean is connected to terrorism. You know, even if their motives were pure, like the bearded dude in this movie who wants to use the ring to protect his people, you STILL don't fight terror with terror. Obviously using the ring will only make everything way, way worse. (Asshole.)

I mean if George W. went to this movie, which is doubtful since it's rated PG-13, he'd be shrinking down in his seat the whole time. I guess calling the new Star Wars missile shield thing Lord of the Rings is out of the question, they'll have to stick with the Matrix.

After the movie I was taking a piss between two fat guys in wizard robes, and one of em goes "I still thought the subtitles were awful. If you're gonna dumb it down for an audience that doesn't know Elvish, at LEAST get the optimum translation." And the other one goes, "I don't know, it didn't seem as bad this time."

(See, it just opened yesterday and this was already the second or third time they saw it.)

So I said, "What I want to know is how come this ring is so big that a huge guy can wear it over his armor, but also so small that little smurfs and goblins can wear it. I mean fuck man let's have some REALISM."

And they go, "Yeah, good point."

Anyway, it's a good picture. I hope they make a part two.

thanks new zealand

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LORD OF THE RINGS PART 2: THE TWO TOWERS

Well I got my wish, they made a part 2. When last we left Merlin, Frodo, Viggo, Sam, Dwarf, and Elf, they were all split up. Merlin fell down a hole and there was no giant talking bird to save him this time. Everybody was separated or something. Frodo and Sam were going to go throw the ring in the volcano. I can't remember what else.

Well part 2 picks up right in the middle of part 1, not where it left off. We find that when Merlin fell down that hole actually he did it on purpose to fight a demon in mid-air. It was awesome.

What this movie is about is they continue going to the volcano in three separate groups, and they never get there. But there are many wars. There are goblins that eat people's legs and each other's intestines. They ride on these monsters made out of computery animation. There are cameos by Dracula and Liv Tyler and the guy who did the voice for Chucky. As soon as you see him you go wait a minute, I think this guy MIGHT be evil. It's just a feeling I got, I can't explain it. You never shoulda trusted that guy just like you never shoulda gone to Dracula's castle in part 1.

Merlin survives the extreme demon jumping but he starts dressing in all white and at first it seems like he lost his memory. So maybe instead of trying to destroy the ring, this one will be about him trying to remember who he was. He goes around and he finds out that he has these magic powers and he thinks maybe he was in the CIA. But then he remembers who he is so the story stays on track.

Also the invisible guys are back, but they don't do as much. They're on giant flying bat monsters. At the end there is a huge war between Viggo, a couple other guys, and 10,000 wet goblins.

But what really makes this movie are two new characters. First of all there is Talking Tree. This is a giant guy who looks just like a tree only he has a face and a beard made out of moss, which most trees don't have, in my opinion. The two goofball hobbits, whatsisfuck and whatsisdick, almost get eaten by goblins. Then they spend the entire rest of the movie sitting in this talking tree. The best part of the movie is at the end, the trees get pissed off about the environment and attack Dracula's castle. Now why the fuck didn't the Lorax think of that? Anyway that's the best part because finally whasisfuck and whatsisdick get something to do: throw rocks.

The other character though you may remember from the hobbits cartoon show, his name is Golem and he also goes by his slave name, Smeagle. This guy is made out of computer animation and yet he is one of the best movie characters maybe I've ever seen. He "was once not too different from a hobbit" but now he's schizophrenic, half naked and emaciated, his eyes have turned giant, etc. He reminds us of Bilbo when he snapped at Merlin in part 1, but more than that he is a constant reminder of what Frodo could become if he gets too strung out on the ring. We know this because they both have giant, pale blue eyes.

Golem was the guy who had the ring before Bilbo and it drove him completely nuts. In this movie we first meet him stalking our boys, Frodo and Sammy, talking to himself about "the precious" which is what he calls the ring. He could easily be turned into a comic relief character but instead he's creepy and tragic. His first scene is almost hard to watch. He attacks the hobbits like a vicious cat, clawing at them, biting them and screaming. When they turn the tables on him and tie a rope around his neck he flops around like a fish and pathetically moans "it burns! it burns!"

They convince him to lead them to the evil volcano, and you don't know if he really plans to help them or as Sammy thinks, he's going to strangle them in their sleep. Frodo figures he has to trust him, because he noticed the blue eyes too and isn't naive about what they represent. As the movie goes on you really start to like this dude Golem and feel sorry for him, especially once you've seen him have a conversation with himself. There are a couple scenes like this and they are perfectly executed, changing expressions and camera angles to denote the two personalities.

I mean this character really is a great achievement. I will probaly go back just to see him again. I was sitting two seats over from Yoda and I kept looking over at him. He was jealous as hell. He kept shaking his head in disgust like this guy was terrible. But whenever the audience responded to a Golem scene, you would see a little tear on the corner of Yoda's eye. No I'm just kidding man I totally made that part up. Yoda is only a puppet and the puppet was not in the theater, as far as I saw. Actually I bet Yoda would admire Golem's work. They are colleagues in my opinion.

I really liked this picture for the same reasons I liked the first one, but it's alot more exciting. You know the characters a little better and they can get to their mission and you can care about what happens to them. Plus you get these two up and comers I just mentioned. Boy I sure hope Golem gets redeemed in part 3, but things are looking dicey.

Also Viggo Mortensen really moves into his own as the main sword guy. The guy is a real good actor and he has an amazing presence. I hope he keeps doing the smaller roles but it is good to see him steal what's left of the spotlight when Golem is offscreen. He is a stoic badass. You know it really takes something to pull off that guy with a sword shit, too. If you don't believe me just compare him or the elf guy to any of the 20 and 30 somethings dressed up like them at the movie theater. Somehow Viggo looks cool, but these guys having plastic swordfights do not. I wonder who I feel more sorry for, the guy walking around proudly displaying his inflatable battle axe, or the poor sap who had to braid his hair for him? I don't know.

The only thing that wasn't as good as the first one was the dwarf. He's not too bad or anything but he only gets used for comic relief. I kind of felt sorry for the dude. He was probaly pretty embarassed.

And again there is alot of noticeable parallels to our current political scene. Unfortunately if you consider what's about to go down in Iraq, that makes us americans the goblins in this scenario. Bush better hope the elves don't go help the Iraqis. Bet he wouldn't see THAT one coming. (because there are no elves.)

I would also like to commend Mr. Mortensen for appearing on tv wearing a "No more blood for oil" t-shirt. This is exactly the moment when the entertainment media is trying to turn him into the new Brad Pitt or somebody and instead he becomes a troublesome Sean Penn. Why must this adorable man bring up politics? We were gonna put him on the cover. I don't think Viggo picked that t-shirt for cynical reasons but it may help him in the long run, by giving him a "not Entertainment Tonight material" reputation that will keep him in interesting roles instead of empty star vehicles where he tries to defuse a bomb attached to Martin Lawrence during a tense motorcycle chase through the Los Angeles warehouse district.

And by the way if you want to see some nutballs on the internet, you gotta see these fuckers on usenet talking about "viggo and anti-americanism." Apparently america = war so if you are against war you are against america. This is why Jesus is often called "The Prince of Anti-Americanism."

Anyway, I liked part 2 and you KNOW there's gonna be a part 3. I can't wait.

Why don't they just have the giant bird throw the ring in the volcano, though?

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LORD OF WAR

Here's a great idea for a movie: a comedy about gun running. A movie that asks what kind of a soul-less, inhuman bastard gets rich supplying weapons to warlords and "freedom fighters" they damn well know are gonna use them to massacre innocent people. A movie that is not shy about pointing out the US government's participation in this horrible industry. But remember I said a comedy, not some depressing documentary or self righteous oscar bait picture. A dark satire with serious bite, so it gets to you, but you don't feel like you're drinking castor oil. It's more like Flinstones vitamins.

Great idea, but not a great movie. And maybe I'm losing my touch, but like THE BROTHERS GRIMM, this is one where I couldn't always put my finger on what exactly wasn't working. It's much more involving than BROTHERS GRIMM and doesn't feel as muddled or sloppy. But it was another one that didn't quite connect with me. It seemed like it should work, but it didn't.

The main problem, and I'm at least sure of this one, is that it's just not funny enough. There are some good lines, but most of them were in the trailer. One of them (when an ATF agent approaches Nic Cage and Cage says, "This isn't about the alcohol and the tobacco, is it?") isn't even funny in context because it happens at a sad part in the story. I've seen some people describe it as a drama, so maybe not everybody thinks it's supposed to be funny. But I mean come on. There is a scene where he tells the captain of a boat to go "slow... dead slow." And then there is a shot of the captain pulling a lever to set the speed on "DEAD SLOW." There's not any other jokes like that but that does happen in this movie. Did HOTEL RWANDA ever have a joke like that? No. Not in the theatrical cut at least. There was the part where his wife held up the shower nozzle like it was a weapon. But still. That was a serious movie. This is not.

The opening has Cage talking directly to the camera rattling off statistics saying that there is one gun for every 12 people in the world. And then he says, "The only question is: how do we arm the other eleven?"

This is followed by a great opening credits sequence I would call Willy Wonka and the Bullet Factory. You follow the journey of one bullet from the time it's made to the time it's accidentally fired into the head of an innocent. This opening perfectly captures what I wish the whole movie was like, and what I bet they were going for: witty, cynical, gimmicky, and then forcing you to think about things you might not otherwise want to. Like rubbing a dog's nose in his shit, except entertaining and odor free. I guess not that much like rubbing a dog's nose in shit, that really doesn't sound like a movie I want to go to. But you know what I mean.

Towards the end the movie turns really sad and even darker, and I'm not against that. I don't need non-stop laughs. I'm a grown man, I can take a shift in tone. But I do think the movie is trying to be funny when it starts out and therefore I think it is fair to ask for some bigger laughs. Don't tell me international arms dealing can't be funny. DR. STRANGELOVE is about as funny as they come and you can't get any more dark than the end of the world.

Although these are fictional characters, it's done like sort of a biopic showing how Nicolas Cage and his brother (Jared Leto, guy who bad stuff happens to in various hip movies) go from poor Ukrainian restaraunt workers to megarich illegal weapons moguls. I'm not sure they chose the best way to tell the story though. It is narrated by Cage pretty much from beginning to end. This gets some good lines of description in but I think it's always a mistake to have this much narrating in a movie. I want to watch the shit play out, not hear somebody describe it.

Also, this might've been on purpose, but I didn't understand why they always look the same age and wear modern clothes. At the beginning you don't believe they're young, poor or Ukrainian. If they didn't tell you it was the '80s and mention Reagan and the Cold War and shit, you would think it was modern day. And although they live in New York and it all takes place before 9-11, I'm pretty sure you never see the World Trade Center. I only think that's weird because they don't shy away from anything else. They even have a joke about Americans selling weapons to Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets. I think without even saying anything, just having a historically accurate skyline would make the movie's point even stronger.

Bridget Moynihan plays Cage's supermodel wife. I don't really have much to say about that part of the movie, except that she looks alot like Famke Jansenn. Which is kind of amazing, that there would be two women who look like that. Also I was glad that when she finds out his secret at the end, he doesn't make a big speech that makes it all better. You see that, romantic comedies? You could learn something from this movie.

One thing that's gotta be tough in this type of movie, they gotta decide whether to make up fake country names or not. Either way it's gonna be kind of weird. Either you gotta accept that the events are going on in East Fakeistan, or that Nicolas Cage (or Forrest Gump or whoever) palled around with actual historical figures. They sort of do both here: the countries are real but there's a fictional dictator of Liberia who is one of Cage's regular customers. His entourage includes a guy with a goldplated machine gun and two girls in sequined cowgirl outfits. Silly, but the character is still scary. They do a good job of capturing the craziness of this world. They don't pretend that somebody who's evil can't also be funny and colorful.

I didn't hate this movie. And I really wanted to like it. I tried to like it. But I didn't entirely succeed. Honestly, it is kind of boring. You wouldn't think it would be possible for a movie to contain this many weapons and yet be this slow. I really liked what it was trying to do. I liked what it was saying. There were some good lines, some clever sequences. The guy behind me kept saying "DAMN!" at various parts so there is definitely some moments.

But I guess what it comes down to is, Flinstones vitamins aren't actually that good. They may contain important vitamins and minerals to help you grow, but just because they're shaped like Fred and Barney doesn't make them fun. It doesn' make them candy. They're still vitamins. They're kind of bland. Come to think of it, The Flinstones isn't even fucking funny. The guy gets fired every week, gets hit on the head and loses his memory, he calls it "Hollyrock" instead of Hollywood. That's not fucking funny. That was the mistake with this whole undertaking, The Flinstones isn't funny enough and neither is LORD OF WAR. They needed to work on this one some more.

I will give them credit for trying though. I give them a 1 for effort.

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LORDS OF THE STREET

Take a look at that cover there. If you know me then you know I had to watch that movie.

I'm not stupid. I knew it would be, uh... problematic. "Probaly unwatchable" is I believe how I pre-described it to friends. But I figured as long as it stars the team of DMX and Kris Kristofferson I'm gonna get something out of it.

True, DMX has failed to deliver on the promise I thought I saw in him when I first saw BELLY. He seems to have pretty much lost his mind (up in here, up in here) and is not above making cameos in unwatchable DTV garbage in order to pay the legal bills for his poor driving, impersonating of federal officers and lack of dog feeding. So DMX alone is not a selling point.

But teamed with Kris Kristofferson? Blade's mentor? FIRE DOWN BELOW's villain? Mohammed Ali's white cohort in the TV movie FREEDOM ROAD? Guy who should play me in a movie if Nick Nolte is not available? Could the creators of the albums 'The Silver Tongued Devil and I' and 'It's Dark And Hell Is Hot' really be standing side by side, weilding their guns in a fortress of flames and sparks?

That is a hell of an odd couple there. Those two names above the title sold me. They didn't even need to bother with that terrible photoshopping, they already had me.

But badly photoshopped covers are promises, and like politicians, DTV movies never keep their promises. If the two bodies who had DMX and Kris Kristofferson's heads attached to them on this cover ever passed each other in the hallway outside the photography studio then that's more of a relationship than X and Kristofferson have in the movie. They are not a team, not in any scenes together, I don't think they even know each other exist. The actual main character of the movie is Detective Travis Roundtree (Ameer Baraka, not pictured). DMX doesn't show up until 23 minutes into the movie and it's unlikely he shot for even a full weekend. He mostly just quotes the Bible menacingly and plays pool in one part.

The good news is that Kristofferson really is in the movie. It opens with him and Baraka in a car hauling ass to a crime scene where a guy is about to blow himself up. Kristofferson gruffly rants about Willie Nelson and how he's better than "Tu-Pack." He brings up Willie Nelson throughout the movie and also declares Ray Charles's "Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music" one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

His character is supposed to be obsessive compulsive, he says due to the violence he's seen on the job and in Vietnam. So he complains about birdshit on picnic tables and uses hand sanitizer alot.

Also he fucks his wife alot, always offscreen through ADR. So for example there will be a shot of the outside of his house and the actress playing his wife makes sex sounds, then it cuts to him in the bathroom with no shirt on.

Now would be a good time to mention that this movie is strictly amateur hour. The opening scene takes place in the day, but when the cut to the exploding car it turns to night. The police work makes no sense - they just go around shooting people and leaving the bodies on the ground with no consequences. There are alot of conversations taking place in cars with greenscreened backgrounds. All of the supporting actors seem like they've never acted before. The script is made entirely from post-consumer recycled cliches, so those Kristofferson character quirks are the closest thing to imagination in the movie. Take a guess what the drug lord villain is named:

a) Salazar

b) Santiago

c) Sanchez

(not that it matters, but the answer is b)

For a few minutes I was mildly amused by Kristofferson complaining but not doing anything while his partner Goes Too Far and puts a gun in a guy's mouth To Get Him To Talk. Kristofferson just acts like his partner torturing people is an annoying habit like snapping his gum or something. But you can only squeeze so much juice out of these cliches by having a gruff old man react to them.

On the positive side it looks like it was really filmed in New Orleans and although it has the filmatic sophistication of DOLEMITE deleted scenes it at least doesn't look like all the other DTV shit. I have the feeling the movie would have Avid farts and digital shit all over the place if these filmatists knew how to do that stuff, but luckily they don't. There's a CGI bullet and some fake digital fire but with the raw, dirty look of the photography and the clumsy crudeness of the thing it mostly looks like it could've been shot in the '80s. And alot of the dudes playing cops and convicts seem like tough guys the director (credited as Mr. V) must've known from his neighborhood instead of your usual Hollywood phonies. So at the beginning it has a certain straightforward integrity to it.

But not for long. A story and characters this generic might be acceptable to string together action sequences, but when there's not much action you got a problem. When Kristofferson isn't talking the movie is boring as shit.

DMX's character is some kind of psychotic hitman who wants revenge on Santiago for the death of his sister. While the hero, Roundtree, is having his climactic showdown with the villain all the sudden DMX shows up and fires a bullet into a barrel, which catches Santiago on fire that appears to be digitally enhanced and then erupts into almost a fireworks show. Then DMX gets on his motorcycle and drives away and nobody seems to wonder who he is or think there was anything unusual about what just happened. To be fair, I'm sure all kinds of crazy shit happens in post-Katrina New Orleans, maybe this sort of thing is not that surprising.

But the girlfriend of the villain, who is now the girlfriend of the hero, says that "It's over," and I guarantee you'll be as relieved as she is.

9/19/08