Monty On Movies

The Runaways

2010-03-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

Hey! I saw The Runaways today and liked it a lot. But I decided to write about it on Mysterious Exhortations, my new blog. Go read it there, please!

Oscar Pool Theory

2010-03-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

This is a terrible year for Oscar pools. See, everyone agrees on the actors (Bridges, Bullock, 'Nique, Waltz), which means there's not a lot of room to separate from the pack. Even Best Picture is widely considered to be Avatar, although I've noticed a trend toward picking The Hurt Locker. Either way, though, it's hard to win a pool if everybody picks the same thing.

So here's my theory. Let's say there's an 90% chance that all the favorites win. So if that's how you bet, you've got an 90% chance of being right. But then you have to divide your chances of actually winning by the number of people that also played all the favorites. Which, this year, is everyone. So if you and ten other people all picked the same favorites at the top, you've got a 90% chance ... of having a one-in-eleven chance of winning. And it'll come down to Live Action Short or something equally random.

So this year, I've decided to stake out the longshot vote. I realize there's a very good chance that Avatar or The Hurt Locker will win Best Picture. But the odds stink. So I went with Inglourious Basterds. I think it was a fantastic movie, and if people can get over their instinctive "Ew! Tarantino!" reaction, they might vote for him. And his acceptance speech would be amazing.

Plus, this way I get to root for my favorite movie of the year to win Best Picture. That doesn't happen when I'm forced to pick Crash or something, you know?

Gums

2010-02-28T16:21:00.001-08:00

Okay. This movie raised a lot of questions. Mostly questions like "What in the hell?" and "Why is this happening?" Let's take it from the top.

Gums is a pornographic parody of Jaws. Except instead of a great white shark, there's a mermaid who kills men via fellatio. Except that she's not much of a mermaid. She's got legs, for one thing. The top-billed character is played by Brother Theodore, who is hilariously crazy. He's also mostly incomprehensible. The whole movie's incomprehensible. At one point, the scientist character (who does, in fact, look and sound a little like Richard Dreyfus) goes to the wrong house. A voice from inside tells him the address he wants is across the street. Then we cut inside the house to see one dog mounting another. Just before the audience goes blind with horror, we cut back to the scientist knocking on the door of a house that clearly has the wrong address.

There were three jokes in the movie that I liked. And I'm pretty sure these were all on purpose.

JOKE THE FIRST: The deputy is seen apparently riding in a parade, but then the camera pulls back to reveal he's just standing up in his jeep and waving to people for no reason.

JOKE THE SECOND: The mayor has a comically large tie.

JOKE THE THIRD: Brother Theodore's master plan at the end of the movie involves Hitler's genitals. But the guy in the burlap sack insists that he's not even Hitler. And he's right: this guy is clearly not Hitler. He tries to go along with it for a minute or so, but finally has to insist that he's just a guy that Brother Theodore stuffed into a sack. I enjoyed that bit, because it was appealingly random.

The rest of this movie doesn't make a bit of sense. For one thing, why, if it's porn, is all the sex concealed behind poorly-drawn underground-comix-style illustrations? Why are two of the characters replaced by puppets for the last five minutes? What was with the vulture?

Anyway, it was a weird, weird movie. Exactly the sort of thing you want to see in a late-night show at a local art hose theater packed with people enjoying themselves, and that's how I did see it. Plus, it's barely over an hour long, so I could still get home and go to sleep. I appreciate that.

It did make me happy by providing another sighting of the Panic in New York; Menagerie Breaks Loose headline. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I've figured out what the deal is with that. But I'll explain it in a different post.

The Wolfman

2010-02-27T18:05:00.001-08:00

Well ... it's definitely a wolfman movie. It's got an aged gypsy fortune teller (who should really have been played by Adrienne Barbeau), frightened villagers, people getting killed on the moors, a lot of shots of the full moon, and an angry mob waving torches. I don't know why they're not waving pitchforks, because we see them lying around in the village earlier.

There's a spot where I think we're supposed to object to the idea of Lawrence Talbot being killed. However, at that point, he's already offed twenty or so villagers, along with a handful of scientists and at least a few Londoners. Frankly, even if he had somehow gotten cured of the werewolfism, he's still got to be brought down somehow. No one's going to say, "Well, you weren't quite yourself when you decimated the Royal Academy of Sciences so we'll let you off. Don't do it again!"

There were some things I liked. I enjoyed Anthony Hopkins as the amused father, although it was largely the same role he played in The Mask of Zorro. It helps that I enjoyed that movie a lot. I liked that Rick Baker was in charge of the werewolf effects. There was CGI, yes, but there was a lot of footage of "a guy in a wolfman suit". And it looked like a proper wolfman. The two stages are "man" and "wolfman", not "man" and "wolf". It's a little thing, but it's important.

I also always kind of enjoy exceedingly blatant sequel hooks. And I suppose this is a spoiler, but I would totally go see Inspector Abberline: Werewolf Detective.

Jabberwocky

2010-01-31T11:58:00.001-08:00

The Terry Gilliam project continues, with a movie made back when Monty Python was still practically a going concern. And it seems strange that I've never seen it, since I've seen all the other Monty Python stuff I could get my hands on.

As it happens, I think I was correct to skip it. It's mostly an excuse for Terry Gilliam to cover Michael Palin in gunk and then hide him behind clouds of smoke. There isn't really a plot, and the jokes kind of feel like somebody who's heard of Monty Python and wants to give it a try without really understanding it. There are a lot of pointless non sequiturs and things that are intended to be funny because they're so strenuously peculiar and unexpected. Wacky!

That's really all there is to say about it, I'm afraid. It's only interesting in the sense that you can watch Gilliam's directorial sensibilities evolve. It's mostly darkness and smoke machines at this point.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

2010-01-26T19:13:00.000-08:00

What with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus coming out, I've decided to watch all the movies directed by Terry Gilliam. There are only three I haven't seen (counting the Imaginarium itself), and several of the ones I have seen are among my favorite movies ever. So this shouldn't be too hard! First up, we have Mr. Gilliam's directorial debut, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which he co-directed with Terry Jones.

I have, of course, seen this before. Many, many times. I've worn out two videotapes of this movie. I want to emphasize that I'm not one of those people who quotes it all the time. I used to be, but I got over it. The quotes are always there in the back of my head. Always. While watching it this time, I got almost ten minutes in without quoting along, but then "Dennis! There's some lovely filth down here!" leapt unbidden out of my mouth.

So obviously I can't be objective about this movie. I love everything about it, and I've reached the point where I'm watching the backgrounds because I've already memorized what happens close to the camera. I've read a bit (read: everything I could get my hands on) about the making of Holy Grail, so I know that Gilliam was mostly interested in making things look right and covering actors with filth, while Jones's directing efforts were more about the actors and the funny. In later Monty Python movies, they sensibly decided that Terry Jones would be the Director, while Terry Gilliam would be Production Designer. Meanwhile, Gilliam would go off to start directing on his own on Jabberwocky, which I will watch for the first time now. Exciting!

Incidentally, I thought "Spamalot" was fine, although it wasn't as funny as the movie.

Sita Sings the Blues

2010-01-24T10:40:00.001-08:00

I am going to attempt to talk about Sita Sings the Blues without reference to the way it was made, the way it was distributed, or the many interesting questions it raises about Copyright and Fair Use. Those are all valid topics of discussion, but I feel they've been amply covered elsewhere. Instead, I shall be focusing solely on the movie itself.

...this is a fantastic movie. It retells the Ramayana, a story from India's myth/history, and it does it in several different ways at once. The characters all have six or seven different appearances, so that the viewer quickly learns what the core elements are. Sita could look like this or like that, and the story could go in these directions, but she's always Sita. As if to back up the idea of a story being told in different ways, we occasionally see classical shadow puppets acting out a conversation by modern residents of India, telling the story, getting confused, and disagreeing with each other on the order of events.

One of the threads is a very cartoony (and adorable!) Sita singing the blues songs of Anette Hanshaw. It's not even that much of a stretch, since Sita's man Done Her Wrong, which of course is one of the main themes of the blues. I like that section a lot, not just because Annette Hanshaw turns out to be terrific, but because most of the movie is a mash-up of different versions of the Ramayana, and the addition of something from the twentieth century shows that the basic themes are, in fact, universal. You can add blues to the pot with no problem at all. That also applies to the Modern Day section, which is about Nina Paley (the filmmaker) and the end of a relationship.

Sita Sings the Blues takes a classic story and retells it in a thoroughly modern way. It shows how the story is applicable and meaningful for people living today, and it does it all exceedingly entertainingly. It's beautiful and a lot of fun.

(And, yes, it was made all by Nina Paley on Nina Paley's home computer, and it's got a groundbreaking distribution model and the use of Annette Hanshaw songs presents interesting questions about copyright and Fair Use. There's more information on the FAQ. Happy now?)

Worlds Greatest Dad and Funny People

2010-01-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

I liked Judd Apatow's Funny People a lot more than I thought I was going to. I keep thinking I'm sick of Judd Apatow Movies, but it turns out I like the ones actually directed by Apatow himself. That's just Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and now Funny People. All those Will Ferrell movies that made me get sick of him aren't my problem.

Aaaanyway, I don't think Funny People is a comedy. It's a drama about comedians. Adam Sandler is the old, jaded successful comedian who lives all alone (and now let's talk about the character he plays! Zing!) and Seth Rogen is the young up-and-comer who's going to Open Mike Nights and kind of stinking up the place. It's got a lot of jokes that aren't supposed to be funny, since they're told by characters who are either trying out jokes or just not funny in the first place.

As usual, I enjoy Adam Sandler more when he's not doing his usual Adam Sandler Thing. He actually does it a bit in this movie, but they're bits his character did in his theoretical Enormous Comedy Successes. There's a lot of crossover between Funny People and reality. All the footage of Young Adam Sandler's Character goofing around is actual Young Adam Sandler, shot back when Judd Apatow was his roommate. And then I'm fascinated by the fact that Apatow's wife and kids are also in the movie. His daughters do well, but I have to assume the roles were written for them. And Seth Rogen has great chemistry with them, presumably because he's met them before. Why, I bet the dogs were actual Apatow Dogs!

Okay. Getting distracted. Gotta focus. I liked the movie. That's my point.

And in other "dramas starring comedians" news, I watched World's Greatest Dad, directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite and starring Robin Williams. If it's a comedy, it's extremely black. What with the autoerotic asphyxiation halfway in. It's like, let's say, a darker, less-funny Heathers. Robin Williams doesn't do any of his usual Robin Williams-y stuff, which is nice.

So I'm prepared to declare that I like dramas starring comedians. I wonder if people will start making comedies starring dramatic actors. I bet that won't be as good.

2009 Movies

2010-01-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

Every year, I find some list of movies that were released that year and decide which ones I liked the best. Here's 2009's list, if you want to play along. These are movies released in 2009 that I saw in 2009. St. Trinian's was released in the US in 2009, bt I saw a UK DVD in 2008, so it doesn't get listed.

This, as always, is in order from "The movie I most enjoyed" to "The movie I least enjoyed". This is not the same thing as ordering by quality, you understand. Sometimes a good movie will just entirely fail to grab me. And sometimes I'll greatly enjoy a terrible movie. I accept this about myself. So let's get started!

Inglourious Basterds
Up
Black Dynamite
Zombieland
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Star Trek
The Hangover
Michael Jackson's This Is It
Funny People
Coraline
Big Fan
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Ninja Assassin
Adventureland
Avatar
Whip It
Watchmen
The Men Who Stare At Goats
Every Little Step
American Swing
District 9
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Fame
Orphan
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Push
House of the Devil
Drag Me to Hell
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Fanboys
Bruno
I Sell the Dead
The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Hmm. 33 movies, which is up a bit from the last couple of years. And I enjoyed a lot of them. I think I really liked everything from Anvil on up, which is pretty good. The top movie was definitely Inglourious Basterds for me. One of the things I like about it is that I can totally understand if someone didn't like it. I feel no pressure to argue people into it. But me personally, I enjoyed it from top to bottom.

So that's it! I thought 2009 was a very enjoyable year at the movies.

Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, look. I liked it, okay? Yes, it's a little more action-y and exposion-y than you normally get in a Sherlock Holmes adaptation. Fine. Yes, the trailer makes it look like it's all explosions. That's what trailers do. I propose that we stop judging movies based on the way trailers make them look. We're hip, twenty-first century movie aficionados and we know perfectly well that the trailers are A) cut together by people who did not work on the movie, and B) designed to show off explosions and groin shots?

Besides, need I point out that Sherlock Holmes has been adapted a million times in far more silly ways? The Great Mouse Detective made him into a freakin' mouse! And it was really good, too. And Holmes has fought Jack the Ripper (in both A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree as well as a bunch more, probably) and Cthulhoid cultists without people complaining their fool heads off. Holmes is infinitely adaptable. And don't go complaining about the sanctity of Arthur Conan Doyle's work, either. I didn't se you complaining about the goofiness of any of those adaptations of The Lost World.

Anyway. The only question for me was whether Holmes would feel Holmesy. And Robert Downey Jr. does. There's an early scene where he's shown analyzing the precise way to beat up an opponent (oh no! Holmes beats someone up! That's completely out of character for him, somehow, even though he says in "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott" he's both a fencer and a boxer -- that's right, I just whipped out an actual citation on you! Look it up!) and it's a great way of showing how an entirely rational character would approach fisticuffs. He's constantly sniffing things and smirking about how many things he knows, which struck me as exactly the right note.

So I liked it. I've heard it was a little long, but it felt fine to me. This is because I saw it at the Crazy Luxury Theater where every patron gets their own reclining armchair and complimentary blankets and pillows. It could have been six hours long and I would have been fine. Frankly, I almost didn't need a movie.

Avatar

2009-12-20T19:25:00.000-08:00

Avatar is an amazing technical and aesthetic achievement. It's like looking at the world's most beautiful matte painting.

I don't actually think there's three hours of movie in there. Many scenes seem to have been inserted just to have an excuse for characters to walk around in a bioluminescent wonderland. But that's okay, since the alien landscape looks really, really cool. I didn't find the plot that interesting, and the only parts I perked up for were the bits that involved things borrowed from Aliens. And the occasional weird plot hole.

One thing I thought was awesome was that Sigourney Weaver smokes, but is not an evil character. It seems like it's been a few years since that's happened in a movie. And the smoking was an irrelevant character detail, possibly just thrown in to give her something to do with her hands. I don't smoke myself, but I'm getting kind of tired of the Only Evil Characters Smoke thing.''

Incidentally, whenever I see Michelle Rodriguez in a movie, I'm reminded of Janette Goldstein's portrayal of Vasquez in Aliens. So it was fun to see her basically playing Vasquez in a James Cameron movie.

Oh, the plot holes. I'll give you three: Michelle Rodriguez probably should have been court-martialled, I think it's weird that Jake's security level (which you can see on the video log) never changes, and the Colonel mentioned that they're in low gravity but I don't think they actually are.

Anyway, it's a remarkable achievement and quite pretty. And I like the idea of making a movie you want to see in 3-D in a good movie theater, because it's a nice end-run around Internet movie piracy. I just wish I liked the movie more. Also, it seems weird that it costs a quarter of a bullion dollars to make a movie with no sets. Shouldn't that make it cheaper?

Ninja Assassin and New Moon

2009-11-29T11:16:00.000-08:00

I wanted to see Ninja Assassin, but my girlfriend wants to see New Moon. So we compromised and watched both of them. This is the sort of compromise that leaves both people cranky and exhausted. Although that's mostly because, while both movies are exceedingly dumb, we watched New Moon last. And at least Ninja Assassin had some entertainment to go with its stupidity.

Okay, Ninja Assassin. This is the Dumb Movie for Boys. It stars Korean pop star Rain as a renegade ninja named Raito, who escaped from the clan years ago and is now bring hunted down. There are, as you might have guessed, a lot of fight scenes.

One thing I liked was that they put a lot of effort into making the ninjas feel like the mythical unstoppable killers of legend. You know how a lot of movies have ninjas that couldn't threaten a fuzzy bunny rabbit? These ninjas aren't like that. The shuriken in particular feel even more dangerous than bullets. They're huge, fast, sharp, and come whizzing out of the darkness, shattering whatever gets in their way. It's probably too late to make ninjas cool again, but this movie does what it can. And it's got Sho Kosugi as the old master ninja, which is a role he's played a million times.

The movie's really about two things: crazy fight scenes (with weapons that vary from "real" to "obviously CGI") and Rain With His Shirt Off. He's covered in scars and blood, but he always has time to pose with his abdominal muscles flexing. One character complains that he looks like he belongs in a boy band, but that's just because he chose one of the rare moments when Rain's wearing a shirt.

And speaking of characters taking off their shirts for no reason, let's move on to The Twilight Saga: New Moon. This is a boring story of Bella, a boring girl who has the magical power of making everybody fall in love with her. I felt sorry for the few mortal kids who befriended her in the first movie, since Bella just blows them off in favor of mooning (ha!) over Dreamy Edward Cullen, a pasty-faced vampire of Clan Mope.

In this movie, Bella's extra-cranky because her beloved Edward has left her because he's afraid that it's bad for her to hang around vampires. So after pouting for three months, she makes friends with Jacob, who turns out to be a werewolf and then tells her to stay away from him because he's afraid that it's bad for her to hang around werewolves. At this point, I think it's perfectly understandable if Bella gets some sort of a complex, what with all the boys she likes suddenly turning out to be supernatural killers and shoving her away. Although all she cares about is being left alone; she never really seems worried about the part about vampires and werewolves.

It's still not clear why everyone falls in love with Bella instantly. Her main traits are "quiet" and "twitchy". Apparently she has blood that smells very tasty. But that doesn't explain why a pre-werewolf Jacob cheerfully spends months helping her rebuild motorcycles. Wait, that's not quite right -- Jacob spends months rebuilding motorcycles for her while she watches and occasionally hands him tools. Then she rides for about twenty feet and crashes (without wearing a helmet) and the motorcycles are never mentioned again. Even though she's always pining over Edward, Jacob is happy to wait for her.

I guess if I have to pick a side, I'm on Team Jacob. But that's only if he doesn't have to end up with Bella. I'm on Team Jacob Seems Like a Nice Guy So Why Doesn't He Ditch Bella and Go Get Himself Someone Cool? He deserves better.

Actually, I liked a couple of the tertiary characters more than any of the main ones. There's one vampire named Emmett who somehow managed to be entertaining and interesting in both Twilight movies even though he's had like four lines. And I kind of liked the jackass Backup Werewolves. The moral is that I like characters who appear to be the only cheerful people in a World of Mope.

Also, after watching these two movies I would like to see something where everyone keeps their damn shirts on.

Magic

2009-11-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

People in movies love puppets. There's this pre-code Frank Capra movie called The Miracle Woman, in which Barbara Stanwyck is absolutely enraptured by the sight of a guy making a puppet dance. He does this for hours in her bedroom, which is why it was important that someone invent television.

Anyway, this is another movie where a ventriloquist's dummy causes people to go into raptures of delight. It turns Anthony Hopkins from an unsuccessful magician to a sensation. And that's hard to understand, because the dummy is creepy as all get-out. Plus, it looks kind of like Hopkins, except that it has an even bigger head. The hardest thing to accept in the movie is that everyone loves the puppet, even though it's incredibly creepy. As a result, Ann-Margret comes off as crazy, because she keeps giggling and shouting about the wonders of Anthony Hopkins and his simplistic magic tricks and his evil puppet.

Note that I refer to the "evil puppet". This isn't a movie where the puppet has a life of its own, so we're not talking about Child's Play here. Unfortunately, this is a movie where Anthony Hopkins can't control what he has the puppet say or do. So he has arguments with it when he's alone in the room and ends up getting bullied by it, which represents him not being able to control that side of his personality. It's pretty silly, is what it is.

The movie is exceedingly artsy, sinc Richard Attenborough was only making it so he could get the money to make Gandhi, and it features Anthony Hopkins being an unhinged angry jerk. He gets hosed down with a lot of Angry Sweat in this movie. And then there's also the creepy puppet, which is enough for most people even without the story or acting.

Penn & Teller fans may be interested to know that there's a big scene in which the key card is the three of clubs.

Bonus line: I like the time when Burgess Meredith (as the slimy agent) says "My God, the IQs alone must go to a hundred!"

The Men Who Stare at Goats

2009-11-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

I loved this movie. But that's almost certainly because I loved the book and this was like watching George Clooney and Ewan McGregor acting out my favorite scenes. The scene in the hotel room where George Clooney is making all these outrageous claims is exactly how I picture that scene happening in real life. Because the people that Jon Ronson talked to when he was writing the book were seriously claiming all sorts of psychic powers with a straight face.

The book is really interesting. It starts with Ronson learning that some people claim to be ex-military psychic spies, and then it works backwards to the First Earth Battalion, which was an attempt to New Age up the army back in 1979. You get a lot of entertaining things during this segment, like the news that Uri Geller (the spoon-bending guy) was a psychic spy, but he can't talk about it because he might be on duty right now.

Then it turns out that some of the First Earth Battalion stuff has actually been put into effect, and that's where it gets relevant to today's military. Apparently those stories that came out about people in Guantanamo Bay being "tortured" with the Barney theme song are due to some sort of theory in the First Earth Battalion manual. It sounds wacky, but I've read the manual and it's surprisingly prescient. The techniques currently called "Neurolinguistic Programming" are in there, for example.

Anyway, the book was fascinating enough that I enjoyed seeing it dramatized. But if you haven't read the book, I'd recommend doing that first. Or instead.

Also, there are goats in this movie. I like goats.

This Is It

2009-11-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

I thought This Is It was fascinating, and I'm not even a big Michael Jackson fan. I acknowledge that he had a large number of huge hits, and I've owned my share of Michael Jackson albums (my share was two: Thriller and Bad) but I've never really been personally invested in the guy.

But it turns out I find it more interesting to watch him dance at half-speed than when he's going all-out. This Is It is full of moments where he's sort of sketching his dance out, gesturing in the direction of the performance, and it's really cool. Part of it is that I know all his moves, so I can tell what the finished performance would look like, but it's also just that it's neat to watch him work out what the performance will be.

Early on, someone (Kenny Ortega, I think) says that the backup dancers are supposed to be "extensions of Michael", and I can really see what he meant. While Michael's moving around the stage showing what he could be doing, the dancers are hitting everything full-speed at all times. So when Michael decides to go all-out for a bit, everything is in sync and looks great. And when he pulls back, you realize that there really is a hole at the center of the stage waiting for Michael to fill it. This wasn't going to be one of those big shows where the "star" just wanders around between professional dancers. The movie makes it clear that every part of the show was designed to flow from Michael's performance. He's the focal point and everything else is designed to either amplify his movements or reflect focus back on him.

It's also made clear just how in-charge Michael was. There are times when he tells everyone that such-and-such a cue has to be given by him. No one else's judgment matters in the moment; just wait for MJ to point to you, then start up. He's very polite about these things (way more polite than, say, Madonna in Truth or Dare) but he's also very clearly a perfectionist who knows exactly what he wants. And since he's always right about these things, people shut up and do what he says.

The movie made me think about the history of stadium shows. The Michael Jackson "This Is It" tour would have been lavish, produced, and choreographed to within an inch of its life (the backup dancers never miss a step, as far as I could tell). But just a few decades ago, the Beatles hit Shea Stadium with a show that just consisted of the four of them standing on a tiny stage playing their songs. At some point, someone realized that if you're going to play to tens of thousands of people, you might want to add more than just a couple of go-go dancers.

I also liked seeing how excited everyone was to be working on this show. There are moments where Michael's working out some steps with the other musicians, and the dancers are down on the floor in front of the stage, giddy with delight that they're getting a private Michael Jackson concert. When he sings for real, some of them are actually jumping up and down, they're so happy. Then he complains that people shouldn't let him get carried away, because he was trying to save his voice for the performance.

But that's what made me enjoy this movie so much; knowing that he was holding back made the whole thing much more real for me. I already knew what it looked like when Michael Jackson is on stage before 50,000 people and he's doing his polished dance routine. Now I know what he looked like when he was just messing around in the middle of a song, too.

Missed Touchstones Week: Female Trouble

2009-11-13T22:18:00.001-08:00

Wait a minute! This isn't a cultural touchstone for my generation! This is John Waters back before he had a budget and had to pretend to be classy! What the hell is going on here?

Actually, I guess this fits in well with the secret sub-theme of this week, which is "movies featuring characters who are treated as being more attractive or interesting than they actually are." Except where There's Something About Mary and Almost Famous are doing it accidentally, John Waters is gleefully shoving Divine in your face while filling the movie with people swearing up and down that Divine is the most beautiful thing in the world. Actually, with this many ludicrously ugly creations running around, Divine might actually count as one of the Beautiful People in this world.

To be fair, though, although Divine isn't classically beautiful (cough cough), she's got incredible screen magnetism. Even when Divine is shoved all the way over to side of the screen and 80% of the viewing area is taken up by Mink Stole in a gold lame ballerina outfit, you can't take your eyes off Divine. This movie also features the peculiar sight of man-Divine raping woman-Divine. There's something you don't see every day. I hope.

Oh, and there's a plot of some sort, I guess. It involves crazy people doing crazy things all over the place. John Waters had a vision, that's for sure.

Come to think of it, there's something else this movie has in common with There's Something About Mary: it's full of absurd things designed to shock and horrify. The difference is, 35 years later, this movie still gets the job done. And the nakedness isn't achieved by special effects, either!

Missed Touchstones Week: Good Will Hunting

2009-11-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, Academy Award winners.

Not for acting, of course. Although Matt's gotten some praise from his acting in recent years, I guess. He and Ben are basically perfectly adequate big-name actors these days. And they get to have "Academy Award-winning" before their names in commercials for, um, "Untitled Jason Bourne Project (2011)" and "Whatever Ben Affleck is doing to follow up on Daredevil and Smokin' Aces".

This is the movie that made them famous. It raised them up from "Wasn't he in Dazed and Confused?" to "Ben and Matt on the cover of Vanity Fair". I didn't see it at the time because I don't really dig on Gus Van Sant movies. The most straightforward movie he'd made at the time was My Own Private Idaho, starring River Phoenix as a narcoleptic street hustler. And I'm always leery of movies in which Robin Williams is a kindly father figure. He got lucky once in Dead Poets Society, but I usually find him insufferable in movies like that.

Speaking of the Academy Awards, did you know that Robin Williams has an Oscar for this movie? And three other nominations? Doesn't that seem like a lot?

Okay, anyway. Good Will Hunting is obsessed with class struggle, I think. Matt Damon's character ("Will Hunting", ho ho ho, and that's another reason I never got around to watching it) is supposedly a genius. Except I never really buy it. He's memorized a lot of books and is brilliant at math, but when he's not spouting theorems, he's not acting like a genius. The movie saw that objection coming, though, because Will is a huge jerk most of the time and it's hard to tell what he'd be like if he calmed down.

I didn't really identify with this movies "Harvard vs. Townies" angle, because I went to college in the city I grew up in. And I guess UCSD students aren't as snooty as they are at Harvard and people in San Diego generally aren't as angry and edgy as people in Boston. My theory is that this is because San Diego is a nice place to live, which creates a calmness not available in places that have snow.

I was surprised that Will was the instigator of the fights. I always figured there would be some scenes of college kids sneering at the townies first, but instead, Will and his buddies apparently just cruise around town looking for "smart kids" to beat up. That's an interesting move, because it practically dares the audience to sympathize with Will. And I think Damon pulls it off. So good for him. I was less impressed by Affleck, who has a big endless monologue-slash-joke that I tuned out. Incidentally, I think it's cheating to fill out your Oscar-winning screenplay with characters telling jokes. That's why The Aristocrats didn't win.

Anyway, I liked it okay. I still think Matt and Ben shouldn't be allowed to call themselves "Academy Award Winners" in ads for movies where they're just acting. I'm even going to accept William Goldman's word that he didn't write the script for them. I'm open-minded!

Missed Touchstones Week: Zombie

2009-11-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

Okay, so not everyone has seen Lucio Fulci's Zombie (or, as it is sometimes confusingly known, Zombi 2). But I've reached the point in my movie-going career that it's frankly embarrassing that I haven't seen any Lucio Fulci. And it's time that changed.

First of all, the title. It was released in Italy in 1979 as Zombi 2 so it could pretend to be a sequel to Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was called Zombi. In Italy. So when this movie came to the USA, they just bumped the number off the title and called it "Zombie". In 1988, Fulci made Zombi 3, but it's not as iconic as this movie and I don't want to deal with it right now.

It's kind of weird at this point in America's zombie-fascination to watch a 100% sincere zombie movie. There's no winking at the audience here. There's not even any assumption that everyone knows how zombies work. This is one of the movies that defined the genre. And I would like to point out that they don't eat brains here. They're only interested in the flesh of the living. And hopefully causing big gouts of bright red blood. The point is that it takes a long time for them to really make their presence known in this movie. This isn't one of your post-Zombie deals like Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland (or even World War Z) where you can jump right into the zombie hordes. One zombie is a terrifying and mysterious creature in this movie.

Also, this movie's zombies appear to actually be voodoo-related in some way, which is practically unique in zombie movies. The Romero zombies are really just ghouls, if you ask me. Even if he started calling them zombies in Dawn of the Dead (you remember, "Zombi"?).

One fun thing about this movie is that half of the cast is speaking Italian, and half are speaking English. Everyone's dubbed over anyway, but it's still a little weird to have only some of the characters' mouths match the sounds. Well, to be fair, none of the characters are exactly in sync, so it's actually distracting when someone does match up for a scene. You have to learn not to look at their lips.

Incidentally, I don't know why all the clips I've seen of this movie have been grainy and terrible. The DVD I was watching looked fantastic, even in the legendary Zombie-vs.-Shark scene. And of course it's full of iconic shots, although I personally prefer the eye-gouging scene from The Wizard of Gore. Um, the original, not the weird remake from a couple years ago.

Missed Touchstones Week: There's Something About Mary

2009-11-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

The problem with the idea of spending a week watching movies I've never seen is that sometimes, there's a reason I didn't watch these movies. This is one of those cases. I knew perfectly well I wasn't going to like There's Something About Mary. And I didn't. Frankly, that wasn't that interesting.

This is the movie that makes everyone think Cameron Diaz is hot, right? Because she isn't, really. She seems very nice, and she has a very pleasant smile. But in later movies, I've come to the conclusion that she's kind of weirdly shaped. Sorry about that. I admit she looks fantastic here, though.

I continue to like about a third of Ben Stiller movies. I like your Zoolanders and Mystery Men, and I'm surprisingly fond of Reality Bites. But this feels more like the Meet the Parents/Fockers Ben. I guess I like Angry Ben more than Frustrated, Stammering Ben.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned this movie is really quite unpleasant. Unpleasant things happen to unpleasant people for no reason other than that people laugh when they're startled. And I'd already heard about all the "shocking moments", so they weren't even all that shocking. It didn't work for me at all. Blah.

Missed Touchstones Week: Almost Famous

2009-11-09T19:04:00.001-08:00

This week, I'm watching movies that everyone else my age has seen and loves. Okay, I may never have seen Almost Famous, but at least I've seen a lot of musicals from the first year of talkies. And a pretty good selection of rotten horror flicks that are only available on VHS. So there!

Anyway, everybody loves Almost Famous, right? I understand there's a scene where a number of people sing an Elton John song on a bus, and it's very emotionally affecting. Going into the movie, I really only know "Tiny Dancer" as the theme song to my old Bar Trivia team. Good times.

Your first question is why I never saw it. Well, I don't know. I like Cameron Crowe okay. I even like Lester Bangs, although I think his writing was a bad influence on generations of pop culture writers who confused attitude with talent. Also, I'm pretty sure he thought it was funny to take some terrible piece of crap band and make them sound like the coolest thing in the world just to see if he could make people buy the record. Don't get me wrong; he was a great writer, it's just that -- actually, I could go on for quite some time about Lester Bangs, and this is about Almost Famous. Which I've never seen. Until today.

I did try watching the DVD once a couple of years ago, but I only got about twenty minutes in before I got bored and antsy and turned it off. It was when Kate Hudson first showed up. I remember I found her first couple of lines as the groupie to be intensely annoying.

This turns out not to have been a fluke: I still find her insufferably obnoxious. I could do with a good deal less of her. She's trying way too hard. She's completely fake. And maybe it's the character that's trying too hard, not the actress. That happens sometimes. But everyone in the movie finds her adorable and magnetic and fantastic, which does not match my personal reaction, which is basically "Why would anyone spend time with this person?" Frankly, I did not find her to be a blithe free spirit, flitting hither and yon and bestowing magical fairy dust on every scene. Or whatever it is people see in her. Even in her big scenes, she doesn't work for me.

You know what she's like? Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The Aaron Sorkin show that wasn't anywhere near as interesting as 30 Rock? Everyone on that show acted like the show-within-a-show was brilliant and groundbreaking, but we could clearly tell that it was awful, because it turns out that while Aaron Sorkin can write dialogue like nobody's business, he can't write a convincing sketch comedy show. Penny Lane is like that. The character I see and the character the rest of the movie sees are severely at odds. And I don't think it's on purpose.

I did enjoy the movie as a whole, though. The non-groupie parts of it. It's fun to have a movie that hides everyone under silly Seventies wigs and facial hair so every new character comes with thirty seconds of "...that guy sounds really familiar. Who is that? Is that ... Jimmy Fallon? I think it is!" And it's just enough of a period piece that parts of it feel quaint. Like, remember when bands didn't get their first T-shirt until after they'd already opened for Black Sabbath and went on a tour? These days, you print up your first shirts on CafePress five minutes after you settle on a band name.

Incidentally, almost the first shot is in Balboa Park, driving past the Museum of Man. I approve of movies that feature Balboa Park. Although the only other one I can think of is Citizen Kane, which uses it for the exteriors of Xanadu (the stately home of Charles Foster Kane) in the newsreel at the beginning.

Oh: The "Tiny Dancer" scene works. Darned if I know why, though. Cameron Crowe's good at putting songs to scenes, is my theory.

Saturday Schlock

2009-11-07T21:27:00.001-08:00

What's better on a Saturday afternoon and evening than curling up on the couch with your loved one and watching a bunch of terrible movies? Nothing! So here's what we watched:

Escape 2000

This movie is really called “Turkey Shoot”. That’s the name it was originally shown under in Australia, and it’s the name in the movie when you watch the DVD. But it was released in the US as “Escape 2000”, and that’s a more Postapocalytipcal title. Seriously, there are like ten movies set “after the apocalypse” that have “2000” in the title.

It’s a prime example of Ozsploitation, which means that it’s full of things that people in 1980s Australia thought of. Like, it’s mostly a story of people stuck in a futuristic reeducation camp, but for some reason there’s a werewolf-mutant guy. He seems pretty well-mannered, though. His name is Alf. His presence doesn’t make any sense.

About half of the movie is the “turkey shoot” of the title. Well, one of the titles. The main four prisoners are set free to get chased by the sadistic weirdoes that run the camp, and a couple of them manage to kill their pursuers and get back to the camp. Then they kill about a hundred and fifty guards with machine guns and bazookas, which should certainly prove that they shouldn’t have been put in a prison for antisocial behavior. Then that Australian army bombs the whole camp, I guess.

Slithis

Okay. It’s sort of like The Host, in that it’s about a monster created by toxic waste. Except that it’s made incredibly amateurishly and contains approximately zero actors. Some of them, like this one policeman in a house, sound like they’ve learned their lines phonetically. And this other guy, who plays the chief of police (I think; I wasn’t paying that much attention until he showed up) puts in the most over-the-top performance in the history of “Trolls Under the Bridge: The Troll Story”. He’s got some sort of fake British accent going on, but it’s a lot like the Wayne’s World imitation of Leprechaun.

Slaughterhouse Rock

This starts with two “Omigosh it was only a dream!” scenes in a row. Awesome. And then it fills the rest of the movie with Horrible Visions by the main character. These Visions are accompanied by extremely shrill noises that require the television to be turned down. Anyway, they eventually lead Dull Main Guy and his pals Fratboy Jerks 1-3 and Vapid Screaming Girls 1-4 to sneak into Alcatraz and battle demons with the help of the ghost of a murdered heavy metal singer played by Toni Basil.

We got bored and didn’t finish watching it. Sorry.

The Terrornauts

This had a terrific trailer on the latest 42nd Street Forever collection. You know, the Alamo Drafthouse one. So we watched the movie, and it turns out not to be worth it. It’s one of those really boring British science fiction movies from the late sixties where a bunch of stodgy scientists stand around on one set for an hour talking about what it might look like if they actually travelled to another planet. When it eventually happens, the highlights are:

A) A crudely constructed robot covered in about twenty heating vents, and
B) A ridiculous alien that turns out to be an illusion.

Aside from that, strictly boresville, Daddy-O.

Texting During Hackers

2009-10-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

I was in Austin a week or so ago, which meant that I got to see movies at the Alamo Drafthouse. I'll watch practically anything there! And I'll also watch Hackers at practically any moment. So imagine my delight when I realized I was going to get to see a special showing of Hackers at the Alamo Drafthouse! Seriously, go ahead and imagine it. I'll wait.

Of course, most people have to be in the right mood to see Hackers. They need some sort of excuse or something. I don't know why. Maybe they just want to limit their exposure to things that are fun. The Drafthouse was going with a weird gimmick: members of the audience would send text messages that would appear on the screen. It's like everybody shouting during a movie, but quieter and nerdier.

Sooooo anyway, here are the things I texted during the movie.

Featuring a star of Sports Night! -- this is because Felicity Huffman plays the prosecuting attorney at the beginning of the movie. Who doesn't like Felicity Huffman?

Poor Dade

The movie begins and ends in an airplane -- Actually, I guess it's the second scene and third-from-last scene. I still think it's interesting to have an airplane scene sort of bookending the action.

NORM! -- I have no idea why I texted this. I assume there was a fat guy on screen.

The challenge is clearly to text far enough in advance that it makes sense when it finally shows up. -- there was a lot of lag at this point, because the automatic system was slowing down the texts, so you didn'treally know when the queue would show yours.

College is the secret theme of this movie. That and the word ELITE -- It's true. Dade's motivation is apparently "get into college", while Joey's is "become ELITE"

Snap!

The kid is Bring It On's Jesse Bradford! -- Well, it is.

This is the most realistic depiction of nerds EVER -- You know, with all the leather, latex, and rollerblading.

He just looks slick all day! -- I love this line, which is used to describe a character who promptly vanishes from the movie.

Wow. Normally you have to pull a lever to set off the sprinklers. -- As opposed to Dade's method of elaborately hacking into the school computer.

Those sunglasses are so small! -- Cereal Killer's sunglasses are barely big enough to shade his pupils.

College!

The pink shirt book is just a Peter Norton guide -- Most of the manuals that Cereal Killer uses are, in fact, classically helpful (and taken directly from the Jargon File), but this one is just pointless.

Booooo -- At this point, the movie froze up. Turns out they were using a bad DVD.

So then the kid says he hit a bank, see... -- I was thinking we might just narrate the rest of the movie via the texts.

Hack the Movie! -- The movie's still frozen.

Now no one will see my hilarious jokes about Penn Jillette -- Because we skipped ahead a couple of scenes, which meant that we missed a scene where Penn plays a security guard.

Yay! Numbers!

Hapless technoweenies are the worst kind. -- The Plague calls Penn a "hapless technoweenie", which is a weird way to talk.

Never use your computer without proper eye protection -- Most of the characters (including Penn) are wearing sunglasses whenever they're using a computer. This is so they can have groovy animations projected on their faces.

ELITE

Razor and blade? They're flakes!

This song is not on the soundtrack -- Joey was singing "Wild Child" in the shower. Incidentally, other texts around this point made the argument that Hackers has the worst shower scenes ever.

Ooh! Escalators! Now we're in the future!

Why not talk about our secret plan right here? -- Seriously, they just got out of the big meeting, they're still surrounded by officers, and they just start babbling about the millions of dollars they're stealing?

Nice read, Lorraine -- Lorraine Bracco's read of "Find the file or else you'll lose all your toys" is just awful.

Loyd wrote this manifesto -- Loyd Blankenship, writer of GURPS Cyberpunk.

He doesn't look like a Nirvana fan. -- Dade's got a GIANT Nevermind poster in his room.

The Plague HATES radios! And hard copy.

It ain't a party until the geeks show up!

What about the pooper? -- We skipped another scene when the DVD froze up again. So we missed Cereal Killer's line about "Lookit that pooper!"

WHOOSH! BEEP!

We missed the part where Angelina spraypainted her computer! I love that scene!

Sexay! -- This could have gone almost anywhere, but I wrote it for Acid's dream sequence where she sees Jonny Lee Miller in a latex dress.

Moo?

Now in this scene, I want you to be reaaally annoying...

Phreak doesn't get laid in his dream sequence. -- Doesn't seem fair, really.

It's in that place put that thing that time... That's what she said? -- I'm worried that I've stopped saying "That's what she said" ironically.

Cereal is also a Bible scholar.

I'm threatening you over a wireless headset and open phone line because I'm an elite hacker.

When is the next freezeframe scheduled? -- They were not using a good DVD at all. At the end of the movie, the audience all got free movie passes! Which will come in handy if I get back to Austin in the next year!

This is actually a pretty realistic scene. I mean, look at the pizza boxes! -- This is the scene where the good hackers deconstruct the virus/worm. It's realistic, I tell you! Look past the graphics!

Fractally!

They care more about Dade getting into college than the inevitable jail time

Erotically, as it were

She coulda killed that guy! -- Seriously, you can't just shoot a a flare gun at some guy doing his job!

Great. Lillard's butt. Thanks, movie.

Nice tape machine from the 1930s.

Couldn't they theoretically be elite flakes? -- Razor and Blade, that is.

I hate these movies that cast Asian actors in whiteface. So racist.

I also need an electronic army.

What's a Voodoo People?

Let's commit our federal crime in public! It'll be more ELITE! -- I just think they could have found a better place to work from than the Grand Central Station payphones, is all.

Oh, that Penn! What a technoweenie!

I love the smirk on the Italian guy. Unless he's French. You know, the Euro from five minutes ago when I started typing this.

Nappy: North, up, get egg, down, south, east, open window -- Someone using the handle "Nappy" asked if anyone wanted to play Zork I. I normally grab the egg right away so that I can get it into the treasure case before I attack the troll, since it shortens the fight. Fascinating!

Joey's getting stupid busy! He used to be just stupid.

I am not talking to you, actually.

Arf Arf!

LOLlerblades, actually. -- Someone said the fashion in this movie was "LOLlerskates", see...

Fine, I'll hack the stupid planet already. Get off my back!

A heinous scheme, you say?

Unlucky! -- Lillard's weirdest line reading.

Same jail

Why did they let the plane take off? Did the cops get first class tickets too? -- Seems like a weird way to arrest him. Now they have to go all the way to Tokyo and back.

Wash off some makeup?

So... it was a romance? -- These last scenes don't have much to do with the theme of the movie, in my opinion.

They had to rent an underwater camera for this one scene?

Needed more UNTZ -- Someone was posting UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ every time those songs showed up on the soundtrack.

Play it again!

Whip It Plus Five

2009-10-04T11:33:00.001-07:00

Before we start, I should mention that I was a scorekeeper for the Rat City Rollergirls for a season. So I might possibly be biased in favor of a movie about roller derby. And I did enjoy it, although I admit that it was awfully formulaic. Between the trailer and my knowledge of How Sports Movies Work, there weren't that many surprises to be had. But who cares when I can watch Zoe Bell being a roller derby girl?

I was also predisposed to like it because it's set in Austin (well, mostly) and I'm going there in a week. So I was already pleased about going to see movies at the Alamo Drafthouse, and now I got to see a movie with the Drafthouse in it! So that was cool.

I don't really have much else to say about Whip It, since it was a straightforward fun movie. I don't feel like dissecting it or anything. Although I did feel that it was inappropriate for a seventeen-year-old character to make out with someone who thought she was 22. And if making out was all they did, I'd be very surprised. Anyway! Here are five other movies you might like if you liked Whip It!

5. The Fireball (1950)

Mickey Rooney is an orphan with a bad attitude who discovers a natural aptitude for speed skating. So, just like Bliss in Whip It, he immediately becomes great at roller derby. But this is back in 1950, when derby was a national sport, so he becomes a massive star and develops an even worse attitude. Then he gets polio (!), recovers, and makes an inspirational return to the track, all while being a huge egotistical jerk.

4. Double Dare (2004)

Zoe Bell plays Bloody Holly in Whip It, and she's a lot of fun to watch. You might recognize her from the Death Proof half of Grindhouse, but I recommend this 2004 documentary, which splits its time between two stuntwomen: Zoe Bell (who did Xena's stunts, which means all that flippy-flippy was her) and Jeannie Epper (a million roles in the Old Days, including doing Lynda Carter's stunts in "Wonder Woman"). This movie is why I spent so much of Whip It watching a character with very few lines.

3. Unholy Rollers (1972)

Roller Derby sort of comes and goes, you know? This is from the Seventies version of derby, and it's kind of like Flashdance. Except instead of being a steelworker, Claudia Jennings works in a cannery, and instead of becoming a Flashdancer, she becomes a roller derby skater. Then all the usual things happen, but it's entertaining anyway.

2. The Demon of the Derby (2001)

Ann Calvello was a tough old broad who skated in the Very Old Days of roller derby. She dyed her hair crazy colors and gleefully played the bad guy. She was awesome. This documentary is from when she was even older, but no less tough. It makes a great double feature with Lipstick and Dynamite, about the tough old broads from the old days of women's wrestling.

1. Kansas City Bomber (1972)

This is probably the best roller derby movie. It's got Raquel Welch! And some of the same background skaters as Unholy Rollers, so you can learn all about the standard Roller Derby Moves from back then. You know, like the Double Clothesline and the, um, Hop Up and Down on One Leg for Half a Lap!

On Stranger Tides? Yes, please!

2009-09-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

It appears that the full title of the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie is "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides".

I mention this because On Stranger Tides is a book by Tim Powers of which I am very fond. It's got pirates and voodoo and magic and would fit very well into the world of the PotC movies. It's even set in the Caribbean! What more do you want?

I admit that I'm not sure how they're going to shoehorn Cap'n Jack Sparrow into things, but I'm willing to keep an open mind. A big-budget Tim Powers movie is Huge News in my world.

Astro Boy Commercials

2009-09-27T22:19:00.001-07:00

The first line of the commercials for Astro Boy is "He was a robot ... who wanted to become a real boy."

What? A robot who wants to a real boy? I've never heard of such a thing! How are we to cope with such a shockingly original plot?

Or, to quote the noted robot expert Joel Robinson, "Oh, Tom Servo, you've got Pinocchio syndrome!"

Sheesh.

(EDIT: It says in that TV Tropes link that "Astro Boy is perhaps the oldest anime expression of this trope." Canonical or not, it's still boring)

Fame (the 2009 one)

2009-09-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the new Fame remake, although mostly for the things that reminded me of the original. I've seen the original a lot, and I kept thinking, "Oh boy! This is where the character considers suicide in the subway!"

First of all, the high school portrayed in the movie has the best faculty in the country. These kids are being taught by Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Megan Mullally, Kelsey Grammer, and Bebe Neuwerth! Incidentally, would it have killed them to put Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwerth on the screen at the same time? I demand my Frasier-Lilith reunion!

The new movie is set in a cleaner, nicer New York. Which I guess is accurate, because 1980 Manhattan was a lot grosser than the one we have in 2009. The kids are also more advanced; a big moment in the original movie was when two of them went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show but this movie has someone use part of that movie as her audition monologue. She actually does a really good job with it. Better than Little Nell did, anyway (it's the part where Columbia yells at Frank right before being turned to stone).

The main Mousy Girl didn't do much for me. They established her hangups and limitations early on, but we don't really get anything later on to show that she's learned to act. She just gets a progressively more mature hairstyle. The feeling of learning and maturing is definitely something that's missing from the movie. The character who starts out as an immature dancer is the one who ends up being told he's not a very good dancer. The dancer who starts out awesome (Kherington Payne from So You Think You Can Dance) pretty much stays awesome. And so on.

Anyway, my main problem with it was that it just didn't feel as real as the original. I put in my time at the San Diego Junior Theatre, and the background action in the 1980 version rang true in a way that it doesn't in this one. Also, because it's PG, I would occasionally think "Uh oh, is she going to get raped? No, I guess she isn't. Never mind."

Also, the songs weren't as good. And they were very on-the-nose, what with the lyrics about "be true to yourself" and "success is about succeeding, not being famous".

But like I say, I still enjoyed it.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

2009-09-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to see Aguirre, the Wrath of God for probably twenty years or so. See, there was this book called Cult Movies by Danny Peary, and I always thought it would be nice to have seen all of them. And the first one on the list was Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which kind of intimidated me into abandoning my plan.

Now, jump forward to 2009. I want an excuse to watch My Best Fiend, which I am reliably informed is an amazing documentary in which Werner Herzog demonstrates just how crazy Klaus Kinski was. I could watch it with no preparation, but the only Herzog movie I can remember seeing is Grizzly Man, and I mostly think of that as "the movie where that guy gets eaten by a bear". So I figured it would make sense, this being a lazy Saturday and all, to watch Aguirre, the Wrath of God first, then a movie with a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage about the crazy dysfunctional relationship between Herzog and Kinski.

And it was, in fact, fun! Aguirre takes its time developing. There's a scene where you look at rushing water for about three minutes. And Kinski doesn't take center stage for quite a while. But when he does, man, that cat is crazy. This doomed river expedition is even more doomed than usual. They don't even really need the cannibal Indians. I'm sure they'd have died off just about as quickly left to their own devices.

Big Fan

2009-09-19T15:56:00.001-07:00

I saw the new Patton Oswalt movie last night. Actually, is "Patton Oswalt movie" a thing? I can only think of two, and it's not like Big Fan and Ratatouille have a lot in common. I mean, I enjoyed them both, but it's not really a genre. It's not like if I said "I saw the new Seth Rogen movie". Or "the new Seka movie". Remember Seka? I'll start again.

Patton Oswalt is the star of a new movie which I saw last night. I'm a fan of Mr. Oswalt, which you can tell by the fact that immediately after the movie, I went to the Moore Theatre and saw him doing stand-up live. Actually, he was live at the movie theater too, doing a quick Q&A for the fifty or so people who showed up at the 5:00 show. It was an interesting experience to see him in a tiny intimate setting and then go sit in a tiny seat in a very high balcony to watch him again. I also thought it was really cool that his Q&A was introduced by Travis Vogt and Kevin Clarke, creators of Steel of Fire Warriors 2010 A.D..

Getting back to Big Fan, it's written and directed by Robert Siegel, who used to edit The Onion and more recently wrote The Wrestler. I liked it because the main character doesn't learn anything. He starts off in one place and resolutely refuses to budge. Good for him! He's found something that makes him happy and doesn't want to let go of it. And why should he?

I also really liked the sound editing, which is a odd thing to pick out. I very rarely walk out of a theater saying "Boy, that sound was really edited together well!" But there were a number of times where the main character is supposed to be feeling overwhelmed by a number of people talking at once, and it makes sense that they overlap and become hard to understand. That happens a couple of times, once in a loud strip club. And there's another scene where he's trying to pick one voice out of a number of other conversations. Come to think of it, he's most comfortable relating to people on call-in radio shows, so the sound really is an important aspect of the movie.

I also really liked the idea of a character who has already achieved an extremely low goal for himself and resolutely refuses to go beyond that. He's a regular caller on one of the less important sports talk stations in New York, and he only calls in after 1:00 in the morning. That's like someone who's satisfied with his lot in life if he becomes a regular commenter on Deadspin. Or not even Deadspin; one of those sites that wishes they were Deadspin.

Big Fan is in extremely limited release (I get the feeling there's three prints of it and they're moving them from town to town on a bus), but see if it's coming to your city.

The Scarlet clue

2009-08-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

I'm watching a Charlie Chan movie called The Scarlet Clue. Charlie Chan, a Chinese detective, is being played by Sidney Toler, a white dude. But his son (excuse me, "Number Three son") Tommy is played by Benson Fong, who appears to have actual Chinese blood. I think it's weird that the one played by a White guy speaks in a pidgin English (although he can't be bothered to put on an accent, so he's just talking slowly and ungrammatically) while the one who looks Chinese speaks perfect unaccented English. I mean, it's also weird that they insisted on hiring a white guy for the main character when they were perfectly willing to have non-whites elsewhere in the movie.

Speaking of non-whites, Tommy's comic relief role is mostly played off Mantan Moreland. He spends about 80% of his screen time in bug-eyed terror. It's not dignified, but it's the kind of work that African Americans could get back then. He also engages in a classic vaudeville routine (with his partner Ben Carter, who appears in the film with no introduction and then vanishes just as mysteriously) called "The Incomplete Sentence". Personally, I don't think the routine is racist, but practically everything else in the movie is.

Anyway, you can see references to Mantan Moreland in Bamboozled, which borrows both his name and the Incomplete Sentence routine. I would not recommend this movie unless the words "fascinatingly racist" sound like a good idea.

Zardoz

2009-08-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

Man, I've watched Zardoz, I've read the novelization, and I still don't know what the deal is with it.

Watching the movie is difficult, both because it's an incomprehensible mess and because the mind naturally recoils from a seminaked Sean Connery. That's him on the cover of the book. He's wearing tiny pants held up by red suspenders. Do you know why he's wearing red suspenders? Because John Boorman doesn't hate us, that's why.

The introduction explains that John Boorman wrote the screenplay in novel form, then shot the movie in the hills near his home (because even coming of Deliverance he didn't have enough juice to get major studios interested). Then he had a friend help reshape the screenplay back into a novel. He doesn't mention it explicitly, but the clear implication is that everybody involved in the movie was exceedingly drugged up. I'd summarize the story, but it really doesn't make any sense. Likewise, I'd compare some scenes from the book and movie, but almost nothing matches up, so the only thing I could talk about would be how a scene would be incomprehensible in two different ways. I was hoping that the narrative voice would at least convey something of what was supposedly going on, but that does not turn out to be the case.

Mayor of the Sunset Strip

2009-08-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

I had never heard of Rodney Bingenheimer, which presented a challenge for this documentary about him. However, I was pretty impressed with the next three names on the Tivo's cast list: Cher, Courtney Love, and David Bowie. It turns out that Rodney is someone who's had a fascinating life, and I'd rather watch a documentar about someone interesting than someone famous.

Although in a way, Mayor of the Sunset Strip is a documentary about fame itself. Rodney came to Hollywood as a young man, when his mother dropped him off in front of Connie Stevens's house and wished him good luck. Connie wasn't home, so Rodney went to the Sunset Strip and should have starved to death. Instead, he got a job as Davy Jones's stand-in on The Monkees and went from there to hanging out with Sonny and Cher, and was generally on the fringes of everyone famous in the world of rock and roll for the next forty or fifty years. He was in charge of the backstage refreshments at the Monterey Pop Festival, and Ray Manzarek still sounds kind of ticked off that Rodney let the Beatles eat all the shrimp. He had a club and introduced David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan, Suzi Quatro, and apparently the entire glam scene to Los Angeles. He's not the only one making this claim, you understand; David Bowie is the one actually telling us this.

Then he had an important show on KROQ and broke Devo and the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and Nirvana on radio. At this point, he's famous in his own right, and all the bands of the '70s and '80s know him. We see some home movies of Chris Stein and Debbie Harry on his bed in 1977. It's really quite impressive.

I think we're supposed to feel pity for him because when the movie was made in 2004, he's living in a tiny apartment and his radio show has been cut down to the Sunday night midnight-3AM slot. But he's had an amazing life. And apparently Robert Plant once claimed that Rodney was having more sex than anyone in Led Zeppelin. And it seems like every rock star in the world not only knows who he is but is fond of him. Joan Jett shows up to say a word or two, and she wouldn't even do the documentary about the Runaways themselves!

Cry-Baby

2009-08-06T20:37:00.000-07:00

There's a great movie theater in Seattle called Central Cinema. Not only does it serve food but it shows random cool movies. It's going to have a Street Fighter marathon, and you can't get more "indie theater" than that. That's the sort of thing that Quentin Tarantino is always babbling about right there.

Not that I saw Street Fighter there. No, I saw a movie much more dear to my heart: Cry-Baby.

Look. I love this movie. Practically every line makes me giggle with glee. It's easily my favorite John Waters movie, and it's right up there for my favorite Johnny Depp movie as well. If you're a movie theater and you want me to like you, I recommend finding a way to show Cry-Baby on a big screen.

It's 19 years old, so it's easy to forget how weird this movie was when it came out. Johnny Depp was "the pretty-boy from 21 Jump Street" and all of a sudden he was doing a movie with Crazy John Waters, who nobody quite trusted to be a "real" director yet. Depp kept claiming that he wanted to break out of the generic matinee idol roles, but nobody believed him. After this, he did Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and people were forced to accept him at his word that he'd rather do weirdo quirky roles. But at the time, this was the quirkiest anyone had ever seen him. And he's terrific in it.

This time out, I particularly enjoyed Susan Tyrrell as Ramona Ricketts. I saw her recently in Night Warning, and she's just crazy, over-the-top great in that.

Bye Bye Birdie

2009-08-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

Look, just because I'm not focusing exclusively on movie tie-ins anymore doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good novelization now and then. And this really is a good novelization. It was enjoyable to read and made me want to see the movie again, which is really all you can ask from one of these things.

Now, as you may know, Bye Bye Birdie is a musical. That means that they had to decide how to handle the songs. As you may remember, the novelization of Grease just incorporated all the songs into dialogue, with predictably disconcerting results. This book goes a different route: most of the songs are just ignored or mentioned in passing. For example:

At that moment, Kim McAfee, humming softly about how great it was to be a woman, floated rather than walked into her blue-and-white bedroom.

And that takes care of an entire musical number in which Ann-Margret changes clothes while concealing her nakedness under a fuzzy sweater. The telephone song is dismissed entirely!

Now, the songs that are actually sung by Conrad Birdie (the Elvis-knockoff whose name, for some reason, is taken from Conway Twitty) appear in the book. But for the most part, this is just a novelization of "what would have happened if the characters didn't keep bursting into song." With one exception! The "Kids" song appears entirely in dialogue, possibly because it actually reads relatively normally:

"Kids," McAfee said sourly. "I don't know what's wrong with these kids today."

Doris nodded slowly. "Who can understand anything they say?"

"Kids! They're disobedient, disrespectful oafs! Noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy loafers! And while we're on the subject..."

Mama took her head from the oven and chimed in: "Kids! You can talk and talk until your face is blue!"

And so on. It works pretty well, although I have to point out that Doris is not, in fact, in this scene in the movie. There are a few differences between the book's events and the movie's, but almost all of them are entertaining. Like the scene where Conrad Birdie talks about going out on the town and finding himself a filly. Oh my!

Having read the book, I rewatched the movie. It retained its most mystifying element, namely "Why does the title song go 'Bye Bye Bir-HEE' instead of having a 'D' in there?" I also have decided that Conrad Birdie's resolute dopiness is probably on purpose. I guess we're supposed to be laughing at those dopey kids, swooning after this gumbo just because he's dressed in gold lamé. Apparently they wanted the actual Elvis Presley to do the movie, but Colonel Tom Parker wouldn't let him. That's a shame, because you have to assume he and Ann-Margret had some pretty good chemistry.

Singin' in the Rain

2009-08-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite movie eras is the early talkies, where they hadn't quite figured out how to take advantage of the new technology. There was a run of fairly rotten (but entertaining) musicals that appeared to be a random collection of vaudeville acts. You can tell them because they have the year in the title, like The Broadway Melody of 1929 and The Big Broadcast of 1936. And it occurred to me recently that Singin' in the Rain is essentially about making a movie in that era. So it was time for a rewatch!

...and it's still good. I think Donald O'Connor's character actually comes out better than Gene Kelly's does. Kelly is just a movie star, but O'Connor is pput in charge of the studio's new music department. That's a pretty good gig!

Fanboys

2009-08-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

This, I think, is the first movie I've ever seen where I'd previously exchanged emails with the screenwriter. Ernest Cline wrote a fan script for Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League a few years ago, although he had to take it off his website. It's around, though, if you know where to look. So I happen to know that this movie has some solid fanboy credentials behind it.

It's set in the distant past of 1998, when Star Wars fans still liked George Lucas and "Episode I" was just something to look forward to. I think Episode I gets a bad rap, so it was kind of fun to have characters talking excitedly about it. The idea is that one of the characters is dying of cancer (movie cancer, though, so he only has physical problems when it's time for a plot complication) and the only way he'll get to see Episode I is if everyone piles into a van and drives from Ohio to Skywalker Ranch in California and steals a copy of The Phantom Menace. This will also allow one guy to finally admit his love for the Girl Geek (Kristen Bell) and the two estranged buddies to reconcile.

There's also another guy who doesn't actually have a plot. But he's the most entertaining one, so he ends up taking a lot of screen time, so by the end of the movie, I'd forgotten about the two-friends plot entirely.

A lot of the movie rings true. If anything, there could have been more dialogue lifted directly from Star Wars. I didn't really dig the ongoing "Star Wars fans hate Star Trek fans" angle, but I can allow it.

The sequence at Skywalker Ranch was particularly enjoyable for me, since I've actually been there for a July 4 party. That's not relevant to the review; I just wanted to mention it.

It would be nice to see a movie like this that isn't awash in stuntcasting. In addition to the previously mentioned Kristen Bell, there's William Shatner, Carrie Fisher, Kevin Smith, and Jason Mewes. Also Danny Trejo, but he's really just being deployed the same way he always is, so I think that's just normal casting.

Buck Parvin and the Movies

2009-07-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is kind of a complicated one.

The book I just finished reading is Buck Parvin and the Movies, published in 1916. It's a collection of short stories by Charles E. Van Loan about the world of movie-making. Naturally, that's silent movie-making, and early ones at that. Most of the stories are about making one-reelers, which they turned out at a pace of one per week. The director would get instructions from the home office to stop making jungle pictures but still keep using the lion and elephant, and hey presto! It's time to make a circus picture!

Buck Parvin is a stunt man cowboy who has a secondary role in the early stories but eventually works his way to center stage. He's full of old-timey wisdom, and the stories are a lot of fun. You can read a couple of them here, complete with annotations to tell you what real people and movies the characters and situations are based on.

And then it gets complicated, because these stories were promptly used as the basis for a series of Buck Parvin movies. They're listed on IMDB, but it's pretty hard to find obscure silent movies that were never on DVD and may not even have gotten a token VHS release. So I haven't seen them. And did I mention that Buck Parvin was played by Art Acord, who was one of the actors he was based on?

I realize this doesn't technically count as a "novelization", since it's simultaneously a behind-the-scenes fictionalization and the source material for movies. Also because it's not a novel anyway but a set of short stories. But it was pretty fun anyway. I recommend reading The Extra and the Milk-Fed Lion to get a feel for what it was like making movies back then. Always shoot your stunts first, because if those don't work out, the part of the movie that builds up to them will fail too.

Ceiling Zero

2009-07-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Howard Hawks! James Cagney! Pat O'Brien! Not available on DVD!

Ceiling Zero was originally a play, but then it was made into a movie in 1936 and consequently into this keen novelization I've got here, which is a hardback. It's got some stills from the movie, which it refers to as "Illustrations from the Photoplay". Neat!

The book is pretty straightforward, combining verbatim dialogue with simple declarative sentences like "Outside the window he heard the motors of a passenger ship roaring at full power." There isn't much attempt to provide an inner dialogue for characters, which fits fine with the movie itself. I happen to live near an excellent video store, so I was able to rent the VHS, and I can report that people talk way too fast in it. I'm a huge fan of Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, which I used to think had the fastest dialogue in movie history. But Ceiling Zero knocks it aside easily. Cagney already tended to bark all his dialogue, and when Hawks got his hands on him, it's like listening to a Tommy gun. And Pat O'Brien is even faster. So fast, in fact, that he frequently lapses into incomprehensibility. It's like watching a movie about angry auctioneers that have drunk too much coffee. So there's not a lot of opportunities for the author of the novelization (possibly Frank Wead, author of the play and screenplay, but more likely an uncredited starving writer) to shove in thoughts and feelings.

There's a big crash in the movie (not a spoiler; it's right there on the front cover), and here's how it's described in the book:

Through the dense mist the blurred outline of the mail plane could be dimly seen. It glided through the fog straight for the hangar. There was a terrific tearing crash as the metal plane ripped into the side of the building. The wings folded crazily back against the fuselage and fell free. Then the boom-boom of exploding gas tanks and a burst of flames.

Exciting!

Now, this movie isn't for everyone. Cagney's character is kind of a cocky jerk, which I admit isn't all that unusual for him, but he's a more aggressive ladies' man than usual. I think it's the fact that his character is 34 and spends a lot of time hitting on girl aviator Tommy Thomas, who is 19, that kind of soured me on him. Also, how come the female characters in this movie are named "Tommy" and "Lou"?

Like I say, this movie is only on VHS, and even then you have to get lucky. It'll eventually show up on Warner Archives (although that still won't mean that Blockbuster or Netflix will have it), so I present yet another adaptation: the Lux Radio Theater version! It was surprisingly common for movies to have a shortened radio version broadcast with much of the original cast. So if you want to know what a radio version of a movie version of a play about aviation would sound like, it's on this page along with various others. Enjoy!

The Happening (not the M. Night Shyamalan one)

2009-06-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Ah, 1967, when no subculture was too obscure to be exploited. I give you... The Happening.

This should not be confused with the M. Night Shyamalan movie by the same name. It should also not be confused with an actual "Happening", which in the 1960s was a weird art experience thing where people would show up at a place and hang out with no real plan. It was sort of like flash mobs are now, I think. When you hear Austin Powers (or the character in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from whom Mike Myers borrowed the line) say "It's my happening, baby, and it freaks me out!" that's what they're talking about. A Happening.

But there is no Happening in The Happening. It starts with a big drug orgy, then four listless characters escape from the police and accidentally kidnap a mob boss. Actually, he kind of kidnaps himself. He's a take-charge kind of guy. Then no one pays the ransom, so he raises it. Which is not the way it's supposed to work. Normally the hostage just sits there tied to a chair or something. Anyway, it ends on kind of a nihilistic, existential note, the way movies in the sixties often did. You should see Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, for example.

The novelization does its best to make the random events interesting. But there's only so much you can do with characters like this. Practically as soon as the four protagonists have met, on page 13, this happens:

Full sunlight had turned Sandy cynical.

"He's a cheap hustler who wants to be legit," she said.

Without taking his right hand from the wheel, Taurus swung his left in a half circle and backhanded Sandy hard and full in the face.

Classy, eh? And Taurus is one of the heroes of this little epic. So's Sandy, who a few pages later has the most memorable line in the book (or, I suspect, the movie):

"Hit me again," she suggested. "A real wham. Maybe I'd feel something anyway, hey Taurus?"

Yeesh. People in low-budget movies in the sixties were serious weirdoes if you ask me. Anyway, Sandy's the only real reason anyone remembers this movie even exists, because here's a picture from the back cover:

That's Faye Dunaway in her first starring role. Later that year, she'd also appear in Bonnie and Clyde, which is a much better movie about directionless clowns committing crimes.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

2009-06-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've got almost ninety movie novelizations, you know. But I've been trying to decide how quickly to spool them out. So here's the plan, for now: every Monday, a new post about a movie novelization. Other posts to appear at random.

Now, with that out of the way, check this out!

The movie came out in 1964. The novelization came out in 2005, and I don't think it's even authorized. As far as I can tell, the movie might be public domain at this point. So why would you write a novelization of a terrible movie from forty years ago?

Well, this is one of those movies that's mysteriously beloved. It was on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and also Cinematic Titanic, which I still think was an odd choice) and appeared in one of those Golden Turkeys books. It's got defiantly weird acting, especially from Dropo. And it's got a very young Pia Zadora, which makes this one of the best movies she ever did.

The novelization is by someone who knows how bad the movie is. It's told in the voice of Girmar (Pia's character) and is full of things like this (after someone has told an excruciatingly unfunny joke about a "Martianmallow":

By the way, that Martianmallow joke ended up sweeping Mars. I mean really sweeping. And it spawned a movement. Within a year after the completion of the Santa Claus incident, Martian jokes were all the self-deprecating rage on my planet.

Not that they were any funnier than Martianmallows.

Or, take Dropo. Please. (classic!) Here's part of the description of the scene where Dropo puts on Santa's spare outfit:

The heavy red coat was next. He slid his arms into the sleeves without removing his eyes from the mirror. Could this be the same Dropo who, in the fractal school yearbook mind chip, was voted Most Likely to Cause an Unwanted Disruption? Yes, it was. And soon things were going to be very, very different.

So although the book is supposedly narrated by Girmar, the narrator seems to share the audience's exasperation with Dropo. And his antics. It's a little meta, especially at the end, when she complains about Pia Zadora's wooden portrayal of, um, herself.

Another fascinating element to this book is that it includes a DVD for the movie that it's novelizing. You don't see that too often!

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

2009-05-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

The novelization for the new movie (which I enjoyed a lot) isn't out yet. So until I get it, let's go back in time to 1979...

That's right, this book was written by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. And unlike "George Lucas's" Star Wars novelization, this one was apparently actually written by the person it says it was written by! Incidentally, I think it's weird that the original story for the screenplay was from Alan Dean Foster. Not that Mr. Foster isn't a talented writer; it's just that he's written so many movie novelizations himself (including Star Wars, actually), it's weird to see him at the other end of the chain.

Now, the book opens with a preface from Admiral James T. Kirk:

My name is James Tiberius Kirk. Kirk because my father and his male forebears followed the old custon of passing along a family identity name. I received James because it was both the name of my father's beloved brother as well as that of my mother's first love instructor. Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel.

This is interesting for three reasons. First, I like that the first thing on Roddenberry's mind was to clarify exactly what Kirk's middle name was. Second, this directly contradicts the new movie, which is kind of neat. Third, "love instructor"? What's going on here?

After Kirk's preface, there's something labeled "Author's Preface", and it's pretty weird:

Considering Admiral James Kirk's comments is his own preface, it may seem strange that he chose me as the one to write this book. I was, after all, a key figure among those who chronicled his original five-year mission in a way which the admiral has criticized as inaccurately "larger than life."

So... this book's "author" is in the Star Trek world, and was responsible for a television show about the Enterprise at some point in the past. An in-character Gene Roddenberry, in other words. Later in the preface, he even says "Why STAR TREK again? I supposes the real truth is that I have always looked upon the Enterprise and its crew as my own private view of Earth and humanity in microcosm." It really is an author's message, but it's pretending to be from within the Star Trek universe. It's complicated.

There are other fascinating things about this book, both from a deleted-scene standpoint (the character "Decker" of the movie was supposed to be the son of the "Decker" from an episode of the series) and from a transliteration standpoint ("V'ger" is spelled "Vejur" everywhere in the book. Weird). There's also a little digression revealing that McCoy prefers homeopathic treatments. But the things which stands out is the spot where Gene Roddenberry decides to comment directly on the canonicity of Kirk/Spock Slashfic. On page 22, there's this line:

Jim! Good-bye my . . . my t'hy'la.* This is the last time I will permit myself to think of you or even your name again.

Those are Spock's thoughts, and they go to a legendary footnote:

* Editor's note: The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t'hy'la, which can also mean brother and lover. Spock's recollection (from which this chapter has drawn) is that it was a most difficult moment for him since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However, because t'hy'la can be used to mean love, and since Kirk's and Spock's friendship was unsually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually indeed become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject:

"I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several time. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow, which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I had always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years."

Ha! Although I can't help but notice that all this really says is that Kirk wasn't monogamous. And who ever said he was? Plus, if this section is to be taken as canon, it means that Kirk definitely has experimented with something other than "that creature woman."

Last Action Hero

2009-05-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

I actually kind of enjoyed Last Action Hero, even though it's now a legendary flop. It helps that I watched it as a projectionist, so I was all alone in the theater the night before opening night, watching it mostly to make sure I had attached the reels correctly, and didn't accidentally play a reel backwards or something.

This played well with the plot of the movie, which involves a kid getting to see the new big action movie all alone in the middle of an empty movie theater. And this was very much the New Big Action Movie. They were going to have an advertisement on the side of the space shuttle, but the launch got scrubbed or there was a public outcry or something. The point is that they got lots of press coverage even though they didn't end up buying the ad space. Nice job!

This copy of the book came with a movie ticket being used as a bookmark. Tragically, it is not for Last Action Hero but Jurassic Park. What fun is that?

Oh, and the novelization is okay, I guess. It plays up the wacky aspects of the movie more than the action scenes, but that's what the movie did too. That's why everyone hated it.

Star Wars

2009-05-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

This isn't the oldest movie novelization in my collection, but I'm pretty sure it's the first novelization I personally read. Let's go back to the time when Star Wars was fun!

Before I get into the book, I would like to point out that it doesn't say "Episode IV" or "A New Hope" anywhere on it. This is just "Star Wars", which is "From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker". However, don't get the idea that this breaks the continuity put forth by the prequels:

Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organ of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic.

Yeah, that's pretty much what happens in the prequel movies. But I'm more interested in this line at the end of the prologue:

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes."
-Leia Organa of Alderaan, Senator

Man oh man, I must have read this book a million times when I was a kid, because I remember that line like it's tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. Which brings us to the thing that this book always reminds me of: this is what made me aware of the question of what's canon. You know the attack on the Death Star, right? Sure you do. Here's how it's described in the book:

"This is Blue Five," Luke announced to his mike as he nose dived his ship in a radical attempt to confuse any electronic predictors below. The gray surface of the battle station streaked past his ports. "I'm going in."

"I'm right behind you, Blue Five," a voice recognizable as Biggs's sounded in his ears.

Wait, what? Blue Five? But in the movie, he's Red Five! This was very confusing to Young Monty. I watched the movie, loved it, read the book, and loved that too. And then I saw the movie again, and something bothered me about it. Eventually I realized that Luke's callsign in the book was different from the one in the movies. Is he Blue Five or Red Five? Which one is right?

The other exciting thing about the book is that it was my first introduction to the idea of deleted scenes. This wasn't just before DVDs, it was before home video. And there are scenes in the book with Luke's childhood friend Biggs Darklighter. Special added backstory!

Oh, and if you're curious, not only does Han shoot first, but Greedo doesn't even appear to get a shot off:

"Over my dead body," Solo said unamiably.

The alien was not impressed. "If you insist. Will you come outside with me, or must I finish it here?"

"I don't think they'd like another killing in here," Solo pointed out.

Something which might have been a laugh came from the creature's translator. "They'd hardly notice. Get up, Solo. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. You've embarrassed me in front of Jabba with your pious excuses for the last time."

"I think you're right."

Light and noise filled the little corner of the cantina, and when it had faded, all that remained of the unctuous alien was a smoking, slimy spot on the stone floor.

Solo brought his hand and the smoking weapon it held out from beneath the table, drawing bemused stares from several of the cantina's patrons and clucking sounds from its more knowledgeable ones. They had known the creature had committed its fatal mistake in allowing Solo to get his hands under cover.

Oh yeah. That's the stuff. Frankly, the book resonates with me almost as much as the movie does.

Battlestar Galactica (the original one!)

2009-04-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

That's right: a novelization by Glen A. Larson and Robert Thurston from 1978, describing the events of the original Battlestar Galactica. I think this counts as a "movie novelization" because this is the original two-hour "movie" that I vaguely remember actually being in theaters. Anyway, it's hilarious.

Actually, the back cover is even more entertaining than the front:

I love that the only person who gets mentioned by name is John Dykstra. Actors? Writers? Forget 'em, kid; we're here for the special effects from the Star Wars guy! And they were pretty good, but they don't really come across in the book. You'd think they'd play it up in the combat scenes, describing things as exploding in an expensive manner, with a noise that would really impress you if you could hear it, but none of that really happens.

But! I want you to look at Lorne Greene up there. He's the glowering white-haired gentleman in the circle. How would you describe him? If you're Glen A. Larson or Robert Thurston, here's how:

Commander Adama's angular cheekbones seemed the work of skilled diamond cutter. But his cold, penetrating eyes could not have been designed by even the finest of artisans. The members of his crew feared Adama as much as they loved him. There was a popular superstition aboard the Galactica that, when the commander became angry, those powerful eyes retreated into his skull and gave off rays that made him look so inhuman he might have just materialized as a god from some new alien mythology. Although tall and strong, he had none of the muscular man's typical clumsiness in normal movement.His gestures were smoothly graceful, and there was an ease in his bearing that made even his enemies comfortable with him—at least when he was comfortable with them.

That's right; the original Commander Adama had magical retracting laser eyes. Take that, Edward James Olmos!

While we're at it, here's how Starbuck is introduced:

Starbuck didn't have to look over his shoulder to know that a gallery of onlookers had formed behind him. When he had a pair of rubes like these two on the line, word always spread through the ranks of the Galactica, and people came running to the ready room. It was considered a privilege to be in onthe kill. Starbuck's gambling acumen had become so famous that his name was now a part of fighter-pilot slang. To be starbucked meant that you had allowed yourself to be maneuvered into a situation in which your defeat was inevitable. It was in the vocabulary of battle as well as in that of the gambling tables.

Like an actor, the handsome young lieutenant knew how to play to an audience. He let his face, so clean-cut for a man so diabolically shrewd, assume a mask of naiveté, as if he had just boarded the battlestar fresh out of space academy. Awkwardness substituted for the normal grace of his movements, and he leaned into the table like a man who wondered how he had gotten himself into this mess in the first place. All part of the setup. The gallery knew it, just as they knew he was ready to sweep down on his foolish opponents like a Cylon patrol from behind a cloud cover.

I remember this scene from the show. The rubes win the hand, but later on Starbuck is about to win his money back when the alert sounds and everyone has to go get in their Vipers and put John Dykstra to work.

This is not, as the cover claims, The Greatest Space Epic Ever, but if you're old enough to remember the original series, it's an adequate replacement for watching the show. And if you only know the recent series, it's probably a weird, jarring experience as you keep having to remind yourself that these aren't the Boomer and Apollo you remember. Either way, the scene where Adama looks at his daughter Athena and muses on her sensuous curves is really, really strange.

The Black Gestapo

2009-04-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

This is one of the more startling titles and posters in movie history. Let's take a look at the poster in question:

Well! That's something you don't see every day.

The movie is pretty bland, except for the occasional shot of the militant black army chanting "VENGEANCE! VENGEANCE! VENGEANCE!" with a soundtrack overlay of "SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!" At the beginning of the movie, Watts is under the sway of beefy, sunglasses-wearing white thugs, who force businesses to push drugs and gambling. So we get a round of scenes in which the business owners are roughed up for not having enough money to give to the white mob. Then we meet the People's Army, which is not really military. It's sort of a black Salvation Army. Except for the second-in-command, who wants to get real guns and start fighting whitey for real. The leader of the People's Army, General Ahmed, doesn't go along with it until his girlfriend gets raped by the beefiest and most sunglasses-wearing-est of the thugs. So Colonel Kojah gets the go-ahead to train a small group to fight back.

So the next scenes involve Kojah's army shooting up the white guys when they try to pick up their ill-gotten gains. There's a fairly short war and the head of the white mob shrugs and decides to get the hell out of town and maybe try his luck in Harlem. And as soon as that happens, Colonel Kojah (who has renamed himself General Kiongozi) takes over the rackets, leaning on the local shopkeepers to sell heroin and push the gambling and so on. So you've got an Animal Farm situation, where the revolutionaries have become the new tyrannical masters, although it happens a lot faster here.

So now General Ahmed has to invade General Kiongozi's compound, which is suspiciously like a country club, and take out the entire army by himself. First he liberates the tennis courts, then he tricks a squad into running down the road until they collapse, then he kills about forty people. Finally, he takes out Kiongozi and the movie's over. Pretty straightforward sleazy stuff.

Now, it turns out there's a novelization from Holloway House, better known (if at all) for the Iceberg Slim books. Check it:

This novelization is an attempt to make the story mean something. It follows the movie precisely, but it fills in a lot of inner details that the director and actors were unable to do:

Kojah couldn't help but wonder if all great men felt as he did when they made their first stride toward greatness. He wiped his sweating brow and then slipped quickly across the carpeted bedroom to the doorway that led to the rest of the house. His team followed closely at his heels.

Was it possible that Henri Christophe, L'Overture, and Nat Turner felt as he felt? He could hear a distant drum beating out a marching beat, the cadence for his army of liberation of conquest. They must have felt as he did as they set out to destroy the dreaded honkie. The beast that had cowered peoples throughout the world. But he would not run in fear. He would fight and win. Win and become a legend, a hero.

The book is still pretty sleazy. I don't think it has a choice with this title. But it's much, much better than the movie it's based on.

Cinemapocalypse!

2009-04-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hey! So last night was Cinemapocalypse at the Grand Illusion. That will require some explanation.

First: the Grand Illusion is the oldest independent movie theater in Seattle. It's a tiny little place with a tiny little screen where you can go and see obscure movies in the company of other people who like to go see obscure movies in a awesome theater. Paste Magazine named it one of the seven best movie houses in the country a couple of months ago. If the movie industry wants to survive, I advise it to take advantage of the fact that seeing movies on a big screen with other people is just a more fun experience than watching one on a two-inch screen on your laptop.

Next: "Cinemapocalypse" is a little traveling road show brought to us by the good people at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, which is also on that Paste Magazine list I mentioned earlier. It's a great theater, not just because they serve delicious food while you watch a movie, but because it shows terrific movies. And two of the programmers are doing some sort of West Coast tour with obscure movies. They've been to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and now it's Seattle's turn!

I have to emphasize here that these were real 35mm prints being projected on a movie screen. That's fun. And the audience reacted appropriately with horror or laughs as the situation called for. It wasn't just a movie, it was a movie experience. And a fun one!

We went to Friday's show, which was a triple feature of Vice Squad, Night Warning, and Tourist Trap. Starting at 10:00 pm. Yikes!

Vice Squad

Wings Hauser stars as the villainous pimp Ramrod in a punishingly ugly movie. The last reel was especially punishing, because I think they had the volume up a couple of notches. The gunshots were extremely loud and actually hurt my ears. If it was a directorial decision, it was a really smart one. Although traditionally I think you want viewers covering their eyes, not their ears.

Some people might be interested to note that former original MTV VJ (and current Sirius XM DJ) Nina Blackwood is a junkie whore. In the movie, I mean. I'm sure the real Ms. Blackwood is a lovely person. She gets killed early on in a brutal and ugly scene. I was more excited to see Pepe Serna, dressed almost exactly like he is as "Reno" in Buckaroo Banzai. At the end of the movie, when he's all bloodied up, he looks just like Reno! Incidentally, I checked out Mr. Serna's IMDB resume, and I'm surprised to learn that he's been in other things I've seen. He was a voice on "The PJs!" Also, he's in two upcoming movies where his character name is "Reno", but they do not appear to be Buckaroo Banzai sequels. Important note for Blue Blaze Irregulars there.

There are some aspects of this movie that made me question its authenticity. For one thing, I thought it was weird that the police code for "hooker in the hospital" is "Code two and a half". What's with the half? Did they run out of integers? Also, when Nina Blackwood flatlines, the doctor just shrugs and covers her with a sheet. C'mon, pal, at least try to resuscitate her!

Next up: Night Warning

Do you know who Susan Tyrrell is? She's been in a million movies, including The Forbidden Zone, Tapeheads, Cry-Baby -- look, just see for yourself. She's the star of Night Warning, which is also called "Momma's Boy," "The Evil Protege," "Thrilled to Death," "Nightmare Maker," and "Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker". Note that there are no butchers anywhere in this movie, although one character does bring a couple of baked goods over.

Anyway, Susan Tyrrell has been in mostly crazy cult movies, although she does have an Academy Award Nomination to her name. According to the Drafthouse guys, Susan denies having any memory whatsoever of making this movie. Which is a shame, because her incredible unhinged performance in the last half is, um, incredible. I probably could have made that sentence flow a little better, but I stand by it: it's so good, it deserves two incredibles, because she was doing things I really didn't believe.

The plot is fairly standard at its base: crazy aunt kills her sister and her husband so she can raise the baby herself, but it turns out she was really the mother all along and she's got an unhealthy attachment to the kid. And then she kills a bunch of people. But two things made the episode stand out. First, of course, was Tyrrell's performance. This was a hardened cult-film audience, and they recoiled in horror a couple of times. It's like you can't show a middle-aged woman licking milk off her teenage son's neck without making people go "Eeeeurgh!"

Before I continue, I just wanted to mention that the entire audience was made up of "The Beardo" from the cartoon "Mission Hill". Trust me, this is a perfect reference.

The other thing that makes this movie weird is the homophobic cop played by Bo Svenson, another veteran actor who apparently has no memory whatsoever of making the movie. His character's theory is that the first murder is committed by the son, not the mother, because the mother's story doesn't hold up. She claims she was defending herself from a rapist, but the guy turns out to be gay, and in a committed relationship with the son's basketball coach. So the cop decides that the kid must be gay too (because he grew up without a father, and what other evidence do you need?) and actively berates the other cop for doing actual police work like "looking into the time the kid's parents died due to a cut brake line" and "asking the kid's girlfriend if he has sex with her". Oh! the girlfriend is a young Julia Duffy, and I have to say, if I'd known as a young Newhart fan that there was a movie with extended shots of Julia Duffy's breasts, I would have seen this movie much, much earlier.

Let's see, what else... well, there's an eighteen-year-old Bill Paxton doing a great job as a jerk. I miss Jerk-ass Bill Paxton. And the entire plot is pretty much fed by everyone's tendency to knock at a house's door and then stroll right in. Personally, if I had a freshly-killed dead body in the kitchen, I think I'd consider locking the door. That might just be me.

After this movie was Tourist Trap, which is one of Rhias's favorite obscure horror movies. But it was 2:00 am and we were tired. Plus, Rhias had just had surgery two days earlier (she's doing well, thanks for asking!) so we staggered home.

...

Hmm. This entry doesn't really have a tie-in for movie novelizations, does it? Sorry about that. I promise to write up "Black Gestapo" soon. It'ss simultaneously a movie I can't believe they made and a novelization I can't believe exists!

My Sweet Audrina

2009-04-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

Hey! So I'm still doing the V.C. Andrews Challenge to read eleven V.C. Andrews books in 2009 and also post about them. Although since I've only done Flowers in the Attic and it's already April, you might argue that I'm a little behind. But here's something you haven't considered: shut up! I'll do it! Get off my back, maaan!

Okay, so My Sweet Audrina. It's not part of a series like all the other V.C. Andrews books. I'm pretty sure that's because V.C. just threw ever random plot twist she had available into the book. But she doesn't trust the reader to pick up on weirdness, so Audrina is constantly pointing out how weird this all is. "How come I don't know how I old I am? What's wrong with my memory? Ghosts? Huh? What?"

The ending is spectacularly unsatisfying. After discovering the Big Twist that her parents didn't really have a previous daughter named Audrina and there were the rapes and also a couple of murders and everyone's been lying to her all her life, Audrina is all set to leave. She's going to walk out the door and maybe go try to start a life somewhere apart from all these crazy murdering rapists. And then she doesn't! She basically shrugs and says "Well, they're my crazy smothering mind-controlling lunatics and I'll stay with them."

Okay. That's two V.C. Andrews books. I have to pick up the pace here.

Yellowbeard

2009-04-04T20:13:00.000-07:00

I love Yellowbeard, because I have a soft spot for Monty Python and pirate movies. I understand that not everyone feels that way, especially about pirate movies. Oh, it's easy to be a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Anyone can do that. But I love Cutthroat Island, which makes me practically the world's leading expert on liking pirate movies. And I understand that while I might love Yellowbeard (in fact, I already said I did, back at the beginning of this paragraph), not everyone does.

It took forever for Yellowbeard to be released on DVD, and when it was, the cover was 90% Cheech and Chong. I guess if it takes the raw star power of Cheech and Chong to get an obscure movie a DVD release, I'll put up with it. But my point is that I think it's weird that a movie hardly anyone but me likes, that only hit DVD on a fluke, had a big tie-in book published in 2005, 22 years after the movie came out. It's got the complete script, the scripts for the trailers (which is a neat idea, which you don't see very often), the story of the making of the movie, and a novelization of the movie. Well, it's pretty short, so I think it might technically be a novella-ization.

Okay, so like I say, there's more or less a 104-page novelization at the end, and that's pretty neat. It hews very closely to the events of the movie:

Clement began to question him. 'Did you see . . .' -- then he realised and turned to Mansell. 'He's blind, you silly sod!'

'I may be blind,' said Pew, 'but I 'ave acute'earing.'

'I'm not interested in your jewellery, cloth-eyes,' snapped Clement.

It probably doesn't read that funny. But if you've got John Cleese's voice in your head, it's hilarious. It's one of those transcription-style novelizations that don't bring much to the party. Luckily for me, I've seen the movie enough that even reading bare-bones descriptions let me essentially watch the movie in my head.

Hawk the Slayer

2009-03-03T15:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, today's fantasy movies just make me angry. The Lord of the Rings movies are astonishingly rich, with compeltely seamless special effects and great action. In my day, we had to rely on things like Hawk the Slayer.

If you haven't seen the movie and you're under about 25, I advise you not to. Even if you're old enough to remember when Krull and Legend were exciting sword-and-sorcery epics, it's a good idea to skip it. It has an emotionless elf and a sword with the Magical Power of Levitation. That doesn't mean it can fight on its own, mind you. It just means that if you drop it, you don't need to bend over to pick it up. In the book, this is described as "The mindsword sparked with a green glow and zoomed into Hawk's waiting hand". In the movie, it's much more, um, "floaty" than that. All I'm saying is that I suspect fishing line was involved.

From this, you might think that the book is better than the movie. After all, a book won't suffer from inadequate special effects, bad acting, and Patricia "Magenta from Rocky Horror" Quinn as the evil sorceress. But the book also lacks the talents of Mr. Jack Palance as the villain. And say what you will about Palance, he always brings some entertainment value to the proceedings.

The real problem with the book is that it's too heavy on the descriptions, while not being absolutely sure what the words mean. Check it:

Dismounting, they stretched weary muscles. The sky had turned to frosty black velvet, clustered with sparkling points of light.

"The stars are out," said Gort obviously.

Baldin, his back against a tree trunk, glanced up and nodded. "So they are," he acquiesced mildly.

Yeah, that's a little too... flat for my tastes. Although to be fair, if you watch that scene in the movie, you will find that he does indeed acquiesce in an exceedingly mild fashion.

Aliens

2009-02-28T10:55:00.000-08:00

Aliens is a terrific novelization. It's probably my second favorite (after Buckaroo Banzai, which I'll talk about eventually).

It helps that it's by Alan Dean Foster, who's written a million of these tie-in books (including Alien, which a lot of people like) and is really good at it. It's not unheard of for an established author to write a novelization or two (did you know that The Sword of Shannara's Terry Brooks wrote the novelization for The Phantom Menace?), but Foster has written bucketloads of regular sf at thesame time he's written bucketloads of movies. It occurs to me that I should stop buying my books in buckets. It's not as convenient as I thought it was going to be, and once I get the books on my shelves, I'm left with a garage full of buckets.

One reason I love the book version of Aliens is that I love the movie. When it came out, we didn't have these newfangled DVDs, and it was even considered a little fancy to purchase a movie on VHS. But I could happily reread the book and eventually litter my conversation with quotes. Many, many quotes. I have a friend who taped Aliens off HBO and watched the first segment of the movie (from the time the Marines wake up from cryosleep through about the time that Apone dies) every day for a few months.

Another reason is that this book has the deleted scenes in it. It's fairly easy to see them now, but at the time, all we had to work with was rumors of a cut that was shown on network television that had them. The book starts on the colony, with Newt's parents being the first ones to find the alien eggs. It also establishes that Newt and her brother were experts at the game of hiding in the air ducts and other hidden places in the colony, which helps explain how Newt survives.

It's a nice reminder that some movie novelizations are awesone.

Imaginary Novelizations

2009-01-30T16:11:00.000-08:00

These are hypothetical covers for imaginary movie novelizations. They're classier than actual covers, if you ask me. Compare this Back to the Future cover...

...with this actual cover for the novelization of Back to the Future III, which I just happen to have:

The hypothetical one has a distinct lack of Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox being plastered across the cover.

Also, now I'm wondering if there was a novelization of the original Highlander movie. It seems like it came out at just the right time for one, but it'll be hard to search for with all the Highlander TV Show tie-in novels that have come out.

(UPDATE: It turns out there is! Oh boy!)

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

2009-01-18T21:17:00.000-08:00

Oh ho ho ho ho. That's right: this is a novelization of the movie starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees that wove Beatles music into what it laughingly called its "plot". It's Across the Universe, but much, much worse. See, it turns out that Mr. Frampton and the Brothers Gibb cannot, in fact, act. You'd think they'd have checked that before starting the movie, but apparently not. So once they were done shooting (this is true), they reedited the movie so id didn't have any dialogue. All the heavy lifting for the plot was handled by Mr. Kite, who was played by George Burns.

So now what you've got is a movie fronted by four heartthrobs and George Burns. They even put George on the cover of the novel:

There is still dialogue in the book. It's not good, but it's there. In the movie, the story is just there to get from song to song. So you've got a character named "Strawberry Fields" and a character named "Mr. Mustard" (who is, as you might expect, Mean), and so on. This is kind of pointless, though, because almost all the songs are either bland and terrible or awful and terrible. Some people kind of like the way Steve Martin performs "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", though. And to be fair, Earth Wind and Fair rock the hell out of "Got to Get You Into My Life" and Aerosmith do a great job on "Come Together". Most of the time, though, the songs are entirely forgettable. The book does not dance around the subject and just blats out the lyrics whenever a song shows up:

The cover claims that there are "16 pages of outrageous photos from the movie". Frankly, not all of these pictures are all that outrageous. It's hard to be outrageous in black and white. Well, I guess Robert Mappelthorpe managed. Look, my point is that this picture is not outrageous:

The caption reads "Mustard and the Brute steal the instruments. Heartland immediately goes punk." Sadly, that is an accurate description of what happens in the movie.

Let's see, what else... well, the whole book except for the first chapter is written in the first person. That's pretty annoying. Oh! And at the end, there's a moment when a whole lot of musicians appear in the movie. Like Donovan, Dr. John, Heart, Chita Rivera, Sha-Na-Na, and Keith Carradine. It doesn't make a lot of sense. But in the book, that list of musicians, since it is unfettered by appearance fees or the bonds of death, goes on for five pages!

The other unusual thing about this book (which is already nearly unique in its weirdness) is that the Acknowledgements page includes "And my dear friend, Dr. Timothy Leary, who touches every experience with magic." I'm told by people that met him that Leary did indeed do that, but it's still not something I expect to see in the novelization of a bubblegum pop movie like this.

Flowers in the Attic

2009-01-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

Before we begin, I should admit that this is not technically a movie novelization, although it is a novel that's been made into a movie. So it nearly counts, even though I haven't actually seen the movie in question.

The reason I read this book is this:

I've been blogging here and there since 2001 or so, and I've never really participated in one of those multi-site ongoing challenge deals. I nearly did with Seven Days back in 2002, but that didn't actually take off. But the idea of reading and commenting on eleven V.C. Andrews books over a year strikes me as too hilarious to ignore. So I guess what I'm saying... is that it's on.

I was nine years old when Flowers in the Attic came out, and within two years, it seemed like it was everywhere, due to its allegedly graphic descriptions of incest sex. I never read it myself, since I jumped straight from Judy Blume to the somewhat more classy (but still properly sleazy) The Hotel New Hampshire. Reading Flowers in the Attic now, I imagine that the sex scene must have been fairly disappointing for the kids who had been looking forward to the graphic detail.

Naturally, I got this copy at a used bookstore, and I have to say I'm delighted with the copy I got. Here's why:

Yes! It's highlighted! Frankly, I think it's got too much highlighting to actually be useful:

About half of the book is highlighted. Here's a tip for you young would-be-highlighters out there: if you highlight so much of a book that you dry out three separate pens, you've probably gone overboard.

This is not one of those highlighting jobs that goes for the sex bits; I think this is for a book report or something, because every single reference to flowers, family, wholesomeness, and colors got the treatment. And there were some handwritten notes for foreshadowing, which doesn't seem that hard to spot. I think the cleverest part of Flowers in the Attic is that the narrator is a teenager, which can justify any amount of clumsy narration. I don't think it quite justifies the occasional "Golly-lolly", though. Also, since the narrator allegedly spends every waking minute reading Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and the Bible, I don't think it would have been out of the question for her to write a little better. But I guess it's plausible for her to sound like she does.

The book was about what I expected in terms of cartoonish villainy and doubtful plot developments. I do have my suspicions about the children's father, though. I realize that he's described in glowing terms (literally, in my copy, thanks to the highlighting), but here's what we know about him: 1) he insists on his children greeting him with lavish hugs and kisses, and 2) he's willing to commit incest. Also, these are probably the unluckiest children you're likely to find, so I think even if he'd lived, things would have gone badly for them anyway.

All right, there you go. Flowers in the Attic. Next month, I'll have another V.C. Andrews book. And next week, I'm going to take on one of the most mysterious novelizations ever: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a novelization of a movie with no dialogue.

Hudson Hawk

2009-01-06T15:24:00.000-08:00

Okay, look. First of all, I love the movie. Love it. I've seen it enough that it's basically comfort viewing for me. And I realize that it's got some flaws, but I think it gets a bad rap.

The important thing to realize is that when it came out, people were expecting it to be just like Bruce Willis's previous movie, which was Die Hard 2. So they showed up for an action movie and got a goofy comedy that's essentially a parody of James Bond-style movies. And I think that threw people. If you listen to the director's commentary on the DVD, he sounds really defensive the whole time, complaining that people just didn't "get" his movie. He even cast James Coburn, the star of the "Flint" movies!

Okay, having said that, I admit that there are things in that movie that, um, aren't for everyone. Not everyone digs Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard as absurdly over-the-top villains. I love 'em, myself. Even Grant hates that performance. Judging by With Nails, his movie diaries, he preferred his work in Spice World.

Now, the book. Back before VCRs, novelizations were the only way to relive a movie at home. And before DVDs, they were the only way to see deleted scenes. It turns out that Hudson Hawk has an entire subplot that got cut out of the final product. It's about a monkey. It's also more self-indulgent, silly, and pointless than the rest of the movie, which is really saying something. It's good that it's not in the movie anymore, but it's neat to read what was supposed to happen.

The real advantage of a novelization of a flawed movie is that you can find out what was supposed to be happening. Apparently, Danny Aiello's character was named "Tommy Five-Tone" because when he beats someone up, they grunt five times in ascending tones. That actually happens in the movie, when Tommy pummels Darwin Mayflower, but the joke doesn't come across at all. Luckily for me, the book appears to have been written by someone who was very concerned about getting the jokes across, so it's explained at excruciating detail. Hooray!

Gidget Goes to Rome

2008-12-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Be honest now. You didn't even know Gidget Goes to Rome was a movie, did you? This is the first you've ever heard of Gidget's trip to Italy, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that it happened. It wasn't interesting, but it happened. But it did not happen much like it is described in the book.

That happens sometimes. The author has to work from an early version of the script, and if a scene gets cut at the last second, it's possible for it to still be in there. In this case, though, I think the entire script was rewritten and thrown out. But they didn't bother having the book rewritten, possibly because, seriously, who cares what's in the novelization of Gidget Goes to Rome?

The differences start in the very first scene. In the book, it's described this way: "And it was there I was lying one July noon last year, pretty much as God made me, except for a few minor accessories like a black bikini and a pair of sunglasses." In the movie, it's a red bikini. And no sunglasses. Okay, that's pretty small. But as soon as she gets to Rome, the book describes an entirely different series of events. Sure, the overall outline is the same (she fights with Moondoggie and has a crush on an older Italian man), but every element is different.

So with that out of the way, I want to go back to that part about "pretty much as God made me". Is that a reference to nudity? In a Gidget book? Oh my yes. Here's the scene after Gidget has dived into a fountain (which happens at the beginning of the trip in the book, as opposed at the end of the book for a totally different reason in the movie) and is getting examined by an older doctor, who will later turn out to be married, with children, and stringing her along:

With an air of detached sovereignty he inspected the thermometer, smiled knowingly and then asked me to take off my p.j.'s. First I got purple as a plum, but then it came to me that I had nothing to hide. While not as generously endowed as Lucy and Libby, I am endowed. Besides, he was a doctor, wasn't he?

Off came the top of my p.j.'s.

He placed his efficient hand on my back and began to knock around with the knuckles of his other hand in the general vicinity of my lower thorax. Then he bent down and affixed his ear to my back and asked me to breathe. Then he asked me to lie flat on my back.

I complied. My no-longer-hidden treasures pointed straight to the ceiling. Dottore Paladino again leaned his perfumed head over me and pressed his ear toward the region of my heart, just underneath my right half-bosom. I have been examined before, but never like this. It tickled.

I mean, really now! I can assure you that that did not take place in the movie I watched. Also, "right half-bosom"?

Another spot I found strange was when Gidget is pontificating on the difference between jet travel and boat travel. She's very worldly, this Gidget. She also talks in Latin a lot more than I would have expected. And here, what's with this section on her parents' drinking habits?

It's different with wine. We drink it at home, my folks making a sort of a ritual out of it, serving it at the right room temperature (red one), or slightly chilled (white one), and my ma being what is known as "a second plateau drinker" (steady intake of small sips from 6 p.m. onward), while my old man has reached "the first plateau" long ago (steady intake from 5 p.m. onward). But they never get bombed. Drinking wine just puts them in a benevolent mood.

I trust that it will not come as surprise that a Google search for "second plateau drinker" yields no results.

Grease: The Novel

2008-12-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

Here's a movie novelization I bet you didn't know existed: Grease, by Ron de Christoforo.

Technically, that should read "Grease, by RON DE CHRISTOFORO, based on the screenplay by BRONTE WOODARD, adaptation by ALLAN CARR, based on the original musical be JIM JACOBS and WARREN CASEY". And then there's something about ACTION PHOTOS FROM THE MOVIE, but this is not one of those photo-novels you sometimes see where a cut-down version of the script is put next to movie stills; this is an actual 220-page novelization. Of Grease.

I do not know why there's a novelization of Grease. I realize it was a successful movie (in 1978, it was the third-highest grossing movie ever, just trailing Jaws and Star Wars), but you don't see that many novelizations of musicals. I'll get to the way they handle the songs later (hint: it makes no sense!) but let's count down the Crazy Things in this book.

5. "Another Original publication of POCKET BOOKS". I guess that's supposed to mean that this first appeared in paperback instead of first being in hardback, but it seems odd to trumpet the originality of a book whose author line includes the words "based on" and "adaptation by". I imagine this is related to the way paperbacks used to have a line about "This is the full and unabridged text of the original edition" to soothe fears that they were just cut-down versions of the hardback text.

4. "Ehey." That's not a word, is it? So how come it appears so often in this book? Like this: "Ehey, Danny-boy, I think that chick in the white is giving you the eye." I think it means "Hey", but I've never run across that spelling before. It's sort of the way John Travolta talks, I guess, with that sort of hiccup in the middle of a syllable, but his character isn't the only one that does it.

3. The author thinks this is a real novel. Seriously, he seems to believe he's writing a coming-of-age story set in 1959. This explains why, for example, there's a chapter about Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly dying. Maybe it's me, but I don't remember this scene in the movie:

We spent the rest of the day talking softly about the singers, mostly going over what it meant to have someone we cared about suddenly die.

"First it was James Dean a few years ago, and now this," I said.

"Shit, what a way to go -- a plane crash," Kenick said, almost to himself.

"Yeah," Roger said, "and what a way to wind up -- face down in the snow."

"Somewhere in Iowa," I added.

"You guys know what?" Danny asked quietly. "It's only the beginning . . . for us, I mean. I don't think from here on out that we're going to be having too many more new idols -- we're just gettin' too old for that stuff. But what's gonna happen is -- all of our ols idols, the people we grew up lookin' up to, they're all gonna fade on us, or die. . . . It's lousy, and I don't like it."

There was something too true and final in Danny's words. In his own way, he sometimes had a real sad understanding of things.

What? In the middle of freakin' Grease, we're stopping to consider our own mortality? Interesting choice!

Also an interesting choice: The first fifty pages of the book take place before the movie begins. We follow Danny (and Sonny, because he's the narrator and therefore has to be shoved into every scene except where he's being told about what happened by Marsha) to the beach and see Danny meet Sandy and blah blah blah eventually school starts. The last chapter happens after the movie's over (but before Grease 2):

Chapter 36

So school ended and we had our girls back and we were all in love and everything was terrific. Hunky-dory, right? Sure, we both know better.

Me, Kenickie, and Danny went to summer school together and finally graduated from Rydell without too much ceremony, except for a pretty good drunk we tied on in the parking lot of the Palace with the Ladies.

By the fall, things started changing, too quickly. It was too much to face and keep up with at the same time. We had to look for jobs, clean up our act, and things of that nature which I promised myself I wouldn't talk about here.

That New Year's Eve we had a big party with the T-Birds and the Ladies as we saw the last of the Nifty Fifties -- and, to be perfectly honest, I don't think any of us felt all that terrible about seeing that decade and that part of our lives finally coming to a close.

Yay! Now Grease ends on a downer!

2. I mentioned that Sonny is in every scene, right? I realize the character's around a lot, but he's not everywhere. The only times he hasn't been shoved in are where Marsha relates to him (in great detail) what happened at, say, the slumber party. It's distracting, because I keep thinking, "Wait, wasn't that scene just between Kenickie and Danny? Why did Kenickie say 'Ehhh, Danny, you and Sonny think you can hang around and help me out?'"

1. The songs. Whoo hoo hoo. Hoo.

Okay. I would have thought that there were two ways of dealing with the songs. First, you could pretend they didn't happen. You know, "Then Danny started talking up the car. He made it sound great. Now we were excited!" Second, you could accept the singing and dancing and put it into the narrative: "I saw Rizzo walking through the hall, singing about how there were worse things she could do." That sort of thing.

As it turns out, there's a third option: you take the lyrics of the song and pretend they're dialogue. Without, and this is important, editing them in any way. Allow me to demonstrate how the novelization of Grease does this in with "Beauty School Dropout". Frenchy is describing a dream she had:

"Not only did Teen Angel say that my story was a sad one to tell, he said I was the most screwed-up kid on the block! Oh, geez you guys, what am I going to do? I know he was right when he said that my career is washed up. On top of that he reminded me I couldn't even get a trade-in on my Beauty School smock!

"Teen Angel really rubbed it in. I mean he said "Beauty School dropout, Beauty School dropout" over and over again. He knew I flunked my midterms and that I even failed shampoo!

"Well he went on like this and pretty soon I started to get pissed but I didn't have nowhere else to go and I didn't know how to get out of the dream. So I was stuck . . . listening to this stuff."

And it goes on like that!

Incidentally, what I've got here is the original 1978 edition (I found it in a used book store, where it was next to one of the more normal "photo-novels" I mentioned earlier; I assume somebody was divesting themselves of their Grease collection), but it was apparently rereleased in 1998 (for the movie's rerelease). That means not only did somebody think it was a good idea to write this, it got published more than once.

Crazy, crazy book. It's awesome. And I've just now learned that there's a novelization of Grease 2! Stand by for further information.

New topic: Movie Novelizations!

2008-12-15T20:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, you know what? I'm tired of just writing quick blurbs about every movie I see. I tend to fall behind, and then I have to rush out a bunch of things like "Meet John Doe was fun, but too preachy and I like Cooper and Stanwyck better in Ball of Fire. Next! The Wizard Rockumentary was adorably amateurish and I just want to pinch the cheeks of all the bands in it. Next!" and so on.

So from now on, I'm narrowing my focus. From now on, we're talking Movie Novelizations. I'm kind of fascinated by them. So that's what I'm going to talk about. Ready? Go!

Golden Globe Nominees

2008-12-11T16:37:00.000-08:00

So the Golden Globe Nomination List is out. And I've seen a grand total of three movies mentioned anywhere on that page. Two of them show up only under "Supporting Actor" (two people from Tropic Thunder and Heath Ledger's Inevitable Win for The Dark Knight) and the other is WALL-E down in Best Animated Film and Best Song. Even with two separate "Best Picture" categories, I've seen none of the movies the Hollywood Foreign Press Association thinks were the best of the year. This is because I was off watching the remake of The Wizard of Gore (verdict: not great. And too tilty) instead of Mamma Mia and In Bruges, which is apparently a comedy. Who knew?

The Sci-Fi Boys

2008-12-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

If you have any nerd in you at all, this is a great movie. It's about, sort of, how sci-fi movies came to be. It starts with Forrest J Ackerman and "Famous Monsters of Filmland" and then has a lot of famous directors like John Landis and Peter Jackson talk about how they wouldn't have become filmmakers without that magazine. And then all the special effects guys like Stan Winston and Rick Baker come in and talk about how they learned about Ray Harryhausen (and how to make monsters) from it. It's a lot of fun and has very entertaining clips of amateur movies made by young boys who would go on to become professionals. There's a lot of stop-motion animation shot with cameras ill-suited to the task, which is always fun.

I mention this movie for two reasons. First, I watched it last night and loved it. Second, Forrest J Ackerman died last night, and he was Important. He practically invented sci-fi fandom. He did invent the term "sci-fi", but then he was always inventing words. "Scientifiction" didn't quite take off. I've got a fanzine he made in 1936, and I wish I'd gotten him to sign it when I got to go to his house a few years ago. It was a great house, packed with amazing stuff. Like "the medallion Bela Lugosi wore in Dracula" amazing. He used to have a lot more stuff (when he lived in a huge house called "the Ackermansion"), but had to sell a lot of it. Much of it is here in Seattle at the Science Fiction Museum, and I hope something similar happens to the rest of his stuff.

I'm sad that Forry is gone, but I'm happy to enjoy a world he affected. Oh, and that 1936 zine I have is awesome, by the way. It's got a piece written for Robert E. Howard's death, and that piece is written by H.P. Lovecraft.

High Sierra

2008-11-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

Humphery Bogart as a vicious escaped criminal with a cursed dog. I saw this a couple of weeks ago and can't remember much except that there's a subplot about raising money so a young lady can get an operation for her clubfoot, but she never looks even the slightest bit crippled. She doesn't even limp!

White Heat

2008-11-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

The thing I thought was most interesting about White Heat was that it didn't waste a lot of time on establishing character. By 1949, all you needed to do was cast James Cagney and the audience would do the rest of the work.

I mean, Cagney's still great and you can't take your eyes off him when he chewing up the scenery. But they save a lot of time by not telling us how he's a vicious sociopathic monster. He just is.

I think I've seen all the essential Cagney gangster pictures now. I should probably hunt down some Paul Muni now, because he's always listed along with Cagney and Edward G. Robinson in these Warner Brothers histories but I've never even seen the original Scarface.

DOA: Dead or Alive

2008-11-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, look. This isn't a good movie. I knew that going in. I'm not dumb, and I knew it was going to involve scantily-clad women fighting. And it did. But you know what? Sometimes, that's enough. It's rotten, but at least it knows it. Don't judge me!

Plus, one of the main characters turns out to be Joy from My Name is Earl. I knew Jaime Pressly was funny, but I didn't realize she was so... let's say "toned".

Mr. Sardonicus

2008-11-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Mr. Sardonicus is known for two things: influencing the look of the Joker and having one of those crazy William Castle gimmicks. In this case, the audience was supposed to vote on what ending they wanted to see. Of course, there was really only one ending, because the vote was "Do you want Sardonicus to suffer even more... or do you want to show mercy?" Obviously, everyone wants the suffering.

The movie itself is a lot like Dracula for the first hour or so, except that instead of Jonathan Harker, they've got a brilliant doctor who specialized in paralysis cases. But Sardonicus (who's really a Baron, not a Mister) turns out to be not a vampire but a crazy guy with a permanent crazed smile on his face. It's creepy, but I don't think it's as creepy as the mask he normally wears. The unmoving face works well with his snooty attitude.

Anyway, it's a perfectly acceptable cheapo scare movie.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

2008-11-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you about the Grand Illusion. It's a tiny little art-house theater here in Seattle. When I lived a block from it, I never went there, but now I go there about once a month because they have crazy movies you can't see anywhere else.

In this case, their midnight movie was a set of three Christian Propaganda movies made by Ron Ormond and based on the writings of Estus W. Pirkle. They're charmingly amateurish attempts to show the horrors that await the world if we don't all get right with God. And the complete lack of budget or filmmaking talent doesn't seem to have slowed anyone down when they were shooting the scenes set in the Old Testament or in Hell. Those are actually in The Burning Hell, which I also saw. It was okay (I never knew the Old Testament Prophets were so white and Midwestern!), but it was If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? that I was really into.

See, it's about the coming Communist Takeover that will assuredly come. And it's got it all, assuming by "all" you mean "1971 fashions, bad acting, and a leering Commie commandant". And it's also got a loudspeaker shouting "Christianity is stupid! Communism is good!" which is the basis of one of my favorite Negativland songs. It's always fun to hear something in context when you're used to the cut-up version.

The print was, of course, really terrible. That's part of the charm of the Grand Illusion: watching these movies on film, with a group of other people. Sure, you could find them on YouTube, but watching it on a computer just isn't the same.

Cover Girl

2008-11-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

You know how sometimes in a movie you're just sitting around impatiently waiting for the mousy girl to finally realize she's beautiful? It gets even sillier when the girl is obviously Rita Hayworth. We're supposed to be astonished that Rita Freaking Hayworth manages to become a famous model? Really?

Aside from that, this was good fun. Before she's a model, she's in a lousy theater company with Gene Kelly (it's one of those "lousy" theater companies that are ridiculously talented and occasionally have wildly over-the-top choreography) and Phil Silvers (seriously, even the terrible comedian is fantastic). The great dancing and characters make up for the times when the audience can't help but think that all these people are clearly talented enough to be huge stars and marry anyone they please.

Dark Intruder

2008-11-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

This isn't really a movie. It was really a pilot for a television show in 1965, but it never got picked up, so they released it as a feature. And I'm glad they did, because it's a lot of fun.

It stars Leslie Nielsen as a kind of supernatural detective who sometimes has to help the San Francisco police with their more... eldritch cases. He has an apartment full of cool-looking things, a dwarf manservant named Nikola, and a secret room that looks like it has a fancy scientific lab in it. Nielsen is a lot more fun here than he would become later in his career when he's playing deadpan stiffs in wacky comedies.

The plot is kind of complicated and involves evil demons and gods and stuff. Oh, and Werner Klemperer is in it, but he's using a British accent and he's buried under makeup, so he's not very Colonel-Klinkish. There's just a touch of Lovecraft. I wish they'd made this a series, because it would have made a fun counterpoint to Wild, Wild West.

Also, now I have to go learn more about Leslie Nielsen's "serious" career, because I had no idea he was so enjoyable.

Hollywoodland

2008-10-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

I liked Hollwoodland, but I wanted to like it more. The George Reeves part with Ben Affleck was very good, but it was only about 40% of the movie. And the Adrien Brody part was okay, but it just felt like an intrusion on a more interesting movie. Brody had his own plot, but it wasn't very compelling. It might have been more compelling if I hadn't been tapping my foot impatiently, but I doubt it. So what you're left with is a mystery with no resolution at all. Huh.

Guys and Dolls

2008-10-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

I really like Guys and Dolls. I'm a huge fan of Damon Runyon's stories, upon which the movie is based. But, and I admit this is weird, I don't really like a lot of the songs. I like musicals in general, but some of the songs here, especially the ones sung by Adelaide, are extremely annoying. So it's one of the only musicals where I like the dialogue a lot more than the songs.

Don't get me wrong; some of the songs are great. Although in this movie version, the casting is a little wonky. Marlon Brando plays Sky Masterson, who does a lot of singing. Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra is stuck in the patter role of Nathan Detroit. It seems like they could have been switched, although I have to admit that both do a good job in the roles they've got. Although Brando's songs were reportedly stitched together note by note, which takes away from the effect a bit.

Rogue

2008-10-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

Rogue is about a giant crocodile who eats a bunch of jerks. I probably would have liked it more if I had found the setting (the Australian outback) interesting. I didn't. Instead, I just got impatient for the people to start getting chomped.

This was also my problem with Descent. I prefer movies where I want the people to live, you know?

I Only Arksed!

2008-10-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

This movie is not very good and I didn't watch all of it. It's one of those terribly mid-twentieth-century British comedies with a lot of wackiness. The premise is that the worst soldiers in teh army are all sent to this one Arab country, and then you turn the movie off because when Michael Bentine is one of the subtler performers, you know you're in for a rough time.

I mean, seriously. "Arsked"?

Mr. Arkadin

2008-10-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

This is a movie that's more "interesting" than it is "good". Orson Welles made it by reusing a couple of scripts from his extremely entertaining radio series The Lives of Harry Lime, but it doesn't really hold together. Or make sense.

I'm pretty sure I understood the plot, which involved the titular Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles in an extremely silly beard and even sillier accent) hiring a guy to dig into his past, claiming that he has amnesia and wants to know where he came from. It's really just an excuse for various disreputable and colorful characters to tell stories about Arkadin's youth. If i had worked, it would have been like a seedy version of Citizen Kane, but it doesn't fly.

I watched the Criterion version, which has several different edits of the movie. Apparently Welles didn't get final cut, so the studio released a version that he despised. The Criterion version has three or four different cuts, but I don't think it makes any difference. It's an interesting failure, but that's still a failure.

One thing did interest me. There are a lot of scenes that involve a lot of chatting and expositioning, so the characters keep moving around to keep the scene visually interesting. It looks pretty tiring if you ask me, the way they keep circling each other like that. There's a boat scene in particular where the characters are flinging themselves back and forth like the Enterprise is under attack by Romulans.

Little Caesar

2008-09-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, so. Edward G. Robinson. If you recognize his name at all, you probably think of Bugs Bunny suddenly having big lips and saying "Listen here, you mugs! Mnnnyaaahhh, see! Mnnnnyaaahhh!" Police Chief Wiggum sounds a bit like him. I'm a bit ahead of the game because I've seen him in a couple of movies, like Double Indemnity. But I'd never seen him in the iconic gangster roles that made him worthy of Bugs Bunny. Hence Little Caesar, which played as a double feature with Public Enemy, in which James Cagney made being a sociopathic gangster look awesome.

Well, it turns out that Edward G. Robinson is pretty cool. He's more of a sociopath than Cagney's character, to the point where the other hardened gangsters are a little creeped out by how willing he is to whip out his gat and start gunning down anyone in his way. He's not quite as magnetic as Cagney, but that's just because he looks, well, weird. Really weird.

The other reason I wanted to see this movie was because it ends with "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" I've heard that line a lot and always thought it sounded really odd and forced. In context, it turns out that it sounds just as weird. Huh.

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising

2008-09-15T00:01:00.001-07:00

I liked the original The Gamers movie by Dead Gentlemen Productions (which is a little difficult to locate since there are several movies with that title and they're all about role-playing gamers), and I was delighted to learn that they were making a sequel. I learned about it kind of early because I work at the company that makes Dungeons & Dragons, and in fact work with one of the stars of the movie.

For that matter, I'm actually in this movie. There's a scene set in an office building and they needed extras. So if you look carefully, you'll see me. For example, here I am as a blurry figure in the background:

In that scene, I'm only visible for about three seconds. But on the plus side, I have a line of dialogue and someone says my character's name. That's not bad, right? It makes it a real character if you ask me. Then later on, I'm at a desk in the background during a ninja fight:

That's me on the right of the screen. I think. It probably is. As a bonus piece of trivia, I'm actually updating my old blog while the scene is being shot. So if you've ever watched a movie and thought "I wonder what that extra is typing," the answer is here. There are behind-the-scenes photos, too!

Okay, anyway. About the movie. I liked it a lot, and not just because I was in it. There are a lot of bits that are extremely funny if you've ever played D&D. And if you've played more RPGs, it's terrific. There are two references to Flying Buffalo products, which I assure you is an impressively narrow joke target.

It's a more professional operation than the first The Gamers. The sound is good (in that you can hear all the dialogue!) and the characters are well developed. Or at least exist. Look, if you're a gamer, you'll like it.

Dawn of the Dead

2008-08-27T00:01:00.001-07:00

This is the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. It's terrible. Don't watch it. Sarah Polley deserves a better movie to be her default credit on IMDB.

See, this is a rotten movie that's not rotten in a new way. In fact, it's rotten in all the same old ways. Plus, I saw the version on the Sci-Fi channel, which means one character's dialogue was almost completely muted.

Incidentally, this was directed by Zack Snyder, who went on to do 300 and Watchmen. I hope he's gotten better. Or at least more interesting. Because this was full of random closeups and slow-motion shots of shotgun shells bouncing off the ground. Feh.

The Cincinnati Kid

2008-08-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

I wanted this to be a much better movie. It's got Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Rip Torn, Cab Calloway, Joan Blondell -- it's just a ridiculously good cast. Oh! And Karl Malden, too. I love all those people! And I don't mind poker movies, either. But it didn't really cohere for me.

I think one problem I had was the realism. Not in the poker. I don't expect realism in poker scenes. But what's with the guys constantly spurning the advances of absurdly hot women? Tuesday Weld gets pushed away by Steve McQueen. Some very attractive woman (who's probably a prostitute) gets rejected by Rip Torn, who presumably already paid her to be naked in his bed in the first place. And Ann-Margret, who's just about as sexy a woman as you're likely to fine anywhere, gets rejected by both Steve McQueen and Karl Malden. If you ask me, Karl Malden has no business rejecting the amorous advances of a 1965-era Ann-Margret.

Don't get me wrong; the movie mostly works. Steve McQueen is very cool, Edward G. Robinson is a killer, and so on. But there were scenes (like the cockfighting scene) that just bored me.

The DVD has two special features that are both very dated. One is dated in a cool way: it's a 1965 featurette in which Joan Blondell learns to deal cards from a professional magician. It was quite enjoyable. The other one really dates the DVD, because it's commentary on the poker scenes from Phil Gordon... and Dave Foley. You might guess that this means that the DVD came out during their run of hosting "Celebrity Poker Showdown". And you'd be right! So if you enjoyed their schtick there (Gordon is kind of boring but knowledgeable, Foley is obviously drunk), here it is again.

Never Too Young to Die

2008-08-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

I realize I say I watch a lot of bad movies, and it's understandable if you don't necessarily believe me. You might think that some of the movies I watch might not be as bad as I say. On the other hand, you might wonder why, if these movies are so bad, I watch them.

Here's my philosophy: I think that anyone who watches only "good" movies is missing out on "awesome" movies. If you allow yourself to be constrained by standard conceptions of quality and competency, you're not giving yourself the chance to see truly visionary movies. Also, you miss out on terrible movies that are terrible in completely crazy ways. It is to this latter category that this movie belongs.

Okay, so it stars John Stamos, and it's 1986 so it's the year before "Full House". He plays Lance Stargrove (his theme song features '80s backup singers screaming "STAAAAARGROOOOVE!" from time to time), a college gymnast with a rich, mysterious father. His roommate is an Asian guy who randomly comes up with James Bondian gadgets even before the plot gets going. Unfortunately, he comes off less like Q and more like The Donger. The poofy yellow shirts with black suspenders don't help.

Lance (STAAAARGROOOOVE)'s father, George Lazenby (still technically a James Bond, although not much of one) dies in the line of some secret agenty stuff, and that means that Lance inherits an old farm, which is full of guns, secret rooms, and Vanity. You remember Vanity, right? She was like Appollonia, but slightly earlier. Or later. I forget which. My point is that she was one of those girls that Prince was always trying to promote. And here she's a hottie secret agent who shoots people and hangs out in a crazy biker bar where everyone rides their motorcycles right up to the bar inside the building and also has unicorn heads on the front of their cycles. And the motorcycles are these absurdly undersized things, like Yamaha 250s and like that.

Oh! And I left out the best part. The bad guy is Gene Simmons, overacting enormously. He's playing a hermaphrodite (...or something) named Velvet Van Ragnar, and there are times when it seems like he's trying to play Dr. Frank N. Furter. And those are his subtle moments. The scene where he tries to seduce John Stamos (!) is especially crazy. But not as crazy as this:

Okay, did you see that outfit he was wearing? It was originally made for Lynda Carter! She wore it in this number where she pretended to be singing with Kiss:

Again: That's a costume that Lynda Carter wore because it was kind of Kiss-like. And then Gene Simmons wore it. Not a copy; that's the actual Lynda Carter dress, although I assume they had to let it out a bit.

Anyway, here's another scene from Never Too Young to Die. People who don't watch bad movies are missing out on stuff like this!

Arsenic and Old Lace

2008-08-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

Normally, I get antsy when I have to watch Cary Grant being frantic and flustered (like in Bringing Up Baby). I much prefer him when he's suave and in-control (like in His Girl Friday). But even though a lot of this movie is composed of him being pop-eyed and shooting goofy looks at the camera, I still enjoy it a lot.

For one thing, he's got good reason to be freaking out. The stakes get raised frequently and crazy things continue to happen. For another, the crazy things are themselves entertaining. It's Peter Lorre again! And I think he actually gets away clean, which is always nice.

Also, I think the aunts are great. I know it's an easy gag to have nice old ladies cheerfully talking about killing people, but they're really good at it!

The Mask of Dimitrios

2008-08-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

Hey, Peter Lorre gets to play the lead in a movie! And he even gets to be the suave detective, instead of Mr. Moto. Well sort of suave. He's got a cigarette lighter in one scene, anyway.

This is fairly good mid-forties film noir, although I got impatient during some of the flashback scenes. The present day has Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre threatening each other and we're stuck in a flashback watching other people? That's crazy, man! I want more Lorre.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

2008-08-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

This was the second movie at the drive-in double feature (the first one was Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is just below this one, because I write these in the reverse order from the way you read them), and it was much worse. It's surprising how different two pulpy Brendan Fraser movies can be, really.

Basically, I disliked almost everything in this movie. The only thing I approved of was the way the characters seemed to have remembered the previous movies. A lot of times, you have a scene where people say "What? The mummy has come to life? Inconceivable! That's completely impossible, even though I've seen it happen several times before!" That happened fairly frequently in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where people were always saying things like "Oh, sure that guy cast a love spell on the student body. A likely story!" even though supernatural things were happening all the time. Mummy 3 avoids that. As soon as the Dragon Emperor starts coming to life, everyone is snapping into action and firing guns and so on. Good for them!

Unfortunately, things break down pretty much immediately so we have a pointless chase and the always-welcome sight of archaeologists destroying priceless artifacts. And there's a comic relief yak that's only in their for three stupid throwaway jokes.

I should mention that even bad movies are better at the drive-in, because it's fun to shout things at the screen and know that no one can hear you. Except the other people in your car, and they're probably shouting things too.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

2008-08-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

Ah, now this is the kind of movie they made drive-in theaters for! And it's just lucky for me that there's still one within driving distance, because that's where I got to see it.

Is it a "good" movie? Well, probably not. For one thing, there's a 3-D version, which means from time to time, something will fly at the camera for no real reason. The yo-yo scene in particular just exists so that people in the audience will jump in their seats. Except if you see it in a non-3-D setting, in which case you giggle and shout "3-D!" See, that's one of the advantages of watching a movie in your car; you're allowed to shout things if you want.

Actually, though, I enjoyed Journey to the Center of the Earth a lot. They didn't let the heartwarming family reunion stuff get in the way of the fun, and they wrapped up that stuff up pretty early. And the woman got to save the guys at least as much as she got saved. In fact, the scene where she shows up at the last second rowing a boat made from half a dinosaur skull is pretty kickass. I also liked the fact that the kid grabbed some valuable jewels and wasn't punished for it. In fact, they came in pretty handy! And Brendan Fraser handled his role pretty well. He doesn't look old enough to be a professor, but I guess it's possible.

I probably would have liked it better if the Jules Verne novel hadn't been an explicit part of the plot. But it was still quite enjoyable.

Blazing Saddles

2008-08-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

Up until last night, I'd never seen Blazing Saddles. And I don't want any guff about it, either. I suppose you've seen every movie ever made.

Anyway, I thought it was... okay. It certainly has laughs in it. But it didn't quite live up to the advance word, which was "greatest movie ever". My primary complaint is that Bart's character is a complete cypher. I never got any sense of how he felt about being sheriff for a town full of jerks. He never even seemed that bothered about getting hanged. He just took whatever silliness the plot presented and did what he was supposed to.

I know, complaining about character motivation in a movie most famous for its legendary Fart Scene is a little off the point. But it just kind of bugged me. Strangely, I didn't much mind the way the movie completely falls apart at the end, possibly because I love Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which has a rotten ending too.

Be Kind Rewind

2008-08-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes a movie's advertising campaign will give away every detail of the plot? Well, this movie's campaign revealed every detail of the middle part of the movie. The actual plot was left completely alone, but the whole deal with Jack Black and Mos Def recreating movies? Man, we saw the heck out of that. The poster features them and nothing else.

And to be fair, it is my favorite part of the movie. I think it looks like a lot of fun to take a random movie and have one day to shoot it by any means necessary. I'd be totally up for some sort of competition of that sort, you know? Anyway, the actual plot of the movie appears to have something to do with a neighborhood being uprooted, but there's not much of an ending to that. And there's also a video store that's apparently having trouble adapting from VHS to DVD, but it looks like a really tiny video store. Charming, sure, but the lack of DVDs is not its main problem. I would say that the main difficulty comes from the fact that the've only got about forty movies and no customers. Apparently they've never made twenty dollars in a day before.

Jack Black is fine in this. He's not as high-energy as he can sometimes be, but I'd still like to see him do a whole movie without scatting. I was pretending at one point that he was playing the same character as in High Fidelity. Remember when he was a supporting actor? Wasn't that nice?

The Dark Knight

2008-07-18T23:05:00.000-07:00

I hated The Dark Knight. I didn't buy Heath Ledger's performance for a second, Batman's "deep, scary" voice just made me roll my eyes, and all I could think about when Two-Face showed up was that he really shouldn't be able to make an "Mmm" sound with no lips. Also, isn't that eyeball going to dry out?

But I'm not going to go into it. I'm not even going to list the two times I thought "That right there was the stupidest thing I've ever seen in a movie." I'll just say this: I went into the movie already hating it. I had been barraged by people telling me that it was the greatest movie ever (Ever!) and that it was the best adaptation of a comic book, and so on. The hype was overwhelming and before the movie even started, I was sick to death of it. I had to force myself to go, and if I had not seen it on Friday night, I probably would never have gone at all.

So, since I realize that everyone else in the world (or at least, "everyone else on the Internet and also everyone at my workplace") loved it, I'm offering you a deal. Don't tell me how great it is, and I won't tell you how much I hated it. If you don't talk about it, I won't.

Okay?

Chained Heat II

2008-07-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

It's not often you get a movie that's sleazy, exploitative, and really, really boring.

The main reason I wanted to watch this was because I somehow got the idea that Brigitte Nielsen was playing the ingenue, like Linda Blair did in the first one. That sounded really weird, but it turns out she's really the warden, who struts around in tailored suits and stuff. That sounds more like her kind of role right? So once I established that, the movie was a long slog through a slightly more softcore take on the same things that happened in the first movie. Somebody really likes the sight of women putting on white cotton panties.

I would like to praise the work of Bobo, the transvestite painter. The actor playing Bobo apparently thought he was in a real movie, although the movie he had in mind was a comedy spy spoof or something. I don't really know what he was doing, but at least he was trying something.

By the way, Brigitte Nielsen is a terrible actress.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

2008-07-13T23:20:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to love this movie, and I didn't. I mean, I liked it, I think. But I didn't love it unreservedly. And now that I'm home and thinking about it, there are more and more things that are bugging me about it. This is going to be one of those things where I talk about things that happened in the movie. So if you haven't seen it yet and that sort of thing bugs you, you should probably stop reading.

Anyway, take the ending. After the plot gets dealt with, Hellboy, Abe Sapien, Liz, and the ectoplasmic Nazi file out of the cave, and then they all tell Jeffrey Tambor to take this job and shove it. Take that, The Man! And the ectoplasmic Nazi (with the voice of the fish from American Dad) references his ghost penis. The weird thing is that there has been no foreshadowing of this. At all. I guess we're just supposed to hate Tambor on principle because he's an authority figure? But I didn't even know these guys hated their job, and then they're all of a sudden walking out. I'm surprised they didn't close the movie by high-fiving in freeze-frame. And in one scene, the ectoplasmic Nazi is an officious German who insists that everyone follow all the rules, and then he's suddenly all "Voo-hoo! Let's steal a plane!" The whole thing comes out of nowhere, and I found it a really unsatisfying ending.

My theory is that this ending was tacked on after people found the actual ending of the plot kind of a downer, what with Abe Sapien's newfound love suddenly dying like that. That bugged me too. When a movie sets up a dilemma (Hellboy must defeat teh prince, but if he hurts the prince, the princess also gets hurt! What will he do?) and then resolves it (answer: pummel the prince, but not kill him, thus saving the princess!) it feels like a cheat to immediately kill off the princess anyway. She could have just cut her own hamstrings at the beginning of the battle, thus crippling the prince and saving us all a fight scene. By the way, have you noticed that ever since The Matrix, you can't have a battle without someone leaning way back in a limbo pose to avoid something and then running along a wall? I guess maybe Abe quit because he was mad that he's not allowed to have a love interest?

Anyway, there were a couple of other scenes that bugged me (the introduction with an annoying kid who was far less interesting than Ron Perlman and the drinking that went on forever), but I'm not sure they made me hate the movie. I really loved the sets, for example. Rhias and I kept nudging each other and pointing to shoggoths in the background. And both the library and the troll market were fascinating. I might actually have preferred this movie if the main characters had been removed so that I could get a better look at the stuff in the background. And I liked a lot of the little things, like the line "I'm not a kid! I'm a tumor!"

I just wish I liked the movie itself more, you know?

Out for Justice

2008-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

I think at this point I may have seen enough Steven Seagal movies for one month. This is the one where William Forsythe kills a cop and then drives around a neighborhood being crazy and killing people. At one point, there is an excellent fight in a butcher shop, in which Mr. Seagal bonks someone with an enormous sausage. You don't have to be Fellini to figure that one out.

Above the Law

2008-07-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

I watched this a week ago. I mean, I originally watched it back when it first came out, and I thought it was great. That was back in 1988, when new action stars were popping up all over the place. I still remember the ad for 1991's The Perfect Weapon, which claimed that Jeff Speakman was the future of action or something. It turned out he wasn't. Seagal looked great back then. Aikido looks cool. And then I watched it again a week ago and still liked it. That's about all I can remember, really. I'm beginning to think that terrible New York accent is how Steven Seagal really talks.

By the way, I don't think you can read it at this size, but the movie poster actually says "He's a cop with an attitude" on it. Yes, kids, there was a time when you could say that with a straight face.

Chained Heat

2008-07-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

Yeah, you heard me. Chained. Heat. Linda Blair and Sybil Danning. Women in Prison. Or as the advertising tagline would have it, "2000 women, stripped of all they had, except the will to survive." I should point out that there are actually only about thirty women who actually appear on screen. Although there are allegedly tensions between the White Girl Gang and the Black Girl Gang, we only see two African-American inmates, one of whom gets killed pretty quickly. The remaining one, the Dutchess, is played by Tamara Dobson, who was Cleopatra Jones, though. So she's got a pretty strong presence. There's also an entire Latino gang we never see any actual evidence of.

It's a really poorly run prison, in my opinion. The inmates apparently get to wander around wherever they want, even in the middle of the night. And the warden's office contains both a bed (with leather sheets) and a jacuzzi. Oh, and a stuffed mountain lion with glowing eyes. And then there are the sadistic rapist guards, but that's just the sort of thing you have to expect in a movie like this. With all that going on, you wouldn't expect quite so much frolicking, but I guess even hardened criminals like to splash each other in the shower.

The plot is pretty much by the numbers: young, nubile Carol (Linda Blair) goes to jail and gets caught up in the whirl of elaborate drug rings, lesbians, and riots. Actually, the only riot in the movie is organized by Carol herself, but that's after she gets raped, goes to solitary, and becomes Tough and Hard, as indicated by her development of a New York accent.

I saw the movie the way you're supposed to: as a midnight (really 11:00 pm) showing at a tiny movie house in the neighborhood. It was a good crowd, because there was a lot of laughter during the movie. Somewhere in the 25 years since it was made, it turned into a comedy

Now, let's talk about Chained Heat sequels. You're not going to believe some of this nonsense! Note that I haven't actually seen any of these movies myself. Yet.

First, there's Chained Heat II from 1993. It stars Brigitte Nielsen, so I have to assume they're skipping past the "young and nubile" stage and jumping the protagonist straight to "tough as nails revenger". It takes place in "a Czech prison, where the sadistic warden and guards rape and perform bizarre sex acts on the prisoners" according to IMDB. The director is Lloyd A. Simandi, who will direct many more of these sequels. For some reason, his company is called "North American Pictures", although he does most of his work in Europe. Weird.

Next: 1998's Hell Mountain, also called Chained Heat 3: The Horror of Hell Mountain. Also shot in the Czech Republic, it's set in Apocalyptical Times, where someone named Stryker keeps women as slaves to work in his mines. There's also something about "the last professor on Earth". This was remade as Rage of the Innocents in 2000, but it appears to have been one of those "remakes" that includes a lot of footage from the first movie.

Now here's where it gets weird. The next movie is Chained Rage: Slave to Love, which is apparently mostly made of footage shot for Rage of the Innocents (which itself was largely made out of Hell Mountain footage). IMDB doesn't list it as an alternate title, but the image it shows is called "Bound Heat: Chained Rage". And there's no plot synopsis, so I don't know what happens in it. At this point, we're looking at sequels to Forgotten Rage, but we'll get back to Chained Heat in a few paragraphs.

Next up, something called either "Dakota Bound" or "White Slave Lovers", in which a plague kills everyone on earth except for twenty women from a private school. There are no characters named "Dakota", and I'm getting increasingly skeptical about this chain (ha!) of movies.

Cries of Innocence at least sounds sort of related to the previous movies, since a small group of women are enslaved by the controllers of the only source of water that isn't plague-ridden. It's also called Forgotten Rage: White Slave Secrets, so it's got the names of two previous movies in it.

Finally (in this series) we get to Bound Cargo, from 2003. Apparently women are on the run from soldiers and are taken in by a lonely widow, and soft-core hijinx ensue.

Okay! Now let's rewind a bit. Remember Chained Heat 3: The Horror of Hell Mountain? There was also Dark Confessions, which was marketed as Chained Heat III: No Holds Barred. I don't know what happens in it, but the IMDB Plot Keywords are "W.i.p." (women in prison, makes sense), "Falsely Convicted" (typical, although I'll point out that Linda Blair's character was actually guilty in the first one), "Lesbian" (no surprise), "Monastery" (really?) and "Prostitution Ring". And apparently sexual slavery is involved at some point.

Now, there are sequels to Dark Confessions, which are therefore also sequels to Chained Heat. We start with The Final Victim, which has a boarding school with a lesbian warden. It's also called "Bound Heat: Tears at Dawn" and "Girl Camp 2003: Chained Vengeance". Next, Girl Camp 2004: Lesbian Fleshpots, IMDB says "A woman infiltrates a factory producing subservient young women in order to steal from its bank account," and I can't possibly improve on that.

Finally (for now), we get Chained Fury: Lesbian Slave Desires. The only interesting thing about this one is that one of its Plot Keywords is "Czechploitation".

So there you go! Those sequels were all produced by Lloyd A. Simandi, including both of the Chained Heat 3 movies. He also made a series of "Medieval Fleshpot" movies, if you're curious.

Oh! There's also a spot wheree someone says to Linda Blair that something will happen "so fast it will make your head spin". It seems like someone should have realized that it's hard to say that to Linda Blair without reminding the audience of The Exorcist.

Wanted

2008-07-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

I'd say Wanted was about 80% stupid and about 30% awesome. I realize that's more than 100%, because some things can be stupid and awesome at the same time. But for most of the time, Wanted was just stupid. The main character? Stupid. And whiny. Really, really whiny. Even after Angelina Jolie shows up, he still spends an unpleasant amount of time bleating about "What's happening? Ahhhhhh!" and so on. When the most annoying person in your movie is protagonist, that's a bad sign.

It's my theory that the most talented person involved with the movie was the Second Assistant Director. That's the guy who's usually responsible for the stunts, and those were the best part of the movie. The script? Rotten, not to mention completely implausible. Seriously, the backstory of this movie is even less plausible than the one in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. It involves something about ancient weavers discovering random threads in their fabric, figuring out that they represent a binary code, and then translating them into people's names. And then killing those people. Somehow, this gives them super powers.

Having just watched both movies, I feel qualified to make this statement: Wanted is like The Matrix, but less realistic and without the philosophy. Both movies have a scene where somebody jumps across a street from one high-rise to another, but Wanted doesn't even try to justify it. The curving bullets are only the beginning of the nonsense.

I will say that Angelina Jolie is great. I've read that her character used to have a lot more dialogue, but she kept asking to have her lines taken away so she could just smile mysteriously. She's good at that sort of thing. Also, it must be nice to have a role where none of her tattoos have to be covered up for a change. And I really liked her final scene, which was pretty satisfying.

Unlike the rest of the movie.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

2008-07-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I was pretty sure this movie would be ludicrous, and it was. Does that mean it's not fair of me to complain about some of the, um, ludicrosity? Because it really is just completely unconvincing and doesn't bear a second of scrutiny.

So here's the backstory. This is all the stuff that happened before the movie starts. First, there's Cibola, the fabled City of Gold. That turns out to be in South Dakota, even though the movie says it's either Aztec, Mayan, or Olmec. At some point, Queen Victoria -- no, wait. That's not right. I think what happened is that someone (we don't know who) buried it under a mountain and built incredibly elaborate counterweights and things. As you do. Then the guy who made the Statue of Liberty knew about it somehow and hid a couple of Aztec (or Mayan or Olmec) planks in a couple of desks, then put a reference to that on one of his statues. Then Queen Victoria, who knew about it from some other means, sent a coded message to the Confederate army, who didn't do anything about it until after the war was over. Then John Wilkes Booth and some buddies went to a cryptographer (who hung out in a bar all day hoping someone would bring him a puzzle), who started to decode it and then burned the pages from Booth's diary.

And then we jump to the present day and Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren, and a couple of other people work through the riddles. My question is: when you have a fabulous treasure, what's the point of doing all this? First you hide it so no one will ever find it, and then you write an elaborate riddle telling people where it is? And then you write another riddle pointing people to that riddle? And then repeat a few times? If you want to hide it, stop putting coded directions everywhere; what are you, the Riddler? Conversely, if you want people to know where it is, just tell them! Just say "It's under that giant mountain over there!"

Marked for Death

2008-07-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

The Seagalogical investigations continue! Most people remember this movie, if at all, as the one with the Jamaican Voodoo Bad Guys. I remember it as the first time I realized just how much Steven Seagal hates glass. In all of his movies, he throws people through windows and stuff, but in this one, he actually goes out of his way to break all the glass he can see. There's a fight in a jewelry store, and he methodically takes a thug's head and smashes each display case one at a time. If I were the owner of the store, I'd object to that sort of behavior.

In fact, I object to a lot of Seagal's behavior. He's an ex-cop, but I don't think that quite justifies a gunfire-filled high-speed chase down the middle of a busy street that ends by smashing both cars through a storefront. And I'm not sure how he got that severed head back through customs, either.

The Matrix

2008-07-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

I just read The Full Burn, by Kevin Conley. It's about the world of stunts and stuntmen, but it wasn't as great as I was hoping it was going to be. I think my main objection was that it was really short, and that about a third of it was stuff I already knew from watching Double Dare. The chapter about Zoe Bell was still interesting, because the author was on the set of Death Proof, but it still spent a lot of time telling me how cool she is. I already knew that, thank you!

Anyway, there's a lot of discussion of driving stunts, and specifically the motorcycle riding in The Matrix Reloaded. And that got me to thinking, maybe I've never really given the second and third Matrix movies a real chance. So, since I was lounging around all day with nothing to do, I figured I'd watch all three of them in a row. That didn't actually happen, but I did get around to rewatching the first one.

It feels kind of dated already, of course. The washed-out green color scheme led to a great many washed out movies, and the bullet time (which, I feel obligated to point out, first showed up in Kill and Kill Again) also isn't as groundbreaking as it used to be. Still, it's a great looking movie. There are a lot of really neat shots and fun action scenes. And there's the vaguely philosophical overtones, which on reflection appear to be a mish-mash of Buddhism, Plato, and fairly obvious Christ symbolism. And you know what? That's fine with me. I have no objection to movies with awesome action scenes and set pieces, vague philosophy to tie it together, and sex-ay people in tight latex. I'd like more movies like that, in fact.

Keanu Reeves is fine in this movie. He's supposed to look dumbfounded and befuddled the whole time, and that's well within his range. I find I like him best when he's playing a vacuous idiot, like in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and arguably Dangerous Liaisons.

Under Siege

2008-07-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

Hey, why not watch one of Steven Seagal's good movies? This totally holds up, and it's interesting to compare it to Die Hard\. It obviously hits several of the same notes, but it's not just a straight rehash. The stakes are bigger and the explosions are larger, so it makes sense that the hero has more killing power.

The villainy is top-notch, too. It's not quite Alan Rickman, but Tommy Lee Jones does a fine job and seems to be enjoying himself a lot. And Gary Busey makes a lot out of a role that I think is just "comedic bumbling henchman" on the page. I think this movie's absolutely fine. I enjoyed it the first time I saw it, and I enjoyed it this time too.

WALL·E

2008-06-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

WALL·E is an incredibly sweet film. That's "sweet" as in "Awwwww!" not as in "Dude, that movie was totally frickin' sweet! High five!" I thought I should make that clear. The first thing to do is to realize that the humans are the subplot. Sure, there's something about the future of humanity and some environmental themes, as well as a certain amount of "get outside and exercise", but that's all secondary to the real plot: a love story between two robots. WALL·E is a robot that's gone crazy from centuries of being alone, and he's turned into a romantic. When EVE shows up, it takes him awhile, but he wears down her programming and turns her into a romantic too. When he's let loose on people, he has the same effect on them.

That's why I don't care that much about whether the people are successful at the end of the movie (my guess is that they're not). The important thing is that they have a dream now. But the really important thing is that WALL·E and EVE are together. Awwwww!

Also, the "Presto" short before it might be my favorite Pixar short ever. It's very funny, and it successfully walks the line of having a trickster character (in this case, an adorable bunny) that plays pranks but stays likable and sympathetic.

Seagalogy: On Deadly Ground

2008-06-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I have been reading Seagalogy, which is just a fantastic book. It sounds like a stunt, because who would really want to watch every Steven Seagal movie, let alone write a book about them? But it turns out that this isn't one of those "snark" books, possibly because that wold be too easy. No, it's an actual critical study, examining the themes that link together all of Seagal's movies.

The theory is that while it's more common to look at all of a director's movies, when you have an iconic actor like Seagal, you can consider his movies as a group. And it's true! Seagalogy starts with his early (great) movies like Above the Law and Hard to Kill, and points out that in the first few movies, a big deal is made out of how his characters traveled to Japan to learn aikido, but after that the movies just accept it and move on. There's also some great examination of which characters have Shadowy CIA Pasts, and the many ways that are found to have characters talk about how awesome Seagal is. It's a really great book, even if you don't care about Steven Seagal. I strongly recommend it. And I can't emphasize this enough: it's neither gratuitously mean nor slavishly fannish. The review of Seagal's band is insightful and sympathetic. And hilarious!

So, having read it, we naturally felt like we wanted to see some Steven Seagal movies. You know, now that we're fully versed in the man's ouevre. Unless that means "eggs".

On Deadly Ground

This is an extremely Seagally movie. It's the only one he directed himself, and it's actually one of the only two with explicit environmental themes. And he goes around in a silly fringed buckskin jacket blowing things up and humiliating Mike Starr in a bar scene suspiciously similar to the one in Billy Jack. It's a lot of fun in a weird way, because although I liked it, I never felt like I liked the main character. He's a big bully, if you ask me. And the end, where he tortures and kills Michael Caine, is pretty cold-blooded.

And then there's a four-minute Environmental Speech at the end. Apparently it was originally eleven minutes, and it is a crime against humanity that the original cut isn't available somewhere. It's pretty dull as it is, and that's why I didn't go see Al Gore's movie, which is pretty much the same thing except with Powerpoint. In my experience, Powerpoint very rarely improves things.

From the guys who brought you...

2008-06-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Step Brothers is being billed as "From the guys who brought you Talladega Nights." And Pineapple Express is being billed as "From the guys who brought you Superbad." My question is: Do they think we'll like them more if they're just "guys" instead of "writer/director/media moguls"?

Let's take the Step Brothers team first. It's got the same billed director (Adam McKay) and writers (Adam McKay and Will Ferrell) as Talladega Nights. But doesn't everyone just assume that 90% of that movie was improvised? I mean, for Anchorman, they had so much "unused footage" that they were able to just edit together a whole second movie. At this point, the movie-going public has decided how they feel about the unending barrage of Will Ferrell movies, and I don't think anyone really cares who the director is. The only question anyone has is "Is this another Stranger than Fiction, or is it more of the same stuff? They might as well just advertise it with the tagline "John C. Reilly has decided it's more lucrative being in movies like this than being a real actor!". Meanwhile, Pineapple Express does have the same writers as Superbad, but the director's new.

Really, it turns out that "The guys who brought you" both of the previous movies were part of the Judd Apatow Squad. He produced Talladega Nights, you know. And Anchorman. And 40 Year Old Virgin and Walk Hard. He's not exactly an outsider, you know? He's got three or four movies every year, and all the hipsters still think of him as "the guy who made Freaks and Geeks, which was cancelled tragically early." We're not talking about Joss Whedon here. Judd Apatow is so hot that he's got two ad campaigns for two movies simultaneously that brag about two different movies he made. His track record is so good that he can pick and choose what to play up. He can make Seth Rogen a matinee idol!

All I'm saying is that once your movies have made you billions and billions of dollars, maybe you're no longer "the guys".

Dog Day Afternoon

2008-06-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

Hey, this really is a good movie! I'd always heard that it was, and I was quite pleased that it lived up to the claims. Al Pacino is really good as a bank robber who's out of his depth almost immediately. And John Cazale (Fredo from the Godfather movies -- did you know that he was only in five features and all five of them were nominated for Best Picture?) is great.

It's very much a movie of the 1970s, and I mean that in the best possible way. You don't see movies on this kind of film stock anymore, you know?

Oh, and this is one of many classic movies of the era that I mostly recognize from the Mad Magazine parody. It seems like an odd movie to show up in Mad, now that I think about it.

High School Musical

2008-06-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

All right, let me explain. See, I've got these season tickets to the local theater's "Broadway in Seattle" series, largely so I could see Avenue Q (which was this week and was terrific) and Spring Awakening (which is next month and sounds like fun). The season tickets came with some shows that I wasn't specifically interested in but had some curiosity about. Last month, the play was High School Musical: the Touring Stage Show. And I didn't like it at all. In fact, we snuck out at intermission to go watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But I was still curious about High School Musical. I mean, it's hugely popular, so there must be a reason, right?

Well, I didn't actually enjoy it that much, but then I'm not the target audience. I did see a lot of things that made it better than the stage show. For example, the play skipped the opening scene where we learn that Troy and Gabriella can sing. That seems like a fairly important plot point, but they threw it away on stage. Basically, all the songs were better in the movie because they weren't all sung by the entire cast at the same time. I mean, they still weren't all that good, and I'm pretty sure the musical-within-the-movie is going to be terrible (it's called "Twinkle Towne", for one thing), but I could at least see why people would like this.

I do object strongly to the ending, in which the mean drama kids seem to completely repent their previous behavior and even get to sing along during the final song. That's ridiculous! During the big happy ending song, the bad guys are supposed to sit sullenly in the corner covered in pie. I know how these things go!

Harriet Craig

2008-06-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Very little happens in this movie. Almost nothing, in fact. Basically, Joan Crawford acts cruel and insane for an hour and a half until her husband finds out how much she's been lying about everything. Then he goes to Japan and the movie's over. i wasn't all that into it, but there are worse things in the world than watching Joan Crawford play a domineering wife.

This movie was produced by William Dozier before he did the "Batman" television series. I think that's kind of interesting.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

2008-05-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

This is a surprisingly fun movie, and I don't even mean that in a "Haw haw haw! Lookit the crappy special effects! Hee-yuk!" way.

I'm convinced it's a comedy, or at least the parts with Bill Moseley are. The whole setup that Leatherface and his family have is way too complicated to be taken seriously even for a minute. And the movie even had Joe Bob Briggs in it, at least until his scene got cut out.

Don't get me wrong. It's not a "good" movie, and you have to be in the right kind of mood for it. But I had a lot of fun watching it. Most enjoyable.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-05-23T21:43:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed the new Indiana Jones movie a lot. I enjoyed it enough that calling it an Indiana Jones movie doesn't feel like a lie. It had action, quips, and ridiculously complex booby traps in ancient temples (which I've always enjoyed). I didn't mind She-Ra LaBeef, and I actively approved of Cate Blanchett and her silly accent.

Were there things that made me roll my eyes? Of course there were. But I did not mind them because I was enjoying myself. Steven Spielberg still knows how to put together an entertaining movie, you know?

I didn't find the Big Thing At The End as jarring as some people apparently did. It's a little like the rain of frogs in Magnolia -- there were things that foreshadowed it and made it not come out of left field, but you have to have done the right reading to pick up on it.

I am a little annoyed by the Internet's new tendency to blame everything they don't like on George Lucas. Listen, I think Spielberg's a big enough boy that he can get his own way from time to time. Lucas didn't even write the screenplay; David Koepp did. I feel kind of bad for George Lucas at this point. You're telling me the man who created Star Wars and co-created Indiana Jones is the Internet's least favorite movie-maker? Really? That's rough.

But back to the movie: I liked the older Indiana Jones character. He was a bit more professorial and a little slower to action. He's suspiciously indestructible, which might be due to drinking from the Holy Grail in the last movie, but he's still Indy and that's good enough for me.