*after I made that joke about a character being named Patrick Henry, I found out that Jon Voight's character actually is named "Patrick Henry Gates." I guess I missed it on account of its subtlety.

NAVY SEALS vs. U.S. SEALS II

Man, Michael Biehn and the other guys on his team in NAVY SEALS really like to party and be outrageous. Especially Charlie Sheen, have you seen how out of control that guy is? On the way to Dennis Haysbert's wedding he jumps out of a moving Jeep and over the side of a bridge just for laughs. You know how those SEALs boys are. You don't even have to TELL them to jump off a bridge, they just do it for no reason. And their nice wedding clothes get all fucked up, but they don't care because they're Navy SEALs.

That's what it's all about.

I think this movie was inspired by TOP GUN. It's one part action movie, two parts lifestyle magazine. It wants to show that Navy SEALs are elite warriors and heroes, but mostly it wants to show what a fun time they have just hanging out with their bros when they're stateside. Just some men, going around together, being men. Hoo rah, best buds for life. Dennis Haysbert is the only one in a serious relationship, he's about to marry S. Epatha Merkerson, but as she's coming down the aisle their SEAL pagers beep and they all leave. Sorry Toots, maybe next time.

So they go on a mission overseas, there's some shooting and handsignals and what not, but as soon as they get back they go to city hall and make the marriage official. Just kidding, they all go to the golf course together and drive the carts around real crazy and say WHOOOOOOOO!!!!!! SEALs will be SEALs and all that. At least they do allow S. Epatha to be the only woman in attendance, and she doesn't say anything about how the wedding was ruined or anything like that, she just smiles and watches their crazy SEAL golf. It's actually pretty surprising how long this scene about golf course hooliganism goes on, and it leads directly into some more Sheen shenanigans. It turns out that he parked his convertible on the green, so it got towed, so he chases after the impound truck on a bicycle, climbs on and liberates his vehicle on the highway.

It should be mentioned that Sheen's character is a real prick, I mean who the fuck parks their car on a golf course? He's like one of those assholes who's real paranoid about his car getting scratched so he parks it diagonally between two spaces. Oh boo hoo, must be such a hard life having to go to such lengths to protect your car that costs more than my organs are worth. Fuck you.

But if that's not enough Sheen's character is also a total racist, he talks about "ragheads" and "Japs" but it's supposed to be part of his roguish charm, just real adorable, like when he has Michael Biehn paged so he can steal his dinner date, drive her to some makeout spot and tell her to have sex with him. He smiles when he says it though so it's not bad, it's cute.

Meanwhile there's probaly something going on overseas with some sort of Egyptian terrorist who has some plan or something. I don't know, it was last night that I watched it so there's no way I'm gonna remember what that was all about. But they wanted this guy real bad I bet so there were gunfights and etc. Haysbert is older, black, and engaged to be married so I will not give away whether he dies tragically or whether he dies heroically. This is a no spoiler review.

Biehn is pretty much the main character, with Sheen in a close second but hogging the limelight on the cover because he's more famous. Bill Paxton is also on the team and has a cool mustache but unfortunately doesn't get much to do in the movie aside from a couple decent Hudson-esque moments.

I never had much of an interest in a Charlie Sheen SEAL movie, but when I realized co-writer Chuck Pfarrer did DARKMAN and HARD TARGET and that he was a Navy SEAL himself it seemed worth checking out. Unfortunately this one doesn't deliver the sweet action movie honey the way those other two do, but it's more realistic if you're into that. For what it's worth the operations seem pretty real, lots of firepower and battlefield chaos, but not disorienting like movies they make in the 2000s. I didn't really give too much of a shit about the story, but the action is above-competently directed by Lewis Teague of CUJO fame.


U.S. SEALS might be a ripoff of NAVY SEALS. I haven't seen it and my video store doesn't have it. But they do have U.S. SEALS II: THE ULTIMATE FORCE, unrelated sequel by Isaac Florentine who in case you missed it is for my money the best director in DTV. This is a Nu Image movie, and even the very best of their catalog like this is gonna be a different kind of cheesy than a studio action movie like NAVY SEALS. The budget is much lower, the cast less experienced, the action not based in reality. But I enjoyed it way more.

While Florentine's SPECIAL FORCES was a cartoonified version of what it must be like to go on special ops missions, U.S. SEALS II doesn't even pretend to be based in military reality. It's not a war movie but a martial arts picture in the post-DIE HARD vein. A psychotic ex-SEAL kidnaps a hot nuclear scientist (with glasses), brings her to an island and threatens to launch his two Russian stealth missiles if the army doesn't pay him a billion dollars. (Come to think of it I'm not sure why he needed to kidnap the scientist.) Russian scientists abandoned the island due to methane leaks, so nobody can use guns or they'll all blow up. So this should be good.

The elite U.S. SEALS II team going in to save the day consists of another ex-SEAL out for revenge because the bad guy caused his sensei to commit seipukku, the daughter of said sensei, a convict, a biker, a contract killer and an armyman (Marshall Teague, the grizzled star of SPECIAL FORCES) who gets to go because he has a powerful air gun that can blow holes in people without blowing up the island. (Nobody ever asks why nobody else gets one of those. Maybe it was made in a limited edition of 1.)

So if you're expecting lots of slogging around in scuba gear at night forget it, this is more of a proudly outlandish type of action movie. There's lots of surprising guards from behind, climbing through vents, trying to get within 25' of the bad guy so they can air-shoot him. Most of the good guys die, but not before at least briefly spinning around some kind of sword, staff or chain weapon. The villain has an asskicking girlfriend played by the stunt double for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show, not movie). When she duels the good guys' Japanese swordswoman they get so into it they both slice off chunks of each other's hair. And I guess this is a pretty big spoiler but in my opinion any movie where the villain is bisected lengthwise is automatically better than most DTV. Now there's a scenario where you don't have to check to make sure he's dead. But maybe they should've had a shot of them just staring at the mess they made. I doubt even a U.S. SEAL II has seen that too many times before.

This one's from 2001, in between BRIDGE OF DRAGONS and SPECIAL FORCES, and has some of the same qualities I enjoyed in both of those. Once again the characters move faster than wind, so every time they turn their heads there's a whoosh sound effect. There's also a laughably corny ending to rival even SPECIAL FORCES: as they leave they remember all the brave soldiers who died along the way through nostalgic slo-mo footage from happier times earlier in the movie. The montage includes a guy who died so early I forgot about him and also the guy who turned on them for money and had to get a sword through the brain or he would've killed them. So this is a very Christ-like montage of forgiveness.

The real question is not whether it's better than NAVY SEALS, but whether it's better than SPECIAL FORCES. Both have the Marshall Teague factor and great action. The advantage of SPECIAL FORCES is Scott Adkins, who has more of a movie star presence than anybody in U.S.S.II and definitely performs the most impressive martial arts sequences of the two movies. But I gotta say overall I liked this one better. The story is more fun and the action is more consistent. It doesn't get bogged down in repetitive gun battles. You know my prejudice against gun action - I prefer fists and blades, and so does this island.

Bottom line: if you like cheesy action movies you could watch NAVY SEALS. If you like DTV you must watch U.S. SEALS II.

3/5/09

NICK FURY: AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D.

Not too long ago it was in the nerd-news that Samuel L. Jackson had signed on to play the character "Nick Fury" in as many as nine Marvel Comics movies. Some people said, "Well, that's not surprising. Samuel L. Jackson will sign onto anything!" But that's not really fair, they were probaly just actors who were bitter because they didn't get the roles in THE SPIRIT, CLEANER, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, S.W.A.T., SOUL MEN, JUMPER, HOME OF THE BRAVE, FREEDOMLAND, FARCE OF THE PENGUINS, BASIC, CHANGING LANES, SPHERE, LOADED WEAPON 1, etc.

Where does this Nick Fury come from? Probaly some comic book, but in my opinion mainly from this TV movie starring David Hasselhoff. I actually have wanted to see this for years because it was written by David Goyer in the same year he did BLADE, but they rarely showed it on TV. One time I happened to catch part of it on cable so I checked to see when it would air again - never, it turned out. That was the one and only scheduled airing. But that was before Fury Fever swept the nation, so now it's on DVD.

This is very clearly made for TV. The sets (lots of high tech headquarters and labs) look cheesy, the female leads are from soap operas, the CGI vehicles look like models from ROBOTJOX, and Nick Fury asks his team to go "kick some butt" which might be appropriate language if he was playing a Presbyterian pastor turned soccer coach, but not as much for a seen-it-all military badass. Still, I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy this more than some of the more lush comic book productions including but not limited to DAREDEVIL, GHOST RIDER, FANTASTIC FOUR and SAMUEL L. JACKSON'S THE SPIRIT. Maybe that's partly because there's no capes or masks, this is more like an action movie.

Fury is a grizzled, eye-patched, cigar-chewing ex-government agent first seen digging in a mine with a sign on the door that says "you better have a DAMN good reason for knocking." A wet-behind-the-ears agent from S.H.I.E.L.D. (Society for Hurrying Injury of Eyes, Limbs and Dicks) decides that a damn good reason is that the evil Nazi Baron who poked out Fury's eye has been resurrected and Fury must return to duty to stop this asshole and his hot daughter from poisoning all of Manhattan.

The script is tight and delivers all the comic book shit I as a non-comic-book aligned viewer demand. It's classic Goyer, full of funny tough guy dialogue, high tech gadgets and gimmicky tricks. There are robot doubles, hologram walls, poison lipstick - all set ups for Fury to show off his Plisskenesque attitude. When the SHIELD director is chewing him out Fury pulls out a gun and starts shooting - turns out there's a duplicate of the director right behind him. Fury made the 50/50 guess which one was a robot. It's clear he guessed right when a hologram message projects from out of the mouth and especially when the android falls apart and catches on fire.

When the femme fatale poisons him and her blood is the only hope for an antidote, Fury says, "I'll get that vampire's blood if I have to suck it out of her neck myself." He goes on a mission with a 103 fever and is happy when he gets locked in a meat locker. He has no trouble escaping - there are explosives hidden in his fake eye. This guy can handle anything, and he doesn't even need a talking car or a boogie board.

I've talked about this before, that it's too bad we can't give actors a fair shot after they became famous for a silly TV show. Every once in a while a Will Smith or a George Clooney pulls it off, but how is David Hasselhoff ever gonna live down KNIGHT RIDER and BAYWATCH? He was too successful at those. He will always be Michael Knight and Mitch Baywatch and singing in Germany. He can't escape it. So playing a comic book tough guy makes us laugh. But it's too bad because he's pretty good in the role and I don't think we'd laugh if we'd never seen him before. He knows the proper procedure for punctuating his lines with cigar removal or replacement, and he's got the cockiness down.

At the end it becomes obvious that this was a pilot for a series that never happened. That might've been fun, but I doubt Goyer would've written all the episodes, and in the last scene Fury puts his cigar away and says he's been thinking about quitting, which is/was/would've been a bad sign.

Anyway, if they can make a TV movie starring David Hasselhoff as this character this much fun they better not fuck up the big budget one.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

Well, Michael Bay is going down the list of everything he can do to ruin the quality of my life. Destroy the language of action cinema - check. Produce a horrible remake of one of my all time favorite movies – check. Make one of the most moronic event movies ever imagined and convince most of America that's the best you can expect from a "summer popcorn movie" - check. He also personally re-elected Bush, in my opinion, and invited all the yelling party kids to hang out outside my apartment every night after the bars close. So he's pretty much set everything on fire already but just to add insult to injury he's circling back to pee on my rose garden by having his rat fucking, no-account production company Platinum Dunes "relaunch" both Jason AND Freddy. And maybe I'm in a small faction here but I was patiently awaiting the JASON VS. FREDDY 2 they've been trying to get off the ground for a while and was not aware that those two troublemakers had been sent back to the docks yet.

So as much as I believe in forgiveness and second chances, I'm pretty sure I will hate this soul-less cokehead asswipe for all his days, even if he prevents world war 3 (unlikely) or gives all his Lamborghinis to charity (way more unlikely). But on the positive side he has so far failed to erase the existence of the movies he is working hard to destroy the legacy of. So to celebrate the silver lining on this toxic cloud I think I'm gonna go back and watch and review all the original NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies. Take that, Michael Bay. Game, set and match, motherfucker.

When people think of ELM STREET they usually think of wisecracking Freddy, making puns and calling women bitches. (Not only is he a child killer, he's disrespectful to women.) You think of all those teens who have one hobby or fear and then they fall asleep and have an elaborate dream where that hobby or fear turns into their ironic death. So if they're into comic books they will be killed by Super Freddy, if they're afraid of bugs they'll be turned into a roach and stuck in a roach motel. If Freddy haunted Michael Bay I guess he'd dream about driving around in his Lamborghini getting a blowjob but all the sudden the hooker turns into Freddy. Freddy sucks Michael Bay (played by Peter Horton) in through his mouth and shits out an animated film loop with Michael Bay's head on it. The film screams "Noooo!" in a high–pitched voice as Freddy puts it into an old fashioned movieola with red and green stripes painted on it. Then he starts chopping the shit out of the film with his finger-knives and makes some quip about quick cuts making a scene more exciting.

Well that's how corny it got in the sequels but people tend to forget that the original was a different animal. Freddy actually doesn't talk much in this one and in fact doesn't have a huge amount of screen time. The kids are scared of him and hear his fingers scraping against metal, but he doesn't actually show up that many times, so when he does it's a big deal.

And the dreams don't get too elaborate or gimmicky. Maybe they could've spent more time to add realistic dream-weirdness like you go through the door of your bedroom and all the sudden you're at school or something like that. But I'm glad they didn't go too far. I'm sure in the remake all the dreams will be fancy computerized wonderlands where the walls melt and stretch and faces grow off of things and all kinds of "dreamlike" show offy shit that never happened in a dream you or I ever had. Here there is some pretty true-to-life dream imagery like for no reason there's a sheep in a boiler room, or the stairs turn to goo as you try to run up them (I've definitely had that one). But other than the boiler room where Freddy was killed the location of the dreams is always the place where the people are having the dream, like their house or their school. Not some fancy abandoned gothic church or some shit. Just real dream shit.

As a horror fan I've seen this movie about a billion times since the '80s. I don't think it's a masterpiece like TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, but it's a clever and well done movie and I do think it holds up. If you want to really understand why it caught on so big you sort of have to compare it to the slasher movies that came before it. When A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET came out there had already been four FRIDAY THE 13THs (three with Jason), three HALLOWEENS (two with Michael Meyers), there had been THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, BLACK CHRISTMAS, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, THE BURNING, SLEEPAWAY CAMP, THE PROWLER. So we were used to slasher movies and especially the faceless, voiceless killers coming after people with knives and power tools. Even in Craven's own movies like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and the more outlandish THE HILLS HAVE EYES it was brutal reality that we were fearing - having to deal with a sudden, savage attack from some crazy fucker or fuckers.

So Craven's concept was devious. Here is another killer coming after young people but this time he's only in dreams. With the other slashers your goal is to escape, to get out of the house or the desert or find help. Those options aren't available on Elm Street. The place you have to get away from is dreams, and the body needs sleep. And nobody's gonna help Nancy because the adults don't believe her and her boyfriend's parents take his phone off the hook and her mom put bars on her windows so she can't climb out.

And of course Freddy can do things that even Jason can't do, because he's not confined by the rules of reality. He can appear where he wants to, he can stretch his arms out ten feet, he can stick his tongue out of the receiver of your phone. He lives in nightmares so pretty much by definition his job is the same as what I think Wes Craven would say is the horror movie's job: to tap into your deepest subconscious fears. He's the fuckin boogey man.

People throw the same "bad acting" criticism at this movie that they do all these types of movies, but I don't think it's that bad. Admittedly Ronee Blakeley as Nancy's mom has a pretty bad line-reading in the last scene. But otherwise the cast is pretty solid. You got John ENTER THE DRAGON Saxon as Nancy's dad, also the police chief who's on the case. You couldn't do much better. He's a dad you want in your corner and also one you don't want pissed off at you. The co-lead is Johnny Depp in his first movie role, and he's not very good but as luck would have it he turned out to be easily one of the best actors of his generation, so to watch him when he was just starting out is a novelty now and any bad acting is no longer a problem. And then the lead, Heather Langenkamp as Nancy does a great job. She's pretty but not a babe, she seems like a real girl. I think she's more relatable than a good percentage of the slasher movie protagonists because she's a little troubled - her mom sends her for medical testing, she's on prescription drugs, her boyfriend's parents think she's trouble, and she can't sleep so she starts to get legitimately a little crazy. But it's not her fault.

ELM STREET is not as much of a college professor's essay as LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES were. It follows the same pattern of suburban people getting attacked, then deciding to fight back and setting up some boobie traps. But this time it abandons the subtext that fighting back destroys your humanity. Because who can say what the ethics are of killing a supernatural murderer who haunts your dreams? Sure, she pulled him out of her dream into reality, but does it still count as taking a life? The guy is already dead.

But the movie does have a little bit of a theme to it, this "sins of the fathers" sort of deal. Freddy in a way is a monster created by the Elm Street parents. He was a killer who was let go because of some legal loophole, so they turned vigilante and burned him alive. I mean you can't get too mad at them, but anytime a mob burns a human being alive and then tries to go on with life as if nothing ever happened, that's a pretty big skeleton in the closet. And now the children are suffering from their dirty little secret. Nancy's mom is the one who seems to admit that maybe they made some mistakes and the kids are paying for it. Even though the story is from the kids' point of view there is part of it that's about a parent's fear of not being able to protect their kids. The system couldn't stop Freddy, so they tried to, and now reality can't even stop Freddy, and they can't go into their kids' dreams to protect them.

So that's what's smart about this movie. It combines slasher movie conceits (horny teenagers, killer with mythic backstory and iconic look, one-by-one gimmicky deaths) with psychological horror. You still get the instinct for survival you get from other slasher movies, but combined with some more abstract primal fears. And when it comes down to it some of those deaths are just brutal. In sequels the gimmicks and special effects they came up with were clever, but jokey. They were cute. This movie is not cute, especially in that fucked up scene where Tina is stabbed by her invisible stalker, slammed against the wall and dragged around on the ceiling, trailing blood. I mean, shit.

I never thought of it like this before, but in a way Freddy is just like Rambo. Two sicko icons from serious-minded '80s classics that somehow turned into children's toys through a series of increasingly cartoonish sequels that were stupid fun in their own way but missed the point of where they came from. So maybe it's hard in your mind to separate the roots from the tree that grew out of it, but give it a shot. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is a good one.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE

Technically Freddy already got his revenge in part 1 by going after the children of the people who burned him alive. In this one he's just messing with a new kid who moves into the same house. It really is not revenge when you do it to a stranger who never did anything to you before and is not related to anyone who did anything to you before. Not to be pedantic but, come on dude, titles are important. Make 'em count.

I always thought FREDDY'S REVENGE was the worst of the ELM STREET pictures, a pretty common view. They ended up figuring out the sequel formula in part 3 and they stuck with that for a while so part 2 is now kind of the odd man out when you look back at it.

But watching it again now I realize that's a good thing. Freddy had not yet become a comedian, so although he's probaly on screen a little more than in part 1 he's still pretty scary and mysterious. At the end of part 1 Nancy had dis-believed him out of existence (at least before the shock-ending - we never really know what happened with that) so now his way to come back is through this kid who lives in Nancy's house (although it sure doesn't look like the same house) and found her diary (that we never saw her writing in before).

The different twist is that instead of attacking this kid Jesse in his dreams and hurting him for real Jesse has dreams about Freddy attacking other people, then all the sudden realizes that it's him wearing the glove. Watching it this time I realize this is actually a really clever idea for the sequel because it makes it a different type of psychological horror - the fear of what you could do to others instead of the fear of what others could do to you. He's afraid that he is murdering people without realizing it. And it's playing off of his deep felt hatred of people like his asshole gym teacher. Alot of people have some violent anger in them at that age, that's why you get all these school shootings. So I think it's a good spin on the concept of the original.

Another idea they use that's not in the other movies is that Freddy sort of haunts the place by making everything hot, like his boiler room or like him when he was on fire. The house is constantly too hot, things melt, things catch on fire. Unfortunately this climaxes at a pool party so the flame imagery gets pretty silly - the pool boils, some hot dogs catch on fire, 25-30 year olds playing high school kids run around screaming. Instead of just bad dreams there are weird things that happen in reality, like one of their pet birds kills the other one, then it gets out and flies around angrily until it explodes into flames.

There's some really surreal imagery, especially when Jesse's girlfriend Lisa goes to Freddy's boiler room. I can't believe I don't remember this because it's probaly the coolest thing in the movie, but she gets confronted by two dobermans with some sort of human (possibly baby) faces. Creepy as shit. And they don't attack her, they just growl like tigers. There's also a monstrous rat that gets eaten by a monstrous cat. She has a cut on her leg that's suddenly infested with ants, and then it isn't. I like the constant changes like this - first Jesse is watching Freddy doing something, then all the sudden it's him doing it himself. That's like my dreams because dreams are stream-of-consciousness, they don't have continuity to them. They don't make sense.

The Freddy effects are excellent. I always liked the part where he peels the top of his head off to reveal his brain. Very realistic assuming he doesn't have a skull. I bet he doesn't. It would be just like Freddy to be going around without a skull. There's another even better sequence, most likely inspired by AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON's transformation, where Freddy tears out from inside Jesse. First the blades of his glove burst out of the fingertips, then his eye can be seen in Jesse's throat, and then he just sheds Jesse's body like a snake shedding his skin. Pretty disgusting. Using this trick he ends up coming into reality.

And this is one of the areas where they kind of blew it. Robert Englund says that bringing him into reality goes against the rules of the first movie, which threw me off since in the first movie he was also brought into reality at the end. I guess only now do I realize that maybe that whole section of part 1 up until the shock ending is supposed to also be a dream, even though you don't realize it at the time. Which would mean the same for JASON VS. FREDDY. Man, this is getting confusing. Anyway I don't have a problem with bringing him into reality, just don't bring him into reality at a pool party. That's kind of dumb. I mean it's kind of funny to see everybody screaming and Freddy flying out of the pool like he's wearing a jet pack. And there's a pretty hilarious line where a guy tries to play it cool and talk Freddy down, saying very softly, "Hey, what is it you want? I'm here to help you." That doesn't work.

I think alot of what doesn't work in the movie is the stuff like the pool party where they're trying to be a typical '80s teen movie instead of an atmospheric and psychological horror movie. They have all the adults playing teens talking about getting laid, playing crappy '80s music. There's one particularly ridiculous montage where Jesse dresses up in wacky sunglasses and hat and dances around his room making sexual gestures. I mean it's pretty cheesy. He's not all that relatable and doesn't have much charisma either. He's not a good replacement for Nancy.

Clu Gulager from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is a good choice to play the dad, though. You gotta have somebody decent to fill in for John Saxon. And the girlfriend isn't bad. She kind of reminds me of that '80s singer Tiffany. That'd be funnier if they got the real Tiffany.

Here's some faint praise: this has the best end credits of the series. I'm serious, I care about this. They play Gene Austin performing the Bing Crosby song "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" I don't know why but I'm a sucker for the horror movies ironically playing oldies at the end. Nothing can top the goofy happy tune at the end of the first EVIL DEAD, but this type of harmless-but-with-lyrics-tied-into-the-theme-of-the-movie approach is fun too. Part 1 has scary horror scoring and if I remember right most of them from now on will have some shitty heavy metal assholes or, in one case, the Fat Boys. So that's one reason this one stands out. Class and wit. Also, great old school logo at the end, not the same NIGHTMARE logo they use on most of the posters and merchandise and shit.

It has been pointed out - and even the director admits it - that the movie ended up seeming pretty homoerotic. So that's the other thing that makes it stand out from the other ones. Jesse goes to a leather bar, he ties his gym teacher up naked with jump ropes in the locker room shower and slashes him. There's alot of intentionally phallic hot dog imagery, even exploding, ejaculatory beer cans. The gayest scene is probaly when he's about to screw his girlfriend when suddenly he gets freaked out and runs away to a male friend's bedroom where he asks if he can stay over, and complains that something is "trying to get inside of" him. His friend says "Yeah, it's female, and it's waiting for you in the cabana, and you want to sleep with me." None of this was intentional but since ELM STREET movies are all about dreams these must've been in the writer or the director's subconscious. So it's fair to interpret it like a dream. Plus, they say one out of ten people is gay, so it's only fair that one of these would be gay. I wonder which one of the FRIDAY THE 13THs is gay? There's been ten of those. And holy shit, there's gotta be two gay James Bonds by now too. This is interesting.

Anyway, don't judge FREDDY'S REVENGE on its sexuality. It didn't ask to be born gay. Judge it on its own merits and I think you can see that, like most people, it has its good points and its bad. But since it was way better than I remembered it being I'm gonna give it some credit. Good job on your "revenge," Freddy. Keep it up in part 3.

DREAM WARRIORS is the most popular of the Elm Street sequels, the one that set the pattern for most of them and, to be fair, the roots of everything that's bad about them. It makes Freddy a little less mysterious, less scary, more jokey. The dreams become less surreal and more gimmicky. But still pretty good.

After skipping out on part 2, Wes Craven decided to co-write this one, although his script was then rewritten by Frank Darabont (who would go on to direct SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION) and director Chuck Russell (who would go on to do crap like ERASER). I think the reason for the movie's lasting popularity is Craven's "dream warriors" concept. In the first two you had one lead character who has to take on Freddy pretty much by themselves, with only a girlfriend/boyfriend trying to help them. In this one Craven has a girl who for some reason has the power to pull other people into her dreams. So you have a group of teens all in a mental hospital because their Freddy attacks have been misinterpreted as mental illness. They not only share the belief in Freddy, they share the same dream world, so they can work together to fight Freddy.

Not only that but Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy, now a grad student with a shock of white in her hair from her encounter with Freddy. She's like Obi Wan coming back to share her veteran's knowledge with these kids. And it's pretty cool when Freddy is surprised to see her in Kristen's dream. "YOU!" he says.

The genius of the concept as far as appealing to young people is that young people all like having friends. Even if they think they are outsiders they often have a group of similar friends who they think are like their family. They have stupid nicknames, they hug alot, sometimes they wear giant pants and clown makeup. Misfit kids travel in packs, they are gonna like Dream Warriors better than Nancy fighting Freddy on her own.

When the group sits together for group hypnosis or sleep and enters the same dream, it's almost like a precursor to THE MATRIX, or even to the internet. They're extending from their bodies to enter another realm with different rules. Another gimmick is that each Dream Warrior has one special talent or power. The quadriplegic Dungeons and Dragons nerd can turn into a wizard. Kristen (Patricia Arquette) can do flips. Kincaid has super strength. The heroin junkie has a huge mohawk and two switchblades (or as she puts it "in my dreams I'm beautiful... and bad."

It's a fun idea but it doesn't make much sense. Why do they only have one power? Wouldn't it make more sense if, realizing they're in a dream, they all can do various weird things? In dreams if you figure out you're dreaming you take advantage of it - you fly, you kill people, you drop everything and start fuckin. You're not just given one power, you're liberated from the laws of reality. You don't just get a choice of do a flip or have a mohawk.

This is also the introduction of the ELM STREET series' corniest weakness: the characters who have one broad defining characteristic that Freddy uses against them in a dream. So there's a girl who wants to be a TV star, Freddy comes out of the TV while she's watching it and bashes her face into the screen. There's a girl who used to do heroin so his fingers turn into syringes, her tracks turn into little mouths and he shoots her up to death. The disabled kid can walk in his dreams but he gets chased by a giant wheelchair covered in spikes.

They're clever scenes and the effects are great, but they're too obvious to be taken very seriously. It's way scarier when the killings are just weirdness from the subconscious and not a thematic dream customized for the victim like a caricature artist who asks you what your hobby is and then if you say baseball he puts a baseball uniform and a bat on the little cartoon body attached to your giant head. So one of the best dreams in this one is the giant penis-like snake with a Freddy head that almost manages to swallow Patricia Arquette. I mean maybe the Freddy head is overdoing it but for a girl to have a dream about getting eaten by a giant penis makes sense in dreams more than in reality, and that's what we're looking for here. And she probaly just thinks it's a snake. So naive.

For the third time in a row Freddy comes out of dreams into reality. John Saxon is back (still a cop, but also an alcoholic and estranged from Nancy) and Craig Wasson (the guy from BODY DOUBLE who looks exactly like Bill Maher) convinces him to go find Freddy's remains where they were hidden in a junkyard and give them a proper burial, because supposedly that will kill him in the dream world. But then the bones come to life JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS style and fight back. It's great to have Saxon back, and everybody loves a good stop motion skeleton, but come on dude. Hard to take the movie too seriously after this part. Pretty fuckin silly.

Another addition to the formula is that they have to reveal more about Freddy's backstory in each sequel. In this one you find out about his mother, Amanda Krueger, a nun who was raped by "a hundred maniacs" in an asylum, making Freddy "son of a hundred maniacs." Which I'm not sure is all that biologically accurate but it's been a long time since I was in school, maybe they have learned some new things. Anyway I guess her being a nun is why he can now be hurt by holy water and crosses and shit. If your mother is a nun be careful, please. I don't want to see any innocent people getting burned. Only Freddy and vampires should have to suffer from that.

I like this movie, I enjoy watching it, and I do think it had a little bit of a zeitgeist type deal going there, it hit on something with the group dreaming concept. But in my opinion it's not real horror anymore as much as it's just some fun gimmicks. At this point in the series real horror is a nostalgic memory from Freddy's carefree younger days. If you want to compare it to the third FRIDAY THE 13TH, it's definitely alot more imaginative, more slick, and more ambitious (except for not being 3-D). But in my opinion FRIDAY 3 still has a little something that ELM STREET 3 doesn't. Freddy said in part 2 "you've got the body, I've got the brain." As far as dumb slasher movies go ELM STREET does have the brain, but FRIDAY PART 3 still had the body - the brute strength that a horror movie uses to lunge at you and make your heart beat a little faster. You can pick which is better, I guess.

From the Academy Award winning writer of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and MYSTIC RIVER, and the director of DEEP BLUE SEA, and with a story by the guy who did the novelization of E.T., comes a new old name in terror...

or, to put it another way, from the writer of PAYBACK and the director of DIE HARD 2 comes a part 4 that's not as awesome as that sounds. If you are a Freddy devotee like myself you enjoy watching this crap every once in a while, but it's the first one in the series that doesn't advance the story at all.

Don't get me wrong. It's kind of nice that they continue with some of the characters from part 3, you don't see that in too many slasher sequels. This one starts out with Kincaid, Joey and Kristen (now played by Tuesday Knight instead of Patricia Arquette and seeming to have a completely different personality) out of the institution and in a regular high school like the kids in parts 1-2. (I wonder if they all go to the same school Nancy did? I'm not sure.)

Eventually these part 3 survivors all get picked off, as does Kristen's boyfriend, a karate practicioner who battles invisible Freddy in a dojo and loses due to a dishonorable flying glove move. (Also, I'm not sure because he's invisible but I bet Freddy didn't even bow after he defeated him.) But Kristen's boyfriend's sister Alice happened to be pulled into Kristen's dream when she died so Kristen's dream power of pulling people into her dreams is transferred to her. You know how those dream powers work. It seems that Freddy has killed all of the kids of the people who burned him alive so now he needs Alice to pull her friends into dreams in order for him to get them.

At this point the movies have no scare value outside of a slumber party. There are lots of cool and imaginative special effects to pass the time (I especially like the girl transforming into a roach and the part where little arms comes out of Freddy's withered flesh and tear his head in half) but the dreams are now art director show off pieces and not anything like real dreams. Instead of nonsensical imagery from your subconscious it's all obvious "spooky" imagery like little girls jumproping singing the Freddy song in front of the rotten haunted house version of where Nancy used to live. There are maybe two bits that remind me of real dreams:

1. Alice and her boyfriend Dan find themselves in a loop, doing the same thing over and over again and not able to get to their friend to save her.

2. Kristen is sinking into sand and Freddy is stepping on her head

But even these parts have a phony Hollywood feel because in 1 she's running past a '50s style diner where she works as a waitress (not exactly the typical experience for a suburban teenager in 1988) and in 2 Freddy has just exploded out of a sandcastle and is wearing sunglasses.

In this movie Freddy is what we now refer to as "a complete douchebag." In most of his scenes he says some asinine line like "Welcome to wonderland, Alice!" or "Why don't you reach out... and cut someone?" or, when he kills a guy on a waterbed, "How's this for a wet dream?" Maybe the worst part of all is when he's eating a pizza with tiny heads for sausages, representing the souls of his victims, and he says "I love soul food!" I mean come on dude. We already hated you for murdering children, now you gotta make us uncomfortable with your lame jokes. Don't expect a courtesy laugh, pal. You are just the worst.

In the part 3 review I mentioned that it added to the formula the idea of having to expand Freddy's backstory in each sequel. Well, I forgot that they didn't do that in part 4 but you almost miss it because there's so little new territory explored here. About the only addition to the mythology is that Alice defeats Freddy with a poem she knows called "The Dream Master" which is actually just a rewrite of the 18th century children's prayer "Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep." As if we never heard that one before. At least Freddy is defeated in dreams and never comes into the real world.

One funny detail I don't remember noticing before: Kristen, Kincaid and Joey are all buried on the same plot as Nancy and her dad (John Saxon). There's a shot that shows all their tombstones together. It would be funnier if they made tombstones for every victim in the series so far. But this is pre-DEEP BLUE SEA Renny Harlin, he wasn't ready to go that absurd yet.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD

Part 5 is one of the less popular Freddy pictures, maybe because it made an admirable attempt to get beyond high school. It continues the story of Dream Master Alice and her boyfriend Dan (still played by the same actors, Lisa Wilcox and Danny Hassel) and their new circle of friends who replaced the dead ones. They are just graduating from high school, Alice and Dan are planning a trip to Paris over the summer, and early on Alice finds out that she's pregnant. So they're still teens but they're dealing with some growing up type shit here.

The gimmick this time is that because she has a baby inside her, and because babies (according to the movie) dream all the time, she suddenly starts having Freddy dreams while awake. In the dream world the baby is a kid named Jacob and he does not have a positive male role model in his dream life so unfortunately Freddy comes in and takes advantage of that. You know how a bad uncle lets his little nieces and nephews drink beer, or helps them score pot? Freddy's like that, he feeds Jacob the souls of Alice's dead friends. I'm actually not sure what he's trying to do - will this make the baby grow up into Freddy? Is he just trying to make the baby a killer like him? Or is he just pushing Alice's buttons by messing with her kid? I don't really know.

What if the baby doesn't turn out to be evil, but has dream powers from eating all those souls? Maybe he'll haunt people's dreams but instead of giving them gimmicky deaths ironically based on their hobbies he'll give them nice dreams. Instead of getting slashed and they wake up and have real cuts, he gives them a lollipop and they wake up and it's right there on the pillow next to them. Or he gives them a bunch of money. And it works as real currency, it doesn't show Freddy wearing a George Washington wig or anything stupid like that. It's not printed in red and green ink.

On the other hand, he's a fuckin fetus. How does he know what a lollipop or money is? What do babies dream about, anyway? I mean it can't be the old "going to class without pants on" dream, because fetuses don't wear pants. Do they dream about umbilical cords? I don't know, whatever they dream about I'm betting it's some weird shit. I bet baby Jacob gives you more fucked up dreams than Freddy. Freddy's dream powers are actually limited by his knowledge of reality. Fetus dreams are unencumbered by such boundaries.

I guess you could say this movie is pro-life, because the baby being a grown kid in her dream kind of indicates that life begins at conception. Also, the whole point of a horror movie is to try to survive, which is pro-life.

But I also think it's a feminist movie. It's pro-lady. Alice has taken charge of her life. She's not so timid anymore, she doesn't get pushed around like she used to. She got her father to stop drinking and repair their relationship. When her friend points out that she could abort the baby and Freddy wouldn't get to her anymore she says no - acknowledging that it's a choice, and making it for herself. When Dan's folks try to get her to let them raise the baby she stands strong and says it's her responsibility. When Dan gets killed in a really cool scene where he becomes one with a motorcycle Alice stays strong, she doesn't lose her shit. So she's the type of strong female character Nancy was in the first one and not the screaming airheads people (mostly unfairly) associate with slasher movies.

Wait a minute, come to think of it, why not get an abortion? Then the kid will just keep coming back in people's dreams. He'll be a more powerful baby that way than if he was alive. I know abortion isn't pleasant, I consider myself pro-choice but in general I hope people don't get abortions. But you gotta at least make exceptions for cases of rape, incest or babies fed "soul food" by Freddy.

But I guess even if he was gonna turn out to be an evil Freddy baby it might be unfair to abort him. I mean think about it, if you aborted every evil slasher baby then Seed of Chucky never would've been born, and he was actually a nice guy. Also Godzilla was a real asshole in his prime but his kid turned out okay.

Anyway, back to the feminism. There are other women who make it out okay - the ghost of Amanda Krueger, Freddy's mom, is key to stopping Freddy this time. And I think Alice's friend played by Kelly Jo Minter may be the first supporting character in any of these movies to have a gimmicky Freddy dream (she's a diver, so it's about the diving board attacking her and jumping into a pool that turns out to be empty) and survive. That's pretty tough. Also, there are many, many scenes where the camera flies through spooky, fleshy tunnels which I guess are supposed to be some kind of evil Freddy flesh but are clearly, you know, girl parts. Private girl parts.

Freddy's not very scary anymore, but he's arguably not as corny as in part 4. He doesn't wear sunglasses, at least. He does re-use that terrible "soul food" line, which is embarrassing. But he mostly stays away from puns and wacky costumes. He's reborn in a dream that also acts as a flashback to his birth. But it can't be what really happened because he's a monster baby that looks like burnt up Freddy. Then he grows into adult Freddy. One of the more authentically dreamlike moments is when a Freddy stuntman jumps through the air and you can see in his silhouette that he has big claw-like toes. That's pretty weird. Also I like when for no reason one of his arms is really long. A nice tribute to the long-arms scene in the first one, but this time it's an animatronic arm with moving fingers instead of a rubber hand on the end of a pole.

But then you get to the scene that really emblemizes everything that gets so lame about these sequels. There's a character who likes to draw and read comic books. In a dream he finds himself reading a comic book of the movie so far, and gets to a panel of him reading the comic. Then he gets sucked into the comic and the world around him is black and white, but he's in color. Okay, so they play with this color/black and white thing which is an okay art director showoffy type gimmick, but then Freddy, he-- I have a hard time saying this. But he, uh-- well, he turns into "Super Freddy." I'd rather not go into the details.

When you think about it the death of this comic book guy is really tragic. This kid is just graduating high school and yet his artwork (which covers his entire room) looks 100% profesional. Clearly he is a great talent lost too soon. But it's not to be relieved by his death because the character is so annoying. He looks like a 35 year old dressing as a teen skateboarder for a Church of Latter Day Saints commercial. And he talks like Garth from WAYNE'S WORLD. In the movie's most unintentionally hilarious line he whines about the death of the girl he had a crush on:

"The Phantom Prowler wouldn't have been afraid to tell her how he felt. If I only had a tenth of his guts!"

Later he inspires Freddy to ride a skateboard. So yes, he deserves to die. And I hope they burn in hay-ell.

Like anything that gets to part 5 this is not all that hot. But I'm not sure it deserves the bum rap it gets. It has some spooky atmosphere in parts and it reaches a little bit, it's taking baby steps towards trying something new. Get it, because of babies. It is a movie about babies so I said baby steps. I didn't even write that pun on purpose, it just flowed out of me. I've been watching too many Freddy movies I guess.

9/1/08

FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE

So here we are. The VERY LAST time we will ever see Freddy Krueger. Dead forever. Never, ever again will he appear in a movie of any kind, because this at last is the end of him. It says it right there in the title, twice. He is dead, and this is the final one. And what a journey it's been. But thank God we have this precious last 89 minutes to spend with him.

I don't know if all the New Line Cinema people were wearing funeral clothes when they made this, but behind the scenes it was kind of a family affair. Director Rachel Talalay had been working on the Freddy pictures since part 1, usually as a producer. This was her first time directing - she later did TANK GIRL. She's also the only woman to ever direct a Freddy movie.

The writer was Michael DeLuca, who was New Line's president of production for years, so you will recognize his name from all kinds of movies during the height of the company, like S7V7N and BOOGIE NIGHTS. Before this he had written the god-awful movie LAWNMOWER MAN as well as 5 episodes of FREDDY'S NIGHTMARES. One online profile of him says, "Michael De Luca is best known for receiving a blowjob at age 32 from the sister of actor Cary Elwes and producer Cassian Elwes in front of guests (such as ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGER, EMMA THOMPSON, JOHN MALKOVICH and QUENTIN TARANTINO) at a pre-Oscar party thrown by then head of the William Morris motion picture division, Arnold Rifkin at his home in March, 1998."

In the beginning of the movie the crazy ticket-taker is played by DeLuca's boss Robert Shaye, who as far as I know has not hooked up with any of Cary Elwes' family, but is best known for refusing to pay Peter Jackson the money he was owed for LORD OF THE RINGS and then spending New Line's last dime directing THE LAST MIMSY (Mimsy's Dead: The Final Mimsy). Before turning the keys over to the landlord Shaye gave Jason and Freddy to Michael Bay's company. Too bad he doesn't get killed in the movie.

FREDDY'S DEAD is also notable for some weird cameos: Roseanne and Tom Arnold as crazy people who try to forcibly snuggle and adopt the teen protagonists, Johnny Depp as himself (or his dead NIGHTMARE 1 character?) on a TV anti-drug PSA, Alice Cooper as Freddy's adopted dad, the Harlem Globetrotters as the employees of the shelter for homeless teens where some of the movie takes place. (okay that last one is a lie, but it would've been a good idea in my opinion, I am pretty good at casting.)

In the role of "guy who gives the movie unexpected credibility" is Yaphet Kotto as the dream expert. This was only two years before he started in HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET. Also you got Breckin Meyer of the GARFIELD series of movies playing the stoner kid.

Now, you should probaly sit down for this because it is shocking as hell, but in my opinion part 6 is not all that great. Still, I think Tank Girl and Blowjob Guy deserve a little credit for trying some weird stuff. For example they made it take place in the near future when Freddy has actually killed all of the Elm Street kids except possibly one who is rumored to still be alive. This is explained to us with an ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK style map, and later when the teens and their social worker visit Springwood they notice that in fact there are no kids alive in the whole town, or at least at the carnival. They show a clown smoking a cigarette - at least somebody is able to take advantage of these tragic circumstances. Good for you, clown.

Also it seems to me that the physics of the dream killings has changed, so now the sleeping bodies are way more affected than they used to be. I know from part 1 on Freddy was able to carve into people's skin and there was at least one sleepwalking victim, but in this one it goes further. You see a guy getting knocked around like he's being beat up by an invisible fist. A guy who is walking up stairs in his dream walks up invisible stairs in real life. The best one is the guy who dies in a video game dream - his body bounces up and down like Mario, smashing his head into the ceiling. I'm surprised that didn't wake him up though.

Yes, there is a video game dream, and yes, Freddy does make a joke about his "power glove." He also has a line about a high score, which made me wonder how familiar he is with video games. I'm not sure when he was born exactly, and we see in some dream/flashback combos that he had a real bad childhood. But I'd like to think he had some peace playing pinball in a diner somewhere in his teens, and that's why he knows what a high score is. I think he was supposed to die in 1968 or something, way too early to be kidnapping kids playing Centipede at the local pizza parlor.

Anyway, as you can imagine the dreams all have stupid gimmicks like that. The stoner dies to the tune of "Inna-Gada-Da-Vida," etc.

We find out more unnecessary backstory - turns out Freddy had a wife who he killed because she found out about his murdering, and he had a daughter. Now we understand him so much more, don't we? Pretty deep. Alice Cooper, who wears a plaid shirt and holds a bottle of booze (characterization), beat Freddy when he was young, and Freddy learned to enjoy it. When he was younger he killed animals. The other kids in school were mean to him and called him "Son of 100 Maniacs." In other words, everybody's misused him, ripped him up and abused him. Another junkie plan, pushin dope for the man. You know, it turns out not all of the lyrics from "Freddie's Dead" by Curtis Mayfield apply to this movie.

I probaly mentioned this in an earlier review, but I'm not sure I agree with the biology of that "son of 100 maniacs" thing. I don't think that works out. Also I kind of wonder what the point of it is in this version of the story. He has the abusive non-biological father and the childhood pet-killing, just like Michael Meyers in the HALLOWEEN remake. Everything but the Kiss t-shirt. So that implies that it was a bad childhood that turned him into Freddy. But then the son of 100 maniacs thing makes it seem like it's supposed to be hereditary. He got it through genetics. Which is it?

Whatever it was that made him a psycho, we know from this one how he became a dream stalker. Turns out there are these flying stop motion worm monsters called Dream Demons who picked out the vilest most horrible human being they could ever imagine and gave him this power. Remember how Freddy was a child killer, he got off on a technicality, John Saxon and friends wanted justice so they went and burned him alive? Well, what John Saxon probaly didn't know is that while they were outside making sure Freddy didn't come out he was inside talking to flying skull-headed snake things. He wasn't surprised to see them and told them "I want it all!" I wonder why they didn't mention this in any of the newspaper articles?

Toward the end Freddy comes into the real world and shows up in Yaphet Kotto's office, and Yaphet beats the shit out of him with a baseball bat. Unfortunately he didn't know to set booby traps, and a mere bat beatdown won't cut it for Freddy. But this does give Yaphet the idea to have the heroine fall asleep and dream, with a set time to wake up while holding Freddy so that they can kill him in the real world. This is also an idea he would've gotten from watching part 1. Of course, it didn't completely work in part 1 because in that last shot he seems to have outwitted them after all. But Yaphet has an idea for upping the ante - kill the fucker in 3-D FREDDYVISION!

So the big ending battle is done in eye-damaging red and blue 3-D, recreated in all its muddy glory on the DVD. It does look slightly 3-D but also looks as fuzzy as an eighth generation VHS bootleg. Nevertheless, I believe this movie proves that 3-D is the future of moviegoing. This is where James Cameron got the idea from. This will really keep the theater experience alive. Hopefully all of the Freddy movies, as well as less genre-oriented movies like THERE WILL BE BLOOD and JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, will be re-released with their final sequence in Freddyvision.

But even if Freddy's legacy lives on in the form of 3-D scenes that hurt your eyes and cause you to keep taking your glasses off to make sure it's still supposed to be in 3-D, I'm still gonna miss the deep fried old bastard. I know, I know, he was always killing people and he was just kind of annoying with all his stupid puns. So fuckin greedy about collecting souls. What was that all about? I know it's easy to just think of him as a total prick, but somewhere inside there he was also a human being. It's hard to understand there was love in this man. I'm sure all would agree that his misery was his woman and things. Things being his daughter and also the kids picking on him. You know what, now that I think about it this really is kind of based on the Curtis Mayfield song. He probaly shoulda got a story credit.

10/8/08

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION

Here's a weird fuckin movie written and directed by William Peter Blatty, the guy who wrote the novel of THE EXORCIST. I've been hearing the title for years so I know it has a cult following, but I think they had trouble selling it because all they could figure was "from the creator of THE EXORCIST" but it's not like that movie at all. It starts out as a goofy comedy and turns into a sad essay about God, or something. I don't really understand the meaning of the title, but it has something to do with a protein molecules and the existence of God. It's mentioned in a dream scene where an astronaut finds a giant crucifix on the moon.

But now I'm making it sound stranger than it actually is. All I can figure to describe it is "ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST meets ROLLING THUNDER."

The story takes place in an old castle "in the Pacific Northwest of the United States." Which is funny because I'm pretty sure the Native Americans who lived here first didn't build castles. And we don't have Mideival Times restaraunt here so it can't be that either. Anyway this castle is being used by the military as an experimental mental facility for mentally ill (or possibly faking) Vietnam vets. Neville Brand is an angry drill sergeant type but he pretty much just lets them have the run of the place, going around dressed as pirates and Superman and crap. One guy is busy casting a dog version of Hamlet (which perhaps could be an influence on Ang Lee's racoon version). Robert Loggia does a blackface routine. One guy has a funny hat. etc.

There's some funny lines in her but I have to admit I'm not entirely on the movie's wavelength. This is in the SHOCK CORRIDOR kind of vein where each insane person has some gimmick or is wacky and cute. There's all kinds of random dialogue like "the man on the moon fucked my sister!" and people do wacky things like read the miranda rights to a boar's head on the wall or show up at 3 in the morning dressed in beach gear and dump a bucket of wet sand on the colonel's desk. Sometimes it's funny but I feel like it's kind of forced and because so much of the dialogue has no meaning I found myself starting to tune out what people were saying.

But what makes the movie work is Stacy Keach as the main character, Colonel Kane. He's the psychiatrist who's just arrived at the castle determined to figure out how to help these people. He demands that the inmates be allowed to come into his office whenever they want, and he indulges anything they want to talk about, never dismissing their nonsense as nonsense. And he talks in an eerily calm voice like HAL in 2001. You start to realize that maybe he's crazy too.

He's especially fixated on helping one particular inmate, an astronaut who freaked out right before take off and was too scared to go to the moon. According to IMDB this is supposed to be the same astronaut character who (not that I remember this) is told by Regan in THE EXORCIST that he's going to die in space.

And then a little more than halfway through there's a big twist that you maybe saw coming and that's when the movie gets much more interesting. There's more going on here than you were told at first, and Kane and some of the others become much more interesting and tragic characters than they seemed at first.

The reason I finally got around to seeing this is a reader named Sean recommended it to me and he mentioned that there's a fight scene in a bar. This was a real good scene, kind of like a more drawn out version of something that might happen in a Seagal picture. Unfortunately this was made in 1980 so you've got a certain cheeseball feel to it. The opponents are some kind of bisexual biker gang with a leader who looks like Gary Glitter. And they're those kind of Troma style villains who just bully somebody for no reason at all. It might be better if they had even the slightest reason to be mad at these guys before they start picking on them. There's a nice touch though, I didn't make the connection until watching the movie again with the director's commentary, but you see the biker gang driver by in the very beginning of the movie, and then forget about them.

Anyway, maybe the most significant thing about this movie that makes it different from others is that Blatty, who apparently is a Jesuit, is trying to have a religious discussion with this movie. THE EXORCIST showed that he believed in evil monsters but now he's trying to show his feelings about God. The movie brings up this idea that if people are just molecules or animals, why do they sometimes do nice things for each other instead of only focusing on survival. It's an interesting philosophical question but I don't buy Blatty's idea that it PROVES there's a God. I figure most atheists don't know why men have nipples or why people do nice things or even why the sky is blue, even though there is an official scientific explanation for that one. All they have to figure is that things are complicated and people don't necessarily understand how they work. That doesn't mean there is a God or there isn't one, it just means that humans don't know everything there is to know.

Still it's a nice notion and I like that he is using movies to make statements that are that personal and profound to him. And especially weird ass movies like this. Put this in the not great but very original category.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
A guide for enthusiasts of Badass Cinema

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is one of those movies that's so quiet it can be uncomfortable to watch with an audience. Alot of scenes all you hear is the wind blowing lightly over the wide open Texas plains, or the cars driving past outside a motel room, along with every squirm, every sigh, every shoulder crack in the theater. At the end when I saw the music credit for Carter Burwell I honestly couldn't for the life of me remember any point in the movie where there was music.

So it's clearly a little arty, it's not like anybody's gonna mistake this for THE MUMMY RETURNS. Or for THE FRENCH CONNECTION for that matter. It requires a little patience. But there's so much about it that's so fuckin good that it will win over all kinds of people from all walks of life. At first.

It's a movie full of great performances and great characters. James Brolin's boy Josh has a career-catapulting role as Llewelyn Moss, Vietnam vet who's out hunting when he stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone real bad, and decides to take home a briefcase of money as a souvenir. Javier Bardem, with his worst haircut since PERDITA DURANGO, plays Anton Chigurh, an enforcer who's gone crazy enough to kill pretty much anybody who sees him along the way while spouting philosophy to justify his actions. And Tommy Lee Jones, in another topnotch quiet old lovable sadsack performance like he's been doing lately, is the disillusioned Sheriff Bell who follows the trail.

And it's a movie with alot of great talking, a script that pays careful attention to the interesting ways different people put words together. But this time credit doesn't go as much to Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers out of Minnesota who made the movie, as to Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book that way already. Alot of the dialogue is lifted straight out of the book so it has alot of classic lines. I was glad they kept my favorite: Llewelyn's wife asks him where he got that gun and he says "At the gettin' place."

This is a jawdroppingly awesome piece of filmatism, but is it a piece of Badass Cinema? This is a question not relevant to most reviewers but since everybody else has already written ten books worth about every other angle I might as well focus on this one.

Let me show you part of an email I got this week:

Vern,

Maybe you can help me on this one. See, last night, my girlfriend and I
went to see No Country For Old Men. Both of us are fans of the Coen Bros.
and of Badassery in general, so we were pretty pumped... So here's the conundrum: We both walked out of that movie pissed off and thinking that it really sucked big donkey balls...

Throughout the first two thirds or so of the movie, we were onboard. It was slow-paced but felt like a tension was building which would eventually pay off when everything tied together in the end. Then, something happened. That something is that either the Coen Brothers forgot to make about 30 minutes worth of the
movie or that the theater forgot to include a reel or, most likely, the
movie fell flat on its face with absolutely no resolution to any of the
story lines. I mean, seriously, the main characters just sort of
disappear. After spending an hour and a half or so watching this cat and
mouse game play out between Brolin's character and the psychopath who
wants his money back, we get treated to a disconnected scene of Tommy Lee
Jones's character now being retired and bam! credits. What the fuck?!?

Then the crowd applauded and [REDACTED] and I just stared at each other like,
"did we miss something?"... So, I implore you, if/when you've seen No Country For Old Men, either (a) tell me that you agree that it fell apart and those douchebags in the theater in Hollywood were clapping because they feel like if they don't understand what the fuck just happened it must be good so they
better applaud so as not to look stupid or (b) tell me what it was that
she and I missed, maybe a subtle line or scene, maybe something major that
will make me feel stupid for not catching... but, SOMETHING that makes
this film something other than a two hour wank. OR (C) write a review
about it (best option).

I need help, less I lose faith in films for about the fifteenth time this
year.

Thanks,
Chris.

I knew of at least two other people who had this problem with the movie. The first was a guy in the back of the theater when I saw it who, when the credits rolled, said "That's it? I don't get it." You could hear it all throughout the theater so everybody laughed and then he said, "What? I don't get it!"

The second was another Ain't It Cool reviewer, the guy called Massawyrm. He infamously panned the movie for not giving the audience what you usually get in this type of story. He blamed the Coens' "experimental streak" and if that's the case then the experiment was to try to measure human tolerance for a faithful cinematic translation of a Cormac McCarthy book. That dude already did it in his book and the part that flipped Massawyrm's wig in the movie is actually even stranger in the book because

TOP SECRET SPOILER SECTION (highlight)
Llewelyn is alive and on the run, then there's another chapter that's not about him, then in the next chapter he's already dead. I had to flip back and re-read a bunch of shit thinking I missed something. In the movie the scenes are back to back so it feels more natural. It's unusual but it's not fucking with you quite as much as the book is.

Having seen it now I think actually the guy in the back of the theater has the more legitimate gripe. The end of the movie seems pretty abrupt, it is definitely jarring if you don't know what's up. There are certain things you instinctively expect a story like this to resolve, but this one has a different agenda. It's telling you a different story than you thought it was and you might not realize this until the credits roll.

In the book they keep going back to Bell's point of view, like that narration he has at the beginning of the movie, so it's not a surprise that it's his story, that's sort of the idea from the beginning. I still thought that one little trick was jarring, but I also thought, well, it's a book. What do you expect. You know how books are. In the movie, the Coens do such a good job of making it a great fucking thriller, that it's even crueler when it pulls the carpet out from underneath your feet. Personally I think that's kind of cool that they fuck with the audience that way but I can see how it would be fingernails on a chalkboard to some people.

The other thing is that with a book you're prepared because you're holding the book in your hands, you're not blind, you know you're on the last page so you're at the end. Or if you are blind and you're reading a braille book you still can feel that you are at the end of the book.

I remember when I read the book I Am Legend I got to this part where something huge happened and I thought holy shit, what's gonna happen now? And I turned the page to the next chapter only to realize there is no next chapter, there's some other unrelated short story in the back of the book. It felt like when you step off a curb or a step and for some reason the drop is bigger than you were thinking it was and you lose your balance. It was a great ending but I wasn't mentally prepared for it to be the ending, I lost my balance.

But at least with that I could flip back a couple pages and re-read it with that in mind. With a movie in a movie theater if it ends when you're expecting more it must be pretty disorienting.

So the temptation I guess is for people who liked that to say people who didn't are stupid and for people who didn't like it to say that people who did like it are just pretending they did to seem smart. That's pretty much what Massawyrm did. I would say that it's true, stupid people wouldn't like this movie, but plenty of smart people wouldn't either. I have sympathy because if I hadn't read the book I bet it would've thrown me too. It's fair to expect a thriller because parts of the movie would fit in the best thriller you've ever seen. There are two extended chase sequences that I already know are for the ages and I just saw the movie a few days ago. Most movies are not this intense, it feels like bullets are whizzing over your head for real. And at least a couple scenes, including the first one, are just like scenes in BLOOD SIMPLE. So it's not stupid to wish for a perfect thrill ride like that. I've seen people saying "don't go to a Coen Brothers movie expecting DIE HARD" but how about going to a Coen brothers movie expecting BLOOD SIMPLE?

You know what? I can't lie. If there was no book and this was just a crime thriller and wasn't all contemplative and shit, I might've liked it just as much. And maybe it doesn't matter that there's a book. I bet if it was the '70s or if it was somebody not as good as the Coen Brothers they would've hedged their bets and Hollywooded it up with some more traditional resolution of the stolen drug money caper. But I knew the Coens wouldn't do that. It's called NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and it's not talking about stealing Waylon Jennings records from the retirement home. It's talking about Sheriff Bell coming to terms with his obsolescence in today's violent world. Not exactly high concept. But worth making a movie about.

So my answer to Chris was that this is not exactly Badass Cinema. Somebody might say it's an arthouse approach to Badass Cinema, like POINT BLANK, and since POINT BLANK is one of the all time greats of Badass Cinema that means you can be arthouse without devaluing the Badass. True enough, but POINT BLANK's badass credentials are built around a lead played by Lee God Damn Marvin, a character who kicks down doors, fires into empty beds, wants his money back. The most badass character in NO COUNTRY is the villain. And yes, Llewelyn certainly pulls enough buckshot out of his shoulder to qualify. He even has the Vietnam vet background of many action heroes. But that "That's it? I don't get it" ending tells us that it's Bell's story, and Bell may be a man's man but he's not a badass, and has no interest in being one. He really would rather be retired, eating at cafes, putting on his reading glasses, "listening to old timers." And not in a Billy Jack or Steven Seagal way where he is a pacifist but he's still gonna kick you in the face and throw you through a window. This story is serious about it.

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the movie, it just means to re-adjust your expectations if somebody told you that's what it was. I think even some people let down by the end will go away kind of liking it because it's such a highly concentrated dose of pure filmatism. Not just the tense scenes but all the quiet, moody ones. Llewelyn coming across the dead bodies and piecing together what happened, later coming back guiltily to bring water to the lone survivor. Bell and deputy examining the scene later, discussing the dead dog, the "second fracas." The powerful score by Carter Burwell, I can't wait to listen to it again and really study it. (Just kidding, I think he formatted the CD of his score wrong and they thought it was supposed to blank so that's what they used.)

If nothing else NO COUNTRY will be remembered for having a classic villain. If I remember right there's only one person in the movie who ever saw him without dying. Another guy asks him if he's gonna kill him and Chighur says, "It depends. Do you see me?" I thought of him as an angel of death. Bell describes him as a "ghost." And Chris told me in a later email that at one point when something happens to Chighur somebody in his theater said "How you gonna kill death?"

Like the book, the movie doesn't skimp on the violence, and that's probaly where the badass confusion comes in. There's more than one graphic scene of self-bullet wound surgery. These are some tough dudes and they're not gonna cry about it, but it's graphic enough that you know when somebody gets tagged it has consequences, like when John McClane steps across glass as opposed to when he falls of an F-35 jet. One of many great scenes is when Chigurh makes a molotov cocktail out of a car to cause a distraction as he storms into the back of a pharmacy to steal what he'll need to turn his hotel room into the ER. That's taking it one step further than Rambo. Chigurh has a higher standard of health care than Rambo. By the way wouldn't it be weird if they did CHIGURH: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN PART 2 and he's working for the government now to save some hostages? I'll answer for you, that would be weird.

The thing is, I think ultimately "the ending" of this one will not be the issue. Once a movie is around for a while and you've had a chance to think about it and to see it more than once it stops being about the plot the way it unfolded for you the first time you watched it and starts being about the movie as a whole. I would bet that some people who didn't like the way it turned out the first time will later go back to it and, with pre-knowledge of what's gonna happen, appreciate more how it comes together. The way Llewelyn comes across these dead drug dealers, not ever seeing what happened to them, and later the Sherriff (and the audience) find him the same way. There's some kind of symmetry to it. It's not just a random sucker punch. It just seems like one.

This fall, if you see only one contemplative literary adaptation with some elements of Badass Cinema that seems like a random sucker punch but actually has some symmetry to it in retrospect, see NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

NOTORIOUS

NOTORIOUS, the biopic of the late rapper Christopher "Notorious (Biggie Smalls) B.I.G." Wallace comes out on DVD today.

I don't know about Gene Shalit or Tom Shales or some of these guys, but I gotta admit I don't come to NOTORIOUS as a Biggie fan from day 1. I was a late adopter. I knew a couple of those catchy songs with the R&B choruses, so I thought he was just a gangster Heavy D or a fat Ladies Love Cool James. But years after his death when I finally heard the whole "Ready to Die" album I was converted immediately. I gotta admit that Biggie (who was only 24 when he died) mostly had the same materialist tough guy obsessions that 50 Cent still has as a grown adult and business leader. He's rhyming about money and guns but like a real slick director his execution elevates the subject matter. He was one of the best storytellers in hip hop. I just read a negative review of NOTORIOUS that called Biggie "talentless" and quoted one of his rhymes to supposedly prove it, but Biggie had the type of intricate flow that makes the words sound much more complex than they would be on paper. (And they're only on paper after you transcribe them because Biggie kept all the rhymes in his head.)

Instead of a quote here's my favorite Biggie song, where he somehow turns the idea "I'll shoot you if you try to steal my shit" into a great crime story:

So I come to this movie pre-sold on Notorious B.I.G. the hip hop legend, and that definitely helps. I've been hoping for years somebody would make a sweeping, Scorsese-esque hip hop period piece, and this isn't it. It has many of the standard musician biopic problems (although with the MALCOLM X way of dying instead of THE DOORS) but it's way better than I was expecting.

This is actually alot like 50 Cent's semi-autobiography movie GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN'. Both tell the story of a kid from a broken home who grew up on hip hop, envied other people's shoes, sold crack, had a wife and kid, stopped selling crack because of hip hop, also went to prison and got shot. They even have the kid who played young 50 Cent playing Biggie's close friend Li'l Cease.

GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN' is probaly the better directed movie, because I remember it had a couple really well put together scenes, particularly the fight in the prison showers and the shooting in the recording studio. But what makes this one way better is the guy at the center of it. First of all, Biggie is a better representation of a rapper success story because he is simply a way better rapper. When it comes down to it both of them are scumbags, but it's easier to look for Biggie's humanity because you hear it in his music. He has a sense of humor and fun. And Jamal Woolard, the rapper who plays Biggie, is a much stronger actor and screen presence than 50. More on him later.

As much as I like Biggie's music I had to call him a scumbag because I don't want anybody going in expecting otherwise. I've seen it called a whitewash and a hagiography (touche, fellas, you win the word duel) but he's not exactly portrayed as humanitarian of the year. For a movie produced by his mom and his friends it sure isn't easy on him. He doesn't just sell crack - he sells it to a pregnant woman when none of his friends are willing to do it. He gets his high school girlfriend pregnant then abandons her for Li'l Kim, then abandons Li'l Kim for Faith Evans (who he marries), then attacks Li'l Kim when she says in front of Faith that she's still fucking him, and attacks Faith when Tupac says in a song that he's fucking her. Just before he dies Biggie talks to all of them and tries to have his kids come visit him, so it's comforting to think he was going to start being a better father, husband and friend. But who the fuck knows? I'm not sure this counts as a Malcolm X style transformation.

I like that I didn't feel like the movie was trying to convince me he was a great person. It just knows that he was an interesting one, which is all you need for a movie. We're gonna have to accept this if Spike Lee is really gonna make a James Brown movie.

But NOTORIOUS is still pretty standard for the genre and suffers from symptoms of music biopic-itis. His career being so short you don't have to go through the usual amount of highlight reels, but there are definitely some scenes that tell naturalism to fuck off and have the characters just say exactly the best thing to sum up the importance of the moment. For example the very second Biggie meets Puffy, Puffy makes an impassioned speech about not hustling and instead following your dreams. Actually come to think of it it is possible that Puffy really did say that. But what about the scene where Biggie's friend decides to go down for Biggie on a weapons charge? This is an amazing sacrifice to make and made Biggie's career possible, but I kind of doubt that guy right then and there made a speech about how Biggie had something special and if he gets lifted off the streets it lifts ALL of us and etc. It's still a touching moment but I think would be more powerful if they talked about it like real people.

If you're familiar with some of the people portrayed in the movie you get to play that usual biopic game of comparing the actors to the real people. Angela Bassett is a great (if obvious) choice for Biggie's mom Voletta Wallace. She doesn't bother to do her Jamaican accent the whole time but still, Voletta is the ultimate Strong Black Mother in real life, you gotta get either Angela Bassett or Alfre Woodard. Anthony Mackie also does a great job in his scenes as Tupac. He's kind of like Jason Scott Lee in DRAGON - he looks and sounds totally different from Tupac, but gets his movements, his laugh and his smile down so well that he transforms himself. Derek Luke, on the other hand, never once looks or sounds like Puffy, to the point where I sometimes forgot who he was supposed to be playing. Naturi Naughton as Li'l Kim and Antonique Smith as Faith Evans - well, to be honest I'm not as familiar with those artists, I never really paid that much attention to them but as characters they work as two opposites, the trash talking, aggressively sexual woman and the classier one, both helped and hurt by Biggie. And Faith actually gets to be the tougher of the two because of the scene where she busts into a hotel and beats the shit out of a girl Biggie is sleeping with.

But the secret of the movie, what made me really like it despite its many flaws, is that they picked a good Biggie. Woolard is a first time actor and up and coming rapper under the name Gravy. When the first promo pics came out I kept seeing movie blogs saying "he looks exactly like him!" which meant "he is a large black man wearing sunglasses and a hat!" Actually he doesn't look much like Biggie, his voice is much higher and his rapping style is pretty different. What he does get right though is the charisma. This is a really good performance that made me like Biggie despite all the stupid shit he did. He wins you over with the little jokes he makes, like when he gets out of prison and holds his daughter for the first time, his mom starts crying and he says, "Why you crying? She ain't that ugly." You get to understand how he makes Faith forgive his problems by making her laugh and then it's a sad and pathetic moment when he tries to make her laugh but the power of his charm has run out and she cuts him off.

When Biggie songs play on the soundtrack they play the actual songs, but whenever he's performing them on stage or recording them in the studio it's Woolard. He doesn't really mimic the original style very closely but it's a good idea anyway, it makes him more real somehow, not just a guy playing dressup. The concert scenes are really effective with the crowd really yelling out the rhymes and getting into it.

One major obstacle: you can't do a movie about Biggie without talking about Tupac's death and the so-called East Coast/West Coast feud. The movie shows Biggie's friendship with Tupac and the incident where Tupac was shot and robbed at a recording studio while Biggie was upstairs. Tupac thought Biggie and Puffy set him up, started doing songs about it, went to Death Row Records where Suge Knight (only seen a few times in the movie) turned it into a feud with Bad Boy Records and exacerbated the whole thing to the point where New Yorkers like Biggie couldn't perform in L.A. without getting booed and vice versa.

The movie takes the point of view that the whole feud was a media creation, that Biggie and Puffy were completely innocent of the shooting and for the most part were above taking part in the feud, and of course that he was shocked when Tupac was killed. So I guess you'll either buy it or think it's bullshit depending on if you believe that homicide detective Russell Poole (who thought some crooked cops working for Suge Knight killed Tupac) or the guy in the L.A. Times (who claimed Biggie not only set up Tupac's murder, but went to Las Vegas himself and gave the killer his own gun to use. I tend to believe the version that does not involve a 6'3" 300 pound superstar having to sneak into Las Vegas without being spotted by a single witness, but maybe they can make movies about other points of view on this.

Seriously, there should be two other movies here, the one about Tupac and the one about Russell Poole and the whole conspiracy, the real life L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. I gotta betray my coast and say that I think Biggie was a way better MC than Tupac, but Tupac was maybe a more interesting person. Like Biggie he was raised by a strong, single mother, but his mom was a Black Panther who was pregnant with him while she was in prison. So he grew up around black militants and considered himself a revolutionary. On the other hand when he was at Death Row he got caught up in all that stupid gangster bullshit. He would do one song about bitches and one song about his mother, he had that whole duality. It could be an interesting movie, but would face the same problem of depicting his unsolved murder.

So anyway, that's all difficult to deal with, and since they really don't know for sure who did it they have to leave that unanswered. But that's okay because in a way this is Voletta Wallace's story, and she's left wondering about her son's murder every day. This is her story because she's the mother who worked two jobs to raise her son alone. When young Big leaves the apartment it's like he's Batman, he has to go up on the rooftops to change into his hustler uniform. Like most parents Voletta is naive about what her son is up to, but when she finds out that wasn't a plate of rotten mashed potatoes she found under his bed and threw out she tries to put her foot down. Big goes out of her life for a while and she goes out of the movie.

The tragedy of this story is not just that he gets murdered, but that he repeats the sad pattern of his own childhood, not bothering to see his daughter very often and thinking he's still a good father because he sends her money. There's an extra layer of sadness when you realize that's Biggie's real son, who was a baby when his dad died, playing young Biggie dealing with being abandoned by his father. If Biggie had lived maybe he would've spent more time with these kids, or maybe not. There's a scene where Voletta says he'll make a great father, and you believe it, but then he screwed up and never had time for a second chance.

You have to struggle with all of these thoughts while watching the movie, just like Voletta did. She knew her son and why she loved him and also knew the things he did that disappointed and worried her. But then after his funeral we see (through real footage that could never quite be re-enacted) the crowds of fans lining the streets of Brooklyn during his funeral procession. The movie doesn't really address the morbid, inevitable feel of it, the self-fulfilling prophecy of a rapper who called his first album "Ready To Die" and his posthumous one "Life After Death," and ended that one with the words "You're nobody 'til somebody kills you." A guy who on "Suicidal Thoughts" confessed his feelings that he's "a piece of shit" and that he's going to hell. Those are the kinds of gloomy thoughts you could dwell on on a day like that. Instead somebody turns on a radio playing "Hypnotize" or something. Everybody smiles and goes crazy, rapping along and dancing, and Biggie's mom and everyone else remember why they loved this guy so much.

NURSE BETTY

(released overseas as Soapdish 2000)

There has been alot of "buzz" and "Juice" as well as "acclaim" surrounding this picture. So, retard that I am, I decided to go see it BEFORE this week's Badass release, Way of the Gun. I would like to apologize right now for my lapse in judgement and lack of support for the Badass movement. What in fuck's name was I thinking. I must have been suffering from temporary trauma induced delusions like the gal of the title.

There are many surprises in the picture. For example, Betty is not really a nurse. I mean you go see a movie called Nurse Betty, you expect AT THE VERY LEAST this Betty gal is a nurse. But no, she is a waitress who wants to be a nurse, and is obsessed with a doctor on this one soap opera. Then Chris Rock and Morgan Freeman kill her fuckwad husband right in front of her, and she goes wacko and goes across the country thinking she has to reunite with her "ex-fiancee", the fictional doctor from the soap opera. So Morgan and Chris follow her around and then she meets the actor who plays the doctor.

But get this, when she calls him by his character name and introduces herself as his ex-fiancee, he doesn't know she is an obsessed fan, he thinks she is an aspiring actress doing an improv exercise with him. So the motherfucker hires her for the show!

So okay, there is alot of funny scenes in there, and at least one dramatic one. But I still couldn't help but feel a little betrayed by the critical Cinematical type community that has been hyping this piece up as the adult sophisticated comedy we have all been waiting for. Yeah, if all you're comparing it to is the farting movies that eddie and martin did. But this is not exactly the next step in the evolution of the laughter. There was one gal in the back of the theater who kept stomping her feet on the floor she was laughing so hard but I don't think most people will be able to bust a gut over this one.

And the more serious beginning scenes had me ready for a little more fucking weight to this picture. I didn't know it was gonna turn out with a totally phoney ending like every other fucking comedy, and with the little title telling what happened to betty. I'm not against combining the comedy and the drama. In fact, I came up with a term for it, if you ever need to describe a combination between a drama and a comedy, you just combine the two words into one it is called a coma. But I don't think this particular combo works all that well. It just don't gel.

I mean I'm not gonna give away that they hire her for the soap opera at the end even after finding out she's a stalker but jesus when you guys see what happens at the end I think you will agree that it's as phoney as a $100 bill made out of a napkin.

Don't get me wrong, this is a fine entertainment picture and enjoyable on at least one level. It has a sweet if obvious message about how you should chase after your dreams, and how these nutballs who stalk John Lennon, David Letterman, Jodie Foster etc. are actually cute and funny. Alls I'm saying is that it's pretty much just a light hollywood comedy about stalking and not anything real edgy or envelope pushy. I heard a certain individual compare it to Pulp Fiction and I must've misunderstood what the motherfucker was saying but it made me expect a little more gravity. This is not a picture that will blow you through the wall unless you're the type of individual that considers "Aaron Brockovich" steve soderberg's best movie. It's more like a script that could have gone to chris columbus, but instead went to whoever the independent fellow is who did it, who was able to make it easier to stomach.

I liked this Aaron Eckhart in his small part as an asshole with a bad haircut. He made the character very believable and hissable, at least until they made him throw out an indian racial slur out of the blue to set up what chris rock does to him. I mean you people who saw this, I dare you to tell me that scene worked. What in fuck's name. Anyway I liked seeing young Chris Rock play a character that was a little different from his usual persona. And I guess Morgan Freeman was good as usual but I couldn't help thinking he was the lite comedy version of Jules Winfield from the aforementioned, underappreciated 1994 crime film Bruce Willis's Pulp Fiction. I guess his character must've seen that movie because his intimidation methodology was lifted wholesale.

I mean we in the audience, it is important for us always to remember Pulp Fiction, and how good it is. But you filmmakers... jesus, forget it! DO NOT LET IT INFLUENCE YOUR DIALOGUE OR CHARACTERS. Never watch it again unless it's just to remind yourself of the standard you are expected to live up to. I wasn't even around most of the '90s even I am about to puke from how much you retards copy mr. tarantino even to this day. Let's move on people it's the year 2000, you are supposed to be copying the matrix now. thank you and have a nice day.