SLEEPAWAY CAMP parts 1-3

There's no way around it: SLEEPAWAY CAMP is a blatant ripoff of FRIDAY THE 13TH. It borrows the summer camp setting, the child with a tormented past and messed up guardian, and the unseen killer who's unmasked in a crazy twist ending that nobody could've seen coming because it came out of nowhere. Alot of slasher movies take the same formula and put it in a different setting, this one takes the same formula and puts it in the same setting. It's like DIE HARD in a building.

The reason it's survived in the popular consciousness, though, is that it has its own weird brand of sleaziness that gives it a feel different from any other slasher movie, including other summer camp slasher movies. For one thing, the kids at the summer camp are played by actual kids. The vast majority of '80s slasher movies were about teens played by actors in their early to mid twenties. And FRIDAY THE 13TH focussed on the counselors. Adrienne King, who played FRIDAY heroine Alice, was 20. Felissa Rose, the star of SLEEPAWAY CAMP, was 13. It makes it more uncomfortable.

Rose plays Angela, a troubled new girl at the camp who barely talks or eats food, maybe because she's so traumatized by that time 8 years ago when her brother and dad were killed by a motorboat. She went to live with her crazy Aunt Martha and her cousin Ricky. Now her and Ricky are enrolled in summer camp.

But please note, this is Camp Arawak, New York, not the much more polite Camp Crystal Lake in Connecticut. These little bastards swear like a sailor who just dropped an anchor on his toe after listening to Redd Foxx records all day. And they're mean. Because Angela is a girl, and because she's new, and because she's weird, the kids swarm in on her. A stuck up girl says Angela has small boobs, makes fun of her for being shy. In a classic bit of kid logic the bully girl argues that Angela must be a lesbian because she doesn't take a shower with the other girls.

Then somebody starts murdering people, mostly the people that are mean to Angela. Who could it be? Protective cousin Ricky? Crazy Aunt Martha? The ghost of her dead brother? The ghost of her dead father? Alternating ghosts of dead brother and father, either in cahoots or separately? Oh, who am I fooling, you all know who the killer is and what she has dangling between her legs at the end. This is a pretty weird movie.

After watching the sequels (and especially the recent RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP), going back and rewatching this it seems to have better production value and filmatism than I originally gave it credit for. For example there are lots of kids in the camp, and they pull up in real school buses. And there's some genuine artfulness involved here and there. The score is good. The opening pan across the empty camp is nicely ominous. The memorable last shot, with that crazy facial expression, is some pretty incredible staging. But to be honest it's the less successful parts that make it enjoyable: the stiff acting, the over-the-top dialogue, the ludicrous methods of murder. I don't understand why a guy taking a shit can't escape from a beehive hanging down into the bathroom stall on a stick, or how the bees so quickly sting him to death. Which is why I like it, I guess.

I think the movie is literally homophobic, as in the filmatists are afraid of gay people. There's a flashback/childhood memory of kids seeing two men in bed together, and this is portrayed as kind of a freaky thing that apparently fucks the kid up for life. I don't know, I don't think it really promotes any existing stereotypes or anything, I don't find it all that offensive but I bet the people who made this movie weren't all that in favor of gay people back when they made this. Whether or not they will be voting for proposition 8 I cannot say. But I doubt they are members of PFLAG.

SLEEPAWAY CAMP is a strangely enjoyable rendition of the classic slasher formula. It is definitely not one of the best ones and yet those weird touches make it a must-see if you're into this type of movie.


SLEEPAWAY CAMP 2: UNHAPPY CAMPERS was made 5 years later by different people. Original director Robert Hiltzik wrote a draft of the screenplay, but they wanted to go in a more "funny" direction so apparently all they used was some of his murder methods. This sequel dumps everything that was original about part 1. Now the kids are played by adults and to take advantage of this they have them already flashing their boobs a few minutes in.

Actually the opening scene is a direct ripoff of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2's opening: part 1 recounted as a ghost story/urban legend around a campfire. After that, though, the basis seems to be all the worst aspects of the ELM STREET sequels: shitty heavy metal theme song, clueless portrayal of teenage life, killer who makes unfunny wisecracks while murdering one-dimensional characters using extravagant methods sometimes inspired by the victim's obsessions or perceived sins. This time Angela (with an assumed last name) becomes a counselor at a different camp called Camp Rolling Hills. She's been through therapy and gotten a sex change and I guess must be nostalgic for that great, great summer she had at Camp Arawak. So this is just a perfect job for her, what a good idea that was for her to come work at a summer camp.

She's got these prudish values instilled in her by Aunt Martha, so when she sees a camper do something she considers immoral - sneak out to tell campfire stories about part 1 with the boys, for example - she kills them and tells everybody she sent them home. It starts to get amusing how brazen she is about it. Does she really believe this won't come back to haunt her, that the parents won't notice their kids didn't come home? That's Rumsfeld planning.

Pamela Springsteen (age 26) plays Angela and yes, I looked it up, she is Bruce Springsteen's sister. She does make the character kind of amusingly clueless, not seeming to understand that she's in the wrong on this one. So the movie is mildly amusing though much farther away from legitimate, effective horror than part 1 was.

But you know, I couldn't help but think the movie has a bit of a puritanical judgmentalness to it. Obviously it's not advocating for actual murder, but it definitely feels like you're supposed to think it sort of serves some of these characters right, and root for Angela. After all, that kid used drugs, drugs are bad, let's burn her alive, etc.

The main thing I remember about this movie from back in the '80s VHS days was not the movie itself, but the cover. It shows some hot chick in cut-offs carrying a backpack with a Jason mask and a Freddy glove in it. There's actually a scene where she kills kids who are dressed as Freddy and Jason, which is the excuse for the cover. But I cannot explain why the woman on the cover is not Pamela Springsteen, or if they expect us to forget this character used to be a boy. Maybe the series isn't homophobic anymore at this point. They definitely want you looking at her cleavage on the cover of part 3, too. The cover model, that is. I assume that's supposed to be Angela, since she's holding a knife, but that's clearly not really her. Then again, who is to say that's really Bruce Springsteen's ass on the cover of Born in the USA? It could be someone else. Maybe the Springsteens didn't do covers back then. It's hard to say.


SLEEPAWAY CAMP 3: TEENAGE WASTELAND

Shot back-to-back with part 2, part 3 is a pretty similar tone with slightly adjusted plot. This time the story begins in New York, where Pamela runs over a girl with a garbage truck, steals her identity and goes to camp. After her last rampage the camp was closed and is now re-opened as Camp New Horizons under new management who are using it for a social experiment where they bring together rich kids and troubled street kids to learn and share and what not.

The troubled street kids are of course the 1989 horror movie idea of a troubled street kid, which is to say they all look about 25 to 30 years old and seem to be dressed up as street toughs for a Halloween party. The title comes from when one of these dipshits (who calls himself Snowboy) for no reason yells "Party all night! Teenage wasteland!" I have no clue what it means, neither did the actor I'm sure or the writer of the line. It's funny man, they got these guys like this in about a thousand movies made between 1978 and 1990, but I never once ran into one in real life. At the very worst you get some smelly fucker in clown makeup arguing with the bus driver about whether he has to pay for his dog to ride. You never get these giggling goofballs like in DEATH WISH movies or guys like this yelling about "partying." I just don't get it. Who writes this stuff? Where does it come from? Do they seriously know people who act like this? Have they seen people like this? Or did one guy make it up at one point and everyone else copied from his test?

To be fair this is not an entirely serious movie, it is definitely trying to be kind of a horror comedy, and it has a good line here or there. I like when one of the rich kids tries to make conversation by saying, "So... you're underpriveleged?" But more often the jokes are along the lines of somebody asking for coke and Angela thinks she means Coke, or some murder pun like - you better swallow any milk or coffee before continuing - she says "It seems every year I'm at camp someone loses their head." But get it, the joke is because she cut off somebody's head. Not because they suddenly become angry or upset, which is one meaning of "losing your head," but because they actually literally lost their head, it was removed from their body and then presumably the body lost track of where it was because of the lack of signal between the brain and body that occurs upon death. That is why it is funny. Think about that one. Let it wash over you.

If a variety of gimmicky murders is a selling point for you, though, it definitely has those. Some of the better ones include tying somebody to a flagpole, lifting and dropping them, and tricking a reporter into snorting Drano instead of coke. Of course that's only after Angela figures out she means cocaine and not Coca-Cola. I still can't get over that crazy mixup, what a bunch of funny stuff they got going on in this one.

The body count is 15, by the way, and the puritanical streak continues. She scolds people about using drugs and about not being virgins, but also about bigotry. Obviously we agree with opposing bigotry, so either we're supposed to kind of agree with her morals, or she is a complex, multi-faceted character with lots of moral grey area and interesting contradictions. You be the judge.

The low point of the movie, and therefore most memorable, is when she kills Riff, the black guy who you will not be that surprised to hear always carries a boombox (or ghetto blaster we called them sometimes in the '80s). She decides to play with him by switching his favorite tape with a recording of her sub-BULWORTH attempt at white person rapping: "Angels are pretty / Angels can fly / and here is the angel that'll make you die! / You got no style and, you got no cares / all ya do is fight and swear / So say your prayers and make amends / 'cause ya life story is about to end!"

This was before Eminem though so nobody expected much out of white rappers.

I cannot make any claims to parts 2 or 3 (or even part 1 come to think of it) being good horror movies. I think "cheesy fun" might apply though, depending on your mood and patience.

10/27/08

RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP (part 4)

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

This is a slasher movie about girls at a slumber party, and a dude with a portable drill. There is no pillow fights or nothing but otherwise it pretty much plays out how you would imagine.

Almost anywhere you read about this movie they say it's a feminist slasher movie. I can see a touch here or there that supports that theory, but I am positive that pretty much every one of these people would be saying it was misogynistic if it was directed by a man. In most respects it's exactly like every other slasher movie of the time, including showing lots of gratuitous female (and not male) nudity. When the girl gets up in the morning you see her take her shirt off to change into a dress. When she goes to school you see lots of nudity in the locker room, including a really funny shot (I'm not sure if it's intentionally funny or not) that pans down and just focuses on a girl's ass for a while before panning back up to where it started. Then during the slumber party they all take their clothes off to change into their night clothes and for the most part don't wear pants for the rest of the movie. The other characters, who don't get naked, wear those tight running shorts that were popular at the time.

Plus, there's a scene where the girls are in the school gym playing basketball, and they're fucking terrible. They can barely dribble, let alone shoot. I thought it was okay, they're just high school kids in gym class. But then they mention that it's not gym class, it's the actual varsity team. You call that feminism? I've seen the Seattle Storm before, I know girls can play basketball.

The alleged feminism in the movie is pretty minor. There is a shot (also used for the movie poster) that goes from between the killer's legs with the drill pointing down to look like a dick, but that's not all that different from Jason's machete or Leatherface's chainsaw (especially in part 2 where in one scene it's almost more of a prosthetic penis than a phallic symbol). At the end one of the girls hacks the drill bit off with a machete and this makes the killer helpless, so the phallic thing is obviously not a coincidence.

When the slumber party attendees first find out there's a killer after them, the two boy characters say "We have to do something to help the girls" and come up with a plan to split up and "make a run for it." Of course, they both immediately get killed. So much for that macho chivalry shit. But I don't think that's anything unusual for the genre either. As most of you know, all the males get killed in the vast majority of slasher movies.

The one and only thing I noticed that I think could be considered a feminist theme unusual to the genre is the way the killer is handled. And this is also the most successful horror aspect of the movie. He has no mask, no gimmick other than the drill, and not much to his backstory. He's just a notorious killer who, we hear on the radio, has escaped. When we see him he's just some dude in a jean jacket and boots. He doesn't make any quips or threats while chasing his victims, so he stays mysterious and you can put yourself in these girls' shoes (or bare feet) because he's just some dude you've never seen before invading the house. But then at the end he finally talks, he tells the girls that they're pretty and that he loves them, and then that they know they want it. And one of the girls says "I don't even know you." It's a pretty good illustration of a guy obsessed with girls from afar who decided because he's sexually attracted to them that he is in love with them. But I guess, like everything else in the movie, calling it feminist might be stretching it.

But since the director (Amy Holden Jones, writer of MYSTIC PIZZA) and the writer (Rita Mae Brown, MURDER SHE PURRED: A MRS. MURPHY MYSTERY) are both women, people are looking for something to interpret in a different way than they would in any other slasher movie. Maybe more than the fact that they're women it's relevant to point out that Brown is in fact a feminist and gay rights activist, and her lesbian coming of age novel Rubyfruit Jungle can actually be seen as a set decoration in the movie. Supposedly she wrote the screenplay as a parody (under the title SLEEPLESS NIGHTS) but then it was directed as a serious movie. I'm not sure how that could be unless either it wasn't a very funny parody or they took out most of the jokes. There are at least three funny parts in the movie, though. There's one part where the younger sister keeps opening and closing the refrigerator part way trying to sneak a beer, but keeps not noticing there's a dead body inside. Another part, one of the girls decides that the way to fight a guy with a drill is with another power tool. The drill in the garage is too small, so she takes a buzzsaw and runs upstairs, but she gets to the end of the extension cord before she can use it. My favorite part though is when the killer is loading dead bodies into the trunk of a car and starts counting them. "One... two... three... four... SHIT!" I don't know if he's mad because there's no more room in the trunk or because his body count isn't high enough.

But that's the kind of humor that fits in a serious horror movie, it never feels like a parody. On the other hand, the acting is generally bad, the dialogue is often atrocious, and do girls really have slumber parties and hang out in their underwear eating pizza? Maybe Brown was saying no and that was where the parody comes in, I'm not sure. If they really wanted to make a slasher movie for women maybe they should've reversed the tables and had men as the victims and sex objects. They would have to pick a male oriented get together such as SUPER BOWL PARTY MASSACRE or FRATERNITY PORN WATCHING MASSACRE or maybe WORLD'S BIGGEST GANG BANG MASSACRE.

I don't know, this is definitely not a classic. The title has the same amount of syllabes as TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but the horror classic it feels most similar to is HALLOWEEN. It's got alot of the same elements - high school girls and some boyfriends as the leads, a killer is loose, faceless shots of the killer driving around spying on the victims, starts out in the day and ends at night in a suburban house, scary movies on TV, making phone calls to friends, banging on the neighbors' door but getting no response, finding friends dead hidden around the house... even the keyboard score sounds a little similar. But of course, it's not shot or especially acted as well as HALLOWEEN, it never feels as real or as tense. It's more gorey than HALLOWEEN, but with lots of unbelievably easy delimbings and beheadings that make it harder to take seriously. The way limbs come off in some of these movies, you'd think we were like insects, with arms and legs designed to pop off if a predator tries to grab us. You'd think we'd be losing those things every time we trip or bump into a wall or anything.

Still, it has a certain something. I sort of enjoyed it. I think the secret is not in the fact that the writer and director are women, but that they are opposites. You see, Rita Mae Brown is the author of a series of popular mystery novels that she allegedly co-writes with her cat Sneaky Pie Brown. Apparently they involve many animals, but the lead character is a cat detective named Mrs. Murphy. Amy Holden Jones, meanwhile, is the writer of the movie BEETHOVEN, not the one with Gary Oldman as Beethoven, but the one about a huge dog that does all kinds of hilarious things that dogs do, although I believe it leaves out the shitting on the floor, the eating vomit, the humping your leg, pissing on things and smelling asses. Anyway, you got a dog person director and a cat person writer, somehow they form this mystical yin and yang balance that creates the perfect vibe for a crappy but somewhat watchable slasher movie.

---

SNAKES ON A PLANE

For me SNAKES ON A PLANE is like an ex-girlfriend: my feelings toward it are complicated. There is alot to say about my relationship with this movie, and I'm gonna try to say it all. But it all boils down to this: I used to think I loved SNAKES ON A PLANE, but now I just want to be friends.

I still fondly remember those glory days when all it was was a title on IMDB for a movie that Ronny Yu was actually gonna direct, and yes it was about what it sounded like it was about. The perfect concept for a Ronny Yu movie and the perfect title for a movie period. So simple, so blunt, so minimalistic, like some kind of Asian poem style that's not as well known as haiku because it's too hard to do, but in this case somebody did it. Four words, four syllables, no more than necessary, no extra flourishes. Boiled down to its basic elements.

When Ronny Yu left I was disappointed, but there was still that title, and Samuel L. Jackson had signed on. Then they changed the title for a while. I went on a big tangent about that in my review for Seagal's SUBMERGED, and as far as I know there wasn't any "internet phenomenon" back then, so maybe I'm a pioneer, I don't know. But you know how it went from there. The title changed back, word spread about SNAKES ON A PLANE. People started "blogging" about it. People started "viral videoing" about it. People started "cafe pressing" about it. Maybe even "krunking" about it, I'm not sure. The current wikipedia entry hyperbolically describes "an entire subculture" based around the title of the movie. The interest on the internet was so huge and so genuine that the New Line Marketing and Human Soul Sucking Dept. decided to take advantage of it and turn it into fake internet interest as well. So they started doing corny advertising bullshit like throwing a contest for bands to make songs about SNAKES ON A PLANE (the video during the end credits is not the contest winner, I have been informed) and to design t-shirts and posters and make the "fan sight of the week" and crap. And they did reshoots "for the fans" and they didn't have critics screenings because it's "for the fans" and you have to wonder, how are you a fan of a movie title? What kind of mileage can you get out of discussing only the title of a movie?

You can get about one inch, and these motherfuckers stretched that inch for months. It wasn't long before this movie I was so excited for I now didn't want to fucking hear about ever again. It's a weird experience because these are the types of movies I get excited about, and I know other people who get excited about them, but we are a small, disreputable segment of society. Some of us are excited for the upcoming WWE Films production of THE MARINE starring Robert Patrick, some wrestler I've never heard of, and ten thousand fiery explosions. Some of us are excited about THE COVENANT. Or at least I am. Because Renny Harlin directed it, so you know that ridiculous trailer is no lie. But if all the sudden excitement and faux-excitement for THE COVENANT or THE MARINE turned into a hugely discussed and dissected international phenomenon, it would be kind of weird, and I would feel kind of uncomfortable about it. Somehow that happened with this one. Maybe there's some of that I-liked-them-when-they-were-a-garage-band syndrome going on there, but I don't really think that's what it is for me.

After seeing thousands of wacky SNAKES related jokes on web sights and in entertainment magazines I actually was in the weird situation of hearing a reporter interviewing moviegoers about whether they would see SNAKES ON A PLANE and why do you think people are so excited about SNAKES ON A PLANE and is it just the title, what do people like so much about the title? And my feeling is that it's one of those things where if you have to ask, then why don't you just mind your own fucking business, you creep. What is there to not understand about why people like the title SNAKES ON A PLANE? Why are you talking to me?

I guess part of my trouble is that I couldn't help but detect some condescension on the part of alot of these, uh, fans. It's not just "what a brilliantly ridiculous concept and title" but "ha ha ha, it will be a bad movie, I will laugh at how bad it is, ha ha they are stupid." This type of attitude sticks in my craw because I don't really get the idea of bad vs. good when it comes to movies like this. To me alot of times what society calls "so bad it's good" I just call "good." (Which I recommend, because it's shorter and easier to say.)

Now this guy on Chud claims that "nobody who was in on the early buzz was looking forward to this movie. The discussion and the jokes weren’t about the movie but about the absurdity of the whole thing. No one who was in on the joke early on felt that they needed to see a movie called Snakes on a Plane. They just couldn’t believe how hilarious it was that someone was making a movie called Snakes on a Plane." Speak for yourself, but everybody I know was excited to see this movie when they first heard about it. If that's the case on the Chud side of the internet then I blame YOU stupid motherfuckers for ruining it for us more sophisticated individuals who want to SEE crazy unusual movies such as a movie called SNAKES ON A PLANE. You have blood on your hands, you fucks. (metaphorical blood representing the mortal wounding of high quality absurdist entertainment at the hands of lame-o wiseass cynics with no appreciation for the great things in life).

That also brings up this whole problem with irony, and my problem with it is that I can't always see the difference between ironic and not ironic in a movie and I'm not sure if it matters or not. This is something I have struggled with. Take for example a movie like DEEP BLUE SEA. It is a straight-faced movie, it is not a comedy or a parody. But at the same time, you cannot tell me that the filmatists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their movie. Not just because they have super-intelligent sharks as the bad guys, but because they play so masterfully on the audience's expectations. They throw every cliche in there, but some of them are just tricks. This is a huge spoiler for that movie so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen it. But the way they set up Samuel L. Jackson's backstory where he was the last survivor of a mountain disaster and blames himself for the other people's deaths... you are convinced that he is the star of the movie and he has to save everybody to redeem himself for failing the mountain disaster victims, thereby saving his soul and becoming a true hero. But early in the movie, he's making a big speech and, completely out of the fuckin blue, a shark jumps out of the water and bites his head off. A classic moment. You can't tell me that the brilliance of that scene was an accident. They knew what they were doing. So what is that, is that ironic? It's a serious movie, but it knows it's absurd. I've always wished I had a name for this type of movie that is completely retarded, but knowingly so, but not tongue in cheek either. I thought maybe "noronic" would work, because it combines "ironic" with "not ironic," and it sounds like "moronic," which is what most people mistake these movies for. But I don't really like the sound of that word so I'm sticking with "Renny Harlin movies" as the name for that type of style.

Anyway, I seem to have a different idea of what's smart and what's dumb in these type of movies than most people do, so I get uncomfortable with everybody laughing at SNAKES ON A PLANE. I don't know if they're on my side or not.

I bring all this shit up because, now that I've seen SNAKES ON A PLANE, it turns out it really is just "an internet phenomenon," which in my opinion is nothing to brag about. An internet phenomenon is, like, that dancing baby they had on Alley McBeal. It has less substance than a fad like pet rocks or wearing your pants backwards. At best, it's an embarrassing craze like "Who Let the Dogs Out" or the macaroni. It's the kind of thing that fills up the hollow heads of those wiseasses on the various VH1 listing shows. This is the show where we list internet phenomenons and then we say wacky stuff about it.

And oh well, so be it. SNAKES ON A PLANE is not unwatchable. I wasn't bored. I've seen worse. I laughed a couple times. But you know me, I believe in striving for excellence. And the SNAKES ON A PLANE I pictured when I first read that title as the next Ronny Yu movie was truly an excellent movie. The SNAKES ON A PLANE that actually exists is not, it is a half-assed enterprise that coasts on the power of its basic premise but never excels in any area past the title.

Some people will tell you that "it's supposed to be bad" and if you hold it to any standard other than "does it have a group of snakes physically located on some sort of winged, flying vehicle?" then you're being a snob and you don't understand it, blah blah blah. Well fuck those people, they don't understand it either. Because I believe STONE COLD is a classic. I believe ROAD HOUSE is a classic. I believe ON DEADLY GROUND is a classic. And I believe SNAKES ON A PLANE should be a classic, not just an okay movie with a legendary title.

Obviously the main thing people are gonna want out of this movie is snakes biting people on a plane, and you do get that. There is the funny part where the oxygen masks fall down along with snakes. A snake bites a nipple, a snake bites a dick, a snake bites an ass. People say "you have a snake on your ass" and some variation or other of "I have a snake on my dick." A snake bites an eye, and crawls out of a mouth. There is, of course, a guy who's a real asshole so that you know immediately that he will get the best death. And then they're smart enough to make him disappear until his death so you don't have to deal with him too much. He's the guy whose head gets swallowed by a giant anaconda or boa constrictor of some kind. That's by far the best death but, for some reason I can't figure out, they cut away early. Another good use of horror movie cliches is the first people to die, a couple who are not only fucking in the bathroom, but smoking weed. You see, tampering with smoke detectors is a federal crime, and also a snake could crawl through the hole and bite you.

I think the snake mayhem could've been done alot better though. Except for the handful of parts where they focus on one particular snake attack (like the head swallowing), all the snake parts are messy and chaotic. The camera shakes around and there's people flailing around everywhere screaming, so you can't clearly follow the action.

They do get a little nasty and have a couple cute animals eaten by snakes. But not a baby. One weird choice is that there are two little kids flying without parents on the plane, and the youngest one spends the entire movie crying. First because he's afraid to go on a plane without his parents, and then because he's been bit by a snake and his wrist has swollen to the size of a softball. This is not played for laughs and the kid actors are believable, sympathetic kids, not typical child actors. So it takes some of the fun out of it to see this poor bastard being tormented like that.

Some of the CGI is really fake lookin, but I didn't have a big problem with that. I just didn't think the storytelling made the snakes into a legitimate threat. If the script says it's snake mayhem time they're everywhere, if it's dialogue time they're nowhere. I never felt that "oh shit, one could crawl out at any moment" feeling you would expect to get in a movie about this topic.

The biggest problem with the movie though is that they waste Samuel L. Jackson. Here you have one of the coolest, most badass actors currently working, and he happens to be ridiculously enthusiastic about and protective of the movie. You would think you would be sure to turn his "FBI Agent Nelville Flynn" into an indelible silver screen hero. At the end of this movie we should be thinking, "Damn, I'd watch another Nelville Flynn movie even if it DIDN'T involve any type of deadly animal loose in any sort of unusual location."

Unfortunately, like the movie coasts on its snakes, the character coasts on just being Sam Jackson. I mean he's pretty cool pointing a gun, he does a couple cool things. But he's not very memorable and he's not even on screen for alot of the movie. And in the end it's Keenan Thompson from GOOD BURGER and FAT ALBERT who does the most difficult maneuver. He lands the plane using the xXx "I learned to shoot from playing Playstation" type explanation. This would be funny if they just said it and then treated it seriously, but instead they try to milk it for comedy for several minutes and they ruin the whole thing. Otherwise, the movie mostly plays it straight, so I give it points for that.

They also miscast one of the main characters, a famous rapper named Triple-G who's afraid of germs. One of the good joke lines is when Agent Flynn finds out the guy's real name is Clarence and refers to him by his name condescendingly. But this was obviously meant to cut down a tough gangsta rapper type of guy, when the guy they cast looks like Urkel dressed up as Jamie Foxx. Turns out he's the guy who played Michael Jackson in the MAN IN THE MIRROR tv movie. Like they couldn't have found a real rapper to play that character? Are you kidding me? But that's a small complaint. And I got some big ones left.

The movie sets up multiple opportunities for the good ol' b-movie/popcorn/pulp/entertainment/leave-your-brain-at-the-door/come-on-man-it's-fun-stop-being-such-an-asshole type action that everybody claims this movie is about, and then it doesn't fucking take them. Could somebody PLEASE tell me how the fuck they managed to spend an entire scene explaining that one of the passengers is a kickboxer... AND THEN NOT HAVE HIM KICKING ANY SNAKES?

When I came out of this movie I wasn't mad at all, I just thought, "Oh well, shouldn't have had my hopes up so high." But as I think about it I'm getting worked up because honestly, if there had been a solid kickboxer-vs.-snakes scene in here it could have completely changed my view of the movie in a positive direction. Not only do they explain that he's a competitive kickboxer, they make him look like a martial arts character, with a sleeveless shirt and tattoos. In a later scene he appears out of nowhere to carry a woman to safety on his back. I guess it's possible he kicked one snake during that part but if so they shot it Michael Bay enough that I didn't catch it. If you put this scene in a movie like this you must know that the audience is gonna expect the guy to kick some snakes around. And come on, that's not a good way to tweak audience expectations. "Oooh, you know what we should do? We should act like we're gonna do something cool... and then not do it! Just do other stuff that's not as cool! They'll never know what hit em!" So if you're a good filmatist you have him kick some snakes, preferably in a long and building scene of awe inspiring absurdity. Or if you're a pussy, you at least take out the part about him being a kickboxer so people won't be disappointed.

And what about the villain? The plot revolves around a bland white chump (Nathan Phillips, I guess?) witnessing notorious mobster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) murdering a prosecutor. Jackson is transporting the witness so, to kill the witness, Eddie Kim has the snakes put on the plane. Lawson is not a well known actor, I guess he was a stunt man on CRYING FREEMAN and had bit parts in THE CORRUPTOR and ROMEO MUST DIE. But he's established as a good, vicious villain and in the beginning they even have a scene where he has his shirt off, with hair like Bruce Lee, doing martial arts.

Now, director David R. Ellis may not have seen movies before, but those of us who have know that when the villain does martial arts in the beginning, that is movie code for "there will be an awesome fight scene at the end." It's especially used when they have to establish early on that the guy does martial arts (or swords, or whatever) so that it doesn't seem out of the blue when he starts busting out fancy moves later on. For example, Craig T. Nelson does martial arts early on in ACTION JACKSON so you won't laugh as hard when he fights Carl Weathers at the end.

But in this movie, there is no fight scene at the end. In fact, you don't even see the villain at all at the end, or find out if the guy ever testified against him. I know they're assuming the audience only cares about the snakes on the plane and doesn't care about the plot. Well fine, then why did you have a plot in the first place? Maybe you should've just said, "Oh weird, there's snakes on this plane!" and leave it at that.

I say fuck that attitude. I want to see the villain get defeated at the end. I know they don't want to get too far away from the snakes on the plane... so have him show up on the tarmac, if it's so damn important to you. He lives in LA and he has moles in airport security, so he could get there. Then he could fight the kickboxer, he could fight Sam Jackson, and of course ultimately he would die at the fangs of a leftover snake. Personally I'd rather see Sam Jackson beat him to death using a big snake as a whip, but I gotta accept that this is not an imaginative movie and they're gonna go with snake bite.

There are a couple absurd lines that I loved. At one point a guy asks Eddie Kim if he's sure he wants to do this snakes thing, and he says he's exhausted all other possibilites. (I'd like to see the other possibilities at the bottom of the list, but above releasing poisonous snakes on the airplane. Did he try poisoning the guy's motorcycle seat? Releasing piranhas where he surfs? I didn't see poisonous spiders released in the guy's apartment. In fact, I think sending two gunmen to his apartment was the only other thing he tried.) Another line I liked, as Jackson's partner dies he says something like, "We missed the bastards because they're cold-blooded!" Unfortunately the movie is really noisy and never edited to emphasize the good lines so they kind of get lost in the mix.

There is one line that gets alot of emphasis, the line you already know, and honestly this part made me embarrassed for Sam Jackson, for movie fans, for the internet, and for white people. If you haven't heard, at the climax of the movie Sam Jackson says, "That's it! I have HAD IT with these motherfucking SNAKES on this motherfucking PLANE!" If I'm not mistaken that was a line that somebody in a talkback insisted had to be in the movie. Whoever first said it, the filmatists added it in reshoots because "the fans demanded it." And that shit bugs me.

Because that is not a natural Sam Jackson badass line. That's a white guy on the internet making up what he thinks Sam Jackson would say. I mean, obviously I enjoy the word motherfucker. I bet I use it more than any other writer on the films of cinema. Maltin, Shalit, Medved - none of these clowns come close to me on frequency or power when it comes to the use of motherfucker. But even those guys could tell you that you don't use "motherfucking" twice in one sentence. I mean come on, it doesn't even sound right. I understand Jackson uses the word well, and obviously he was the guy with the bad motherfucker wallet. But I still think it's borderline racist how all these jokers just want to hear him say "motherfucker" a bunch of times. Ha ha make the strong black man say motherfucker for us, what a great time at the movies. But I don't know. Jackson seems proud of the line when he's on talk shows, so who am I to question its authenticity as a Sam Jackson line? All I know is it sure bummed me out in the movie, completely forced and phoney.

One person I think deserves some praise is Julianna Margulies, because she plays her role as the lead flight attendant with complete conviction. She doesn't act like she's slumming and she doesn't try to be funny. She just plays a character in a disastrous situation trying to help people. I honestly appreciate that they made a serious movie and didn't try to turn it into some comedy to prove they were in on the joke. But this is not nearly as fun as DEEP BLUE SEA, which the director, David R. Ellis, was second unit director on. He's best known for directing FINAL DESTINATION 2. I think that one's a little overrated, but you gotta admire the meticulously constructed highway death sequence, with all its red herrings, complex but understandable geography, and carefully choreographed stunt/CGI spectacle. That section alone had more imagination and care than all of SNAKES ON A PLANE, I'm afraid.

The cover story in Entertainment Weekly a couple weeks ago explained it: "Ellis, 53, was yearning for something more respectable, like Crash or Hustle & Flow. 'When they said Snakes on a Plane, I thought, F--- me,' he recalls. He jokes that he got over himself when he realized he had bills to pay." Great, you fire Ronny Yu for a guy who doesn't even want to do it? Thanks alot.

The part that makes me sad is that I really believe Yu could've made the better movie SNAKES deserved to be. Of course, I'm a guy who really liked FREDDY VS. JASON, so I have a different appreciation for his style than your average human being. But I think his movies offer all kinds of evidence of what he might've done:

I didn't really like THE 51ST STATE/FORMULA 51, but I did like Sam Jackson in it. I mean, that scene with the golf club. And the very end when we find out why he wears a kilt. The movie kind of sucked, but it is a memorable character. So we know Yu knows how to showcase Jackson properly.

WARRIORS OF VIRTUE and BRIDE OF CHUCKY have extensive use of groundbreaking animatronic technology. So I think he could've pulled off the puppet snakes Ellis tried to use before he gave up and switched to all CGI.

All of Yu's movies, including BRIDE OF CHUCKY, are beautifully designed and shot. He would've definitely made a much better looking movie. No question on that one.

He's also a master of Hong Kong style action, where they shoot it in such a way that the audience can understand what the fuck is going on. I think all the mayhem would've been alot more involving if Yu did it.

And finally, perhaps most importantly, NO WAY Ronny Yu would've dropped the ball on that kickboxer business. I mean, he managed to get martial arts into BRIDE OF CHUCKY and wrestling into FREDDY VS. JASON. He would've shown no restraint and no shame when it comes to a kickboxer beating up a bunch of snakes.

So I'm sorry, I know how "the critics" are supposed to be these elitists who don't understand a movie that's just about people getting eaten, so now I'm one of those critics I guess. But believe me, I understand movies just about people getting eaten. I love movies that are just about people getting eaten. I just happen to have more respect for the potential of those type of movies than some people do. Come on Sam. It could've been beautiful. It's okay, but I would've preferred beautiful. Thanks for your efforts though, you're still the man.

--VERN

credentials:
Rant about SNAKES ON A PLANE title change included in my review of SUBMERGED starring Steven Seagal
Guy with "snakesonaplane.blogspot" domain says he first heard about the movie from me

---

SOLARIS (2002)

Well that young bald man Steve Soderbergh is still on a roll. He just keeps hittin em, bam bam bam and even when they're not a home run like THE LIMEY or OUT OF SIGHT they're still real good. Hell, even FULL FRONTAL, he just squirted that one out like a soft ice cream, and it was pretty good ice cream too. This one is a little more of a sunday. It's not my favorite soderbergh movie but that's like saying "that's not necessarily the greatest blowjob I ever got." This guy has never made a bad movie. Go ahead, try to find one. You can't. You would have to make a fake movie and put his name on it. But he didn't make that one, you did. You can't fool me. Fool me once, shame, shame, you can't fool me.

First of all let me make it clear that I am ignorant on the topic of Solaris. I have not seen the legendarily long and boring and brilliant Russian version by Mr. Tartavsky. Also I have not read the book which is according to the credits what Mr. Soderbergh's version is based on. But I did see this movie. So that's my background on that one.

What it is is a sci-fi picture with no action scenes, no lasers or robots, no zips or booms or bleeping computers or aliens or presidents fighting aliens or scientists capturing aliens to train them to do tricks. George Clooney gets called up to a space station to, you know, help out. The trouble is, weird shit keeps happening. As soon as he steps on the ship he finds bloodstains all over the place. He meets Jeremy Davies, the guy from SPANKING THE MONKEY who looks exactly like the kid from E.T. IS A EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. Mr. Davies does a great job playing a freaked out stoner nutball who swings his hands around and keeps saying, "Yeah..." as he casually explains that most of the doctors are dead or have disappeared.

But then other people keep showing up on the ship, people who shouldn't be there, like Clooney's dead wife. Now what the hell are these people? Are they ghos†s? Aliens? Ghost aliens? Fortunately, the movie doesn't tell you. There isn't even a long speech giving a theory about what they MAY be. It's just up to you. The questions they ask are not as much why is my dead wife here on the ship with me as, do you think it would be okay if I just keep her around? So you gotta think of the moral implications of that, etc. And not to give anything away but they never implant themselves inside the humans or hijack the ship or lay eggs or set a course for earth or rip off their faces to reveal that they are really lizards or bugs or grey guys with big black eyes.

It is very quiet, only a couple characters, lots of long, thoughtful conversations in plain old rooms on a spaceship. Even the flashbacks on earth are about relationships and they are shot just like a Soderbergh movie. (which is what this is, in my opinion.) There is a scene where George Clooney is in a restaraunt with his lady friend and it looks just like that scene in OUT OF SIGHT where he meets Jennifer Lopez in the hotel bar, only he's wearing a weird collarless shirt. Because it's the future.

I like this movie's version of the future. When he walks on a city street, it's just a city street. When he's in a restaraunt, there are no robots or holograms serving the food. Everything's pretty much normal except you can go to space easier and the news is on a floating screen and is even more crammed with useless logos and charts than it is now. And the clothes are weird, but in a subtle way. They're clothes we'd wear now but with some small alteration that makes them look weird. But George Clooney looks good in them. Maybe if they don't release enough period pieces this year it will get an oscar nomination for the costumes.

Clooney is an interesting case because he's a huge movie star, and yet most people don't hate him. Even after FIGHT CLUB there are many people who hate Brad Pitt. He's a pretty boy. He's married to some gal from FRIENDS or EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND or one of those type of shows. People use him as a symbol of empty headed hollywood plastic people. They hate him. Even if they loved him in SEVEN and FIGHT CLUB and TWELVE MONKEYS and let's say KALIFORNIA or something, still, he comes out with a new movie and they go, "Ah, shit, Brad Pitt!?"

But George Clooney, I don't think many people feel that way about him. Maybe they did before, but then Soderbergh taught him to stop bobbing his head up and down. The women think he's sexy and will be happy that his ass is shown in two scenes in this movie. And the men can like him too because he's manly, but not Schwarzenegger. He's charming and he seems pretty smart. But not in a fancypants kind of way. He's the closest we have to Cary Grant in modern USA cinema. And he's made pretty good choices ever since he stared into the abyss of that Robin and Batman movie. There was OUT OF SIGHT and O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU and OCEAN'S 11 and now he's directing a Charlie Kaufman picture. Not a bad run. Nothing weird enough to scare off the Access Hollywood fuckers but, at the same time, genuinely good movies that people with brains can watch and not die or puke.

This one's different though because, in the words of some song that they play on the mtv music channel, "I don't think you're ready for this jelly." It really is a quiet movie, I mean real quiet, like it's designed to make you hear all of the squirming and seat shifting throughout the theater. And some of the people when I saw it, in my opinion, did not like the movie. It was so slow they were shifting in their seats before it started.

I think I've seen all of Soderbergh's pictures, and of all of them this reminded me most of the best one, THE LIMEY. It really has nothing in common with it except a pulsing, whispery, hypnotic type feel, and a regretful look at the past. The Limey mourned the loss of his daughter and tried to fill that emptiness by finding out who was responsible and killing the motherfucker. Clooney is a little more cultured so what he does is fly into space and let a weird glowing planet nearby create a mysterious replication of his memories of his dead wife.

And even more than THE LIMEY, I don't think mainstream Blockbuster Video type audiences are going to want to see this crap. I really liked it though. I think Clooney was even a little better than usual. I think it is very refreshing to see a slickly made outer space movie (with very good space effects) where the most memorable scenes are people sitting around talking, or walking around not talking, or eating noodles naked on a bed. A movie about, you know, contemplating and shit. But if you're not into that type of movie then this one will probaly seem to you like FINAL FANTASY seemed to me.

Some day I will have to watch the 4 hour Russian version that everybody swears by. But this one doesn't exactly get me excited for it since it seemed long at 95 minutes. It's not a movie you want to see when you're tired. Or maybe you do. For me it became sort of an interactive type deal. I fell asleep during a part where, I guess, he got rid of the Solaris-wife. So then when the second Solaris-wife found out that he got rid of the first Solaris-wife, I thought they had deliberately not shown us that so that it would be a surprise. So I got to see a different, trickier kind of story than the the people who laughed at me after the movie did. Suckers.

---

SOLDIER

After seeing Paul Not Thomas Anderson's remake of DEATH RACE 2000 and finding it surprisingly enjoyable, I decided to finally go back and see that Kurt Russell movie he made more than ten years ago that I wanted to see but didn't because everyone said was garbage. And maybe the lowered expectations helped, but I thought SOLDIER was a good one.

The movie begins in the '90s with a group of babies being taken out of a hospital into military custody (wonder if the parents noticed?) where they will be raised to be super soldiers. The opening is a montage of these soldiers from infancy to their 40s, being indoctrinated, training and participating in various intergalactic conflicts. I was impressed that I could immediately tell which kid was supposed to be Kurt Russell. I thought they did an amazing job of finding a kid who looked like him, but then I found out they just cast his son, which is kind of cheating. Anyway this character's name is Todd, but don't worry, if you forget that it's tattooed on his face, they all have their names and numbers tattooed on their faces. (I honestly think it would be cool if the movie was called TODD.)

Of course, they get the usual kind of training - running, shooting practice, etc. - but also they have to watch three dobermans fight a boar without looking away. So you can understand how this kid grows up into a stoic, glassy-eyed Kurt Russell, sort of channeling Michael Dudikoff in AMERICAN NINJA. I don't mean that as mockery either, I thought Kurt Russell was great in this role. He is credible as a great soldier and also as a sort of Frankenstein monster who doesn't know how to relate to normal humans.

The real story begins when the soldiers are in peace time ("in between wars"), pretty much just sitting there motionless. (That's what they do.) Todd is the best of the bunch, so he gets to sit at the front. Then Jason Isaacs (with sinister mustache) shows up to brag about his new model of super soldiers, distinguished by their tank tops and led by Caine (Jason Scott Lee, now bald and looking about twice as big as he was when he played Bruce Lee.)

Gary Busey, who commands the old models, wants to stick with them because they've done a good job and he doesn't see how these new ones could be so much better. (Sort of how I feel about Blu-Ray vs. DVD.) The difference is that the new ones were created from ideal DNA profiles, no more of that bullshit of just taking any old baby and training it from birth. They're starting earlier.
So to test them out, Todd and Caine are pitted against each other in a series of tests, including running 15 miles, climbing a chain, and fighting to the death. I like this because Busey is standing up for Todd and the others, he obviously feels bad for them being tossed off like obsolete machines, and yet he still treats them like machines, commanding them to fight other people. At best he's treating them like fighting chickens.

Not surprisingly, Caine wins, and Todd and two others are thrown in the garbage. But Todd's not quite dead, so he ends up a refugee on the landfill planet where all the garbage gets dumped.

So then it's kind of a western, this mysterious killer drifts into a colony formed from the survivors of a space ship crash. They welcome him. He saves a guy's life. But he scares the shit out of everybody, and their merrymaking scares him. It seems like anything could set him off. He trains by using a big metal engine as a punching bag. Then a guy gives him a scarf.

In a way, Todd is the classic troubled Vietnam vet. He is John Rambo. They taught him how to kill but they didn't teach him how to turn it off. In fact, they literally didn't teach him anything else, he's been doing this shit since he was born. I bet he never even read Paddington Bear or anything like that.
So Todd gets cast away from the colony, but when those people are endangered by the super soldiers who also rejected him he chooses the side of the civilians.

This is a beautiful action movie setup for many reasons. He gets to prove himself to the colony by showing that his skills can help them. He gets to prove himself to the military by destroying their supposedly superior new models. And the geography and characteristics of the battleground have been carefully and subtly set up earlier in the movie, making for some satisfying payoffs. It's also cool because he does take them on single-handedly. Connie Nielsen tells him they are not cowards and that they will help, so you figure he'll teach them some moves and give them weapons. That's what usually happens. But he tells them no, he will handle it himself, so you figure at some point he'll be in trouble and then they'll all come out and show their solidarity by risking themselves for him... but that doesn't happen either. Nope, it's Kurt Russell vs. everybody.

I can't pretend to understand the reasons people hated this movie, but I bet part of it comes from the pedigree of the script. It was written by David Webb Peoples, one of the writers of BLADE RUNNER and the writer of UNFORGIVEN. At least one of those is a masterpiece, and most people would say both. They are movies that try to transcend their genre a little, and say something about the human condition or some shit like that. So that's what people want from this movie, even knowing it's the director of god damn MORTAL KOMBAT. Making expectations even higher, it was said that the script took place in the same world as BLADE RUNNER, and apparently there are some visual references to that in the movie (although I never noticed them).

Well, Paul W.S. Anderson is no Ridley-Scott-at-his-peak. I can see how this script could've been given to a better director and it could've been a masterpiece. If this same story took place in a more vivid and atmospheric type of world, like an ALIEN, it would be one for the record books. Instead it feels kind of like a precursor to CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. I think that's where my colleague Mr. Knowles was coming from 11 years ago when he complained that they didn't have some battle that was in the script and the acting is the worst ever and the movie is shit. He was imagining the groundbreaking sci-fi masterpiece it maybe could've been, who knows.

But you know, coulda woulda shoulda. For what it is, SOLDIER is very enjoyable. When held up to UNFORGIVEN, yes, it is bad. But compared to UNIVERSAL SOLDIER it's fucking great. If you see it as lowbrow sci-fi action it actually transcends its genre because it seems serious about this poetic idea of a killer finding a small piece of humanity. I'm not saying this is THEY LIVE or anything, but it's somewhere near that neighborhood, the effective b-movie that also has a little something to say if you're open to it.

1/27/09

---

SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME!

John Carpenter is on my list of top directors. HALLOWEEN, THE THING, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THEY LIVE - all by the same guy? Not to mention DARK STAR, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA... well, you have IMDb. Point is the guy has done a tone of what I consider classics, and most of the rest are real good or at least pretty interesting. I'll watch any of them. I watched BODY BAGS last year. I watched MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, and it wasn't too bad actually. The two MASTERS OF HORROR episodes he did with my internet buds Moriarty and Scott Swan were cool as far as TV goes. Even VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, I was surprised, that was pretty good too. And CHRISTINE. The guy is good.

So a couple weeks ago I realized, shit, I've seen all of 'em except ELVIS: THE MOVIE. I'd been meaning to rent that one and so that day I finally decided to do it, get everything on the John Carpenter list crossed off. It was a 3 hour TV movie originally but the VHS release is a 2 hour theatrical cut. It's slick and well made and it's basically every musician biopic cliche all lined up in a row: the discovery of talent, the loyalty to old friends, spending money on the naive parents, the first girlfriend who leaves him, the new love, winning over her parents, the honeymoon is over (why the fuck you gonna marry Elvis and then ask him to stop doing music!?), the fall from grace, the amazing comeback.

I'll be damned if I know what connects this stylistically to Carpenter. It'd be funny if it had his keyboard scoring, but it doesn't. Historically though it's monumental because this is where Carpenter met Kurt Russell. And Russell is fucking great, scowling and gyrating and just being Elvis. To do that much Elvis impersonating without seeming ridiculous is a real feat.

I even thought wait a minute - Bruce Campbell won't do the sequel to BUBBA HO-TEP for whatever mysterious reason. Nobody thinks they can recast it. But what if Kurt Russell would do it? Then it could be a sequel to BUBBA HO-TEP and to ELVIS: THE MOVIE. He'd probaly want too much money but they at least gotta ask. That's the one guy who would be a step up.

Anyway, I saw ELVIS: THE MOVIE. So that's it. I'd seen them all then. The whole John Carpenter filmography from front to back. Well, everything except that other TV movie he did that year, but they never released that on video.

Later the same day I'm talking to a buddy, not even about Carpenter, and he says "You excited about SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! coming out?"

So here we are in a world where SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! is available on DVD, and now I've seen that one too. It stars Lauren Hutton as a smartass director of live TV, new to L.A., who moves into a fancy apartment on the 43rd or so floor of a highrise. It faces another highrise, two seas of windows pointing at each other. So it's hard for her to figure out who exactly it is over there that's watching her in a telescope, calling her, and sneaking in when she's not home. He's playing a game, sending her packages, even a telescope so she can try to find him. Fuckin perverted astronomists.

Carpenter wrote the script and it has alot of smart little details. Like how her job as a director mirrors the voyeurism of her stalker, she's watching all these cameras and controlling everthing through a microphone from another room. Or the way she talks to herself, so the first time the stalker spots her he can see this and I wondered if maybe this is what he likes about her, maybe he pretends she's talking to him, or maybe he feels he's invading her thoughts when he bugs her and hears things no one is intended to hear. Also I like the way men are always hitting on her and she knows how to hand it, so when she's getting stalked she refuses to move away. She wants to beat this fucker at his own game. The only part I thought was dumb was that she leaves her curtains open, and even has sex with her boyfriend out in the open, and doesn't think about that she's obviously being watched.

Carpenter didn't do the score. It's a perfectly fine and normal orchestral thriller score. But it makes you realize that in the beginning Carpenter must've done the scores himself because he couldn't afford to hire somebody else, not because he knew how perfect his style would be. Thank God he didn't get a normal composer for HALLOWEEN (which he started filming 2 weeks after he finished this one).

In other ways though it does feel like Carpenter, and it definitely rises above being a TV movie. I'm not gonna say it's as good as DUEL, but man, isn't weird to think they used to make TV movies this good? This could pass for a theatrical release if it wasn't full frame. Like the opening of HALLOWEEN he uses POV shots (both for the stalker and the victim) very effectively. He keeps the stalker mostly faceless, you usually just see an eye in closeup or catch a glimpse of him darting through her apartment behind her back. God damn, a TV movie that's more tense than most theatrical thrillers and horrors these days!

It also has future Carpenter regular/ex-wife Adrienne Barbeau, playing a lesbian but looking less butch than usual. And Charles Cyphers, the sherriff of Haddonfield in HALLOWEEN, plays almost the same role here. Guess he got transferred.

So now it's up to John Carpenter to make some new movies so I can reinstate a checklist. Otherwise it's all over for me. But he's had a good run and I thank and congratulate him for his valor. If you are going down your checklist I recommend putting SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME! high up. Don't let the TV movie thing scare you off, this is his best television work and better than some of the theatrical releases.

---

SORCERER

If you're a never-give-up Rocky Balboa type of dude, a real achiever, or if you have to carry heavy objects alot as part of a job or strongman competition, then you know this feeling: your body is exhausted, bruised, broken, covered in sweat, maybe some blood, your task seems impossible, but you're too stubborn to give up. You keep going until you're done, powered by the sheer force of will. That's what the second half of SORCERER is about. Four guys, two trucks, a bunch of nitroglycerin, and miles of untamed South American jungle. They gotta drive the nitro without blowing up, because it's needed to put out an oil fire, ON DEADLY GROUND style. The job is ridiculously dangerous so it pays well, and they're doing it for the pay day. They're all fugitives hiding out here for a wide selection of crimes and the money they'll get represents a chance to start over somewhere nicer. (The first half sets all this up.)

So there they are, in a couple of fucked up trucks, rolling over craggy roads, along the edges of cliffs, through swamps and across the shakiest bridges you've ever seen. And who better to lead the charge than Roy Scheider*? I think he's the right man for the job, and if you disagree I think you will change your mind pretty quick when you watch the movie. In one harrowing scene they come to a broken rope bridge in the middle of a storm. It seems logical to give up at this point, but Roy refuses. He has his partner crawl across the bridge guiding him inch by inch all the way across. It's a terrifying ordeal that seems to take forever and then the second they're safely across the movie cuts to the other truck getting to the bridge and having to do the same damn thing. No time to catch your breath.

[*actually there's one person that might've been better, that's Steve McQueen, who almost starred in the movie. But he was having trouble with his marriage to Ali Macgraw and wanted Friedkin to make her a producer so she could be on location with him, Friedkin said no and the rest is Scheidermania. That's too bad but just try to forget I told you that and appreciate that Scheider was a good second choice)

Another great scene has them come to a redwood sized tree in the road, and Roy still can't give up. He flips out, gets his machete and starts whacking, ranting about carving a path around the tree, how he'll only have to cut down 8 other trees. The other guys just look at him like they feel sorry for him. We always liked Roy Scheider's damn fool mind, too bad he lost it. But one of these guys was a bomber in Jerusalem. Not one of the more admirable trades, in my opinion, but one that comes in handy for this particular situation. He's examining the tree and he says, "I think I can do it." And then you get to see him try.

Friedkin's filmatism is smokin in this one. More of that confidence to tell a story the way he wants to instead of the way you expect. The beginning of the movie introduces each of the characters at the tail ends of their criminal endeavors. It doesn't coddle you with context or explaining that these characters will connect later. It skips between four different countries. And it takes its sweet time. But then when it finally does cut to the next scene it's WHOOMF, right into the action. Good editing.

It's a remake of WAGES OF FEAR and maybe that's why it doesn't feel like an American movie. I haven't seen the original but from what I gather the only huge departure here is that sorcerer that comes out at the end and starts shooting magical wizard rays at everybody. That was a little airbrushed-on-the-side-of-a-van for my tastes, but-- nah, I'm just fuckin with you, there's no sorcerer in the movie at all. Supposed to be some kind of a metaphor. Oh well, even a sorcerer knows you win some, you lose some.

An artsy fartsy idea that does pay off is getting The Tangerine Dreams to do the score. It doesn't pop up much but when it does it's John Carpentery, a little Gobliny, adds to the drive of the journey.

This is kind of a sad turning point in Friedkin's filmography because it was after THE EXORCIST and THE FRENCH CONNECTION but then it went over budget, his behavior on set pissed people off and it was a huge flop competing against STAR WARS. It didn't totally Cimino his career, but it took away his right to do whatever the fuck he wants with his movies. It wasted his get out of jail free card. Still, looking back now I don't think there's much doubt that it's one of his best.

Long story short: SORCERER is MAGIC!

---

SOUTHERN COMFORT

Okay, this group of National Guardsmen (Peter Coyote, Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, others) are on one of them training exercises, right? Basically, they gotta go out into the Louisiana swamp with a map, try to locate this one particular place. To practice their navigation skills. Most of them aren't taking the job too seriously, paying more attention to their plans to hook up with some whores when they're done. I mean they're carrying guns, but with blanks, because who are they gonna shoot at anyway. There's no enemy in this exercise.

And then they get to some water, and they realize either they're reading the map wrong or the water has shifted and the chunk of land they're supposed to find is now a chunk of underwater.

They come across somebody's camp site, where there's some flayed animals hanging around, and a couple of canoes. And after some debate they decide, against Peter Coyote's better judgment, to borrow the canoes. But they leave a note.

When they're out in the water they look back and see some "indigenous" Cajun dudes on the shore, apparently the owners of the canoes. While they're trying to yell to them to read the note, one of these soldiers decides to be a wiseguy, shoots a bunch of blanks in the Cajuns' direction with a machine gun. Ha ha, very funny.

So then the Cajuns fire back with real bullets, and blow Peter Coyote's damn head off. And you can imagine where the movie would go from there. Directed by Walter Hill, this disturbing swampland war story is, I'm sure, supposed to be about Vietnam. But there is no way to watch it today without thinking about Iraq.

I mean here you got this group of americans, some of them acting like knuckleheads. They come in this place and they don't understand the culture, they sort of look down on them. They don't speak the language or understand the way of life. They borrow people's property without permission, figuring it's not a big deal. And inevitably the people whose land they're intruding on take it the wrong way. They fight back. They set up booby traps. And they know the land better. They know where to hide and how to track them.

Eventually the soldiers get a prisoner (the late great Brion James). Because he's Cajun, they lump him in with the people who killed Peter Coyote, even though they really have no idea if he's connected or not. Some of them treat him badly, punch him in the face, start talking about revenge. One of them starts acting completely insane, runs around with a cross painted on his chest, setting off dynamite. And the others aren't really sure what to say about it. Kind of like, "Uh, boss, are you sure we should be stacking up naked people and taking novelty pictures of them?" Things get out of control in these situations.

And then when the last survivors make it into town, they have no idea who are the "good Cajuns" and who are trying to kill them. That's how it works in Vietnam or Iraq or Louisiana. We're not talking shirts and skins here, it's hard to tell who's who. (Luckily, they don't kill any civilians in the movie. If only reality could be so lucky.)

This is a good movie, but right now it's impossible to separate the story from reality. It's just such a perfect symbol for the inevitable failure of this type of business. It doesn't matter that the soldiers really didn't do anything worse than borrow a canoe without permission and then act like a jackass. A clash is gonna happen. They're barging in where they're not wanted, they don't understand who they are dealing with, and who they are dealing with don't understand them. They are outsiders who are trampling and threatening. And they don't even understand the type of impression they are making. It's not really their fault. It's the situation they've been put in. There's just no winning.

I don't know much about Cajuns but in the case of the soldiers, the movie just has a real ring of truth to it. You just know, from knowing people, that this is how it really is. It's human nature. You throw some guys into a strange land with guns, at least a couple of them are gonna be assholes and gonna ruin it for everybody else. I mean, REALLY fuckin ruin it. That's what happens. That's war. That's southern comfort.

---

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

Nope, this is not a sequel or rebuttal to Walter Hill's SOUTHERN COMFORT, and it's not a withering expose of labor unrest at the Southern Comfort liqueur factory. SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT is an hour long documentary about a night of indie wrestling in Alabama made in 2000 by Fred Olen Ray, a director I thought only did no-budget movies with babes and dinosaurs and shit like that. Although much more upbeat than THE WRESTLER or the Jake "The Snake" Roberts portion of BEYOND THE MAT this is that same world, the bonebreaking for small crowds and small pay in high school gyms.

The Iron Sheik is the superstar of the bunch, doing a good job of not seeming drpessed that he went from 19,000 fans at Wrestlemania in Madison Square Garden to 400 at the Saks High gymnasium. But the stars are all wrestlers I never heard of before who as far as I can tell have mostly never achieved much more fame than this and in their interviews never imply that they want to. They're happy working regular small town jobs and then on the weekends putting on a mask and throwing people around.

The interviews don't go too deep, and many of them stay in character, but it's still a great visual record of a world most of us have never seen. It's wholesome but ugly - lots of hairy, fat bodies sweating in the 100 degree Alabama heat. The crowd boasts a complete collection of every redneck stereotype ever invented, especially the one about wrestling fans thinking wrestling is real. Some of them get in heated arguments with the bad guy wrestlers, looking incensed, their eyes about ready to pop out of their heads like Nerf darts. Two of the bad guys successfully egg the crowd on about being rednecks, and one of them even pulls it off while wearing a Jim Beam t-shirt and Hank Williams Jr. headband. They still don't seem to catch that he's just trying to get a reaction out of them. Both fans and wrestlers sport hair styles that must've been holed up somewhere where they never heard that the '80s ended.

There are several wrestlers with lucha libre style maskes. Shanghai Tex wears a cowboy hat over his and lets his mustache throw through the mouth hole. The Power Rager wears a costume copied from the Power Rangers kids tv show and enters the ring wearing a modified motorcycle helmet. The Bullet doesn't mind doing an interview unmasked, he only wears it because Ted Dibiase kicked the bench out from under him while he was lifting and destroyed his nose. He tells that story like it's funny, and in fact it does smell kind of funny. His wikipedia entry says the bench he was lifting on broke and does not mention Dibiase at all. I guess he must've agreed to be blamed at the time.

My favorite as a documentary subject is The Flame, a bad guy who reveals himself as the fat, balding manager of a fast food restaraunt. He seems like a regular old working man but put the Flame mask on him and he starts yelling insults at the old ladies in the front row until they want to fight him. I guess has a dark side lingering beneath the surface while he serves food to the ladies from the nearby nursing home.

The Iron Sheik seems to be at a weird place in his career. His talent is for being hated, but he's so much more famous than the others that he starts acting like a good guy. In the interview he stays in character but keeps talking about moving to America, "the greatest country in the world," and how he wants the kids to pray to Allah and Jesus. When he comes out he does a weightlifting demonstration, has a guy from the crowd try (and fail) to do the same thing, then pats him on the back and praises him for having the guts to try. But then when he comes out in a head dress with an Iranian flag everyone boos angrily and chants "USA! USA!"

The women actually seem like the best wrestlers in the event. They do the most impressive and dangerous moves and the most acting to sell the storyline. The heroine Bambi works the crowd alot and sends spit flying when she's hit in the face. The villainess, the butch Peggy Lee Leather, acts angry at the crowd, referee and the match itself. Bambi seems to be the most popular of all the wrestlers, especially with the little kids, who go nuts for her. I wondered why - maybe the girls look up to her as a woman who appeals to traditional southern values without staying in the kitchen, and the boys, uh, have special growing up feelings for her? But I think the answer comes at the end of the movie when the event is over and as the crowd pours out she stands near the door greeting all the fans like a pastor after church. This is especially impressive because we last saw her alone in a locker room buckled over holding her ribs, which she seemed to think were cracked.

There's not much noticeable camaraderie among the wrestlers. For a minute it seems like The Bullet is giving Bambi supportive advice about her injury, but then you realize he's just using it as an excuse to brag about all his injuries. He mentions at least 3 times that he broke his ribs in the back and that that's worse.

Although they talk frankly about some aspects of wrestling, and some of them take off their masks, they don't really get much into the fakeness. I don't mind but I'm always curious about the specifics, how much they plan it out, how they know what each other are up to. How improvisational is it exactly? The other mysterious part of the movie is a guy called "Big Boss Hoss," who dresses just like an old WWF wrestler called Big Boss Man. I wondered why he thought it was okay to do that and whether people watched him believing he was the other guy.

The beginning of the movie calls them "outlaw wrestlers," and that got me thinking maybe I'm kind of the film criticism equivalent of these guys. I do it for the love of it, I rarely get paid, I sometimes feel like a big shot in my little world but to anybody else I'm a nobody. My reclusiveness is my mask, geocities is my high school gym, you could even argue some talkbackers are the toothless hicks yelling at me from the crowd, trying to start a fight with me. Harry is the guy who used to wrestle but now owns the ring. I started out as a bad guy but now I'm a good guy. In my arena everybody wants to high five me, but outside nobody gives a fuck. Go back to the burger stand. But they never wanted to be Hulk Hogan and I never wanted to be Roger Ebert.

Fred Olen Ray is maybe a director equivalent, but he's being literal, he's not looking for any metaphors in this thing. He explains on the commentary track that he made this partly because he was looking to get into wrestling. I had no idea that he wrestled under the name Fabulous Freddie Valentine, but sure enough he did. He also appears briefly in the movie as a manager, which is probaly against some documentarian code of ethics, but at least it's less corny than the Michael-Moore style first person narration the BEYOND THE MAT guy did.

---

SOUTHLAND TALES

Poor The Rock. With his outsized charisma, cartoonish build and air of sincerity I'm still convinced he has the potential to make great movies. The problem is he doesn't seem to hook up with any good directors. THE RUNDOWN is still his best movie and it's a fun time but, come on, it's no PREDATOR, or even COMMANDO. I believe we, as a society, can offer The Rock more than THE RUNDOWN. So I was excited when I found out the Rock would be one of the stars of this weird new movie from the director of DONNIE DARKO. "Should at least be interesting," I thought, not bothering to knock on wood.

Trouble is I had writer/director Richard Kelly pegged all wrong. I liked DONNIE DARKO well enough, thought it was pretty original and enjoyable. Saw it once on video and once as the director's cut at the Seattle Internation Film Festival, which is when I learned that some youths worship this guy. They traveled across the country dressed in DARKO-themed costumes to nervously stammer to him that he changed their lives. That's weird, I thought.

Then he wrote DOMINO, one of my most hated movies of the last several years. But I blamed Tony Scott. I figured there could've been a good script in there, Tony Scott just ax murdered it to unrecognizable bits with his Guiness Book of World Records All Time Worst Editing Ever In the History of Cinema. But after seeing SOUTHLAND TALES I'm not so sure Kelly is clean on that one. In fact I bet he specified alot of that shit in the script.

SOUTHLAND TALES takes place in Los Angeles, in the near future, after a nuclear attack on Texas. It involves intrigue between an amnesiac action star, a senator, a porn star/talk show hostess, left wing radicals, a Homeland Security type Big Brother department of the US government, twin brother racist cops, the inventor of an alternative fuel, some dwarves, and a weapons dealer in an ice cream truck played by Christopher Lambert. The plot also hits on time travel, dimensional travel, the human soul, psychedelic drugs, kidnapping, blackmail, staged murders, slam poetry, and a zepellin piloted by Kevin Smith wearing old man makeup but talking exactly like he did in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. The cast also includes Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Curtis "Booger" Armstrong, Zelda Rubinstein, Janeane Garafolo in one shot of a crowd scene, and the guy who apparently played Seagal on MAD TV. Also your mom is probaly in there somewhere.

Obviously that sounds like a big crazy mess, but whenever I heard about it I just laughed and looked forward to seeing it, naively assuming that Richard Kelly was a smart guy with a clear idea of how to wrangle all of this madness into a story. Nope, not at all. Not only is he not trying to do that, I don't think it ever occurred to him to consider doing that.

As far as I can tell this is not a story. It's a long, convoluted explanation of the background details of some other story that you will never see and not really feel like you are missing out on after you've watched this. If there was a real story in there it would be an entirely different movie, and this would be the ambitious DVD extra that you would be excited for but then turn off after a couple minutes when you realize it's duller than you imagined.

Most of the actors in the movie do a decent job. I would single out Gellar as the best for her character, she gives the closest thing to a funny performance in what the extras repeatedly claim is a comedy. There are actually a few parts that intentionally made me laugh, but overall it does not feel like it's supposed to be a comedy, except when The Rock cartoonishly twiddles his fingers and somebody eats a bunch of Cheetohs.

There are ideas sprinkled here and there that I like. He's trying to hit on that media saturation/corporatism theme that Paul Verhoeven did so well in ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and he doesn't do it nearly as well but I do like that sort of thing. So I liked seeing the Hustler logo on the side of a tank and the car ad where two CGI Humvees fuck doggystyle. But that's about it. The vast majority of the movie doesn't click at all. You don't give a shit about any character or what they are doing. You're not sure where the movie is going, and when it suddenly ends it turns out the reason you didn't know was because it wasn't going much of anywhere. (I thought it quoted"this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper" about 25 times so that must've been on purpose. You see, it's supposed to be not entertaining. In order to be a whimper. It's deep. But a reader kindly reminded me that the movie intentionally misquotes it as "not with a whimper, but with a bang." So I guess you could say it mis-misquotes it.)

The characters, who by the way have some of the worst names since Desolation Williams (Vaughn Smallhouse, Martin Kefauver, Dr. Soberin Exx, Dion Element, Fortunio Balducci, etc.), mostly talk in slow, "dream-like" nonsense about how they wrote a screenplay about babies not having bowel movements or a dream they had last night as Moby's keyboard drones try to imply some sort of deepness. Imagine some of the dipshits from WAKING LIFE trying to talk to you like The Architect in THE MATRIX RELOADED. There are words coming out of their mouths but that doesn't mean they're talking.

Kelly has made a movie exclusively for those DARKO fans in the bunny costumes who will take every weeeeeeeird line of dialogue and quote from the book of Revelations and study it for years. You gotta do the research. One post on the IMDb actually criticized "The ones who can't be bothered to read the graphic novels so they can actually understand the film and unlock all of it's secrets."

Yep, it turns out this 2 1/2 hour (cut down from 3 after it flopped at Cannes) movie is only chapters 4-6. Maybe that's why I didn't know it was a comedy - I didn't study hard enough to know what was funny. You have to stay up all night doing your homework and then come in and try to stay awake through this god damn lecture. The teacher is Justin Timberlake, who narrates constantly throughout, explaining all the concepts that would come out in the story if at some point Richard Kelly (for now on R. Kelly) decided to include one.

I'm not gonna get into one of those "You just don't get it / Oh yeah, 'cause there's nothing to get, the Emperor has no pants" type arguments. If some people on the IMDb message boards have figured out ways to enjoy this horse shit then good for them. We don't want to waste our precious resources such as electricity and John Lovitz. I've seen people who love SOUTHLAND TALES on the internet but I doubt I'll ever encounter one in the wild. If you're gonna be one of those people you will have to be more interested in studying symbolism and puzzles than in watching movies. Do all the paperwork and apparently the hidden entertainment value will reveal itself to you. Well that's fine but to me the trek to the Holy Mountain should not be a prerequisite to enjoying a movie.

And speaking of which, let me just say that I can take weird. On the weirdness scale HOLY MOUNTAIN makes SOUTHLAND look like SWEET HOME ALABAMA. "Your sacrifice will complete my Sanctuary of 1,000 Testacles." But it's still captivating, it ends up having a structure, it brings you along on a journey with these characters and has a conclusion. It also makes stronger satirical points and is funnier than SOUTHLAND TALES. So it can be done, at least by a mad Chilean mime/Tarot expert. Not as easily by a frat boy armed only with some poetry books, a Bible, and a collection of David Lynch DVDs.

After watching the making of featurette on the DVD I really realized how much they failed. They keep saying "it's about the end of the world - and it's a comedy!" like some Amish guy who's never heard of DR. STRANGELOVE or various comedies of the 1980s is gonna be impressed by that. The only shocking part is that they think they have made a comedy. Then they say it's an action movie, though there's no action in the movie. They say it's a musical - there is one musical scene for Justin Timberlake. I'm no fan of his singing or dancing but I have to wonder why they would cast him in a movie and then have him do a musical number where he doesn't dance or sing, but merely lip synchs somebody else's song. Don't you get it? They're going out with a whimper!

And they say that it addresses many important issues of the modern age, which is the biggest failure as far as I'm concerned. Hearing Kelly list all the things it's supposed to be about is a pretty good way to understand why it ends up not being about anything. But just look at the basic premise: left wing militants are messing with a politically connected celebrity to try to change the outcome of an election and pass a proposition that will add reforms to a PATRIOT ACT type bill. Of course I get the part about encroaching on civil liberties, but this is not the world we live in. When was the last time you heard of left wing radicals trying to do anything? Other than those kids who burn down buildings every once in a while to save the environment there is no such thing. There is no Weather Underground of the 2000s, no SLA, no Black Panther Party. I'm writing this on the fifth anniversary of this godforsaken war and what does the real life counterpart to the "Neo-Marxist Movement" (as they're called in the movie) have planned? Some more marches. Writing some letters to the editor. I bet there will be an online petition. Some anarachists will put up a bunch of fliers. Maybe even graffiti!

The world of the movie just doesn't ring true. Nobody, even crazy stupid people like this, have the balls to fight that way. You can't picture any of this happening. If this was good satire it wouldn't be using this setup that Kelly knows from movies about the '60s and '70s. It would follow the actual world we live in where people are either too apathetic to care or too overwhelmed to know what to do about it. Good satire has to come out of the reality of the world you're looking at and not just out of the way stories are expected to go. You know what, the photography and effects may be classier in this movie, but IDIOCRACY is a way more entertaining movie that is also way more accurate as a satire about the world we live in right now. Unlike SOUTHLAND TALES it's constantly funny, and in fact the thing dampening the laughs is that the jokes paint such an accurate portrait of our culture that you get kind of sad watching it.

But if it wasn't spot-on satire it could still be fun to watch. Here's the best analogy I've come up with to explain this movie: George Lucas was a huge nerd who spent years compiling notes about the world he used in the first STAR WARS. But then he went and made STAR WARS. He didn't make a slide show about all those notes. If you watch STAR WARS you might love it and then go and read up on everything about yodas and chewbaccas and get wrapped up in that whole world outside the movies. With SOUTHLAND TALES you're asked to do all of that without the movie to inspire it.

I learned more about the world of the movie from the set decorator talking about one of the sets than from watching the movie. I think it's great to put all that thought into the sets, but then you gotta put something in front of them. That's what Kelly forgot.

Sorry R. Kelly but until further notice you are persona non grata. As a buddy of mine said after watching SOUTHLAND TALES, "He just went from being the director of DONNIE DARKO to being the writer of DOMINO." If you have a good debut but then follow it up with two of the worst movies of the decade then I'm afraid the math doesn't work out in your favor. Richard Kelly, I sentence you to life imprisonment in Movie Alcatraz. If you figure out a way to swim off I'll look the other way. But I'm not holding my breath.

3/19/08

---

SPARTAN

SPARTAN is named after some quote from Leonidas, so yes it sort of has something to do with 300. Or maybe David Mamet is really into John Spartan, Stallone's character from DEMOLITION MAN. Either way, this is a gritty thriller where Val Kilmer plays a badass special ops agent from a nameless government organization who investigates the disappearance of a high ranking politician's daughter. (It seems like it's the first daughter, but I think they leave it ambiguous.)

The movie feels much less Hollywood and more realistic than any other of its type, but at the same time you have to accept some pretty crazy shit. I'll just say it: "the girl," as the agents all call her, is mad at her dad so she whores herself out at a brothel one night and then, coincidentally it seems like, she gets shipped off to a white slavery ring in Dubai. I say coincidentally because they don't know she's anybody's daughter. They just like her because she's blond.

So that's pretty far-fetched, in my opinion. But just go with it.

What's great about the movie is the way Kilmer executes his job. You never are really told what he's gonna do. He has these daring plans and then if something goes wrong he has to quickly come up with a plan B, C and C.5. For example, he maps out a complex operation with a recruited team of mercenaries who are going to raid the place where he believes the girl is. But scoping out the place the night before it's gonna go down he looks up at the stars and realizes that the north-south on his map is reversed. That means the sun will not be in the eyes of a driver they have to ambush. So he says "fuck it" and storms the place right then and there.

People always say that Mamet is a writer but not a director. I disagree because I see some serious directing going on here, some serious visual storytelling. I love the scene through the POV of a sniper's scope. The way it's paced, the way Mamet visually establishes everything you need to know in the scene but still doesn't make it obvious how he's gonna fake out the sniper. It's like the camera itself is trying to kill Kilmer and it can't do it. He beats the camera.

Mamet of course is known for his fuckin dialogue, and there's some of that here, but it's mostly pretty quiet. The music is really quiet too, which I think is a big part of the movie's unusual feel. I think with the same story and even cast this could've been a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, a better one from around the CRIMSON TIDE era. But Mamet's approach isn't Tony Scott, it's low budget art movie. So it really stands out.

One thing that keeps it Mamet is that Kilmer never turns out to have a heart of gold. When he rescues the girl he doesn't reassure her, he tells her "Shut the fuck up!" Later she complains so he punches her in the stomach. I'm pretty sure Will Smith wouldn't do that. When he tells her encouraging lies it is clearly not out of empathy, it's a calculated psychological trick to help with his mission. The mission is everything with this guy. He has a young partner you expect him to bond with. But when something bad happenes he doesn't get broken up about it. Like in many movies he holds onto his partner's meaningful-family-heirloom for him. Unlike many movies he uses that heirloom to roll a cigarette.

There are two exceptions to the character's cold-bloodedness, and although he would never admit it it seems like he ultimately ends up doing what he does for an emotional reason. But it's kind of like BAD SANTA. The fact that he's so much more of a pure cutthroat than most movie heroes makes it more meaningful when he does that. At best he has a heart of bronze.

This is a really good and unique movie. Or so I thought, but then I went onto IMDb and read that it is a terrible movie that makes no sense and the acting is horrible and the dialogue is so bad you could drive a truck with it or whatever. So you should all be ashamed of yourselves if you were involved in voting it onto the Badass 100, because those type of accolades are what got me to finally see it, and no doubt others will follow and also believe this is a good movie. Thanks alot guys, you embarrassed me in front of the IMDb message boards.

---

SPECIAL FORCES

SPECIAL FORCES is part of the AMERICAN HEROES series which, as I'm sure you are all very aware, are unrelated Nu-Image action movies each spotlighting the heroism of one branch in the American military. So I hope I'm not unpatriotic for watching it for its Israeli director Isaac Florentine and British co-star Scott Adkins. I've written about these guys before - Florentine is the director of such movies as UNDISPUTED II and THE SHEPHERD: BORDER PATROL, while Adkins is the co-star of movies ranging from UNDISPUTED II to THE SHEPHERD: BORDER PATROL. Okay, so they aren't making classics yet, but they're some of the only reliable individuals I've found in the world of DTV action. They always seem like they're trying.

A journalist taking pictures of atrocities in the in my opinion fictional former Soviet republic of Muldonia is taken hostage by some sadistic military assholes. One looks like a regular-sized Jaws from James Bond, but with grey hair, the other looks like the comedian Emo Philips wearing a beret. The second one is one of those villains you're supposed to hate extra for his stupid haircut and hat, and the way he turns his nose up at everything. We should have enough to hate him for just with the atrocities he's committed but we still find ourselves thinking "I hate him, he's so stuck up!"

Anyway they send in a special forces team (okay, now I get that title) led by Major Don Harding (Marshall Teague), who actually had his whole platoon killed by these same pricks in Bosnia, but he insists he's too professional to let it get personal.

The movie really starts rolling when they encounter a stranded British S.A.S. agent played by our boy Scott Adkins. All of the characters can fight, but his scenes in particular are acrobatic martial arts spectaculars like you rarely get in modern movies, especially cheapass DTV. This is a movie full of silenced pistol assassinations, guards shot out of watchtowers, bombs planted on trucks, gratuitous somersaults, snapped necks, slit throats and various other favorites. Adkins rolls around like a ninja, hops over fences like a yamikasi, even does one of those maneuvers where he jumps up, does the splits in the air kicking two guys in the head, then before hitting the ground brings one leg over to kick one of them a second time. (I wonder how he decided which one needed the 2 kicks?)

I think Adkins will become better known soon, but I'm not sure how much. He was already in a Bourne movie and he's gonna be in WOLVERINE. But starring in a martial arts movie is the best thing for a guy like this, so I look forward to Florentine's NINJA, where, if I'm not mistaken, he will be playing some sort of ninja. He's kind of a pretty boy, he kind of looks like a cross between Ryan Reynolds and Ray Park. But his moves make him instantly badass, and he looks tough on a motorcycle. He steals this movie in the climactic battle with the Emo PHillips guy. That scene is more classic Hong Kong kung fu movie than DTV.

In fact, Florentine's whole style is a throwback, a look back at a time when the camera was supposed to emphasize the action instead of be it. He also loves angles that glorify the characters, looking up at them or zooming in on their grimacing faces. It's an energetic style, but not a spastic one. No Avid farts or distractingly-quick cuts. A reference to prisoners at Guantanomo took me by surprise - I thought it was a much older movie than 2003. In fact the only trace of modern hyper-active style is when the soldiers are first introduced it says their first name or nickname ("Bear" for example) on the screen with 2 swords crossed underneath it, and you hear the swords clanging together even though they're just wingdings. This is of course because these brave men's hearts were forged in the hot coals of combat.

The other thing that's appealing about this movie besides the nearly non-stop action is the unashamed corniness of the characters, the lack of cynicism. They're proud to be soldiers and sacrifice their personal lives for heroism. They say things like "When you're the last man standing you have a responsibility." "What's that?" "To be the last man standing."

Teague is perfect for this type of character, a grizzled grey-haired man's man, kind of a bulkier Tom Berenger. In 2003 an action hero this old, this tough, and this lacking in irony is a precious commodity. At the end they're being flown away in a chopper and Adkins asks Don why he still does it. He says, "I don't know about you, but I know why I do it," turns and smiles at a small American flag sticker on the inside wall of the copter. (And it dissolves to footage of a real flag fluttering in the wind, just so it's not too pathetic.) If most action movies were this RAH! RAH! it would probaly piss me off, but seeing one like this is kind of charming.

This one kind of reminds me of SNIPER, but obviously way more violent since they don't follow the one-shot method of war. To be honest the story isn't as captiving and the characters aren't as fleshed out as I would like. There is something not quite there about this one, and anything that's stiff or inept doesn't have any of the strangeness that I enjoy in my favorite DTVs. But the filmatic craftsmanship as far as putting together skillful action scenes goes far above and beyond the above average DTV action movie, or even some modern theatrical ones. So keep an eye on these two.

12/21/08

---

SPEED RACER

If the old Speed Racer cartoon had a baby with a Hot Wheels commercial in the back of a candy store and fed it magic mushrooms every day for breakfast, then when it turned 18 that baby would legally become this movie. What I mean is it's clearly the product of its upbringing: silly cartoon plot, Skittles color palette, cartoon physics, monkey wearing clothes, etc. But it wants to become a man, so it rebels. It confuses little kids and their parents with a complex non-linear structure intercutting a present day race with backstory and a flashback race and overlapping past and present races within one shot. And instead of trying to stop some evil plot to destroy the world like you're supposed to do in this type of movie, SPEED RACER helps an investigative body stop a corrupt corporation from manipulating the stock market by fixing races. (It does not mention the tax disputes from PHANTOM MENACE.)

The result is a movie that people want to beat up. The Wachowski Brothers until now have only directed 4 movies, 3 of them THE MATRIX and the other one just to prove to the studio they could direct THE MATRIX, so this is almost like their sophomore slump. It's an absurdly ridiculous and/or ridiculously absurd, kind of alienating and weird Wachowski version of a kiddie movie that already seems destined to lose the studio a ton of money and either force the Wachowskis to try something smaller or safer or to go away and not direct for ten years. Also I kind of liked it.

The story is pretty much the same as the old cartoon from what I remember. A young guy who actually has the first name Speed and last name Racer is a race car driver, his brother Rex was killed in a previous race and also there's a mysterious masked race car driver named Racer X who appeared shortly after Rex died and helps Speed in a very brotherly way but who knows maybe it's a coincidence. I don't remember thinking of the cartoon being in some future world or alternate history but it was some place where everybody was involved in dangerous car race intrigue and what not, and same here. In fact at one point there's a historical photo of a model-T type car in a race, so this seems to be a country founded on burnt rubber.

What makes the movie unique and maybe unwatchable for many people is its dedication to being a live action cartoon. They keep all the main elements like the little brother and the monkey Chim Chim who wears pants and a hat, and the cars (which are all video game style CGI) are equipped with springs and tire spikes and extendo saws and what not. And most strikingly the entire outdoor world is a computery collage of different elements which are all in complete focus. That was supposed to make it look like a cartoon but instead makes it look like a commercial for Starburst or some shit. I actually think it would look better if it had the same stylized world but with realistic depth to it. But oh well. It least I've never seen a movie like this.

I think it should also be pointed out that the eye-scorching rainbow colors used in the movie "to make it look like a cartoon" actually look nothing at all like the cartoon, which was mostly dull colors at least by the time it got to our TV sets. But oh well, it looks cool.

Even aside from the visuals this is a cartoon world where people can move in fast motion, cars are equipped with sawblades and tire spikes, etc. What I like is that all of this is done in a playful manner but not in a sarcastic or jokey way, and the racing story is treated with dead seriousness. The only element of the movie that seemed postmodern to me was the "comic relief" with little brother Spritle Racer and chimpanzee life partner Chim Chim W. Racer III. Alot of their scenes are just like the stupid shit in the cartoon, like "oh no, Spritle ate a whole bunch of candy!" and it's funny because it's so dumb. The kid playing Spritle is really good at it and also the kids in the theater loved it when he flipped a bad guy the bird.

What I believe the Wachowskis added is a sincere anti-corporate message. At the beginning Speed and his family are given a tour of the big corporation's facilities and all they have to offer Speed if he joins their team. It's like in HE GOT GAME when the sports agent gives Jesus Shuttlesworth the grand tour, except it's a cartoon world so they give him a purple suit and show him racers learning to eat noodles in zero gravity conditions as part of their training. I like that before the corporation is revealed as being crooked Speed's inclination is already to turn down the generous offer because he is loyal to his small family business.

The style of the movie is so hyperkinetic that even my Michael Bay fan buddy Mr. Armageddon had no clue what was going on in the race scenes. Personally I didn't have that much of a problem, they weren't Spielberg-clear but much clearer than Bay. At worst maybe a Jason Bourne level where I'm a little flustered sometimes but basically understand what happened. (Usually it involves a car flipping through the air. And John Goodman punches some guys.) My only difficulty was some of the quick inserts, newspaper headlines or when it cuts to John Goodman's ring to show that he's a veteran wrestler. I got the gist of what was going on but wasn't quick enough to read all the words. There's also alot of wipes where some character's head slides across the screen as one scene dissolves into another. That threw my buddy off for some reason, but he thought it looked cool.

Now, you people know I'm not a fan of all this phoniness. I would rather see this type of world built on a soundstage than pasted together in a computer program. To me the most visually appealing parts of the movie were things like the classroom in the opening, with its brightly colored desks, or the carefully designed Racer home (instead of a painting of the ocean or something they have a painting of the open road). You know why? Because they appeared to be actual solid objects, right before my eyes, existing in the same plane as live human beings.

I was harder on SIN CITY than most people. Good stories, and I enjoyed the movie, but I wish it had some grit and reality to it instead of some dudes wearing silly Halloween costumes performing a play in front of a flat painted backdrop. I think that approach sort of fits this subject better and anyway I couldn't help but smile at this movie because of its sincerity. The Wachowskis believe in this goofy world and expect you to accept it into your family no questions asked. They don't feel the need to wink and nudge and make ironic statements to say "hey guys don't worry, we're in on the joke, isn't this all a real hoot? ha ha ha" like almost all movies do these days. They are willing to have a girl flying a pink helicopter say "Move it Speed! It's getting ugly out there!" without then making some other wiseass character make a comment to point out that it's silly.

They also believe in their anti-corporate, pro-family theme, and even with literal 2-dimensional characters I found myself kind of moved by the way their family cares about each other and grows together (although to be fair that might be some residual emotion from old ROSEANNE episodes - Pops Racer is pretty much just Dan Conner in a Super Mario costume). I was also happy for Speed's girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) when she got to drive in one scene because otherwise the women would spend the whole movie spotting for the men and making them food. Poor Oscar winner Susan Sarandon mostly just makes pancakes and peanut butter sandwiches.

By all accounts the Wachowskis meant to make a mainstream family movie with broad appeal that would make lots of money for their corporate masters, etc. Turns out people didn't want to see it so much so now my internet movie nerd colleagues are pointing fingers: it is because people hate the movie, so after they paid the money for it they travelled back in time and did not pay the money for it. It is because the movie is over 2 hours long and audiences demand to only be entertained in short bursts. It is because Emile Hirsch is in it and he's not a huge superstar like Jason Lee or somebody. It is because of the marketing. It is because of gas prices.

But really, unless you work for Warner Brothers, who gives a shit? ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS made more than twice as much in its opening weekend. In fact, in its opening weekend it made $11 million more than David Fincher's ZODIAC made in its entire run. That's how it works, friends. Sometimes great movies are beloved and popular, sometimes they are only beloved. Sometimes trash gets buried, sometimes it gets its own private island in the Bahamas just to use for storage. We as film enthusiasts should probaly start evolving beyond the ancient superstition that these things are important or meaningful. What happened here is the Wachowskis made a strange movie that has not immediately caught the attention of billions of people. Life goes on.

I also read that Emile Hirsch fired his agency and that the movie "could ruin his career." Now, that's just stupid. Are you telling me that any agency would've told you "no, don't take a huge pile of money to star in a $150 million dollar movie from the reclusive directors of THE MATRIX"? And I'm having a hard time imagining that he didn't want to be Speed Racer and they talked him into it. Come on dude. You did a good job. Maybe the helmet looks bad on you. So what. You'll live. Also could you loan me some money Emile. I'll pay you back in my opinion.

I like that, even if it was an accident, they took their own weird approach to this thing. I guess it's selfish but to me I am happy for an interesting movie to exist even if it did not work out as somebody's business investment. I'm sure it would be more popular if it was about talking chipmunks eating their own shit, but they took the tough road where it's more interesting to me personally but costs a corporation hundreds of millions of dollars. It could've been a tighter and simpler movie and I admit that might've been better but I don't know man. To me it's endearing that the Wachowskis reach for those things. They make movies that only they would make, for good or bad. I'm into that I guess.

Also I liked when the monkey pulled down the ninja's pants.

---

SPIDER-MAN

Spider-man, Spider-man. Sam Raimi, Spider-Man. Bruce Campbell cameos. Spider-man. Spider-man. That is a song I Wrote.

Anyway. This is a picture by Mr. Sam Raimi only it is based on the popular children's comic strip, "SPIDER-MAN". If I remember right what that was about was a nerdy kid who gets bit by a magic spider so he puts on a red and blue bodysuit and swings around on webs saving people. This works on account of he now has magic spider powers to climb up buildings, make wisecracks, etc. My internet research indicates that the webs actually did not shoot out of his wrists, as any logical person might assume, in fact they were shot by mechanical laser watches or some stupid shit that Peter Parker invented and this apparently is the building block on which all Marvel Comics are built and should never be altered if Sam Raimi doesn't want to face a fate similar to that of Salman Rushdie (i.e. years of fear and hiding, followed by a cameo in Bridget Jones's Diary).

There is a dash between Spider and Man apparently, you gotta be careful with that one on the internet. Again, Salman Rushdie.

Other than changing the web lasers this one appears to be very faithful to the juvenile picture books it is based on and that is where the charm is. It seems to me that most of these funny books are based around outlandish costumes, and at the same time the outlandish costumes cause the biggest dilemmas when adapting to the legitimate artistic medium of Film. I mean do you really want to have a guy wearing that kind of shit or not, that is the big question. In the case of Super-Man they said yes, he'll wear the exact same thing that he wears in the drawings. And America loved it.

But that was the 1970s or 80s, a simpler time. Then there was Viet-Nam. Well, Viet-Nam had already happened but then there was a series of movies about Viet-Nam. So America was changed forever. I don't know.

So by the time of the year 1989 and BAT-MAN (1989), nobody wanted to see that kind of dress in public. It made people uncomfortable. People were not as accepting of that kind of alternative lifestyle and did not want anyone dressed like that around their children. We fear what we don't understand and in the '89s we did not understand a guy swingin on a rope wearing tights and a cape. One of the biggest concerns by all involved (those making the movie, those watching the advertising) was that it would be like the old tv show from the '60s, and nobody would take it seriously. Their solution - no bat-man costume, put im in rubber armor. And it worked. Audiences were immediately won over by the gloomy, serious approach, and although the movie is considered pretty boring by today's lower standards of summer entertainment I would argue that it turned out to be one of the most influential movies of that decade. Even the topic of discussion this evening, SAM RAIMI'S SPIDER MOTHERFUCKIN MAN, by Sam Raimi, fits a bit into the Bat-Man template (spider-man confronting the killer of his guardian, danny elfman score, big showdown at community event featuring large inflatable characters).

THE X-MEN starring 2000 Outlaw Award Winner Hugh Jack-Man as Young Clint Eastwood also took the embarassed approach to costuming. They not only abandoned the colorful costumes from the children's booklet series but had the characters joke about how asinine it would be to wear costumes like that. The best comic book movie franchise ever, BLADE, features fashion that might be considered eccentric but that at least passes as an outfit rather than a costume, and which is not based on the colorful costumes he apparently wore in the '70s strips.

But Sam Raimi is an old fashioned gentlemen. He wears a suit and tie on set as an homage to Alfred Hitch-Cock. He creates imaginative horror masterpieces and then claims the inspiration is all 3 Stooges. He swears he really wants to be making boring movies about baseball. He starred in a movie as a manson like killer vietnam vet but he is in a pre-Vietnam film mentality. He is not the kind of guy that is gonna put Spiderman in black leather with some kind of infra-red goggles or some shit like that.

I mean maybe Spider-man is different. It's hard to imagine what else you could do with him other than put a Spider-man costume on him. So that's what he did. If you remember what Spider-man looks like, yeah, that's what you see in the movie. Just, some guy wearing a Spider-man costume.

And I gotta be honest, the costume works, and so does the casting, and the effects. Together, they create exactly the comic book world that Mr. Raimi must remember reading from when he was child, and was able to still read comic books. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and James Franco are all perfect for their characters. It is easy to get wrapped up in the story as Peter Parker discovers his powers, uses them to deal with his nerdy teenage problems, than finds a greater purpose for them.

What really makes the movie work though is all the swingin around. I mean it was pretty cool in Sam Raimi's THE AMAZING DARK-MAN when Dark-Man was hanging off a helicopter, but now computers can do all this swinging shit. Spider-Man just flops around all over the place, swings and swooshes and floopty floops. He jumps from buildings, kicks people across rooms. He does MATRIXY spider-dodges, and BLADE 2-esque computer jumps. And it's all spectacular to watch, a real good time at the movies. To be honest it makes Super-Man, flying around in straight lines, look like a fuckin baby. Is that all you can do is fly, you fuckin cape wearin pussy? Spider-Man can flip, and stick to walls, and hang upside down. He has little pointy bug leg things that come out of his fingers, for christ's sake. Can you compete with that? I don't think so. Go home Super-Man. You can't save the day, why don't you go do a visa commercial with the guy from Seinfeld, asswipe.

You know what in all seriousness though, Christopher Reeve is the real Super-Man. Because he's in a wheelchair.

Another thing Spider-Man does that most of the other comic book movies don't bother with, he saves a bunch of people. Gals, babies, you name it. Not just a few cursory establishing heroics, they seem to make up the bulk of his daily activities. But there is a main villain, and that's where the problem comes.

Willem Dafoe is pretty great as Norman Osborne, a scientist trying to get money from the military, who makes that classic Dr. Jekyll mistake of testing on himself and getting all Hyded up. Next thing you know he's in a room by himself talking to a mask sitting on a chair that he thinks is telling him to kill people. Which, I mean, it's time for some therapy there dude. He starts flying around on a magic jetboard wearing green armor and a mask, and throwing bombs at people and laughing. They call him the Green Goblin, I guess because he's green.

I don't know what it is but I completely accepted Toby Maguire flingin himself all over the city in a fancy molded Spider-Man costume. I wondered where in fuck's name he GOT this costume but I had no problem watching him wear it. But then the second you have him standing on a rooftop talking to a guy in green armor, the whole thing seems pretty silly. They make a good joke about it, having Green Goblin lean up all casual and talk buddy buddy with Spider-Man. But until their final showdown (which for some reason reminded me of a scene in the Raimi executive produced HARD TARGET) you have a hard time taking things seriously any time the two costumes are in the shot together. I mean, jesus. Put some real clothes on, people. You can still be evil wearing, say, a hat.

So yeah, the villain is pretty stupid, but when he's just Norman Osborne he works. His son Harry is Peter's best friend and roommate. He treats his son coldly but gets excited around Peter because of his knack for science. And of course this makes things uncomfortable between the boys. I mean there are actual characters and relationships in this movie, melodramatic but interesting, and they set up many possibilities for sequels. It's a good story, good characters, only one stupid costume, and good action scenes.

One word of warning to the hardcore comic strip enthusiasts. The pig version of Spider-man, Peter Porker the Amazing Spider-Ham, does not appear in this picture. He is apparently being saved for the sequel. I enjoyed this picture though thanks.

 

APPENDIX. RAIMI TOUCHES OF NOTE: Cameos by Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, Lucy Lawless. We learn of Peter's future powers via guided student tour of laboratories (as in Dark-Man). Green Goblin talks to evil version of himself in mirror (as in EVIL DEAD 2: HIS BEST SO FAR). Ends with corny shot of Spider-Man in front of American flag, which I'd guess is how FOR LOVE OF THE GAME probaly ends, but I haven't seen it.

---

SPIDER-MAN PART 3

Okay, first off, I only seen Spidermans 1 & 2. I have not seen anything between 1.1 and 1.9 or 2.1 through 2.9, any of these weird DVD special editions. So if I'm missing any info I apologize. But based on this limited theatrical knowledge I would have to say that the conventnerdal wisdom is probaly a little correct: Part 3 is more flawed than Part 1 or Part 2. But not by much. It is the same tone, same combo of boy-girl soap opera, cornball old fashioned comic book reverance for New York City and high-flyin' CGI action. Only thing is in this one they are telling a more ambitious story (good) which is stitched together with some ridiculous coincidences and occasional bad ideas (bad).

For example, there is a black goo that falls from space which just happens to land right in the park where Spider-man is kickin it with his girl. Okay, admittedly the space goo may have been intentionally honing in on Spider-man's powers, we don't really know this. So I will let that one go. But when Tom Hayden Church is running from the pigs he just happens to climb over a fence into a science facility where, at that exact moment, scientists are about to do an experiment with sand which turns him into a sand monster. Admittedly, he did say earlier that he had bad luck, so that is sort of explained why that happens. So I guess I can let that one go too. But what about this. Eddie Brock happens to be in a church praying for God to kill Peter Parker at the exact moment Pete is yanking the evil space goo off of his suit up in the bell tower right above, so the goo falls on Eddie and turns him into a monster!? I mean what are the chances of that? The only way to explain it is that God was pissed that Eddie would defile the church with such a bullshit prayer, so He went Old Testament on him. Hmmm, actually I like that. Come to think of it, never mind, there are no coincidences, it's air tight.

But what about Spider-man's liberal attitude toward maintaining a secret identity? I know he's always been kinda bad at it, but here he stands on a roof at a parade in his honor, wearing the suit with no mask. He allows all 3 villains to see his face and know who he is. He sits in the park out of his costume with his girl MJ using a super-spiderweb as a hammock. He even has an entire flying and web-shooting fight through New York City wearing a suit and tie and no mask. Hell, he can't keep his suit in one piece anyway, and sometimes it turns him evil. I'm not sure why he even bothers anymore. Come out of the closet, dude.

The part comic book fundamentalists will burn the most effigies over, I bet, is where the goo gets ahold of Peter. Instead of turning him DARK and EEEEEEVIL like you might expect it gives him bangs and makes him a prick who thinks women love him. First there's a scene where he struts around New York smiling at super models, a parody of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. I thought this is like something they'd pull in those corny old Super-man movies. Then comes the scene where, to piss off Mary Jane, he goes to the jazz club and interrupts her song with a piano solo and a super-powered evil chair dance (possibly a mating ritual from the Planet of the Evil Space Goo). Here I thought holy shit, Sam Raimi is trying to get fired from Spider-man. On the DVD it will be Chapter 22: Holy Shit, Sam Raimi Is Trying To Get Fired From Spider-man. I can see why most people would hate chapter 22, but it was so ridiculous and so "what the fuck" that I think I sort of liked it. You really need an evil piano solo to keep the audience on their toes.

Besides, comic strip fans are gonna hate this movie anyway, because it's so different from the comics. I saw an issue once and in the comics he's not even human, he's a little pig named Peter Porker who turns into Spider-ham. I was surprised they never mentioned this in part 1 but geez, it's been 3 movies now, they've had time to explain it. Those guys must be pissed.

The worst part of the movie to me is not a scene, its just one line. After a really fake looking but thrilling fight with his former best friend Harry (now using his dad's Green Goblin equipment to try to kill Peter) Harry ends up in the hospital. This leads to a useless amnesia subplot, but oh well. The part I hate is when Harry tells his nurse, "My best friends. I'd give my life for them."

Now, I'm not gonna give it away. I won't tell you how I was able to decipher this line. But to me, personally, it gave a hint of how the movie was gonna end. And since it's a good ending, the fitting way to resolve this trilogy, it would be nice to not have it announced 10 or 15 minutes into the damn movie.

But that brings me to what I like. The fights with Goblin Jr. are great. They are not just super hero fighting super villain. They're also former friends, jealous rivals, and best buds getting pissed and trying to one-up each other. And their relationship changes throughout the movie. It's not really like any other hero/villain relationship in these types of movies. They even get to team up at one point. Nice to see them pay off what they've been setting up in the other 2 movies.

I also liked The Sandman. He's a cool special effects monster, also a likable lug. Thomas Haden Church in a striped shirt looks so much like a cartoon sailor it's eerie. I couldn't figure out if his mouth really looked like that or if it was movie magic.

Also, you got Space Goo Eddie, who is the lamest of the villains but still kind of cool. His motivation for hating Peter is that after he stole Peter's job by cheating, Peter pointed out that he cheated. Boo fuckin hoo. Some super villains had their dad killed in a fight with Spider-Man, or Spider-Man stops them from stealing money they were gonna use to help their sick daughter. Maybe that's why they need this guy Eddie: the other two villains are very sympathetic, you need one that's just a complete dick. But at least he has a giant CGI mouth full of fangs, that's cool.

They could've done a better job writing some of this shit, but I appreciated that they were trying for more. I like that they juggle a bunch of stories, it makes it feel different from the other two. The freshest thing about the movie though is the way it ends. You get the drift there pal, what I mean is HUGE SPOILERS COMING UP. See, most of the comic strip movies, they kill off the villain(s) at the end. That goes for most of the Batmans, the other 2 Spidermans, all 3 Blades I believe, even one of the Garfields. (just guessing.) In this one two die, but one of the two dies helping Peter, the other Peter actually saves but he is such a greedy prick he jumps back into the danger zone and gets blown to dust (actually I'm guessing he'll be back, but I'm one a them conspiracy nuts). But the third one, the one that lives... Peter actually forgives and lets go. I've seen some nerds complaining about this, but fuck those guys. This is a brilliant touch for many reasons. 1. It's something you hardly ever see in a movie. Usually the bad guy has got to die, or at least get busted. It's not every day that the hero and villain come to understand each other and make peace. Original is good. 2. It's actually a better solution to the problem. Sandman really is a well meaning individual. He is a sympathetic character. It is better for the world if he goes and helps his daughter than if Spider-man kills him. 3. (most important) The whole trilogy has been about Peter learning this lesson. He started his career as revenge for his Uncle Ben's death, but his Aunt Grandma has been trying to teach him that revenge is a dish best not served at all, unless you're some kind of huge asshole. In this scene Peter learns not to get revenge, he learns that he himself is a big asshole and he can't exactly go around passing judgment on other people who do the same shit, and also he has just helped his best friend/worst enemy have a Darth Vader Redemption Moment so things are looking a little less black and white right now. So really this is the character and emotional climax of the entire trilogy, so if any of you assholes hated it because you'd rather see yet another villain fall off a building or get impaled, you really don't deserve the effort these people are putting into these movies. Go watch GHOST RIDER.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that this scene is reminiscent of the legendary bar/hand slap game/Cupcake scene from ON DEADLY GROUND (1996, d: S. Seagal). I almost yelled "I NEED TIME TO CHANGE!"

In conclusion, this movie is worse than the other two in some ways and better in other ways. Lots of interesting characters, great action scenes, good emotional climax, some sloppy writing and a weird tangent for the history books. When all is said and done I realize that actually I don't like Spider-man that much. He's no Blade. But these are three entertaining movies that fit together pretty well.

Anyway, trilogy done. Sam Raimi, please report to the woods.

---

THE SPIRIT

Yes, as you've heard by now, THE SPIRIT is a terrible movie. But don't fall into the trap I did. Just because almost everyone agrees that it's terrible doesn't mean it's funny or interesting to watch. I thought it looked bad from the trailers and really had no interest until I started seeing some of these reviews comparing it to various landmarks in bad movie history. The more vicious the reviews got the more I started to think shit, I kind of want to see that. People acted like it was some bizarre Ed Wood type shit that they couldn't believe they were seeing.

Well, there are a couple weird touches. For some reason Samuel L. Jackson's villain character, The Octopus, talks about eggs all the time. Seriously, he just keeps bringing them up - "I beat you like an egg," "I don't have egg on my face," etc. etc. It's worse than Tarantino's obsession with feet. Also there's a part where SPY KIDS style home computer effects depict a little tiny head attached to a foot that hops around on a table in front of him and he keeps saying it's "plain damn weird." I kind of wish writer/director Frank Miller was in the theater to experience the uncomfortable silence as the scene milked the "joke" over and over again for a couple minutes, clearly convinced it was hilarious.

The story involves a mysterious super hero dude called The Spirit who sort of helps the cops and gets in a fight with Sam Jackson and gets a toilet broken over his head. But the Octopus implies there is a secret that ties their pasts together, and then everybody dresses up like nazis and kills a cat. Also the Spirit's childhood girlfriend is back in town trying to steal the same treasure that would give the Octopus super powers or I don't know, who gives a shit. Not me and not you, I guarantee you.

Scarlett Johansen plays a sexy nurse or secretary who works for Jackson and drives him around. I like the girl but she has no idea how to handle this dialogue and comes off like an idiot. Eva Mendes does the same thing but, let's be honest, that's what she's known for. The police commissioner is played by the dad from the Wonder Years. I guess if I had to choose the best performance it would be this dude Gabriel Macht who plays the Spirit. He's kind of like Casper Van Dien might be after hanging out with George Clooney for a month. He does his best to embody the spirit of, you know, whatever this thing is supposed to be. (that's not a pun by the way, it's a coincidence.)

Some of the shots look kind of cool as individual stylized images, but this is clearly the work of an amateur director. There's just no sense of pacing, acting or storytelling. It's all the problems of SIN CITY without many of its strengths. It's Robert Rodriguez's cheesy tendencies without his natural born filmatist skills.


I guess I can sort of in concept admire Miller's dedication to his own stupid idea of what's cool. At least he doesn't try to copy what other people are doing that actually is cool. It's pretty ballsy to start out the movie with a personification of death named Lorelei and a long, melodramatic voiceover monologue about the city being the hero's special lady friend. It's a metaphor I just summed up in an overly generous 8 words - he stretches it on for a couple minutes, and then returns to it again at the end of the movie. "She is my mistress. My lover. My damsel. My lady. My fuckfriend. My booty call. My one and only love. I wrap my arms around her streets and run my fingers through her glistening chimneys. She is my city; the only one I would go down on. Ordinarily I'm not into that but for her, I would do anything. Sorry Meat Loaf." (paraphrase)

In the early '90s there was a small spate of these retro, defiantly cornball super hero movies, trying to partially modernize these old Saturday morning serial characters but also recapture whatever it was people might've liked about them back then, or something. So you had THE ROCKETEER, THE SHADOW and THE PHANTOM. All very flawed but also kind of fun. I especially liked THE PHANTOM where Billy Zane had the balls to wear a bright purple super hero outfit and ride around on a white horse in the jungle protecting African treasure from colonialists. I guess the Spirit looks more like the Shadow, but he's that type of defiantly old school super hero - a dude in a fedora, tie and Kato mask. He's a former cop who has mysteriously become immune to gun shots, so he decides to become a vigilante and a spy for the police force. Apparently his crimefighting mainly consists of clumsily jumping across roofs and stopping two pursesnatchers.

Okay, so let's say you accept the cornball retro super hero deal. Now can I interest you in a SIN CITY hypermacho hard boiled noir thing also? I hope so, because The Spirit is gonna constantly narrate and flashback and talk tough about "broads." When he disappoints his girlfriend by hitting on another woman right in front of her she will say "You bastard!" but then secretly smile to herself because she thinks it's adorable that he treats her like human garbage. I'm sure all of America will love the retro super hero/chauvinism combo but just to appeal to a wider audience let's mix in some juvenile humor like cartoon sound effects during fights, pants falling down and some wacky mentally deficient clones who wear t-shirts with their names written in bubbly cartoon font. That way we're hitting all the bases of all the greatest things that make movies awesome. Mask, broads, pants falling down. Home run.

It's all a bunch of tributes to obsolete entertainment styles that don't mix that well. Didn't we (those elite few of us) sort of like The Phantom because he was such an old fashioned boy scout? Would it really make it better if he was wearing that purple suit but lived in an exaggerated cartoon of a black and white city and there was blood everywhere? I don't think those are great tastes that taste great together, necessarily. Maybe in the nerd world of comic books people are more accepting of this fetishistic nostalgia passing for a story because they expect less from reading a pamphlet for ten minutes than from paying ten bucks and 90 minutes to watch a production that took a year and millions of dollars to make and doesn't have another installment coming for at least 2 years.

And maybe that's part of the problem, is that those other movies I mentioned looked like they spent alot of money and time on them. This thing would be really impressive if some dude made it in his house and put it on Youtube, but for a major studio motion picture released in theaters it looks bargain basement. Not even bargain basement, more like garage sale. It's suspiciously lacking in establishing shots, it always seems like it's in closeup because they only have a 3'x3' piece of brick wall background to put behind somebody's head. It seems like it's always CGI snowing but there's rarely snow on the ground. They must've been real excited about a snow effects filter they had on their laptop.

The thing I really couldn't figure out is Miller's obsession with fuckin Converse All Stars. I think him and Will Smith's character in I, ROBOT are the only people in the world who think Converse are all that fascinating to look at. I mean here is a guy wearing a suit, trenchcoat and fedora, and fuckin Chuck Taylors. It's like those dudes who wear a suit and tie but then jeans instead of slacks, and that's supposed to show that they're laid back. It just looks silly but Miller is so proud of it that throughout the movie he does a special effect where the soles of the shoes are stark black and white like a xerox. So it draws your eye.

I don't get it man, those aren't even good footwear to be jumping roofs in, the soles are so flimsy and the traction's no good. Plus, it's such an outmoded stupid visual cliche for a cartoon character to be wearing Chucks. Here are a few other cartoon characters who wear Converse:

(I would've included a picture of the Spirit for comparison, but I can't find any online that show his shoes. I guess the marketing people agreed with me on that one.)

THE SPIRIT is not so muçh a disaster as a miscalculation, a naive assumption that because people liked SIN CITY that they would also like whatever other stupid crap this same guy tried to do in the same style.

You know what it is, man? It's nerd overreach. It's like when one political party takes over the whole government. They start to get cocky. They lose track of reality. They go too far, so far even the people originally on their team get mad. The Nerdening of America may have reached that point.

I truly believe that my associate Harry Knowles and many of his colleagues and competitors have transformed western culture. As recently as the '80s and '90s being a nerd or geek was not something anybody would want to admit to themselves. They were the lowest of low, the socially awkward, the uncool. With the rise of the internet though came the rise of "geek culture," and slowly these people reclaimed the word, turned it into a badge of honor. (I wonder if in 20 years people will proudly call themselves douchebags?)

Guys like Harry and Moriarty started to interview writers and directors and to some extent measure their worth based on if they knew about comic books or collected movie posters or some shit. We're all used to these articles about, "Trust me, this is one of the good guys! He's a geek like us, he knew everything about TRON, he has a tattoo of J.R.R. Tolkien on his calf, he has it in his will that a Mexican lobby card of KRULL will be burned and mingled with his ashes." And people on the internet would become protective of these "geek" filmatists and their projects, hype them up on their websights and postings, petition the studios, force their nerd views into the conventional wisdom. The Nerd Panthers.

As their generation took over the media and entertainment industries the types of movies, TV shows and children's comic books that nerds love became more widely accepted into the mainstream culture. Now magazines, TV shows and marketing firms try to reach out to "geeks." They seem superstitious about the geek acceptance much like republicans going after that evangelical vote. In the last year Entertainment Weekly has done cover stories or entire issues on the San Diego Comics Convention, the Watchmen movie, Dark Knight, Iron Man and probaly other ones I've forgotten about. And in their endless chasing of zeitgeist tail they end up believing these "fanboys" as they call them might be right and they better be covering all this shit from a "we're geeks just like you" perspective.

So when Robert Rodriguez made his movie based on the SIN CITY comic book, the table was set for him to try a pretty ridiculous experiment: why not, instead of taking this book and telling the same story as it fits best into the medium of film, dress up a bunch of dudes in Halloween costumes and have them awkwardly re-enact the exact drawings and every last word of the comic book using cheesy low budget special effects to make actual photographs into a limp imitation of black and white ink drawings? And in fact why don't I quit the director's guild so that they'll allow me to have the guy who drew the pictures stand on set with me and credit him as co-director? Nerds always complain about comic book movies not being faithful to the source material, why not make the first ever UNCOMFORTABLY FAITHFUL comic book movie? It's just so stupid it might work!

And I guess it did kind of work. I forgive SIN CITY its many shortcomings because at least it was an original thing to try, and I thought they were pretty good pulp stories, alot of it worked for me even though it looked like dudes standing in front of greenscreens, which in my opinion is exactly what it was. But if I may make some constructive criticism of the geek lobby - please don't take this as racist against geeks, some of my best friends have glasses - the motherfuckers are way too god damn literal. Always talking about faithfulness and canonical this and the original that. I understand being a purist but I think some of these guys are sort of obsessive compulsive about it, they focus on one meaningless detail and miss the whole picture. For example I swear to Christ (and Christ will back me up on this I'm sure) there was a dude in the Chud comments on a story about a rumored "reboot" of the BLADE series, and he said he would see it if they went back to the original source material and used wood weapons instead of silver. To him it was the material that the weapons were made of that was interesting to him in that particular story.

What I'm saying is maybe SIN CITY is a pretty good movie that gets a little too much credit just for being literal about adapting the comic strip. That maybe Nerd America is too willing to accept literalness in place of actual cinematic quality. Unfortunately I can't test that theory because this one is done in the same phoney greenscreen style as SIN CITY, but apparently the comic strip isn't so much like that. So of course nerds want Frank Miller's heart on a Lord of the Rings limited edition sword replica with certificate of authenticity for not being faithful. Okay, fine, but another reason to hate this is it's a terrible fuckin movie. No need to get into the specifics of the adaptation.

If you must watch it, do it in a safe place surrounded by supportive friends.

---

THE SPLIT

There are two Richard Stark based movies left that have never been released for the home video in the U.S. One is MISE A SAC, a French one based on The Score, where Parker and a crew try to rob an entire mining town. The other is THE SPLIT, based on The Seventh, where Jim Brown as the Parker character robs a football stadium and then has some trouble afterwords. My man David M. in France has seen both - he saw a restored print of MISE A SAC and told me it was great. As for THE SPLIT he did me one better than telling me about it, he sent me a recording from when it played letterboxed on the French Turner Classic Movies channel. (I don't know who the French Ted Turner is, but it sounds like he plays better shit than the American one.)

If you're reading this in the future maybe every movie ever made is available for instant download, but in my day you had to be patient. You don't know how long I've been waiting to see this thing. The closest I came before now was an old movie magazine I bought at an antique mall because it had Barbarella on the cover (wait a minute, is Roger Vadim the French Ted Turner?) So I bought it for the Barbarella, because a man has needs, but it turned out there was also an "article" - really just a plot summary - about THE SPLIT. I'd been meaning to read it and write a book-to-movie-summary comparison until they get off their ass and release it. But now thanks to French Ted Turner I don't have to stoop to that.

Jim Brown plays McClane, a man of unspecified ill-repute who returns to his girl Ellie (Diahann Carroll) who's pissed at him for leaving her and tries not to take him back. Meanwhile an old friend shows him an idea for a job- stealing all the gate and concessions money from a football stadium. He recruits a team and pulls off the job, but makes the mistake of leaving the whole score alone with Ellie before they can split it up. Next thing you know Ellie's dead, the money's gone, and everybody thinks McClane betrayed them. And he wants to get back his share.

For some reason I assumed this would be a weak one and not at all like the book. Actually it's solid and although it's alot different from the book it's about as close as any of the other Parker movies. What surprised me most was the cast. His team is made up of a fighter (Ernest Borgnine), a driver (Jack Klugman), a safecracker (Warren Oates) and an assassin (Donald Sutherland). They also run into trouble with a pervert landlord (James Whitmore) and a police detective (Gene Hackman). Plus, the music is by Quincy Jones. So how the hell is this not on video?

One idea I really liked is how McClane picks his crew by testing them without their knowledge. My favorite scene is when he shows up in Borgnine's office and just starts punching him. I never seen Borgnine look so tough, like an old school wrestling or boxing trainer. McClane takes some blows, gets a flying kick in, destroys some furniture. When he's convinced this guy will do he just exits through the window, leaving Borgnine on the ground asking "What the hell was that about?"

The book The Seventh was the seventh Parker book, and the money was supposed to be split seven ways, so "the seventh" was what Parker was trying to get. If I remember right the heist was over much quicker in the book and the story was mostly about the aftermath. Also the way he lost the money made more sense because the girl he left it with was more familiar with his life and he just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes when it happened. In the movie he's stupid and leaves it for a while with his uninvolved girlfriend. Like she's gonna guard it.

For the most part though I think I understand why they felt they needed to Hollywood it up a little. It takes away some of what is unique about the Parker of the books, but it leaves a pretty solid heist movie that's probaly a little more accessible. Parker in all the books (and none of the movies) is completely emotionless. He doesn't even have a slight whiff of a soft side. Just a cold-blooded bastard concerned only with money. When his girl is killed he kind of figures well, shit happens. He only cares about getting his share back. But, you know, we expect that in Parker book #7. I can see why they'd worry that it would be too harsh in a standalone Jim Brown movie. He gets poor Diahann Carroll killed and doesn't give a shit? No, they have to show that he wants vengeance (although to be fair the money does seem more important to him, since he knows he can get it back). Also unless I'm mixing it up with another one I think the book is one of the few where he loses at the end. But again, that's in the context of a series, and you know he'll get back on his feet in the next book. Might be more of a bummer in a movie.

A side note: I was telling some buddies about this movie and one of them heard me wrong, said "Jim Brown is in a parkour movie!?" And I thought damn, I would watch that. I don't want poor Jim Brown to have to jump off buildings at his age, though. But how about a parkour Parker? The Luc Besson version of POINT BLANK. He could actually climb Alcatraz at the end. Think about it.

---

SPY KIDS PART 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS

This is the story of a man (me), a famous television critic (Gene Shalit) and a children's action picture called SPY KIDS PART 2. Three entitities living their separate existences. Independent and peaceful. And it coulda easily stayed that way, if not for the simple words of a newspaper advertisement. But it was not to be. Because of those words, our three lives converged. And we would be changed for a while, I guess.

GENE SHALIT OF The TODAY Show RAVES:

"THE MOST JOYOUSLY IMAGINATIVE MOVIE OF THE SUMMER! JUST ABOUT EVERY MINUTE IS FUNNY OR INGENIOUS... IN A WORD, FUN-TASTIC!"

Now I gotta be honest. Normally I don't pay attention to these fuckwads on the ads. I am one of the most important film Writers today and I never been quoted once. So obviously these people aren't the cream of the crop. But there was something about this quote from Gene Shalit that intrigued me.

Now first of all let me mention that alot of individuals are down on Gene Shalit, but I'm gonna stand up for him here. Like me, he has a criminal past. Yeah, he used the "senior moment" defense instead of the more honorable "just some bullshit", but he's still one of our guys. Now I don't know what it is about the guy that makes people belittle his work. Maybe it is his ridiculous hair and mustache, or the funny voice he talks in, or the bad puns he uses, or the incredibly bad taste he has in movies. I don't know. To tell you the truth come to think of it I hate this fuckin guy. I think maybe I was thinking of somebody else. Never mind I'm not gonna stand up for Gene Shalit. But I am going to tell you what about his quote intrigued me: the word "fun-tastic".

The Webster's dictionary defines "fun-tastic" as... well, nothing. Because fun-tastic is not a word. And no smartass, it's not two words either. Two words with a dash between them still counts as only one word, in my opinion. Anyway as far as I can tell this strange new word is some kind of contraction or compound word, which combines all the powers and distinctive qualities of the word "fun" with those of "fantastic". But really, what is there that is "fantastic" that is not, by definition, already fun? And isn't fun a fantastic thing to have? Maybe it is a shorter way of saying "fantastic fun", but then wouldn't it be "fanta-fun", to keep the words in the right order? By removing the "fan" from "fantastic" is Gene saying that it is somehow less than fantastic, but still alot of fun?

I don't fuckin know. So there was only way to find out. To postpone my plans to see XXX and/or BLOOD WORK and go to this kiddie picture first.

Today I learned many things about what it takes for an old man to have a fun-tastic time. And I also learned about what kind of freaky ass shit your kids are watching today. For example they have a movie coming out where there are cartoon vegetables that talk. They are pirates and it is also the bible. There is a caterpillar involved who has a funny accent. There is also a cartoon about Adam Sandler. And because Miramax is putting out a dubbed SHAOLIN SOCCER, they made yet another update of the song "Kung-Fu Fighting." Because that song never gets old.

What in fuck's name is wrong with all you people.

SPY KIDS PART 2 is directed by Robert Rodriguez who did the great MARIACHI series. Now he does kiddie pictures. This one's about two little kids who work for a government agency using all kinds of magic gadgets to fight weird creatures and scientists. There is lots of little kid stunts and fighting. They do kung fu, they dance, they fly around on little jets and fight skeletons and monsters. Antonio Banderas is their dad and Ricardo Montalban is their grandpa, in a flying wheelchair.

This is not really a good movie for the adults without kids (me and Gene Shalit). It is pretty empty, just trying to impress with lots of little computer effects and kiddy fantasy fulfillment, and the occasional poo or booger joke. To be frankly honest I wish they had this kind of crap when I was a kid. The little boy Junie is just a regular lookin pudgy little kid, but he gets to do badass kung fu, wear a little tuxedo and dance ballet at a formal ball. Everything you wanted to do as a kid, except also ballet. He gets to drive vehicles, climb up shit, fly around, play a long guitar solo, etc. There is lots of typing on funny lookin computers with big round buttons. At the end he is disillusioned by the lack of honor in the spy world and vows to retire, which proves that he is a good kid. This is actually a pretty smart theme in the movie - most of the characters are willing to switch sides constantly to be on the winning side or to save themselves, but the little boy knows who he is loyal to. Obviously, there aren't many little boys in the CIA, FBI or Bush Administration.

In a way this is a new type of movie, a mid-level effects extravaganza. Robert Rodriguez did not have a Star Trek type budget behind his movie but he used the same digital cameras (which actually look fine) and crammed the whole movie full of computerized creatures and weapons and stunts and backgrounds and flying vehicles. They are able to fit more gimmicks in there than they could when we were kids because it doesn't cost as much. Plus they got Bill Paxton in a small role.

This is not a realistic style. The creatures do not look as real as the dinos in jurassic park or what have you. The backgrounds like at the amusement park at the beginning sometimes look cartoony and phoney. You can tell they're blue screened and the skeletons they fight are deliberately flickery like the ol' stop motion ones they are a reference to. They probaly coulda spent an extra $40 million and made it all look more photo-realistic, but then it would still be the type of movie where Antonio Banderas suddenly announces that he once did the kid's dental work for a year and that was so he could implant special tracking devices in their teeth which happen to be non-electrical so they will still work despite the fact that the kids are on an island with a special gadget that prevents all electric devices from working.

So why bother? It's all about how many silly gimmicks, goofy adventure and every robot, flying vehicle or monster you can fit in, not about how convincing you make them look. If you are ten or have a ten year old with you (yours, by the way, none of this kidnapping bullshit that's goin around) then you'll have a great time. That's the whole point of the cinema fun-tastique.

---

A THRILLING DIVORCE DOUBLE FEATURE:

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE meets THE WEATHER MAN

Okay first of all I gotta ask, why does every movie lately gotta be about a nasty divorce, somebody's dad dying, or both? I guess that's just what happens when the sky turns grey and the leaves start falling off the trees, all the sudden you get all these depressing movies about how either you or your dad is a novelist and you fucked up everything with your wife and kids and you want to fix your marriage but that's completely delusional, your wife has a new guy and she hates you because you're an asshole and she can do better. (that's what both of these are about.)

Which brings me to my second comment, you better look up what these movies are about before you see them because the titles are misleading. I know, how could you go wrong with a movie called SQUID VS. WHALE, but unfortunately it turns out that title is some kind of a metaphor or something. Which answers my question of how this got a theatrical release. There is no squid vs. whale fight, at least not a living squid and whale. And the dead ones that fight is only in a museum and only in the very end.

And THE WEATHER MAN is the opposite problem, the title actually is literal. It's about a tv weather man, and not a tv weather man who secretly works for the CIA or a tv weatherman thrust into extraordinary circumstances or anything like that. Just a regular tv weather man, thrust into only the most ordinary circumstances. So if you're thinking what I was thinking, you better lower your expectations. It really has very little in common with THE GLIMMER MAN.

Nic Cage (FACE/OFF) plays the weather man and although divorce and weather are generally not as interesting as the international weapons trade, this is a better movie than his last one LORD OF WAR. The directionist is Gore Verbinski, who specializes in pulling shit off that you would think nobody should even try (an American remake of RINGU, a movie based on the Pirates of the Caribean ride at Disneyland). This movie must be his reward for pulling shit off, the movie the studios humor him with to keep him in their pocket. Shit, put Nic Cage in it it will probaly make a few bucks on cable. Who knows, maybe some asshole will confuse it with THE GLIMMER MAN.

This is one of them internal dialogue movies, the whole thing narrated by the main character, whining about his problems. But unlike LORD OF WAR, where he just kept telling you the story instead of showing it and you wanted him to shut the hell up, this one puts you into his mind, more like a book. There's even a part where he's walking to pick up some take out and you hear his thoughts as he wanders from thinking about not forgetting the tartar sauce to thinking about how he likes to eat pussy but other men don't or do they, maybe that's only black guys, he's not sure.

Of course these more important topics cause him to forget the tartar sauce, and this leads to the fight that ends his marriage. The whole movie is about a depressing period in his life when his dad is dying, his daughter is getting picked on at school, his son is getting molested by some prick from Alley McBeal, and he is starting to realize that he doesn't like being a weather man. The only good thing in his life is that he might get a high paying job on a national morning show, but even that is with Bryant Gumbel. There's a short but important scene where he talks to Bryant Gumbel for a second and it feels like he's meeting Elvis or something. And I think he realized how pathetic that was before I did.

What I liked about this movie is that it really doesn't feel like any other movie and it doesn't follow the paths you expect a studio movie to. He tries to bond with his kids, and he doesn't do a very good job, but it seems like he's really trying. It seems much more genuine than some piece of shit where Steve Martin or Robin Williams or Jim Carrey or somebody keeps fucking up but they really love their kid and then after a bunch of humiliating misunderstandings and coincidences they come through with some grand gesture in the end and prove that they are a great father and at some point somebody falls down in a big puddle of paint, animal shit, or pie. This is not like that at all although people are always throwing food at him.

At the same time he's trying to bond with his dad, Michael Caine (ON DEADLY GROUND). He's always living in his dad's shadow because the guy is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. He's afraid of disappointing his dad but seems to find a new way to do it every day. The thing is, in this type of story Michael Caine would usually be an asshole, or if not, a saint. Or an asshole until the very end and then he's a saint. But here he's something different, he's kind of cold but genuinely caring and wise.

And then there are just little odd touches here and there that you don't expect. For example I think this is one of only a handful of movies where a dad finds out that the kids at school call his daughter "camel toe" and he has to figure out how to get her not to wear tight pants without hurting her feelings. I mean you see alot of movies where a guy has to shoot a bad guy without hitting the hostage but you don't see too many where he has to get his daughter to not be called camel toe without her finding out why she is called camel toe.

 

In THE WEATHER MAN the most likable character dies. Nobody bites it in SQUID MEETS WHALE as far as I remember but somehow it is still way more of a bummer. In this one the novelist dad is also the fucked up divorcee, so it's Nic Cage and Michael Caine rolled economically into one Jeff Daniels. Daniels (BLOOD WORK) plays a snobby prick writing professor who lives in New York and wrote some books a long time ago. He separates from his wife (Laura Linney, ABSOLUTE POWER) and the movie is mostly about how his two sons deal with it. The older son takes his side and the younger son takes his mom's side and everybody fights.

The professor's personality is very well constructed and reflected in his kids. His main interests are books (ranked either as interesting or "minor") and tennis (he also ranks tennis players and only considers a few of them to be artists). He looks down on everybody outside of his family except his student, Anna Paquin, who he claims is a good writer but actually he just wants to get a BJ from her.

There's a part where he is caught reading Fade to Black by Elmore Leonard and is clearly embarassed, explaining that he didn't want to read "a good book" but that it's "good for what it is." Fuck this asshole.

The guy is such an elitist that even his own elite have to have most of their books dismissed. When his son says he's reading A Tale of Two Cities in school, he says it's "minor Dickens" and the kid decides not to even read it. You really see how full of shit this guy is when the kid sings a Pink Floyd song to him, pretending he wrote it himself, and the proud father says, "very dense, very interesting." And then you realize why his son described a book that way earlier.

The way the dad acts pisses you off, but then the son goes and takes it to the next level, saying that his new girlfriend is "not gorgeous, but cute." So the seeds are definitely sewn for SQUID AND THE WHALE: THE NEXT GENERATION.

Like in THE WEATHER MAN the characters are pretty three dimensional. The wife seems like the more reasonable one in the marriage but then you find out she was cheating on him for years. So there's no bad guy. He's the asshole, she's the fuckup.

 

The skipper on this one is a guy called Noah Baumbach, he was co-writer of A LIFE AQUATIC with Wes Anderson, who is also the producer of this particular picture. Baumbach and Anderson share the same funny attention to detail and dark sense of humor, but somehow with Baumbach it comes off way less cute and alot more bitter. The quality of the movie is very high but I gotta admit I didn't entirely enjoy myself. The Jeff Daniels character is a great character, but he's such an asshole. What I like about a Wes Anderson picture is that he somehow brings a humanity to an asshole like Tenenbaum or the brat from Rushmore. To me the message of Royal Tenenbaums was that assholes are people too. It was heartwarming.

In Squid-on-Whale assholes are people too but they're not people you ever want to be around. You maybe feel sorry for Jeff Daniels sometimes out of brotherhood for your fellow man but I can't think of any redeeming qualities he has. The older son, you know he's just taking after his dad, but he's a prick too, parroting all the same dickhead bullshit his dad says, but even more full of shit because he hasn't even read the books he's talking about. Put it this way, the kid doesn't get picked on in school because the audience would have to side with the bully. At least after he fucks over his nice girlfriend. The younger son, maybe he's a little nicer but then he goes around jerking off and wiping semen on public property. I guess it's a long story you sort of have to see the movie.

I mean don't get me wrong, I like how uncomfortable this movie makes you, but I'm just saying maybe it would be better if there was a little more of a reward at the end. Which reminds me, this is one of those movies that ends really abruptly. Usually a movie gives off some kind of scent that lets you know the credits are ready to roll. But every once in a while you get something like this where the credits come up and you think oh shit, I wasn't ready for that. In retrospect it makes sense that that was the last scene but I just wasn't expecting it quite yet, I wish I could back up a little and know that it was the last scene. I think in the future if Baumbach is gonna pull this type of shit, he should put a little countdown somewhere in the corner or somewhere saying "movie ends in 15 seconds" or whatever so you can mentally prepare. Otherwise it's like when you step off a curb and you think your foot's about to hit the ground but you misjudged the height of the curb and you sort of stumble forward and your stomach feels like you're going down a hill on a roller coaster. I think I just piled too many similes on top of each other but anyway fuck you Baumbach.

Actually that was way too harsh, I actually liked the movie, so I take it back. You see that Jeff Daniels? That's called being nice and reasonable and apologizing for shit. That's how it works bud, try it out. And by the way I was way ahead of you in BLOOD WORK man, you're not as slick as you think you are.

A word of caution for parents and families: This isn't Larry Clark or Whoriental Sex Academy but it's not Walt Disney either. There's some fucked up shit you gotta look out for, mainly the scene where the older son walks in on Jeff Daniels trying to get Anna Paquin to suck his dick. This scene will be very disturbing for anybody that is a big fan of FLY AWAY HOME, where Daniels was Anna Paquin's father and they flew around and saved geese together. Not that I am one of those big fans necessarily. I mean I wouldn't lie about it if I was but, you know, how can you really say for sure, there's no way to really know something like that either way in my opinion.

---

STARWARS VOL. II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES

a.k.a. YODA VS. DRACULA

This is a picture that most people already have an opinion on, that will never change, whether they've seen it or not. This is only one of those opinions.

First of all, I enjoyed this picture. I laughed at some of the cornball speeches, the sometimes stiff acting, and a couple bad puns. But you know, I can get into this space 'n robots shit sometimes, and for one main reason: Dracula. As you know from my review of Lord of the Rings Part 1, I enjoy any picture where some dude has a duel with Dracula. This one raises the bar by making the dude be a little green space-elf/Shaolin monk.

There are some good action scenes in here. The story is fun, starting out like some kind of space detective movie, with a murder mystery, an attack in the night, a chase through the big city. Obi Wan even goes to a space-cafe to get information from an old connection. Then it turns into a romance and then a full-on political picture, but more on that later.

There are lots of nuggets for the trekkies. Even ol' Vern here enjoyed that feeling of the puzzle pieces starting to fit together, connecting this one to the other ones. You're finding out where Darth Vader came from, where the empire came from, the stormtroopers, the helmet guy, etc. But most of all it answers that question that all americans have asked since the early '80s: if Yoda is a jedi then where is his space sword?

And he fights Dracula.

You know what though friends I am going to take this piece to the next level. And I'm 110% serious here. While all the pussy critics are struggling to see who can seem to hate this movie the most, I am going to be the first to say THIS PICTURE IS DEEP. Accidentally, kinda, but it doesn't matter. You see, the political themes of this picture have striking parallels to what is going on on right now on a planet not, not far away. I think Lucas was going for universal truths about the world and not specific timely commentary, but that's what he got. There are whole books about how the PLANET OF THE APES pictures mirror the racial struggle, Vietnam war and other issues of their time, whether intentional or subconscious. Nobody will admit it but CLONE ATTACK does the same.

Let's take a look. First of all we've got George W. Palpatine, the leader of a supposed great democracy, who in part 1 took office through manipulation. And he's very popular despite being obviously evil. (I mean I don't want to give anything away but I think there MAY be a connection between Mr. Palpatine and the mysterious evil dude in the robe who is played by the same actor.)

Then we got the Space Senate, who are repeatedly said by the jedis to be corrupt, not representing the people but taking the stands that they are paid to take. We believe in Padme's ideal of the senate as a democratic force but we see that it's made inneffective by sellout politicians and easily manipulated numb nuts like Senator Jar Jar.

And elsewhere we have the weapons manufacturers (the cloners, the fish people who make robots) eager to take part in the manipulation of intergalactic politics for profit. The cloners have spent nearly ten years preparing weapons for a conflict that hasn't happened yet! Wow, how convenient that suddenly there is turmoil that all of these weapons can be used for.

Let's face it, these are all things that we have on this planet, that are especially relevent right now, during the Bush regime. Well, except we don't have a Senator Jar Jar. Some of our politicians are worse, in my opinion, although they walk better. But the most timely political thread of CLONE MENACE is that when the jedis see a genuine threat - like we earthlings did last september - they take charge of a powerful army and destroy all the enemies they can find. Much to Yoda's regret. I think many of us feel Yoda-esque about the "victory" in Afghanistan, which like this first conflict of the clone war is said to be only the beginning.

Count Palpatine, just as Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft, uses the threat as a way to scare the senate into giving him unprecedented powers, and the people willingly give up their democracy in the name of safety. They even talk about "executive orders". But don't worry, he loves democracy. He'll give it back when this all blows over some day in the distant future.

In space the war was all orchestrated and taken advantage of by sinister forces within, while on earth - well, you be the judge. Anybody read today's headlines? "Bush warned of Osama bin Laden highjacking plot."

[UPDATE (MAY 27th) - Can't believe I missed this, but a buddy pointed out a scene where they talk about how appalling it is that the trade federation creature "Nute Gun Ray" stays in office despite what he did in Part 1: Phantom Menace. This of course is a parallel to cases like the many Iran/Contra criminals who were pardoned by Bush I or put into office by Bush II. Apparently one of them even had a hand in the failed military coup in Venezuela.]

All this doesn't make it a great movie but it does make it more interesting and smarter than most critics will notice. They see this as a big, dumb, empty computer movie but really, I mean can you deny it? It's the first movie to clearly address "the war on terrorism."

And in general I think people are being way too hard on this movie anyway. It's funny to watch people complain about the cornball non-ironic dialogue they praised two weeks ago in Spider-Man and two decades ago in the other star trek pictures. Yeah, the delivery makes a difference, but if it's so bad then doesn't that make this a movie that missed the mark instead of the shocking, foul, BATMAN AND ROBIN-like pile of shit people make it out to be?

I'm not one of those "turn off your brain" morons but I can't believe how many film snobs complain about an alleged lack of character and story in a good yoda picture like this one but have no problem with soul-less, story-less, character-less garbage like SNATCH. I mean tell me you're not being dazzled by dumb gimmicks on that one, please. I guess it's all about what you expect and what you want and how smart and tasteful you are, or want to appear. It's all subjective. So nobody's gonna be talked into enjoying this one. I thought it was some pretty good space shit, though.

AND NOW A WORD ABOUT DIGITAL PROJECTION. I Wrote a piece on this topic for The Ain't It Cool News, but I don't know if they'll use it, so here's a start. I got to see YODA VS. DRACULA projected digitally with a brand new Boeing Digital Projector at the Cinerama. I sat in my favorite place in my favorite theater, to watch this highly anticipated nerd movie on this state of the art machine that they just busted the cherry on.

AND IT LOOKED LIKE CRAP!

Don't listen to George Lucas, don't listen to the hype. The idea that digital video jumps off the screen and looks more vivid than film is a huge load of horseshit. True, there are no scratches or splices. Instead, there's fuckin pixels! It just looks like a giant tv, or computer screen. The credits look like a video game. The thx and boeing digital logos looked like screensavers. The movie itself looked digitized, like a Quicktime trailer or something. Sometimes you can forget about it in the dark parts but in the light and especially when there's words on the screen it can be real distracting.

It didn't ruin the movie for me but it was far inferior to real film projection. And even if they perfect the technology it's still gonna be made out of squares. I don't think it's ever gonna look as good.

Remember that scene in CLONE ATTACK where the clone trooper went to pull Natalie Portman out of the sand, but they were obviously standing in front of a green screen with a digital picture of sand, and then she started walking funny to try to imitate walking in sand, but it looked totally phoney? And you were like, what is this HR Pufnstuf bullshit? Is this what it has really come to, that we can spend $120 million to make a film that is entirely shot on digital video, full of spectacular computer animated space ships and robots and all manner of soldiers and aliens and beasts and flying whatnots, an epic multi-planet story with cities and factories and crowds and... and we can't get out a couple fucking BAGS OF SAND and make Natalie Portman walk through some sand?

I mean it's fucking sand! SAND!

It's humbling to us humans, it brings us right down to earth. Yeah, Dr. Frankenstein, you can create life. But can you walk through sand?

Well, that's exactly what digital projection is. It doesn't ruin the movie, but it makes no damn sense, and it's no substitute for the real thing. Not even close.

---

STAR WARS PART 3: REVENGE OF THE SITHS

Here's a couple topics I never want to hear about ever again: Star Wars started the era of the blockbuster. Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw and made me fall in love with the films of Cinema. I camped in line for thirty two days to see Star Wars. Empire Strikes Back is the greatest sequel ever made, and also better than any non-sequel ever made. George Lucas earned ten billion dollars on merchandise. I hate Ewoks. I love Jawas. (or is it the other way around.) Originally there was a part where Hans Solo shot Jabba the Hutt with a harpoon but now they changed it so a robot bit Luke Skywalker on the leg. George Lucas ruined my life. I have a tattoo of Hans Solo. I had all the star wars dolls now they are worth one hundred and sixty two dollars on E-bay if somebody would buy them, which they wouldn't. The first time I ever jerked off was to Princess Leah in a metal bikini. I have nightmares about the part where Jar Jar stepped in space shit. George Lucas touched my childhood in the bathing suit area.

For years there's been a cliche about trekkies who like Star Trek, how they're obsessed nerds and they gotta get a life and etc. And I agree but somehow I think the trekkies for Star Wars are worse. Because at least the Star Trek trekkies are obsessed with something they LOVE. Now days the star wars trekkies seem to be defined by hating ewoks, hating jar jars, hating computer effects, hating george lucas's neck, hating the prequels, the Anakins, the special editions, some of the originals, themselves, their parents, and orphans. I mean there's six Star Wars movies and if you're a REAL fan it's only socially acceptable to like 2 of them. But that 1/3 of Star Wars (or more often the other 2/3) is their whole god damn life. Go over there on the ain't it cool news talkbacks, and every god damn topic turns into how they been wronged by George Lucas. Lord of the Rings is good, take THAT George Lucas. I enjoyed such and such movie, which is more than I can say for GEORGE LUCAS MOVIES, are you listening to me George Lucas?  The article could be about the translation of Kinji Fukasaku's BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY series, it would still come back to how George Lucas would've screwed up the translation if it he was a guy who translated classic Yakuza movies instead of a guy who directed space movies every once in a while. And there is a 300% chance there'd be an assrape metaphor in the discussion. Even in real life these fuckers are crawling all over the place. Just the other day I heard a guy announce emphatically, "Phantom Menace is quite possibly THE worst piece of crap that George Lucas has EVER made." You could tell he got really worked up about it - I thought the dude was gonna start crying.

Well luckily, this REVENGE OF THE SITHS is the last puzzle piece for star warses so give it a 7 or 8 year cool down period and maybe the nightmare will be over, and these ponytailed assholes will fixate on some other god damn thing, like the lord of the rings prequels or something. What we got here is the best of the newer star warses in my opinion, one where you only gotta forgive a couple scenes and you actually get to enjoy the rest. This one has a better, more emotional story, the main guy Anakin is a better actor, and they got Darth Vader in there. I mean facts is facts, americans love a picture with a yoda or a chewbacca or a darth vader in it, and this one's got both.

I admit, I was soft on the other two. I realize there are some real howlers in there, but who gives a fuck. There's enough detail and imagination in this spaceland, and the whole feel of the thing is different enough from any other movies that exist that I was willing to give it a whirl. I'm not saying you gotta enjoy it too or that I don't feel dirty in the morning but they really didn't bother me the way they did to anyone who ever wrote anything on the internet. This new one though, honestly, it's alot better. Except for one part where Darth Vader, in the full iconic costume, looks up to the sky in anguish and yells "NNNOOOOOO!!!" which will probaly be the butt of nerd jokes for generations to come.

One thing I liked: they actually made Anakin into kind of a cool dude here. Before he was a whiny kid who talked in bad love poems but now he's got cool '70s hair and a scar, he does some dashing derring do or whatever it's called, and he's got a dark streak. A pretty big one where he ends up murdering children. Which I'm against. The exact moment of the switch from good guy to bad guy is a little bit iffy but the story is surprisingly convincing. There's a lot of different complicated motives for it that tie into the events of the other movies. I guess what made me realize it was working was when I caught myself rooting for this guy to figure out what's going on and make the right decision. I mean I had a pretty good idea it was gonna turn out bad. (there's other movies that take place later where he's darth vader, for those who don't know)

Also, I liked his relationship with Obi Won. I mean there's a little scene early on where the robot R2 fucks up and almost gets them killed. And Obi is about to complain about it but Anakin gets in his face and defends his boy R2. Because these two go WAY back to the days of bowlcuts and podraces and he's got R2s fuckin back. They're like brothers. Same goes for Obi and Anakin, but they're a little more like the brothers in GUMMO, they fight sometimes. But they're still brothers so you gotta feel bad when they end up trying to kill each other and one of them (I won't give it away) ends up face first in the mud, on fire, with both legs chopped off, gargling "I HATE YOU!!" in anguish just before being turned into Darth Vader. This is a tragedy by the way. Kind of a bummer, even in space.

You can never underestimate the whining and negativity of people who like movies, but my guess is some of the trekkies will actually like this one. This is the first movie I've ever seen where the audience applauded a hallway. There was a hallway that I believe was also seen in the original Star Wars part 1, now called Star Wars part 4. So everybody clapped. A real crowdpleaser as far as hallways go. There's one big opportunity that Mr. Lucas missed out on though, and that is to kill Jar Jar. I think we all know that if Jar Jar died in this movie, it would create joy and thunderous applause in every theatrical screening. Of course, it could've ended up Jar Jar dies heroically saving babies. Maybe it's better you don't make a god damn martyr out of the guy. I was also kind of afraid he'd be there for the birth of Luke and Leia (note: they are the main characters from the original star wars). Jar Jar would be saying: "Pusha! Pusha!" and then maybe "Looksie! Yousa has twinsies!" Instead, Lucas pretty much abandoned Jar Jar, showing him in a couple scenes but no lines. So it turns out Jar Jar lives which means that in the later movies, when a battle is waged to save the universe from Jar Jar's fuckup in the senate in part 2, he doesn't bother to help out. Fuckin figures.

I only seen this movie once but as far as I could see there was only two scenes to really be embarassed of. One was the "NNOOOO!!!" scene I mentioned before and the other one had Anakin and Podmay in an apartment together talking that kind of forced soap opera dialogue that part 2 is reknowned for. But otherwise this one is alot stronger and faster paced than the last two. There's a ridiculous amount of detail in these battles like some kind of where's waldo come to life. But at the same time they make you care about what's happening with the individual characters, even the robots. And they got some smartass dialogue going between them for a while, before children are being massacred and amputees are being burned alive. Before all that mess it's the kind of feel that fans love the Star Warses for. So they're probaly gonna hate this one.

I gotta say though as a movie watcher, you fuckin Star Wars trekkies should be grateful for getting a part 3 this good. Who ever heard of a part 3 that's better than part 1 and 2? Not fans of Blade, Alien, The Godfather, Halloween, Scream, Superman, Batman, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday, Night of the Living Dead, Hellraiser, Wild Things, Cruel Intentions, Jurassic Park, Naked Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Rambo, Robocop, The Terminator, Tremors, Vampires, The Crow, etc. Friday the 13th 3-D was probaly my favorite though, 'cause it was in 3-D and has the best theme song. So I guess Revenge of the Siths is the Friday the 13th 3-D of science fictional movies.

Well shit, you know me, I gotta talk about the politics for a minute. Remember when I reviewed the last one (see above) and I talked about how nobody was acknowledging how much the political events of the movie reflected what was going on on earth. Well this one obviously has to continue with the story of the end of democracy in skywalkerville. The pervy chancellor who announced "I love democracy!" in volume 2 is now being even more blatant about his power grab. When he makes a crazy speech to the senate about how he's gonna make the republic into an empire and kill everybody that's allegedly after him, what happens? Everybody claps! Sound familiar?

Of course it does (hint: space story = exactly what is happening in america, except with robots.) I honestly believe that this is not based on what's going on in our country right now. I think it just happens to be what's going on in our country. The story is based on the cycle of how all democracies tend to end. It follows inevitably from the stories in the other new star warses and to what happens in the older star warses. I'm sure most of this aspect of the story was probaly made up in the '70s or '80s. But a funny thing is happening: this time people besides me noticed. There was even early word that this was a "Bush bashing movie" and I saw a couple right wingers complaining about it on their "blogs" (or web sights as I call them, because "blog" is a stupid god damn word that will hopefully die quickly like "dotcoms" and "webzines" and other "buzzwords.") I like that some of these guys are noticing. Our government does the same things as the evil empire in Star Wars, but it's the movie that's bad. Not the evil empire. The movie is unfair to evil space villains.

Obviously alot of people in the US aren't gonna be able to watch this movie without catching on to that parallel of a scared republic losing track of the values they once stood for, letting them be perverted. But maybe there's a Star Wars trekkie out there somewhere cursed with a poetic soul who will see it as a symbol of Lucas losing track of what made the original trilogy good. I don't know but I got a question for you star wars trekkies that I can't figure out. The question is what the fuck is your problem with ewoks. More specifically, why do you hate ewoks but not other lovable furry creatures such as chewbaccas.

This movie has some scenes on the planet of Chewbaccia where the chewbaccas live. Chewbaccas are like a far more lovable version of ewoks. They live in trees and have cartoony primitive tools just like ewoks, but they are much taller for hugging and they love people instead of growling at them and trying to cook them on a spit. Also chewbaccas do not bash people to death with rocks and logs and do not play drums on the severed heads of storm troopers. Chewbaccas are basically the kiddie version of the ewoks, for little babies who are afraid of ewoks just because they are cannibals. What I'm saying is you guys are a bunch of fuckin bigots. This is 2005 man, lay off the damn ewoks.

By the way I got a theory here about part 1 or 2 or whichever it was, when they got the E.T.s in it. As all trekkies know there is a scene in one of the star warses where they're in the senate, and in the corner of the screen you look closely using the pause technology and what you got is a delegation of the E.T. aliens from the movie E.T. Well at the time I thought this was sort of an "in" type joke but now that I've had five or six years to really seriously contemplate this scene I realized what's REALLY going on here in my opinion. You see E.T. - not just any E.T. but the specific character of E.T. we all know and love from the movie E.T. - he used to be a space senator. But that was a long time ago in a galaxy really, really far away or what have you. And the senate was dissolved when the empire was created. So now it's years later, 1982 or whenever, and the poor glowing bastard is flying around picking god damn flowers for a job. It's pathetic. So what I figure is, E.T. is always complaining about it. "I used to be Senator E.T. We flew around on platforms. I knew chewbaccas and everybody. I was like a god to girl E.T.s. And now this is my life, sneaking around at night picking flowers. I'm a fuckin migrant worker." Eventually these other flower pickers are gonna be sick of the senator's bullshit and take matters into their own long alien glowing fingers. What I'm saying here friends is the beginning of E.T. was no god damn accident. What I'm saying is, they left that fucker there for a reason. They WANTED Senator E.T. to be stranded on earth. Because otherwise they had fly back with him. And you know what happened though, my man learned his lesson by going through one of them inner journeys. He hit rock bottom. He learned how to party, getting drunk, dressing up like a girl, etc. He flew on a bike, he died and came back, he turned on his heart light, all because of the magic of a young boy's dream. And now hopefully he's gonna be a little bit less of a prick. It's like Scrooge in space. Only on earth.

Anyway E.T.'s not in this one that I noticed so fuck him. The point is, STAR WARS 3 is a pretty good space movie in my opinion.


DIGITAL PROJECTION UPDATE: I saw part 3 at the same theater I saw part 2, the Cinerama here in Seattle. Back then I complained about the digital projection. Now it's 3 years later, when digital projection was supposed to have caught on, and the Cinerama has actually ditched the digital projector and use the superior "film" type projector. I'm sure it was hard since they probaly spent alot of money on that gizmo but I applaud them for making the right decision. Unlike Anakin.

---

STEALING BEAUTY

Well if you know what this movie is then I know what your thinking. How the fuck does a motherfucker like ol' Vern end up watching a picture like Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. Well the answer is the Bravo network. Ever since I saw The Getaway on Bravo a week or two ago I started watching this channel pretty regular. I think you know about inside the actors studio so I won't mention it except to say, at the end, he always asks them what their favorite curse word is, and they either say fuck or more often motherfucker, and the audience always laughs like it was completely unexpected. Kind of like how everybody always laughed when arnold said "Whatyou talkin about Mr. Drummond?" even though for fuck's sake we all knew the joke was coming, jesus let's not pretend it snuck up behind us fer cryin out loud.

So anyway, Stealing Beauty is a picture about gorgeous 19 year old Lucy who comes to an equally gorgeous Italian villa where all the artists work and what not. This is like the prettiest god damn place you ever seen. The houses are huge and old fashioned, there are perfectly clean streams to swim in, plenty of nature and olive groves and beautiful wooden statues everywhere. I mean it's like going camping, only in the garden of eden. Everyone there loves a laidback lifestyle, they appreciate the arts and the nature and beauty more than anything. It seems like none of them ever go to work, but they have huge houses and property and big parties with candles everywhere and yet they don't come off like a bunch of soulless rich fucks. It takes place in the modern day but it wouldn't have to. People ride bicycles and read books. Nobody watches TV and the only connection to the media or the outside world is an occasional call on the cell phone or a CD that Lucy plays.

This is about the direct opposite of any place I have ever lived, and ordinarily I wouldn't say it was my kind of place. I mean I generally like to have concrete under my feet at all times. I like the sense of community you get from crowded sidewalks late at night, I like the friendliness of the hookers you walk past (or whatever, don't wanna be judgmental). Now that I'm settled down sometimes I even like the sound of the distant siren or police helicopter, knowing that some other poor motherfucker is being chased and not me. Or when I'm living in a suburban community I at least like the hum of the powerlines and the smell of the streets when it rains.

That said, Stealing Beauty does make a PRETTY fucking convincing argument for the sunny Italian villa lifestyle. First of all, the photographing techniques here is stupendous. Having everything bathed in a glimmering golden light grows on a motherfucker after a while. But more importantly, in this town, EVERYBODY is an artist - you got a chainsaw sculptor, a Writer, some poets, dancers, and even one dude who is never said to be a Writer but you at least know that he wrote a pretty outstanding love letter when he was younger. Lucy doesn't consider herself an artist I don't think, but she jots down little phrases like poetry and near the end of the picture, finally graduates to writing one that rhymes. Good job Luce, welcome to real poetry.

Anyway this is a community I might like to be a part of. Now I'm not entirely convinced I would fit in right away, I mean everybody is gentle and soft spoken, most of them have accents and most of the men are real pretty and kind of vacuous. And everybody sits around outside drinking wine and passing joints every night which might be a bit tempting to me but we shall see. Cause hell man it would be worth the trouble, partly because ALL of the women in this villa are fucking knockouts.

You see these motherfuckers have what you call a muse and Lucy is maybe the best one. She poses for artists, even shows the titties and what not. Pretty much every guy wants to nail her or draw her and that is kind of what the whole "stealing beauty" title is about in my opinion. They want to use her beauty to bring happiness to their lives or life to their art. Some of them even lust after her in a hands off type of approach, where just looking at her beauty is good for their health. Now I don't want to sound like a pathetic old fart but I wouldn't mind one of them muses right now, I am stuck on one of my short stories, and the sad truth is it's a true story about my life! I know exactly what happened but I don't know where to go next and THAT is when you need to look at a pretty young gal and, if I understand this correctly, it makes your brain more artistic? Not sure but hell I'd try looking at a pretty gal, no problem.

All the beauty in this movie might be too much to take for some dudes with weak hearts, I mean this is the second movie I have seen this month that gave me flashbacks of the time I watched Fly Away Home on shrooms. But I still followed the story and it is about how Lucy searches to discover who her biological father is as well as find the right dude to, you know, pop her cherry or whatever the sensitive way to say it is. (make a woman out of her.) You know it is one of these coming of age stories about a young gal, and how the beauty of nature and of people helps to inspire people's art and people's lives and holy shit, the more I think about it the more I should mention that if any of my old crew are reading this, or anybody I knew in the joint or whatever, anyone from the old days - well, just kidding bud, I never even SEEN this movie, hell you know me. I would NEVER watch this kind of crap and even if I did it would only be to make fun of it... i mean hell i am not that type of dude, no fucking way. But I mean if you think about it in a way, I mean I can understand how a dude would appreciate a movie like that, if he was a little more cultured and what not, I mean not anybody I know, DEFINITELY not anyone I know, but still, I mean, I'm just sayin. for sake of argument, you know.

---

STEALTH

Director Rob Cohen's STEALTH, which would be called WHOOOSSSHHHH! if it was up to me, takes place in the near future. In the near future, the world's three best and also sexiest pilots have been specially trained to combat terrorism. The way this works is, they fly around and drop bombs on the terrorists. They got this shit down to an art, so for example the CIA calls and says listen up super flyers, we know for sure that three evil terrorist cell leaders who are planning an imminent and deadly attack are going to be meeting up in 24 minutes in a completely empty skyscraper in Rangoon. Have at it, kids.

Even though they know for sure that there are no innocent office workers, janitors or burglars inside the building, our three top guns check out some statistics on their onboard computers to make sure this is morally sound. They know this is in the middle of downtown so they have to plan out a way to implode the building so that it will be all neat and tidy and no bricks will fall on anybody's heads or anything. And they pull it off!

So this is actually a pretty optimistic near future where the pilots are not only interested in preventing casualties, but given the tools to do it and the courage to turn down the mission when it will harm civilians. It's also optimistic because despite the amazing technology on display here, they have not gone and militarized space, which would make this super plane flyers obsolete.

Another thing that might make them obsolete, and the reason we are gathered here today to discuss a movie, is EDI, pronounced Eddie. That's the new plane they got with a robot brain. He is their "new wingman" and they gotta teach his robot brain (which looks like it was made in a collaboration between Macintosh and Tron) how to fight terrorists. Eddie of course gets struck by lightning, his brain starts to evolve and he decides to disobey direct orders and go start selecting his own targets to attack. Which could cause some problems, is what the military people start to worry.

He got this "disobeying orders" idea from the main character of the movie, Josh Lucas. This actor was real good as a psychopath in UNDERTOW. Here he's playing a charming McConaghey type who plays by his own rules. A maverick if you will. He doesn't want to admit it but he's in love with Jessica Biel (Whistler's daughter), pilot number 3 in the secret super flyer anti terror space attack squad. There's a scene where he sits in Whistler's daughter's quarters talking about the foster homes he grew up in, and in the background of the shot you can see her childhood drawing of a jet plane with the words "my aunt" at the bottom. This is another way the movie is optimistic, it assumes anybody gives a shit where these characters come from.

While this is going on, pilot #2, Oscar winner Jamie Foxx, is in his quarters by himself, going over a computerized briefing about Eddie. Also, he's dancing and singing along with music and spinning a basketball on his finger. That is not a joke. I bet Mr. Foxx convinced them *not* to have his character eating fried chicken during this scene. I kinda figured he signed on for this before he won any awards for RAY, since this is after all a Rob Cohen movie about a talking jet plane. But I was still pretty surprised by how weak his character was. He spends half the movie trying to get laid or talking about his dick, then he dies. A Seattle critic I usually don't agree with named Charles Mudede called him "the negro sidekick" which is pretty accurate.

I didn't expect this out of Cohen. Obviously his movies are big on stereotypes, but he has made a movie about racism (DRAGON) and made use of multi-cultural casts (FAST AND THE FURIOUS) so you'd think he'd be up on the advances of the last 50 years.

One of the reasons the movie interests me is because I am a sucker for dumb action movies that have some kind of serious political point hidden in there somewhere. And this really is trying to be a movie about an issue. It's like Top Gun meets 2001, except stupider. Josh Lucas and Joe Morton both play characters who are concerned about this idea of machines doing all the war. Josh gets to make a couple little speeches about how war SHOULD be horrible and require sacrifice, and how these decisions should be made by people with emotions. His admiral argues that if we can send these planes to do the fighting we might have fewer Jamie Foxxes coming home in bodybags. So they both got a point. And then they chase a plane around.

I guess the big question is is this movie funny, and to me it kind of is. It is definitely not in the higher echelon of funny-bad movies, but I got my money's worth. I'd say it's arguably less asinine than Cohen's XXX, but also less gloomy and boring. And less pro-establishment. Sorry I keep bringing that one up, but I still feel betrayed by the way that guarana swilling dickhead Xander Cage sold out in that movie. Anyway, one aspect I liked in this one, there's a little bit of a sullen teen personality in the plane as he goes through these growing pains. He starts to download MP3s and blast shitty rock music when he's mad. Later there's a scene where he goes to refuel from a shiny blimp thing in the sky, and he gets rejected. When Josh Lucas's plane comes and successfully has intercourse with the blimp, Eddie comes back and starts a big shitstorm. If I can't have her, nobody can! I HATE YOU!

There's also the creator of Eddie, guy by the name of Dr. Keith Orbit. They make fun of his name and say he changed it, give you the idea he's some space cadet. But then when you meet him he's a normal dude so you know they added that late in the game when they started to worry about having a character named Dr. Keith Orbit. Anyway, he lives in Seattle in a fancy lower Queen Anne building I never noticed before. They obviously put him in Seattle to make him a Paul Allen billionaire software type, but they have this L.A. idea of guys like that being hip and glamorous. He fondles the cover to a Thelonious Monk LP while listening to some completely unrelated music. Which shows that he is cultured without having to actually have good music on the soundtrack.

Unfortunately, they didn't do as much as they could've with Dr. Keith Orbit. I really wanted to see Eddie come after him, and not just because I want to see my home town attacked by an artificially intelligent jet plane in a big dumb movie. It's also because it would've been funny if they tried to pull some kind of Frankenstein shit and have the plane come after his creator. But they didn't.
There is one action scene I kinda liked, where Whistler's daughter has to eject and finds herself between a rock and a hard place: above her is a couple tons of burning wreckage, below her is North Korea. She manages to not get hit on the head by a chunk of burning plane, but her chute does catch on fire.

And the movie didn't quite go where I expected it to. I don't want to give it away but let's be realistic, nobody else wants to see this shit so I will give it away. The plane is ultimately not evil. It actually develops emotions, and Josh Lucas is able to win it over. Then it becomes a buddy movie or a flying Knight Rider scenario, before Eddie ultimately sacrifices himself to save everybody. Jamie Foxx gets a military funeral at the end (just like the end of Under Siege). Eddie doesn't get shit. I woulda at least liked to see a single tear come out of his windshield before he died, to prove that he had become a real boy, but maybe I'll have to wait for the unrated DVD. For more information on the films of Rob Cohen, see 5 ON THE OUTSIDE: VERN'S WRITINGS ON THE FILMS OF CINEMA which is the only book that will ever exist with a full chapter on Rob Cohen.

---

STOKED: THE RISE AND FALL OF GATOR

Did you ever see that skateboarding documentary DOGTOWN AND THE Z-BOYS? Well STOKED is like the depressing, fucked up David Fincher part 3 to that where all the main characters from part 2 (except the cat) get killed offscreen in the opening credits and Z-Boy shaves his head and gets infected and jumps into a pit of molten metal at the end and burns himself up. Except kind of worse. And metaphorical.

Actually alot of this picture is a fun time nostalgia type of deal about a period in the late 1980s or some time like that where young people grew their bangs real long and wore pink helmets and funny pants and went around on skateboards jumping up in the air. In DOGTOWN they were doing wheelies and shit on their skateboards but what they would do according to this one is go into an empty swimming pool or a woooden ramp and they go back and forth real fast.

Now what they say is one of these guys who was doing this was a dude named Mark Ragowski but they called him "Gator" because of it was a nickname he had, I guess. At a very young age he became a professional skateboarding rider, sponsored by some skateboarding company I believe, or possibly rollerskating, I'm not sure. He became one of the most famous ones, little kids treated him like a rock star and they would go on a big tour and set their ramp up in a mall and then run around the hotel naked, punch a cop in the face, get drunk and fuck some young gals, etc.

Because Gator dressed really bad, some guy from the skateboarding company decided to design clothes for him, so they sold them and started making millions of dollars, etc. So he gets rich and him and his friend Tony Hawk from the video games they have mansions together.

Now the most interesting part of this picture is the universal story arc of the doomed celebrity. You basically got all the cliches of the biopic in here but luckily it's a documentary so you can get away with it. He starts out with nothing, gets famous through his incredible talent and eccentric personality, falls deeply in love, but has a troubled off and on type relationship, starts to get possessive and a big ego, has major drug problem, alienates friends and family, changes his name, goes on MTV, accused of selling out, suddenly loses all fame and money, tries to straighten out his life, turns to jesus, suddenly goes fuckin nuts and rapes and kills somebody and goes to jail the end.

Like every moron who ever becomes famous at anything, he takes all this skateboarder bullshit WAY too seriously and suddenly thinks he is qualified to be in movies. It's pretty funny when Gator is on Club MTV dancing and riding his skateboard. He really thought because he was famous and rolling around on a piece of wood that all the rock and rollers and movie stars would want to hang out with him. Everybody is fucking like this. Every rapper, R&B singer, wrestler, standup joke teller, chef or crocodile hunter becomes a fad for a month and suddenly they and corporate america lose track of reality and tries to reach for the gold. Even people who already are in movies get this same disease so they think they can start a rock band or be a painter or some stupid shit like that.

So those game show contestants from American Idol make a movie together. Mariah Carey makes Glitter. Vanilla Ice makes Cool As Ice. Those dancing guys from Saturday Night Live make a movie. That chef makes a sitcom. Jerry Springer makes a movie. The cast of Blair Witch Project goes on talk shows talking like they are real actors. Anybody who ever lived in a house or ate something foul on a reality show suddenly has an agent and tries to get acting gigs. Bruce Willis, Kevin Bacon, Eddie Murphy, Billy Bob Thornton and David Faustino all make albums. Why can't people just stay cool. All this ambition leads to nothing but pain.

Just as Mr. Gator gets to this point in his career, there is suddenly a major change. Skateboarding kids invent the "street" style of skateboarding where they jump around on benches and curbs and bother you when you're walking innocently down the sidewalk minding your own business. It turns out most kids don't have a giant round empty swimming pool or specially constructed giant wooden ramp in their backyard. So they can relate to this low budget type skateboarding style more and it just explodes. Nobody fucking cares what Gator can do anymore and when he tries the street thing he's as bad as you or I would be. End of career sorry Gator.

And that's not even the depressing part. I wasn't kidding about Gator turning into a rapist/murderer, and there is some unexpectedly nasty crime scene photos in there. Didn't want to see that, actually.

So it's a story of one guy who, for whatever reason, was not strong enough to survive the loss of fame without losing his sanity too. Somewhat in the tradition of the great wrestling documentaries, this is a very interesting documentary that makes even us non-wheeled individuals interested in the history and the tragic ending of a silly sport for guys in pink helmets. what's the deal with that, guys?

---

STONE COLD

As you know I have a professional interest in the old B-action pictures. I like your Seagals, your Swayzes, and your etceteras. That's why somebody asked me Vern, do you know about this guy Brian Bosworth though. I said are you kidding me? Let me answer your question with a question. Did I live in Seattle in the year 1987? Of course I know who the damn Boz is. He was on the Seahawks and the local media acted like he was Jesus Christ Hisself, coming down from Heaven with a sacramental football and a new haircut. The haircut of course was a bleach blond mullet with designs shaved on the side, sometimes a full color Seahawks logo. It was called the Boz cut. I guess you could say he was the Dennis Rodman of his time. Known for his calculated outrageous fashion and In Your Face Attitude, he was a phenomenon with the kids. The white Mr. T. People copied the haircut, they had pro and anti Boz t-shirts, they even had this poster that said "Land of Boz" and showed him going down the yellow brick road with a bunch of kids dressed as him (Bozkins, probaly). He was a real big fuckin deal for all us retards here in Seattle.

Only one problem was, he never played that good. He kept getting injured and retired after three seasons. But his career was insured so he got rich off it all. After that score he figured, what the hell, maybe you can pull this same shit off in movies. Moved to L.A. and made STONE COLD. And it should've been obvious just from that background that this was gonna be a real good bad action movie.

The movie opens in a grocery store where a group of Troma-style insane biker criminals are robbing the joint and terrorizing the shoppers with machine guns. But they start to panic when they realize some dude (Brian Bosworth) is just ignoring them and continuing his shopping. Remember after 9-11, everybody was all scared and they told us the one way we were gonna show these terrorists what fucking time it was, was we were gonna go back out there and shop, buy products, etc. This is the same exact thing, the fuckers just freak out. They send guys after him but he uses canned food to foil them. He acts real cocky and he's wearing a leather trenchcoat with big shoulder flaps like a samurai or an evil space villain would wear. I mean, Seagal must've been so jealous when he saw this coat. When the cops show up they're sayin shit like, "Oh jesus, what did you do this time Joe, you're still on suspension!" So you know he's a Cop Who Plays By His Own Rules. In these type of movies it is heroic to be a self absorbed asshole who everybody at the workplace hates.

So far so good, but it's during the credits that we realize this is something special, a bad action movie with a little more crazy energy than expected. I mean there's a pretty good part where a judge gets blown up while he's fishing. But the topper is before that, a little scene, maybe about 4 or 5 seconds long, consisting of only 3 shots. First you got a smiling minister baptising a baby. Next shot, you got a big bald dude firing a shotgun at the priest. Then finally you got the minister flying through the air and crashing through a stained glass window. I didn't notice until the second time I rewound it that when the glass shatters you can barely make out the rest of the biker gang sitting outside like they're watching a play.

I mean they just hit you with that scene out of the blue and then move on like it's nothing. It's important to the plot, because the baldy gets 45 years in prison, and a showboating D.A. is trying to get it changed to a death sentence, and that's what the gang is angry about throughout the movie. They act like he's a political prisoner or something. I mean, all he did was shotgun a baptist minister in front of a baby. Is that a crime? They never explain why the fuck this guy wanted to blow away a minister in the middle of a baptism. I mean there must've been some reason I bet.


Anyway, the Boz is a typical Alabama cop, except that he has a Boz cut and lives with a giant lizard, and probaly lives in L.A. The FBI somehow holds the singlehandedly-stopping-a-grocery-store-robbery/takeover incident over his head to force him into an undercover job, using his expertise in biker gangs. He has to infiltrate The Brotherhood, which I don't know if it's the same gang as robbed the grocery store, but these guys are killing religious leaders and selling drugs and hooking up with the mafia and who knows, probaly smuggling human organs. All kinds of bad shit. So you see it is a heavily researched and highly realistic examination of modern day bike gangs.

The Boz renames himself "JOHN STONE" and teams up with an uptight and obsessive compulsive square cop (Sam McMurray) then goes to a bar and picks a fight with a guy named Ice who's a bigshot in the Brotherhood. It's kind of like throwing rocks at girls on the playground though because they invite him to the rally and he becomes some kind of junior probationary member. Anyway Ice is William Forsythe, playing another great lunatic like he did the same year in OUT FOR JUSTICE (arguably Seagal's best picture). This guy is such a fucking weasel. I love him. His overacting goes so far over the top that it loops back around under the bottom and then flips back to over the top again, like a little kid getting pushed way too hard on a swingset. This time he's a greasy, bearded longhair so his mad eye gleam makes him look like Manson (in OUT FOR JUSTICE he's an insane mafia wannabe on a suicidal killing spree/crack binge).

So William Forsythe becomes Stone's rival in the gang, but we need an even better villain for the leader so, obviously, it's Lance Henriksen as Chains. (There are also other gang members with such one word names as Gut, AWOL, Tool, Trouble and Mudfish.) It's great to see Lance Henriksen with long hair and a goatee, walking around with a sleeveless vest and no shirt. He plays alot of damn villains and alot of them are pretty much the same character, but this time he's lower class and he gets to have a different look.

If you ever get chained up, what you do, you pick up a stone and start pounding on the chain until it breaks. Stone and Chains are born enemies, two bones chipped off the same skeleton and cast into the sea in opposite directions, fated to one day drift together and collide again. Chains is Lance Henriksen, so he's a lanky freak with deep, cold eyes, his face covered in more lines than a map. Stone is Brian Bosworth, so he's a smooth, shiny, golden haired meatball. One look at these guys standing next to each other and you can understand why Chains would hate that smarmy muscleman bitch.

I mean think about how perfect it is. Here's Lane Henriksen, such a talented character actor with such an interesting face and strong presence. Working his ass off for decades, never getting cut a fuckin break. Dog Day Afternoon looked like it was gonna be the big one, but it never made him a household name or gave him the kind of clout he needed to be able to pick and choose his roles. Shit, even after Aliens, he doesn't seem to be able to turn anything down. Including everything from Wes Craven's Mindripper to Alien vs. Predator to Stone Cold. He later got that TV show Millennium for a while, but at this time the best he could hope for was action movie villain roles like this one and Hard Target.

So that's Lance Henriksen in one corner. And then in the other corner you got this bland jock who has to wear a silly coat and paint the side of his head to seem interesting. They made a huge deal out of him, paid him piles of dough, and he didn't deliver at all. Got rich off of hype and good agents, not off of talent. So he blew it at football, has no experience in acting... what the hell, let's give him the starring role in a movie! The first Brian Bosworth vehicle.

I don't blame you Lance Henriksen. Kill that fucker.


I got some beef with some of these villains though man, the way they run their operations is so incompetent. I mean what the hell kind of robbery was that in the opening anyway? You got a big team, you're risking murder one and wasting a bunch of machine gun bullets on a measly grocery store job? I mean there's probaly pretty good cash in those tills for a one or two man job, but not with this kind of split. Especially in this day and age when most people are gonna be paying with credit. Only people that use cash are just buying a Pepsi or a Snickers or something. So either they didn't put too much thought into the economics of this job or, more ominously, they just don't give a fuck. They do this shit as a leisure activity.

The mafia is pretty inefficient here too, they attack one of the biker gang's runners and steal the bag of money from a shakedown they did. And it's only four hundred! (Musta been all in nickels judging from the size of the bag.) The damage Stone does to their car before they get away is gonna cost more than $400. That's just not a good crime there, guys.


But that's either here or there, or whatever the saying is, that they say. Anyway the director is Craig Baxley of the Baxley stunt family. He started out as a stuntman and stunt coordinator/second unit director. Started out directing on The A-Team, then started doing movies like Action Jackson and I Come in Peace. I guess it must be his background in stunts that gives this one that extra spark. I mean I've seen so many generic takes on this exact type of material but this one is more memorable. There are lots of little touches that take it further than you expect. A guy gets hit in the face, he's gonna flip all the way over. A guy gets shot, he's gonna go flying ten feet through the air, maybe fall out a window and crush the top of a car. A vehicle moves, it's gonna explode.

This is a movie with the big action finale inside the Mississippi Supreme Court, during a trial. There are motorcycles driving around the halls, burning rubber on marble floors. When Stone pulls a matador maneuver on one motorcycle it crashes out a window, collides with a helicopter and explodes, causing the copter to fall down onto a car, which explodes also and scorches some other cars (too bad it didn't make those explode too).

In the middle of all this you got Lance Henriksen gleefully machine gunning everybody in the court room, dressed in a priest outfit.

When Stone's uptight partner is forced to kill Chains, Stone just gives him a smile like, "I'm beginning to like you, man." Don't be a pussy Sam McMurray, having to kill a guy in a priest outfit in the middle of the supreme court building couldn't be that traumatic. I don't know, maybe Stone regrets treating the whole thing so lightly. That's one of many possibilities of what he might be thinking about during the awesome end credits where he struts out of the courthouse, blood dripping down his face, staring off thoughtfully in the distance as everybody else scrambles to make sense of the mayhem.

In my opinion, STONE COLD is in the upper tier of this type of movie, the ones you want to watch over again and share with your friends and what not. Brian Bosworth wasn't a keeper, but this movie was. And now the Boz cut will live on forever. If they ever put this out on DVD.

---

THE STORY OF RICKY

Long before PUNISHER: WAR ZONE there was THE STORY OF RICKY, another hilariously violent, ridiculous movie based on a comic book. This is a lower budget Hong Kong movie, though. Raw and scrappy, not stylized. So it's even more ambiguous how serious or goofy it's actually supposed to be. I like that.

The movie starts with John Carpenter-ish keyboards and a bus pulling up to a prison. Ricky is a new fish who sets off the metal detectors, not with a random titanium knee like Seagal in HALF PAST DEAD, but with 5 slugs he keeps in his chest as a souvenir. (What's wrong with one of those smashed pennies?) You know the rule: 5 bullets in the chest = tough. Hell, 50 cent only had 3 and I think one of those was in the ass.

So the screws already hate Ricky. The villain in most of the movie is the assistant warden, in charge because the boss is on vacation in Hawaii. The assistant's a fat slob with a fake eye that he keeps mints in. Or maybe they're pills and he just calls them "mints" to be cute, but I prefer to think they are actual mints. That would be weirder. Also, they never say anything about this but I couldn't help but notice the guy's got a shelf full of VHS porn on the wall beside his desk. That shows you the kind of office they're running here, because most places you'd have to stash that shit. Just ask Clarence Thomas. This guy keeps the collection proudly on display like it's his Assistant Warden of the Year trophies.

So this fat, one-eyed, fresh-breathed, unashamed chronic masturbator has it in for Ricky, and so do the "Gang of Four" who control the prison. They're some super-powered dudes who seem to just pop out of the sewer every once in a while to attack him. The gang bosses set up Ricky to have to fight various cartoonish enemies such as a giant fat guy who they think will eat him. But Ricky (we learn through flashbacks) is highly trained in martial arts and breath control that makes him super-powered. So when the fat guy comes at him Ricky tears open that giant belly like it's a pinata. Please note: guts pour out instead of candy. Not as fun for children.

The main strength of this movie is the endless supply of absurd mutilation. He crushes a guy's jaw like it's made of Doritos. He gets his arm cut, but re-ties the ligament in a way that makes him punch harder. His enemies are powerful too - one causes a guy's head to explode by clapping on it. Another guy, defeated honorably by Ricky, cuts his belly open as if doing seppuku, then uses his own intestines to try to strangle Ricky. Now that's a good move. You don't see that in UFC.

Even when he's not punching people into mush, Ricky keeps pulling these Hercules moves. When a guy is tied to a huge cross he doesn't climb up to untie him, he lifts the entire thing out of the ground and carefully lays it down on the ground. At the end (spoiler) he escapes from the prison, not by spending months digging a tunnel with a spoon or something, but by just punching the wall and knocking out a hole the size of a house. Shit, shoulda thought of that before, could've saved a few lives.

Ricky also has a poetic soul. He plays a recorder (called a trumpet in the subtitles) and that seems like your classic badass juxtaposition. A musical instrument always represents a soft spot somewhere beneath the leathery, callused exterior. But then there's a flashback to before he was in prison and the guy is out in a field wearing a white and yellow ensemble. And in that context you start to realize he's got this long willowy hair, young face, smooth features... he's a god damn pretty boy! Clean off the blood and put him in his regular clothes and you don't need any juxtaposition, the guy could be on the cover of Tiger Beat.

Anyway, that's Ricky. Quite a story.

4/12/09

---

STORYTELLING

I don't know what you've heard about this one, but I keep hearing that it's a pile of shit. That Todd Solondz has gone from a visionary manipulator of our deepest taboos and human flaws, to some kind of shock value asshole just trying to get a rise out of people. That this is just a big fuck you to the audience with no sense of humanity and etc. etc.

Well none of that is true. I'm not gonna say this is a perfect movie. It feels a little short (apparently they cut out one of three stories, and that seems like it mighta been a mistake). But if it weren't for all the shit I heard from contrarians waiting to pounce on their former hero, I would say that anybody who liked HAPPINESS would like this one too. Because it's the same kind of feel - a deep probing of the things that make individuals the most uncomfortable. It's not as sad as HAPPINESS but it has that same feeling that it is daring you to laugh. Come on motherfucker. Laugh at this. I fucking dare you. Remember, you're in public here. Do you have the balls to let everyone else in this room know that you think that's funny?

Do you?

What I like about this movie is that it brings up interesting questions and then refuses to answer them for you. For example there is a scene in a college creative Writing class where a student with cerebral palsy reads a short story about himself. The rest of the class tries to be very supportive, comparing his work to Faulkner, praising his choice of words, listing famous Writers that had disabilities. One frankly honest student, half-way apologetically, bashes the story as trite and poorly written. And the Pulitzer Prize winning professor says, "She's right. The story is a piece of shit."

What an asshole, right? But then he's being honest. And the rest of the class aren't, not with their classmate and not with themselves. I mean, which one is worse? Being dishonest, or being an asshole? I really don't know and I don't think Solondz does either. But I think most people don't even want to ask the question, let alone answer it.

And by the way I would like to dedicate that first portion of the movie to my old wednesday night creative writing class and say, see this you assholes? This is you. Anybody who has ever been in a Writing class will recognize this type of holier than thou dissection of somebody else's words.

The movie is full of those kind of questions, many of them aimed at the filmatist himself and at us, the Cinema viewing type audience. The second of the two stories is about a loser filmatist named Toby making a documentary about a teenage stoner and his family and "the college admissions process in post-Columbine America." The story is loaded with questions: at what point does a documentary, or a fictional movie for that matter, exploit its subjects, and make fun of their lives? At one point Lola from RUN LOLA RUN questions Toby's motives. Isn't he making fun of this family? He says no, he really likes this family. He loves this family. She is skeptical.

Later Lola starts to like where the documentary is going, as it gets more serious, and now it seems Toby thinks she's loving the characters too much and he asks, "Don't you think it's funny, though?" I think Mr. Solondz is asking these same questions.

Things don't end well in Toby's documentary, and it's easy to interpret as an attack on documentaries. But just to confuse things a little, Solondz casts Mike Schank, our friendly, brain dead guitarist friend from the great AMERICAN MOVIE, as the cameraman. What does this mean? That documentaries exploit the lives of their subjects, but that AMERICAN MOVIE is one exception? Or is Mike's presence supposed to remind us of that movie as one example of exploitation? And if so, isn't having him in this movie in order to criticize his other movie another form of exploitation?

And if it's cruel for people to be laughing at Toby's movie AMERICAN SCOOBY, isn't it cruel for us to be laughing at STORYTELLING, which is fictional but true to its characters? Does laughter always have a victim?

Also, to those who say that the characters in HAPPINESS are more sympathetic, I gotta disagree. Toby is heavily flawed, but he's not a bad person. Lola doesn't ever do anything wrong. Selma Blair is naive but she's a more sympathetic victim than that put upon gal in HAPPINESS. And I think Consuelo's flaws are easier to relate to than the pedophile psychologist who everyone seems to consider the most likable characters in HAPPINESS. (How come motherfuckers don't give Michael Jackson the same leeway, by the way? I mean that dude can DANCE!) Scooby's brother is a character you don't see much in movies - he's your usual fag-hating football playing oaf, but he tries in his own way to accept his brother being gay. And Scooby himself is a lazy stoner but part of his brain is working and he has a cynicism and pain that the audience should be able to sympathize with.

I mean the only through and through evil character is the little brother, and I'm gonna fuckin smack that kid up the head if he tries that hypnotism shit with me. God damn it go to your room. He might be the best villain of the year.

In conclusion, Todd Solondz may be a whiny dude with huge glasses but he sure can make a fuckin movie, in my opinion.

---

THE STRANGERS

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman (Felicity) play a young couple who have come to town for a wedding and are staying at an isolated house Scott's family owns. It's a house with a long driveway and a lot of trees around, a place where people can get lost, he mentions. They've had a bad night and might be calling it quits with each other and then all the sudden, around 4 am, some girl knocks on the door asking for somebody they never heard of.

Out here? In the middle of nowhere? Where did she come from? Then Scott makes the mistake of going to buy cigarettes. While he's gone the girl shows up again, and things start getting weirder. Basically this is the story of what happens when 3 people in Halloween masks show up at your house and try to get in, for unknown reasons.

I gotta admit man, the setup on this thing really pushes my creep-out buttons. The first half of this movie is the most genuinely scary new horror movie I've seen in a long time. Rural areas at night - hell, even suburbs - those places creep me out. Because nobody's supposed to be around. If you see a stranger nearby then you know they're up to no good.

Out in the city it's not a problem. I got drunks stumbling around all the time, sirens going by, people laughing or yelling at each other, that's normal at any time of night. Not a big deal. In the city I can walk around in the middle of the night and there's not much to fear. You're not alone, there's always cars driving around and a few people out. They're very polite and ask you if you "need anything." Not that long ago a dude tried to sell me a porno VHS while I was waiting to cross a street. You generally assume people will leave you alone or won't give you too hard of a time. If they do they're probaly some schizo or something, they'll back off if you ignore them.

But a small town like that, somebody shows up on your property, how you gonna get rid of them? Where would they go? Even if you got them to leave you'd be paranoid they were still out there in the trees somewhere watching you. I don't know, I got less experience there is why it creeps me out I guess. But in my experience you look out into your backyard and if you see something bigger than a cat moving you better get a weapon.

The genius of THE STRANGERS is the simplicity and the lack of Hollywooding it up. There's very little scoring, the lighting is not exaggeratedly gothic, there are no skipped frames or show-offy edits or digital effects. The strangers don't have super powers (except knowing how to disappear when your head is turned), they don't have backstories or secret identities, and they're not exactly committing a massacre either, which makes it seem more real and therefore more unsettling. Their favorite thing is not to try to stab you but to stand there and stare at you making you think they're gonna stab you. The scares come from things like when Scott is in his car and feels a hand brush against him.

The instant classic moment of the movie is when Liv is standing in the kitchen and you see a dude with a bag over his head appear across the room. He just stands there and she never notices him. And he appears so subtly that I didn't even notice him at first either. That is some seriously creepy shit. A good channeling of that original HALLOWEEN spirit.

The characters are unusually respectable. Nice to see a horror movie about regular adults (even if they're pretty young ones) going through a relatable emotional trauma that I have not seen come up in any horror movie before. Of course they're better looking than you or I, but they seem like regular people and aren't trying to be hip or crack wise or nothin. They don't grate on your nerves the way many horror characters do.

So I approve of this movie, it's worthwhile. But I do have to admit it's mainly the first half that's good. It doesn't ever turn stupid or anything, but the second half sort of loses its momentum. It's an effective and original type of scares, but it's mostly the same sort of thing happening over and over so it gets a little repetitive. It does have the good sense to be short and sweet - even in the extended unrated cut it was something like 88 minutes. So I don't know if it could've been much tighter, but I think it could've been a more perfectly constructed machine. It revs up a powerful engine of spookiness but then it kind of sputters and wobbles instead of just hauling ass down the freeway and/or going off a jump. (metaphor)

THE STRANGERS is very similar to the French movie ILS, where a couple is harassed and stalked by barely-seen figures, possibly wearing hoodies. That one maybe had a little better build to it, but I think maybe I like this one slightly better. Nothing against the twist ending of ILS, but the straightforwardness of this one works a little better for me, it seems less farfetched. I do have to scold the marketing people though because this is yet another movie that feels the best way to begin is by calling us morons, expecting us to believe that it's based on a true story. I guess the "true" part is that yes, there is in fact violent crime in the world. So they loosely adapted it from that. And they have a narrated opening crawl with the names of the characters and how what exactly happened is not known, etc. It's especially stupid because they already have a good opening with a very real sounding 911 call, a kid reporting finding the bodies of the characters we haven't even been introduced yet. I don't see why you need anything before that. I know, I know, I love THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE too, but I think we've done the opening narration homage enough now, fellas. Time to stop. And I demand a letter of apology for the calling me a moron thing.

---

THE STREET FIGHTER

This is Sonny Chiba's most famous movie, the one that made him an international star, and the one that Christian-Slater-as-Tarantino-stand-in went on about in TRUE ROMANCE. And as a vehicle to show how awesome Sonny Chiba is, it's great. As a movie though I would argue that it's not necessarily his best.

Maybe it wasn't the greatest idea in the world to re-watch it right after enjoying the KARATE BULL FIGHTER trilogy. This one has alot of the same elements. Fights in dojos, dirty fighting on the streets, war time flashbacks, the tragic death of a goofy sidekick. But I don't think the story is quite as good. It starts out very promising with Sonny's character Terry Tsugura going into a prison disguised as a priest to bust a guy out. I mean, you know that's gonna get good. But after that it's pretty meandering and confusing for a while as he discusses things with various factions and people try to hire him and what not. (I should point out that I haven't found it in a subtitled version, only dubbed, and that probaly doesn't help.)

It's pretty sad when the annoying sidekick dies and professes his devotion to Terry, but other than that it doesn't have the same emotional impact as the KARATE trilogy. He seems more like just a tough guy who has fight scenes than a fully formed character. Which is probaly all most people care about, but I like to have that extra dimension. Because of how I like excellence and everything.

But the good news is it's still pretty fuckin cool. Chiba's badass presence and charisma stab right through the bad English dubbing. He has this image as the bad guy hero, so he wears all black. At times I wondered if Anakin Skywalker's costume in Star Wars Adventure #3 was based on what Sonny wears in this one.

Terry doesn't try to help people as much as his BULL FIGHTER character did, but at least he's not a rapist. In fact, his view on that topic is pretty militant, he actually kills a rapist by ripping his dick off. Then to add insult to injury he wipes his hands off on the guy's shorts. That's pretty spectacular, it's hard not to enjoy it, but unfortunately the scene manages to slander more than just rapists. Because they gotta have a black guy be the rapist. One black guy in Japan and he's going around making funny faces trying to rape everybody. Give me a break Japan, you can do better than that.

The street fighter never fights a bull or a bear or wrestlers or 100 guys at once, but the fights are still pretty good. He has kind of a smooth dancing-around style he uses sometimes, and this breathing thing. This guy is into breathing. He makes weird hock-a-loogie sounds sometimes which I think means he's doing breathing techniques to make his body indestructible. Or maybe it's just to freak people out.

I'm not entirely sure how the movie got that title, but there is the occasional vicious streetfighting technique. I think the main reason the movie is famous is because it's gorier than your standard martial arts picture. So he'll throw a guy to the ground face first and a bucket of bright red blood will splatter across the pavement. The very end of the movie is pretty amazing - he's fighting a guy at night in a rainstorm and he's losing, down on the ground. The guy jumps on him for what could be the killing blow, but Terry manages to grab the guy by the throat and next thing you know he's smiling crazily and holding a slimy piece of human who-knows-what in his hand. And his funky theme music plays as he wobbles to his feet and raises the chunk in the air victoriously. And it says "THE END." And then, "For now. Look for RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER."

I mean I don't care how unimpressive a movie is, if it ends that way you're gonna remember it. If WEDDING CRASHERS or WAKING LIFE had had that ending, I'd probaly think back on them and think they were pretty good. I mean I know it would be kind of weird, but it would be cool. I hope in WAKING LIFE it would be that "Timothy Speed Levitch" guy who got the chunk ripped out of his neck. I don't know who would do it. Anyway what comes before the neck chunk in THE STREET FIGHTER is more up my alley than those other movies so it's even better. The neck chunk becomes the big exciting part at the end of a symphony where the dudes start banging on those giant drums.

Some other highlights: bad guys lifting up Terry's car with an excavator while he's inside. People falling from heights using awesome blue screen effects. Terry jumping out a high window on purpose and landing in the back of a pickup truck. Cutting to an x-ray of a skull as Terry punches a guy in the head.

I don't know, I'm being a little hard on it. I don't think it's really the masterpiece some people make it out to be, but it's definitely worth seeing. Especially if you haven't seen a Sonny Chiba movie before. (IRON EAGLE doesn't count by the way.

---

STREETWISE and AMERICAN HEART
both directed by Martin Bell

Well this is an incredible, classic documentary and a pretty good narrative type companion piece, and both were filmed in Seattle and now that I saw them I wonder why in fuck's name I took so long getting to them. The real winner of the two is STREETWISE, academy award nominated documentary about runaway kids on the streets of Seattle in 1984. The story behind this is that the photographer Mary Ellen Mark (web site) was doing a photo essay for LIFE magazine. At the time Seattle was considered one of the country's "most livable cities" (imagine that) so she thought it would be the perfect place to photograph homeless kids. If it can happen in seattle then shit, it can happen anywhere. Well the photo essay turned out good so she decided to get her husband Martin Bell to direct a documentary about the same kids she took pictures of.

Watching this movie I thought about movies like KIDS that work because they have some amount of shock in them and at the same time they are closer to real life than what you usually get in movies. But here they found a group of people just as colorful but they're actually real. It's about a group of kids who all hang out in front of a grafitti wall between 1st and 2nd on Pike Street. You know, like a block away from where the tourists go to watch those guys throw fish.

The main girl is "Tiny" and like almost all the girls in the movie, she's a prostitute. It's pretty horrible to watch because this is a tiny little girl and you see her walking up to these cars. I mean I've been around some sick sacks of shit but when you watch this movie you just wonder what in fuck's name is wrong with these people that they would even be TEMPTED to get with a little girl like that. This girl has a mom who she goes to sometimes, she's a waitress so she gets Tiny food, but she's totally passive about her situation. She knows her daughter is living on the streets and turning tricks but she just kind of has a defeatist attitude like, "how am I gonna stop her?" And the gal isn't completely unlikable, she seems very nice, but she lets her daughter turn tricks! Shit, these permissive mothers of the '80s, what are they gonna lead us into?

There are kids you follow as they spare change, dumpster dive, order pizzas to fake addresses so they can get them out of the dumpster, go to the doctor, get in fights, squat in hotels. There's a butch lesbian gal named Lulu. It's the '80s and they have those hair styles so at first I thought she was a teenage boy. Anyway she's sort of the neighborhood enforcer, she gets in fights with men for grabbing her friends boobs and shit like that.

There's also this kid named Duane who looks about 12 but apparently he's 16. In one of the best scenes in the movie he goes to visit his pop in the can. Dad is about to get out and he's real excited to get back with his kid and try to make up for everything. He has big plans to start a thrift store. He kind of goes back and forth between being loving and scolding the kid, checking his arms for tracks and calling him a little punk. "Do you want to end up like me?"

The craziest part is the kid asks if there is a guy named such and such in there with his dad - his dad looks surprised, because it's a guy he actually knows. "Tell him I said hi."

Well the sad thing is the dad never gets the chance to make it up to the kid, because the kid hangs himself in juvy a couple days later. And you actually see the dad at the funeral, with almost nobody else there except the guards that escort him.

I mean there are some incredible scenes in this movie. One of the minor characters is this pimp who the hooker girls are pretty wary of, they talk about how cruel he is. But then there's a scene where his mom and grandmother find him on the street and give him money for food and try to talk to him. He turns into a shy little boy and won't look them in the eye.

If you live in Seattle like I do it adds an extra dimension to the movie because it's a pretty amazing time capsule. Most of this takes place on very recognizable blocks that everybody knows. Look at the picture I used on the bottom of the "VERN'S AMERICA" page. That's the block that most of this takes place on. The grafitti wall they hang out at was right across the street, about where I was standing when I took the picture. That "Liberty Loans" sign with the rifle is there today and it was there in the movie in 1984. I chose that block for the picture because it's one of the sleaziest looking blocks downtown, but right in the middle of a tourist area, bookended by t-shirt shops. It has been slightly gentrified in the past year. I think they closed down the drug clinic. There used to usually be about a dozen of my type of fellas standing there hanging out. The billboard on the other corner was always some kind of hard alcohol, and that's not a coincidence.

I figure the runaways and teenage prostitutes must hang out in some other part of the city. I don't see them there.

Anyway if you're from Seattle you might even recognize some of the people in this movie. There's a guy with a long beard playing a steel guitar on the beginning of this movie. That's Baby Gramps, he's a well known street musician. You only seem to see him at festivals these days but he used to be around with a two-headed antique teddy bear and he'd sing songs in his raspy voice about palindromes and shit. I never knew he used to have a brown beard! There's also a guy in a wheelchair, I'm not sure but he looks like the vietnam vet that sells roses outside of the Bon every day.

So it kind of feels like spying on ghosts or something. After watching the movie you find yourself trying to calculate how old these people would be now and guess if they're still alive. Would you recognize them if you saw them walking around somewhere? I figured somebody must've followed up on what happened to these people so I did some research. All I could find was that Tiny is a welfare mother and Lulu was killed in a knife fight 2 years after the movie, and her last words were supposedly "Tell Mary Ellen and Martin Lulu died."

Lulu does get to live on as a supporting character named Freddy in the drama AMERICAN HEART which Martin Bell made 8 years later. Somebody told me it was gonna be basically the fictional version of the documentary, and that's not the case. But it's obviously inspired by the relationship between Duane and his dad in STREETWISE, if Duane had lived to see his dad get out. The story is about Jeff Bridges getting out of jail where he finds that his pesky son Edward Furlong wants to live with him. At first he tries to ditch the kid but they end up greyhounding it to seattle and living in a shitty apartment, one sleeping on the mattress, the other on the springs.

There are other connections to STREETWISE. Both have a couple songs by Tom Waits. The character of Freddy is obviously based on Lulu, she looks alot like her and has the same sort of role in the neighborhood. Edward Furlong seems like Duane or Rat in STREETWISE and although he has a home he hangs out downtown with a group of teenage prostitutes and drag queens very similar to the kids in the documentary, but now it's 1992 so their clothes are even worse. Sadly somebody added the element of a boombox blaring heavy metal type guitars whenever the kids hang out, and that makes the whole thing seem phoney. But sadly we know from STREETWISE that the situation of the little girl selling her ass and her mom not caring is realistic.

The biggest connection to STREETWISE is one of the main themes: Jeff Bridges tells his kid "You keep me straight, I'll keep you straight" which is the same thing Duane's dad told him. What works about the movie is the relationship between father and son. It really is sad how little capacity this fuck has to show his son he cares. I mean to a certain extent he really does care but he sure doesn't know how to show it and in the end what's the difference, if you don't care enough to show it then you don't care enough. There are some good uncomfortable scenes like when he brings a gal home and pays his son to leave so they can get it on. That didn't seem to be a big turn on to her, though.

That reminds me the one pretty phoney aspect is the love Bridges has for a gal he met through the "American Heart" penpal magazine while in the joint. Nice try martin but you are not gonna get a gal that is good looking and well adjusted through prison penpals. If that really happened even once in the history of prison penpals you shoulda done a documentary on that because that's bottled lightning there pal. sorry but i gotta call it like i see it. Oh well, I guess we didn't want to see Jeff making kissy faces at a grizzled hag with a black eye coughing up cigarette loogies. (sorry.)

But other than that the movie feels very true to life. In the end you get the emotional connection you want between dad and son but it's not to forced. He doesn't suddenly turn around. They both fuck up pretty bad but they also both take a genuine step to be together.

I recommend AMERICAN HEART but I demand that you see STREETWISE. I really don't have anything smart to say about it but I bet you will, so just shut yer yap for now and go see the fuckin thing. the end.

---

STRIKING DISTANCE

In this one Bruce plays a cop from a long line of cops. Which of course means his uncle is played by Dennis Farina. You also got John Mahoney as his dad and Tom Sizemore and Robert Pastorelli as his knucklehead cousins. All cops. Sarah Jessica Parker is the love interest, also a cop but not related, so they can fuck in one part. The movie takes place in Pittsburgh and I guess they even got local people to work on the movie, because I recognized the editor's name, Pasquale Buba, from watching DAWN OF THE DEAD a thousand times. The director also has a familiar name, Mr. Rowdy Herrington of ROADHOUSE fame.

Unfortunately the bad guy is a serial killer - always a bummer. Terrorists and robbers and CIA agents are a good time a the movies, but some asshole that gets a boner tying up women? Not really as fun, in my opinion. Anyway they keep getting real close to catching the fucker, even chase him in a good over-the-top car chase at the beginning. I mean there's a pretty serious maneuver the killer pulls when completely surrounded. Excellent use of the extreme Y-turn.(The new rule is, always put the best action scene at the very beginning.)

Bruce insists that the killer has to be a cop, but then they convict a guy who's not a cop. Also his dad dies. Not to mention he recently testified against his partner/cousin Robert Pastorelli and sent him to the joint for police brutality. This of course has never once happened in the entire history of the universe and never ever will, but that only shows how fuckin cool Bruce is, he could pull something like getting a cop put in jail for police brutality. His cousin doesn't want to go down though so instead he jumps off a bridge. Splash. No body shown. Who knows what this could possibly mean. Forget it, it's probaly nothing.

Of course all the cops despise Bruce, he gets written off as a kook and 2 years later he's an alcoholic and/or down-on-his-luck river patrol cop. And you would think at this point he would just go on with his life, ride around in some boats, screw Sarah Jessica Parker every now and then. Maybe start riding bikes or something, flying kites, fixing the porch. Whatever.

But no. Instead, to the surprise of the Amish but not anybody who's ever seen a movie before, THE KILLER IS BACK. But wait, I thought they execu-- what the-- how could the killer be back? Apparently the Pittsburgh justice system doesn't know that BRUCE IS ALWAYS RIGHT. They won't admit it until the end of the movie but they roasted the wrong guy, and now the killer only goes after women that Bruce has dated before, and tries to get Bruce involved in the case, etc. It's hard to imagine who could 1) be a cop 2) know who Bruce has dated 3) have it in for Bruce. Nobody really fits that profile. I mean except for Robert Pastorelli, but I mean, it couldn't be him. He's dead! I saw the splash!

Bruce is as convicted and charismatic as always, even though he's not allowed to use much humor. And I always enjoy Mr. Farina. It's also nice to see Brion James in there playing his usual bitter asshole, and Andre Braugher from Homicide doesn't get anything to do, but at least they probaly paid him for the movie. That's good. I swore Jake Busey was in one part too but I don't see him in the credits.

It's not all that stupid of a movie, but the problem is, it assumes that you are. It's like they ain't even trying to hide who the killer is. The answer is so obvious that I actually thought it was a trick. Because that would be such a huge insult to the intelligence of us, the average Bruce fans, to assume that we don't see that coming. I mean, you could probaly guess who the killer is if you watched the first ten minutes with the sound off, standing on your head. The only red herring at all is Tom Sizemore, so the only question is whether he's in on it or not.

Are you gonna let a movie talk to you like that?

A note about serial killers in movies. Why do they always have some song that they associate with their killings? In this case, the killer (Robert Pastorelli) calls up and plays some "Little Red Riding Hood" song over the phone before he kills a woman. And then every time you hear it you're supposed to go OOOOHHH, SPOOOOOOKY. I hear this song in a whole different light now that a serial killer plays it. I'm sorry, Rowdy. It's just corny.

Oh well, I've seen worse. But you can do better than this Rowdy. Let's see some striving for excellence out there bud.

---

STUCK

I like where Stuart Gordon is coming from. Always thought of as a horror director because of REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, now he's just this low profile indie director, doing his own thing, making little movies with playwrights and obscure writers, usually with gore and dark undertones but not really horror anymore. Not that he has disowned the genre - he's still trying to do another REANIMATOR sequel.

And this new one, STUCK, is an interesting idea. It's inspired by that horrible case you may remember reading about a few years ago where a nurse's aide was driving under the influence, ran over a homeless guy, and parked the car in her garage with him still stuck in the windshield. She left him there to die (it was originally reported as taking two days, which is how it's portrayed in the movie, but from what I've read it was actually 2 hours).

Stephen Rea - who would've seemed like a casting coup if he hadn't recently played the corrupt cop villain in the Van Damme movie UNTIL DEATH - plays the homeless guy, and for his character it's basically DIE HARD in a garage. There's a very sympathetic setup of his character, you see how he gets kicked out of his apartment after being laid off, his application gets lost at the employment services office, a cop kicks him out of the park at night, and he happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then he spends the rest of the movie trying to get off this windshield, trying to honk the horn or grab the cell phone or get out and rig up support for his broken leg. Then he has to fight off the people trying to dispose of him. And somehow a gun appears. I always wanted to see "DIE HARD in the trunk of a car," this might be as close as I get.

But most of the movie is from the point of view of Mena Suvari's character and man, I don't know. I think she's supposed to be partly likable. The first thing you see her do is clean shit off of an old man and not complain about it, which shows strength of character. Unlike the woman in the real case she almost drops her victim off at the hospital. But she takes off when somebody might see her because she can't jeopardize the promotion she's up for.

Like in the real case she's in a haze of ecstasy, pot and alcohol which causes the accident and the ensuing panic. But they also add the detail that she's checking her phone when she runs him over, which automatically erases all sympathy. I don't even believe in capital punishment, I'm still yelling for this bitch to fry.

I think the idea of making a movie about this is to take this unimaginable horror and try to explain it. What the fuck was this lady thinking? What would cause a human being to be so selfish and callous? The movie gives a few excuses but to me does not seem like a convincing portrait. I don't believe this is really the lady that would do this.

Rea gives a very credible performance, Suvari is pretty good half of the time, otherwise the acting is a problem. Authority figures like the nursing manager and the employment agency people are over-the-top portrayals like the principal in the Twister Sister videos. And the conversations just never feel real. For example there's a scene where Suvari and her boyfriend (Russell Hornsby) convince her friend (Rukiya Bernard) that the blood on the car is from hitting a deer. It should be painfully tense but instead it's painfully unbelievable. These morons are terrible liars, worse than Jon Lovitz. Every time she asks a question they repeat the question, hem and haw, and then make up something ridiculous. But she's not suspicious at all. As far as I can tell it's not being played for laughs, although the boyfriend's acting throughout the movie sometimes seems like he thinks he's being funny.

On the positive side there's a completely out-of-the-blue scene where Suvari beats up a naked woman, hits her over the head with a frying pan and literally kicks her ass out the door.

Other than the frying pan there wasn't too much of this movie that worked for me. I guess there are a few effective suspense moments when people almost look into the garage. Rea's gorey predicament is kind of disturbing at times. It's funny when a cute little pomeranian type dog runs in and starts licking his wounds. And there were a few moments where I felt like it was working as a parable about self-absortion and man's inhumanity to man and what not. She doesn't care about this guy dying on her windshield just like nobody cares about him being stuck on the streets pushing his clothes around in a shopping cart. And there are actually neighbors who find out about him but are afraid to help because they have their own reasons for not calling the police.

There's one important thing I haven't mentioned yet. It's completely superficial and yet a major problem with the movie: Mena Suvari has fucking cornrows. I'm not some hair expert, but in my opinion this is the worst hair that anybody ever tried to pull, ever. It really is hard to look at. I hate picking apart somebody's physical appearance, but we're all adults here, let's just say what we're all thinking: Mena Suvari has a giant god damn forehead. I'm sorry but the shit freaks me out. If that thing ever got loose it could go on the deadliest headbutting spree in modern history.

You know what, if she doesn't want to grow bangs that's cool. It's her forehead, not mine. I should admire her for not giving a fuck what I think. But let's set the forehead aside for a minute. I think we can agree that any white girl is gonna look ridiculous with cornrows. Right? Everyone knows that. But if you're gonna go ahead and give them to a white girl anyway, for God's sake the very last one you want to give them to is Mena Suvari. We as filmgoers do not want to spend 90 minutes staring at that hairline. This is a fuckin nightmare.

And the mystery of why the fuck you would give her that hair is complicated by the facts of the real case. In reality the driver didn't have cornrows, but she was black. And this isn't a story mainly about race but I think it would be naive to say race wasn't a factor. I'm sure that him being white, as well as being a "bum," is part of why she was able to shut off her humanity towards him and treat him as an embarassing problem she can get rid of. Actually, the way she got caught was by going to a party and laughing about running over a white man.

Do the cornrows mean Suvari is supposed to be black? Or symbolically black? Or down with black culture? Or a cultural appropriater? I'm not sure. I was too distracted staring at her hairline to really figure that one out. I guess I should just be thankful they don't have her speaking ebonics at all.

I do think Gordon deserves credit for trying something like this instead of some formula picture. You probaly gotta make a couple of duds like this before you make another KING OF THE ANTS. I'm not writing him off yet.

You know, they probaly should've called it AMERICAN PIE PRESENTS... STUCK. And there would be some indication that Mena Suvari is playing the same character from those movies. And toss in a Eugene Levy cameo. That would've played alot better. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.

9/2/08

---

SUDDEN DEATH

There are about three kinds of Jean-Claude Van Damme pictures in my opinion. There are the real experimental, artsy type like Double Team and Knock Off (the best kind), the real cheap and crappy ones like Cyborg and Double Impact (the worst kind), and the more expensive ones where he's trying to become a more respectable mainstream action star (the kind that Sudden Death is).

I have a hard time reviewing this picture since it is an unofficial sequel to Die Hard. For those of you who don't know I am a HUGE fan of the Die Hard pictures (starring Bruce Willis, look it up if you haven't seen it) because, as a fan do I want to support this as part of the die hard mythos or should I not support it since it is unofficial, it is hard to say.

For legal reasons, McClane's name has been changed to McCord, and he is being played by Van Damme instead of Bruce. He is now a fire marshall and instead of saving Hollie he has two kids going to the hockey game while he's on duty. Hans Grueber (now played by a different guy) has planted bombs in the arena and has taken over the vice president's VIP box seats. He's gonna blow up the whole arena with everybody in it if the feds don't transfer a whole assload of money to his bank accounts and what not.

Van Damme does not do the smartass oneliners that Bruce does, but he does a pretty decent job and he wears an undershirt like Bruce does. One complaint I think they should have shaved his hairline to make him look more like Bruce.

Now at the beginning I didn't think I was gonna like this picture because it was too cutesy to be believed. For cryin out loud the guy sign languages "I love you" to his kids before he goes on his shift. When he's gone the kids have an argument about whether or not their dad is brave. And before there's any sign of danger he tells his son to stay in his seat no matter what, "even if the building is falling down around you, stay in your seat." Well gee willikers I wonder where this one is going.

There are some good tricks though, like they introduce this chef character who impresses the kids with a meat cleaver trick, and you're thinking, "Gee, I wonder if that's gonna come up later." But about three minutes later the guy gets shot and you never see the cleaver again. Good stuff.

In the beginning of a die hard picture what you gotta do is establish how organized and how vicious these terrorist bastards are. So one technique they use on this one is where Hans shoots a secret service agent and the vice president says, "That agent was named so-and-so, he has a five year old son, a three year old daughter, and his wife is pregnant." So that way you know that it is so bad that they killed him.

Of course McCord quickly finds out about the terrorist plot going on and it turns out he knows alot of karate for a fire marshall, and doesn't have a problem beating people to death. Right away there is a good scene where he savagely murders a gal in a penguin costume. His daughter becomes one of the hostages and this time it's personal. He doesn't try to pick the terrorists off one by one like McClane usually does, but if they try to stop him from defusing the bombs, he kills them using kitchen supplies, hockey gear, fire, or what have you.

One of the best parts is when he's running from some dudes, and he has no choice but to steal a guy's hockey uniform and go out on the ice and be goalie in the big game. It is a great way to hide but also I'm thinking wow, this is a good twist, now the movie's gonna be about will they win the game or not.

But again, the movie is not going where you think it is, actually it goes back to the terrorist story when the dudes notice him out on the ice. So then I'm thinking maybe they'll have to disguise themselves as players from the other team so they can get out on the ice and shoot him. But no, the dumbass gets kicked out of the game for a flagrant foul and has to fight them in the locker room where it is more difficult to wear skates, because there is no ice.

There is a really cool and ridiculous stunt that I won't give away, where McCord gets his daughter back and saves all the hostages. Hans has his perfect chance to run off and go collect his money. But instead he puts on an elaborate disguise with fake mustache and blond hair and kidnaps McCord's daughter, forcing McCord to come after him. It's just one of those stupid mistakes you make, you get nervous and you slip up you know. There is always some little way to drop the ball... the closer you get, the farther you are in some ways. I mean if I had a nickel for every stupid motherfucker that made it to the home stretch and then crashed into a parked car or got his pants stuck on a fence or dropped the money down a sewer or slipped on a pile of wet leaves and broke his tailbone or, as in this case, put on a fake mustache and kidnapped the daughter of an over zealous fire marshall, I would be able to drop these reel.com banners that's for sure.

I think McCord is the real jackass in this situation, though. He also has the chance to get away, he has his kids with him, he saved all the hostages, and the building is evacuated. But I guess it just chaps his ass to think he's busting his balls every day as this hockey arena fire marshall, changing light bulbs and what not, trying to raise two kids on his own on this measly salary, I mean really WORKING for a good honest living - and then here's this German fuckhead Hans Grueber getting all these billions of dollars for one day of work. And I mean he wasn't even planting the bombs or anything, he was just sitting on his ass up there in the box seats. He killed a few people but big deal, it was a gun and they weren't armed, it wasn't like hand to hand or anything. I mean if anyone deserves this money it's the blue collar terrorists, the guys who put their blood sweat and tears into chasing McCord around the arena, the guys who ended up set on fire or blown up or steam pressed because this fire marshall happens to be so god damned ingenuitive.

I think this must be what McCord was thinking when he chased after Grueber and climbed onto his helicopter and made sure to kill the bastard. (The big surprise here is that even though McCord refers to the situation as a "game" throughout the movie, he doesn't say "I win" or "game over" when he kills him. Good restraint there bud, seriously.)

But I don't think this is good judgment on McCord's part and I think he should be ashamed of himself and so should the whole fire department. I mean maybe if he was a security guard he should chase the guy down, it would be his job. But he's a fire marshall, his job is to prevent fires which means he should NOT be blowing up helicopters while he's on the clock. I hope if there is another sequel it will start out with him fired and disgraced or at least on suspension like McClane in the beginning of Die Hard: With A Vengeance. If he gets away with this then I can only say that this kind of lenience by employers is the reason why the american work ethic is often so shoddy, they can get away with this kinda crap.

---

SUDDEN IMPACT

I'm not sure what the title means on this one, but if it were up to me it would be called A DIRTY HARRY SALUTE TO DEATH WISH II. The three before this all felt like "DIRTY HARRY" but in this one he goes to San Paolo and all the sudden he's in Charles Bronson's jurisdiction.

Let me point out a few connections: The score is by Lalo Schifrin, but the opening credits are still DEATH WISH sequel style cheeseball drum machine and keyboard rockafire explosion over establishing shot of the city (Lalo's revenge for not getting to score part 3, I bet). Kevyn Major Howard, the gang rapist Stomper in DEATH WISH II, plays a criminal who gets off due to improper police work by Callahan. And like most DEATH WISH movies the lead villains are maniacally overacting gang rapists. In DEATH WISH and DEATH WISH II Bronson is getting revenge after (among other things) his daughter was gang-raped into a state of catatonia. In this one Sondra Locke is getting revenge because she and her sister were gang raped and her sister is in a state of catatonia. Speaking of which, Bronson's wife Jill Ireland was in DEATH WISH II, and here we have Clint's live-in lady friend at the time starring in this one. It ends a little more like the first DEATH WISH with the police (in this case Harry) knowing about the vigilante actions and letting it go because they sympathize.

This is the only DIRTY HARRY directed by Clint, and although it's not the best one it's got some of his thoughtfulness in it. In the DEATH WISH series there was always a little sense of some kind of patriarchal shit where it's always the women in his life getting hurt and he's getting revenge, it's like they keyed his car or something. Here it's the actual victim of the crime getting the revenge, and evening the score by shooting off their balls. (I wonder if this is the first review where I tried to describe a movie as thoughtful because of guys getting their balls shot off? Probaly not.) Anyway, THE ENFORCER explored gender equality and this one still seems down with this idea (although still not enlightened about the gays - check out the small town cop casually referring to one of the villains as "the dyke").

It further explores the "where do you draw the line?" question of MAGNUM FORCE but this time comes out on the side of vigilantism, at least in this case when it's not done by a cop. Harry seems a little less sure about what's right and what's wrong. This lady is saying shit that he could've said. "What about my rights?"

Even the climax of the movie is reminiscent of a DEATH WISH because it takes place in an amusement park (Santa Cruz boardwalk I think) and uses some western showdown meets horror movie type imagery when Harry appears down the boardwalk completely covered in shadow and holding his gun. It's weird having Harry so out of his element - even out of San Francisco - so it seems like the least Dirty Harry DIRTY HARRY movie. And yet it's the one that used the line always associated with the character: "Go ahead, make my day." They probaly couldn't have known how much that line would catch on, but they knew it was a good one because they use it twice. They do not have a scene where he foils a crime while eating, but they do have a scene where he criticizes a colleague for putting ketchup on his hot dog, which is a good point. Also Albert Popwell returns, this time promoted to partner. Kind of a mixed blessing - he's graduated from punk to partner, but of course both categories of characters are doomed in a DIRTY HARRY movie. So what's the point? Also he gives Harry a dog named Meathead.

Sondra's character is an artist - she funnels her troubled psyche into spooky paintings, but clearly she doesn't do enough of them to get it all out. She mentions that she's in town to restore the horses on a carousel, but somehow I didn't see the PERFECT VILLAIN DEATH coming. The lead rapist falls off the top of a rollercoaster, breaks through the top of the carousel and is impaled on a unicorn horn. I mean that would be a cool death no matter what but in this case you can read it as his victim raping him with her art - pretty fuckin amazing. I mean I enjoy a good impalement regardless and I'm not a big fan of looking for phallic imagery in everything, but in this case it works. That's right, a unicorn horn is actually a big dick. Keep them out of your daughter's room.

SUDDEN IMPACT is not as good as THE ENFORCER, which is not as good as MAGNUM FORCE, which is not as good as DIRTY HARRY. But it's better than most DIRTY HARRY and DEATH WISH ripoffs. Between "make my day" and the villain being fucked to death by a unicorn I think it's safe to say this is a worthwhile artistic venture.

8/8/08

---

SUNSHINE

With the release of this movie I'd say there's now officially a subgenre of sci-fi movies about the angst of long distance space travel. Two of my favorite movies ever - 2001 and ALIEN - are in this category. There's also DARK STAR, a predecessor to ALIEN and an inspiration to this movie (one of the characters is even named Pinback after Dan O'Bannon's character in that movie). I also liked the remake of SOLARIS, but I still gotta see the original one. Rounding out the category now there's Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE.

This one takes place sometime in the future, but probaly not too long in the future. The main difference between then and now: the sun is dying. Pretty shitty. Humanity came up with a plan where they sent a spaceship called The Icarus which would set off a bomb that would reignite the sun. But that ship was a bunch of slackers or something so nobody heard from them again. This is the story of the Icarus II, where they decided to use up Earth's resources to make the last possible bomb that they could use to try to relight that bitch.

This is not the usual action type of sci-fi. No robots or lasers. The characters are not super heroes, they're astronauts. They're a crew of experts. They're hoping to not only save humanity but to make it back safely, but they know that's not guaranteed. (If it was their ship would be called The Guy Who Was Like Icarus Except His Wings Didn't Melt So He Made It Back Safely.)

For most of the movie the drama comes from the tough decisions they have to make. For example they discover the location of the Icarus I and although they all agree that reigniting the sun is more important than saving any possible surviving crew members, a convincing argument is made for why it might be smart to go check out the ship. So they have to follow protocol and a decision has to be made but not everyone agrees. So not only do you have to worry about whether it was the right decision, but about whether the tension between the people who disagree will cause new problems that will lead to other tough decisions.

This team is literally humanity's last chance at survival. If they do not succeed in putting this bomb in the sun or if it does not work, then the earth will die. Because of this concept everything that happens on board happens with a thousand tons of pressure on top. When they fight with each other, or when they make a mistake, they're not just endangering themselves, they are endangering human life. Even SPOILER at the end when there's a guy going around slashing people it has this extra suspense. Because Jason and Freddy never went after people who were on a mission to save humanity. Even if you don't care about these specific people dying you want to make sure they get that bomb in place.

And you can understand why the pressure fucks them up. I may be confessing too much here but every once in a while a horrible thought comes to me. I see somebody standing near a ledge and I think geez, I could push that guy right off. Wouldn't that be horrible? And it makes me shiver. Or I think, what if I just yelled FUCK! in this old lady's face? It's not like I want to do any of these things, they just occur to me. The most wrong things to do. Well, here is the opportunity for the ultimate version of that. What if I stopped my team from saving humanity? Wouldn't that be horrible? It's a terrible place to snap.

From what I've heard almost everyone has a problem with the final conflict in this movie. I don't think the idea is necessarily bad, but when Boyle gets into some 28 DAYS LATER type filmatics to try to amp things up I did get disoriented and lost track of what was going on. For example, I thought Cappa was going to ride the bomb into the sun, but then all the sudden he was inside with his suit off, and I thought wait a minute, is he back in the ship? I guess he must be. But what is this place, I don't remember seeing a big grid like this? But with the surreal imagery of the villain you never quite see and the sudden stylistic change I also wondered if this was a dream or an afterlife vision or if Boyle was trying to pull a starchild. Then I realized okay, this must be the inside of the bomb, he has gone inside the bomb. But it would've been more exciting if I understood that while it was happening instead of piecing it together after the fact.

Danny Boyle is a weird director to me because he's done some good movies, all of his movies are fairly interesting, but I can't quite put a finger on what connects them. I don't think I could see his next movie and think "hey, this must be Danny Boyle." But he seems to be going through different genres now, he did a kid's movie that people liked and a not-zombie movie and now here's his intelligent sci-fi movie. And you don't get too many of these anymore.

By the way, the actors are all very good. I didn't know going in who the cast was gonna be. I knew Cillian Murphy from 28 DAYS LATER and BATMAN BEGINS was the star. But also you got Jane Fonda's son Troy Garity, you got Cliff Curtis from LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD, you've got the Human Torch from FANTASTIC FOUR (miraculously good) and most of all you got Michelle Yeoh! It's great to see her doing a role like this although to be honest there was at least one scene where I wished she woulda done some kung fu. Or jumped a motorcycle onto the back of a moving train. In space. But luckily the movie doesn't need that.

---

SUPERMAN RETURNS

According to this movie Superman has been in outer space for five years doing some research and now he's returned. The concept is supposed to be that everything has changed, because Lois Lane is now engaged to the guy who plays Cyclops from X-Men and has a kid. The problem is though, nothing much else has changed. Sure, this is a whole new set of actors, a new director, and modern special effects. It's been exactly (something) years since Superman part whatever the last one was, and its two lead actors, Richard Pryor and Christopher Reeve, have both passed away. Still, director Brian Singer goes out of his way to NOT reinvent the series. He wants this to be a sequel to the old ones so he got a guy who looks like Christopher Reeve, he uses the same theme song, he puts some goofy '80s retro comedy in there and even did retro style opening credits. In the last Star Wars I heard an audience cheer for a hallway, in this one I heard an audience cheer for a font. Strange times we're living in.

In real life when you go away for a while and come back, it seems like the god damn planet of the apes, everything's changed. I mean if Superman really was off the planet for the last 5 years there's a whole lot he missed out on. He's gonna have alot of questions.

"Why does everybody's phones keep playing those stupid songs?" "Would you people please shut the fuck up about this god damn American Idol? Why would anybody give a shit?" "Wait a minute, that dude got re-elected?" "What do you mean never forget 9-11? What's that all about?" etc. UNITED 93 is definitely "too soon" for Superman because he just found out about flight 93 five minutes ago and feels like an asshole for not being there.

But it doesn't seem like Metropolis has changed much since the Christopher Reeve days. I'd like to see more new shit that wasn't in the old ones. I already know about the evil bald dude with the wacky old timey girl sidekick, and how Kryptonite makes Superman weak, and that he can fly. I already seen Marlon Brando in a wig playing his dad. I already got that theme song stuck in my head. It's cute nostalgia and all but let's see a new movie here boys. What are we paying you for?

Let me be clear. I'm not asking them to "reinvent" Superman by giving him a different suit or a hat or making him Matrixy or wear a leather coat or something. But let me play armchair nerd here. Superman is a classic American icon, he's been around for what, at least 40, 45 years. Could be 100, I have no idea. The point is, he's been around longer than that crappy late '70s movie this is all a tribute to. Your parents grew up knowing about Superman, it's not just a thing from your childhood. So I think this movie oughta stay true to all the things that always made him Superman, but then they oughta come up with some new stories and ideas that are not just homages to that particular movie. Just making the same movie with better flying is not enough to capture the heart of 2006 America. Or at least, the heart of me.

And by the way, as long as you got Marlon Brando in there using old footage, where the fuck is Richard Pryor? He wouldn't even need a wig or anything. I'm sure they could find some outtakes from BUSTIN' LOOSE or THE TOY or something where out of context it seems like he's talking to Superman about magic crystals.

As far as I can tell there is exactly one major change to the legendary story of Superman, this whole thing about Lois having a kid. Everything else feels like old hat. Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey this time) has an evil plan, let me lay it out for you:

1. He has magic Superman crystals that he puts in water and they grow
2. He has 1 (one) piece of Kryptonite

Now, if it was really so many years they spent trying to make another Superman movie, it seems like there would've been time to come up with a better evil plan than this horse shit. He's growing his own continent, okay, fine. It's the one piece of Kryptonite part that bugs me. He stabs Superman with Kryptonite once. Superman gets hurt. Then he pulls it out. Now the plan is foiled. Not exactly the greatest cinematic drama and suspense I have come across, in my opinion.

The one thing that does really work is Superman and all his superness. The guy they got playing him is perfect. It's nice that he's not somebody from other movies, he just seems like if Superman was a real guy, this would be him. When he interacts with the humans he gives them a charming smile and says corny things to them, but he seems like a cool guy. You don't hate him for being such a square.

By far the best scene in the movie is the one where the world finds out about the Superman return of the title. It involves a spectacular feat where he catches a falling plane inside a baseball stadium during a big game. And after a moment of contemplation, the crowd applauds. The only thing that could make it more American would be if all the baseball fans were eating apple pie. And maybe dressed as astronauts. And then he leads them in the National Anthem. I would like to think that Superman would not be an asshole and add that extra high note they always gotta do now to get cheap applause. "For the laaaaand of the fre-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..." You know what I'm talking about? I know this is a tangent but it must be said, I am against that bullshit. Every time I go to a ball game and they do that I think yeah, that old national anthem never quite sat right, thank God somebody realized they had to add an extra note in there in order for it to live up to the much higher standard of musicianship set by Mariah Carey. I actually make sure to only applaud lightly to any act that pulls that nonsense, and I give extra applause for the rare singer who sings the song correctly. But it doesn't matter, if they do that extra show off note people always whoo like crazy. These are probaly the same assholes with the plastic flags on their trucks that are supposed to show how patriotic they are but they're all ripped up and faded from the sun. BECAUSE THEY ATTACHED IT TO A FUCKING TRUCK AND THEN DROVE AROUND WITH IT. There is no common sense or actual meaning involved in these acts of patriotism. But that's what happens in the land of the freEEEEEEEEEE.

Anyway whenever the movie is about Superman flying around lifting giant objects, it's a good movie. There's alot of beautiful imagery where he's flying around in the upper atmosphere and it almost looks like a painting more than live action.

They do a good job of emphasizing that he's godlike. Not that God would feel the need to wear a cape, but you get what I'm saying. There's a funny montage of news footage of him zipping around the world helping people, which puts you in mind of somebody like God having to deal with everybody's prayers all at once (or Santa Claus answering letters if you're not into that). He even flies up into the heavens and sits with his eyes closed listening to every sound in the world, deciding which ones to respond to.

There's a whole thing about how Lois won a Pulitzer Prize for the article "Why the world doesn't need Superman." He has a little talk with her where he makes a good point, she says the world doesn't need a savior but every day he hears people crying out for one. The problem is, it seems like Lois just wrote that article because she's pissed at him for screwing her and then running off to outer space. There is nobody else in the world (well, except Lex Luthor) who appears to be anti-Superman. There is no actual argument ever made for why the world doesn't need Superman, we only see the headline. So the whole thing seems a little empty and makes Lois unlikable.

I guess there is one thing that makes Superman a little less goody two shoes. In this one he actually uses his x-ray vision to spy on Lois. He stands on a neighbor's house and watches the family interact. I kept wishing he would get caught, that would be hard for him to explain. He never uses it for perverted means, but this is definitely stalker behavior, it makes it a little more interesting that he crosses the line like that.

Still, Superman is the squarest of all super heroes. You compare him to more of a brawler like a Batman, a Wolverine or a Popeye, and he seems pretty milquetoast. Which makes the life of Lois's poor bastard fiancee all the more tragic. Even when Superman was in another galaxy, this guy knows he's Lois's second choice. I'm betting he knows spoiler the kid is Superman's end spoiler - if not he's in for a surprise in part 2. He risks his life and he tries his damndest to be a good dad and nobody fuckin cares, his girl and his son will always push him aside and trample over his face to get a better look at Superman. That's the sad destiny of this poor chump of an actor because the same shit happened to him in the X-Men movies. In those he even has super powers but who gives a shit. Wolverine is cooler. He knows it, the audience knows it and most of all his smokin-hot fiancee or wife or whatever Xenia Onnatopp knows it.

Superman himself was enough to make the movie watchable, but if they make a sequel they have GOT to come up with a better story and characters to put around him. It's hard to believe this is the same directionist who gave us the X-Men series. Yeah, this movie is more impressive on a visual level, and the action is much more exciting. But it's not as good in the places that count most. Superman is trying to be more emotional and personal, but I can't help thinking that the X-Men movies (yes, including the third one that Singer didn't do) have so much more depth.

The biggest difference is in the villain. Magneto is an old friend and colleague of Dr. Xavier whose political views about mutant liberation are more extreme, and this puts them in conflict. He's a holocaust survivor and he doesn't want the same thing that befell his countrymen to befall his fellow mutants, and he is willing to kill to stop it from happening. Also he enjoys chess and is played by an old Shakespeare guy.

Lex Luthor, on the other hand, is a greedy evil guy who hates Superman. And he's bald and has alot of wigs and crystals.

Magneto's plan in part 3 was to lead a mutant revolt against a factory and kill the source of a drug that the human government is using to take away the characteristics that make mutants unique. He's going about it wrong because his plan involves killing a child, but you can understand where he's coming from and kind of side with him.

Lex Luthor's plan is to grow magic crystals out of the earth that will destroy part of North America but he thinks he will own the new land so he will get rich. Nobody sides with him, not even his girlfriend.

When Magneto tries to execute his plan, he's met by the military armed with dart guns loaded with the cure, a dangerous proposition. He tries to use his magnet powers to destroy their weapons like he has done in the past, but they were smart enough to make the weapons out of plastic. But he uses the unique powers of various mutants in his group to disarm the weapons. It's a back and forth strategic battle where each side tries to outwit and overpower the other.

When Lex tries to execute his plan, Superman tries to stop him, so Lex stabs him with Kryptonite, like he did in every god damn Superman story you ever saw. But then Superman takes the Kryptonite out and Lex didn't think of anything else to try, so he loses and gets stuck on an island.

Hell, even on the superficial level of skills and accomplishments there's no contest here. Magneto can control metal objects and he used that to move the Golden Gate Bridge creating a path for his people to start an uprising. Lex is a master of wigs and he fucked an old lady for money.

Ah shit man, I'm gonna say it. I had more fun watching X-MEN 3. (Those are the seven words you recite to bring on a deadly nerd curse.) SUPERMAN is a better piece of filmmaking but I didn't connect with it as much. Singer has already established the type of things that can make these super hero stories more exciting and relevant, and now he abandons them in his new movie.

I mean I can't believe it's ME that's the one arguing this, but didn't they already prove that comic strip movies can be more thoughtful than this? The X-Men movies have subtext about race, sexual orientation, the Patriot Act, all kinds of shit. This movie, every time it starts to bring up an interesting philosophical question it then runs away like a sissy. In his review Moriarty pointed out how Lex Luther brings up this question of whether it's fair for Superman to have advanced alien technology and then just keep it to himself and not use it to help the world. Then the movie doesn't explore that question at all. The one I noticed is the question of what Superman should be doing with his time. It's just like the question of why God didn't stop the levees from breaking in New Orleans, or why He allowed Bush to stop drinking and go into politics. We see that Superman listens to all the sounds in the world and then zips around stopping bank robberies and catching cars that go off jumps and that kind of stuff. But he never has to make a tough decision. I mean don't get me wrong, he deserves all the credit in the world for saving the world at the end. But if you're gonna compare him to God and Jesus you might want to show him facing the challenge of helping people who are starving or civilians being killed by war or Pakistanis in an earthquake or something. Not just American bank robberies. Or deciding which victim is most worth saving at any given time. In an X-Men movie you would be encouraged to think about these things while watching the movie, but in Superman you gotta suppress them.

So this one's kind of the reverse of BATMAN BEGINS. It's got great action but not a good enough story. One of these days you nerds are gonna get both in the same movie and your Hawaiian shirts are gonna burst into flames.

 

Two more Superman topics I want to address before I cut this off:

1. GAY. Some guy begged me in the talkbacks to review "the gay Superman movie." Apparently Brian Singer is gay so some people expected the movie to be all about boys holding hands and giving you a makeover to impress your girlfriend and shit like that. Well, sorry to disappoint you but there isn't a god damn thing about this movie that's any gayer than it would've been if anybody else was directing it. Shit, the whole damn movie is about men and women pining over each other and thinking about fatherhood. Of course people will say that everything in the movie is gay and phallic and whatever. But these are guys, you could give them a copy of World's Biggest Gang Bang and if you convinced them it was directed by Brian Singer they'd write a seven page essay on its homerotic imagery.

2. 3-D. If you go see this one in Imax it's in partial 3-D. There are something like four scenes, I guess about 20 minutes of the movie, where a symbol comes up and you put on the goggles and it's 3-D. POLAR EXPRESS was created in a computer, so they were able to process it into 3-D. But this was live action shot with one angle so they had to go through frame-by-frame and digitally alter it, and they didn't have enough time to do the whole thing.

In my expert opinion, this 3-D is only okay. At least with my goggles and where I was sitting, it looked blurrier and ghostier than when I saw POLAR EXPRESS. It looks kind of cool, about as good as the old one-color-glasses ones like FRIDAY THE 13TH 3-D. But the scenes weren't really designed to be 3-D so the whole thing becomes a distraction. It gets to the big exciting action scene, then you gotta put your glasses on, suddenly you can't see Superman's face clearly and the whole screen looks smaller and faded a little. I was actually kind of wishing it wasn't in 3-D, which is not something you're gonna usually find me wishing.

the end

I would like to dedicate this review to the biggest Superman fan I know, my old movie newsgroup colleague KalElFan. He first captured my heart when he argued for weeks on end that the shot of Thora Birch's boobs in AMERICAN BEAUTY was a digital composite, and that any contrary information in interviews or articles was part of a coverup. He would accept the word of Steven Spielberg, as head of Dreamworks, that it was just a regular shot of some boobs, but since Spielberg had not come out to announce this to the world it was clearly not the case. To this day KalElFan is one of the craziest motherfuckers I ever came across online, and his works spurred me on in my early Writings. For at least the past 6 or 7 years (probaly longer) he's used the name "KalElFan," posted thousands of insanely detailed, bizarrely reasoned posts relating to his theories and mathematical equations of Superman, and apparently started a bunch of wars between himself and various Superman related newsgroups. But he claims after reading Ebert's review of SUPERMAN RETURNS he wouldn't have bothered to see it if he didn't already have tickets. That's my guy right there. Look him up if you ever get really bored.

---

SURVIVING THE GAME

In this 1994 MOST DANGEROUS GAME ripoff, Ice-T plays a homeless man hired by a bunch of rich assholes supposedly to be their guide on a hunting trip, but actually to be their prey. Because the second deadliest prey is man, the first deadliest is Ice-T. (I wonder if Predator knows about this yet?)

The movie doesn't really offer any backstory for why Ice-T is tough enough to survive this hunting expedition (SPOILER), he's just Ice-T. He's not an ex-soldier or ex-cop or trained in the Orient or anything. In fact it's the reverse: he's a regular guy and almost all of the people he kills are ex-CIA.

I gotta warn you this is a little on the cheesy side. It's not exactly great action, and some key moments are bogged down by bad decisions like having Ice's one-liner clearly recorded in a studio and looped in so it takes you out of the moment. But it's still enjoyable to watch because it's such a simple, classic setup and it's an all star cast. Hunting Ice are no less than Gary (PREDATOR 2) Busey, John C. (ON DEADLY GROUND) McGinley, Charles S. (BLACK DOG) Dutton, F. Murray (SCARFACE) Abraham, and their sicko leader, Rutger (BLIND JUSTICE) Hauer. Then there's some guy named William McNamara as Abraham's babyfaced son, and for most of the movie that is the entire cast. So not a bad ensemble.

Busey gets to be crazy Busey, in fact he has a pretty incredible monologue about his fucked up childhood that makes the idea of his character being a CIA psychologist even funnier. McGinley also gets to do the type of over-the-top acting that makes him so enjoyable. And the movie has a great use for Dutton - at first we see him as a volunteer at a street mission supposedly trying to help Ice-T out. It's pretty standard for a guy like that to secretly be evil, but this is Charles S. Dutton we're talking about. He's Roc. He drove GET ON THE BUS. He's in RUDY. Even when the guy goes into space, like in ALIEN 3, you know he's still playing a great inspirational dude who gives tough love and makes righeous speeches. That's exactly who he seems to be at the beginning of this, so it's actually kind of surprising when all the sudden he's talking about choosing Ice-T as his prey due to his breeding and musculature. Talking about him like he's a horse or a piece of meat. This movie is kind of fucked up! And Dutton has the best death, laying on the ground mumbling about plans for the next expedition right after having his legs blown clean off.

You know, I'm gonna go on a little tangent here, but I read the nerd websights so I've learned a few things about this "GI Joe" movie that comes out next summer. They are mad because the leader of the bad guys looks totally different, he used to wear a blue hood with eyeholes, but supposedly the filmatic adapters felt it looked too much like a Klansman hood so they did something totally different for the movie. I thought that was funny because it's THE BAD GUY, why would it be a problem for him to look like a Klansman? Are you worried the Klan will complain about being portrayed as bad guys? As recently as the 1980s white supremacists were a great go-to villain for low budget action movies (see for example AVENGING FORCE or NINJA VENGEANCE.) I really hate when people whine about "political correctness" but this is one that makes no god damn sense. Sure, these guys are evil, they're murderers, but let's make sure the audience doesn't think they're racist. That would be bad.

I bring that up because in a way I think having Dutton as one of the hunters is kind of a copout, because in 1994 it would've been pretty provocative to have a movie about white people hunting a black man for sport. Clearly they think he's less than them because he's homeless, but if Dutton wasn't one of them you would figure they're racists too. Back then "gangster rap" was still a major boogeyman for the mainstream media. On the newstands, a menacing young hoodlum with the scary name "Snoop Doggy Dogg" was leering out from a spooky Newsweek cover story. And to the type of people who would read that thing, Ice-T was only known for "Cop Killer." That was a couple years earlier - his most recent album at the time was "Home Invasion," a title referring to the idea of black rappers getting their ideas into the heads of white kids in the suburbs. Paranoid white people were afraid of these rappers, but SURVIVING THE GAME reversed it, making the rapper the victim and the establishment the aggressor. And that point would've been even stronger if the hunters were all white.

Director Ernest Dickerson is black, but maybe he didn't want to make a movie about racism, I don't know. I just hope that's what he wanted and not what the studio made him do.

At the end of the movie Ice-T ends up in Seattle, which threw me for a loop. I assumed the unnamed city at the beginning was supposed to be New York or L.A. (most like L.A. I guess since that's where Ice-T's from). I watched the scenes again and didn't recognize any Seattle locations. It turns out that yes, the movie was filmed in Washington State, but the Seattle scenes were filmed in Wenatchee, which is a small town all the way on the other side of the mountains in Eastern Washington, known for its apple orchards. I know Seattle isn't exactly Gotham City but Wenatchee is so tiny compared to us, I think it's amazing that they shot a movie there and I thought it might be somewhere in New York. They chose some good buildings and angles I guess. Good job.

SURVIVING THE GAME is, you know, a pretty good movie to watch on cable or some afternoon when you just don't feel like watching an actual good movie. It's not that good but it has enough elements to make it fun. Unfortunately it came out less than a year after HARD TARGET, a much more stylish and enjoyable take on MOST DANGEROUS GAME. This is such a great ensemble, but do their added powers equal Jean-Claude Van Damme standing up on a moving motorcycle + Wilford Brimley with a bow and arrow + Arnold Vosloo + Lance Henriksen playing piano + John Woo when he was still hungry? Not really.

2/24/09

---

THE SWORD OF DOOM

When the Criterion company puts out a DVD, and the title doesn't rhyme with either THE SCHROCK or SCHMARMAGEDDON, you know it's probaly a pretty good movie. And everybody loves a good samurai picture so I've had my eye on this THE SWORD OF DOOM for a while now. What finally inspired me to watch it though is the ballots for the revision of the Badass 100. It hasn't been rated as many times as alot of the other movies, but so far every single person who's rated it has given it a perfect 10. It seems like they like it.

Sure enough, this is a good one. It's basically the story of a crazy fuckin bastard goin around killing people for no reason in samurai times. The guy's name is Ryunosuke and he's played by Tatsuya Nakadai, who I guess is in some of Kurosawa's pictures. The Japanese title actually means "Dai-bosatsu Pass" which is the location of the opening scene where we first meet this psychotic fuck. And right away you get this feeling that something horrible is gonna happen because the opening title says something like "Spring 1860, the Dai-bosatsu Pass Incident." Like what's about to happen is some horrible notorious thing we've all heard about before. Gulp.

An old man and his grand daughter have climbed 15 miles up this mountain for a pilgrimage and they've stopped at a Buddhist shrine. Suddenly this asshole in a shinobi hat, Ryunosuke, approaches the old man. He asks him a couple questions and then slices him up. His eyes look crazy but he doesn't seem too worked up about the whole thing. And it's kind of ambiguous because, to be fair, the old man was actually praying for Buddha to let him die and come to "the other side." So you're not really sure if Ryunosuke is trying to do him a favor or what. Anyway, he just walks away. You know how those fuckin shinobis are. They think just because they have giant hats they can go around fileting people. Fuckers.

Next we find out that Ryunosuke has a sword fight coming up tomorrow, and for complicated reasons to protect the family, his dying father begs him to throw the match. Next, his opponent's wife comes to him and also begs him to throw the match, because if her husband loses it will destroy their whole family. Ryunosuke tells her that a sword fighter's skills are like "a woman's chastity" and asking him to throw a match is like asking her to give up her chastity. If you know what I mean. Nudge nudge. You get me? You get what I'm saying lady? This give you any ideas what it would take to make me throw the match?

So basically he coerces/rapes the poor gal (offscreen, thankfully) which brings up the hypocritical stance I will always believe in: that it's okay to kill people in movies, just not to molest them. So at this point I'm definitely rooting against Ryunosuke. And then he goes ahead and wins the match anyway, killing the guy, takes the wife as his own, has a baby with her that he ignores, and treats her like shit.

Nakadai is real good at making this guy scary. He has an alien look in his eyes like he's disconnected from what he's doing. When he goes home he just kind of sits there and stares into nothingness. In some parts he just starts laughing for no reason. You could maybe compare him to a Travis Bickle or somebody. One guy on the IMDB compared the movie to HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER.

But there is a samurai you could compare him to. I think Ryunosuke is kind of a pre-Lone Wolf and Cub. Ogami Itto considers himself a demon, and he kills alot of people, but we root for him because 1) he started this demon quest after being totally fucked over and 2) he follows a code of honor where the people he's killing are usually assholes. Ryunosuke, depending on how you interpret this all, could be more of a literal demon samurai. Or he could just be nuts. The American title "Sword of Doom" seems to imply that the sword he uses is cursed, and this theory is supported by no less an authority than Toshiro Mifune, who plays a wise swordfighting teacher that Ryunosuke fucks with. Mifune says "The sword is the soul. Study the soul to know the sword. Evil mind, evil sword." And based on what I've observed about Ryunosuke that means his sword is REAL GOD DAMN EVIL.

This is a 2 hour movie and it's right about the one hour mark when we find out that even Ryunosuke's own father notices he's fucked in the head, and he personally sends the brother of the guy killed in the duel at the beginning to the best teacher (Mifune, of course) to train to kill Ryunosuke. So at that point the movie begins to switch over so instead of following the crazy psychopath we follow the good guys who are gonna try to do something about this. But the movie doesn't exactly pan out the way you expect it to.

I'm gonna go ahead and spoil the ending so you should stop reading now. Did you stop reading? Good. At the end Ryunosuke really hits rock bottom. There's an amazing scene where he seems to be haunted by the ghosts of the people he's killed, represented by shadows on the rice paper walls. And he pulls out his sword of doom and starts fighting with thin air. He goes completely crazy, savagely cutting through all the walls until he discovers that he's surrounded by the clan of assassins he's been hanging out with, who have turned on him. And he takes them all on. This scene I'm sure is a big part of those badass ratings of 10 out 10, because it lasts for 7 minutes and according to wikipedia he kills 70 samurai in the scene. But to me the best part is that he's in a total frenzy and he's just spinning around swinging his sword and then it freezes and that's the end. To me this freeze frame seems to be saying "You get the idea." We've seen him killing 70 guys and this is going to continue forever. For all we know that bastard is still fighting that battle somewhere.

Here's the thing. The movie is based on a serialized novel. The movie was supposed to be a trilogy, so we would find out more about what happened in the next movie, but the next movie was never made. In fact, the story was made into at least 3 other movies and none of them had a sequel either. And apparently the author of the novel died before the story came to a conclusion. So as far as I'm concerned the universe means for the story to end the way it does in SWORD OF DOOM, with a crazy fucking massacre that will never end.

I don't know how much of it is intentional but this movie, while being enjoyably violent, is a good portrait of what violence is all about. We don't know why this guy is killing people. We don't know if he's crazy, or if he's possessed by an evil sword. Samurai don't kill people, swords kill people. If it really is a sword of doom, we don't know how long he's had this sword, and how long it's had a hold of him. Is the incident on the pass the beginning of the killing spree? Or did we come in late? Maybe he's been pulling these sword of doom shenanigans for years. The thing is it doesn't really matter. As far as we know the killing spree has always been going on and always will be. We gotta stop fighting, people, and scrap that fucking sword of doom.

---

SYRIANA

SYRIANA is not the movie about the talking Jesus lion, that's CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. CHRONICLES OF NARNIA is not the one where Vin Diesel says "I haven't smelled beautiful in a long time," that's CHRONICLES OF RIDICK.

Sorry, my man Richard Pryor died this week, so the jokes are awkward. But seriously folks. "Syriana" and "Narnia" sound similar enough, and there are alot of people who space out on movie titles. There's got to be somewhere in this great country of ours where some knucklehead mixed up the names and went into the wrong movie and hilarity ensued. Picture a guy sitting waiting for what he thinks is a political ensemble drama. Thinking, wow, I'm surprised this many kids are interested in global politics. Or vice versa. Get all the popcorn, load all the kids in, wait through the ads and the previews and make the people around you uncomfortable. Shhh, Gunnar, time to be quiet. Skyler, you too. Do you need a time out? And then all the sudden a chubby George Clooney is in the middle east somewhere trying to set up a deal to sell a missile launcher.

Where I saw it they had it on multiple screens, playing every hour on the hour like it was SPIDER-MAN or something. So I actually did see a couple come in an hour late and try to make sense of it for 5 minutes before they figured out they were at the wrong showing. I feel bad about not telling them what was what but they were late for their own show anyway and I wanted to see if they could tell the difference between "hard to follow" and "we missed the first hour of this movie." So it was an interesting experiment. The movie itself was interesting too, I guess.

SYRIANA is that rare political movie where the politics don't seem simplified or spruced up for dramatic purposes. There's a bunch of different storylines: George Clooney is a CIA agent on the outs because he keeps writing memos about a missing missile, Matt Damon is a guy working for an energy firm sent to meet with a middle eastern prince, then you've got a young Arab man laid off by an oil company who can't find work and may or may not be destined to become a suicide bomber, it's hard to really say, and you've got Jeffrey Wright as a lawyer investigating some, uh-- I don't know. Honestly I don't remember exactly what was going on in this movie. But it was complicated, I remember. And it made sense at the time.

There's alot going on, alot to follow and it all kind of connects in the end but not in a climactic Brian DePalma kind of way. But it does have a satisfying feeling when you realize that wait a minute, at some point when I wasn't paying attention all the puzzle pieces seem to have come together. The characters themselves don't know each other, don't know what is going on in each other's subplots, but some of them connect by the end.

The only movie that's easy to compare it to is TRAFFIC. Stephen Gaghan wrote TRAFFIC (directed by Steve Soderbergh) and this is his rookie directorial job. He is apparently the type of guy who sits around for years researching this type of shit (the war on drugs, the oil industry) and figures out how to write complex ensemble dramas about it. Actually I shouldn't say "sits around" because he went to Lebanon and shit and apparently at one point even got put in a car with a hood on his head and went to meet with a leader of Hezbollah (there's a scene just like that in the movie, too. Good to see the research didn't go to waste).

The story shows how many of the problems in our world are caused by our dependence on foreign oil. The best example is the prince here. The oil companies, and therefore the CIA, and therefore George Clooney (at first), want this guy taken out because if he takes over for his father, he plans to sell the oil to China instead of the US. This, he explains to Matt Damon, is for the best interests of his people because it's a better deal, and he wants reform and revolution, he wants to invest the money in the people and the infrastructure instead of the way his father does, the way his brother would, in the fancy palaces and hotels with swimming pools that we see repeatedly throughout the movie. The idea is that we need to support reform minded Arab leaders but we'll side with the bastards if it helps get us oil.

Although it's a political movie it's not an attack on republicans or Bush. Not that it would be wrong to attack those fuckers, they deserve nothing more than to be attacked and attacked and attacked by attackers and attacking related program activities. But the fact is this same shit was going on during 8 years of Clinton and in fact you see a portrait of Clinton in one guy's office which made me think it even took place during the Clinton administration. Later there's a reference to 9-11 though so that's not the case. Anyway there's no mention of any president or politician or party, that stuff seems irrelevant as long as politics are controlled by corporate money.

Clooney's character is based on Bob Baer, the real life ex-CIA agent who wrote the memoir SEE NO EVIL which inspired the movie. I heard the real guy on the radio, he said he was not a consultant and was worried how the movie would turn out but as soon as he saw it he called them up and asked to do promotion for it because it was the only movie he'd ever seen that "got it right" about how the spy world works. This is a movie that's not dumbed down at all. Or who knows, maybe it is dumbed down, but not below my level, so I couldn't tell. Anyway, this movie is smarter than I am. It has an intelligence level of Vern or higher. So it takes effort to keep up.

And there are alot of damn characters. The truth is, this should be a mini-series. Because they're all interesting characters but you don't get enough of any of them. There's a little personal life in there. In fact, some of the most powerful moments in the movie got nothing to do with the politics, they're about the people. Like the tragedy that happens to Matt Damon's family, and the relationship between Jeffrey Wright and his alcoholic father. The moment where he's offered a drink and turns it down, and you realize why.

What's most interesting about these lead characters is they are all trying to do the right thing, they all see flaws in some part of the system and try to fight it in their own way. But at the same time they're all a part of the system. So they fail, or they get crushed, or shoved aside, or blown up, or they blow themselves up. They can't stop it or they only perpetuate the problem. But it's interesting because think about it, Matt Damon is a moneyman for an energy company. That should be a bad guy, you would think. But he's portrayed with nothing but sympathy. He's trying to get his company to help reform the middle east. He's even a vegetarian.

Clooney's storyline is the most interesting to me, the most cinematic, but he doesn't seem to be in the movie enough. I ougtha read the book but if you read my JARHEAD review you know how that can turn out. His story has all the intrigue, it involves a couple of explosions, some torture, some threats and a bit of the old stifling bureaucracy/disobeying a direct order routine. The trailer was a good trick, they show you the few scenes that seem like a thriller and promise that this will tie into an explosive political expose and it gave me chills and pretty much looked like the greatest movie ever. But it's not the greatest movie ever. I like the movie, I admire it, I maybe oughta watch it again. But I don't love it. And I tend to LOVE a movie when it's the greatest movie ever.

I was excited to see it but it took effort to stay excited while watching it. I'm not saying it's a complete bore, because it's not. But it does lean a little more towards eating your vegetables because you know they're good for you, not as much toward great entertainment. It gets it all right politically but only partly right cinematically. There's a scene where Matt Damon and Amanda Peet try to get their kids to eat vegetarian bacon, but the kids want "pig bacon." That could be a metaphor for this movie. The movie is good for you and good for the world but maybe a little too dry and crunchy for breakfast. (On the other hand maybe the real bacon should stand for the "meat" and realism of this movie and the soy bean bacon should stand for artificial Hollywood movies, which are the ones that are too crunchy. Also, isn't soy bacon kind of soggy sometimes and real bacon too crunchy if it's overcooked? Ah shit, I don't know, my metaphor has turned on me.)

Come to think of it, this brings up a troubling contradiction that seems to be a theme in Clooney's work as an actor and producer now. He's doing these political movies that work so hard to be unimpeachably fair and real that they abandon the tried and true techniques of Hollywood entertainment. So they "get it right" but they don't exactly blow you through the back of the theater. Would it be better if it was an intense thriller that was looser with the facts? Where do you draw the line between refreshing and misguided? Intelligent and boring? I DON'T KNOW!

But I gotta be honest with you, the balance is not there. You got realism, you got smarts, but you got just under the required amount of compelling drama to pull me in all the way. It's a more interesting subject to me than TRAFFIC, but somehow the story's not as involving. And plus, TRAFFIC is not exactly my favorite Soderbergh movie. Some day somebody's gotta figure out how to make a movie with more balance. Why can't there be a movie as relevant as SYRIANA but as badass as THE LIMEY? You're telling me Bob Baer is a pussy? Actually, take badass out of the equation. Soderbergh made TRAFFIC and ERIN BROCKOVICH in the same year. Both movies are good but not his best. I want to see something in between those two, between the phoney feel good crowdpleaser and the overly complex political drama. I am not a centrist though, I just think a movie can do both.

By the way, I got no clue what Syriana means. The middle east scenes just say they take place in "the Persian Gulf" so maybe Syriana is supposed to be a fictional all encompassing Middle Eastern country, but they chickened out and never said the name in the movie. Or maybe it means something else. Maybe it was the name of a character and I never picked up on that. Maybe it's just a badass sounding name like DIE HARD, except not as badass. Like I said, I got no clue.

Conclusion: Stephen Gaghan is probaly a genius, but not a cinematic genius. This is a very smart, very pretty good movie. It probaly won't knock your socks off but you may be willing to take your socks off yourself just on principle to reward a guy for trying to make a movie like this. Don't give up Stephen, you got a good heart, you can do this some day.