January Recap

Here's the rundown on what I watched this month:

Remo Williams
A Perfect Getaway
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
District 9
Dead Bang
Patriot Games
National Treasure 2
Extract
Valley Girl
Point Blank
Payback
The Invention of Lying
Gladiator (1992)
Funny Games
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
The Hurt Locker
The Postman
Cavegirl
Julie and Julia
The Fugitive
Coach
Surrogates
Jocks
Edge of Darkness
My Tutor
Zombieland (review coming)
Tomboy (review coming)

Holy shit! I watched a lot of movies in January.

The best:
Edge of Darkness
The Hurt Locker
Dead Bang

The worst:
Cavegirl (everything else looks decent next to this)

Review // MY TUTOR - Cherry poppin' in the 80's

Now I'm 4 films into the Too Cool For School Collection.



My Tutor is another airy slice of 80's Teensploitation that much like Coach, deals with an affair between a horny teenaged boy and older, more experienced woman.





The setup is simple, Bobby is horny and desperately looking to lose his virginity before going to college in the fall. Which college he goes to depends on acing a remedial French course for which his wealthy father has procured him a tutor. His tutor is a hot, sophisticated chick. She tutors him in French, but more importantly, in screwing.

The opening credits, set to a totally bumping disco song, let you know exactly what kind of movie you're about to see:



Nice!

Bobby, the tutee, is played by someone named Matt Latanzi, a total 80's hearthrobby type, albeit with a hilariously girly voice. Turns out he was also in Xanadu where he met and married Olivia Newton John and who now lives off-the-grid in a tee pee he built himself. No shit, a tee pee! Half the fun of this whole Too Cool For School Collection is researching all the various players and what they did prior to these movies and since. It's a fun OCD nerd exercise for me. For instance, at one point Matt Latanzi fantasizes about fucking this gorgeous girl in a telephone booth. That gir,l who goes completely nude and has no lines, turns out to be Jewel Shepherd who appeared as the blue-haired punk chick in Return of the Living Dead (one of my favourite movies) and who now does the horror convention circuit where she lets random strangers touch her tits for photos. Do I need to know this? No. Am I glad I know this? Yes, yes I am.

When we meet Bobby, he and his friends are going to a whore house in order to rid themselves of their dreaded cherry's. One of the friends is played by a very young, fresh faced Crispin Glover. Aside from some TV, this was Glover's first movie role and anyone that thinks his oddball persona is an affectation can look no further than this movie, where all this freako mannerisms are in place and he's wearing wardrobe that could only have been selected by himself. My Tutor was made in 1983 and in 1985 Glover was playing nerd patriarch George McFly in Back to the Future. When you see him in this, Glover seems really, really young and yet just 2 years later he was quite believably playing Michael J. Fox's father.

Anyway, the trip to the whorehouse is a failure after Bobby falls asleep on the impossibly busty Kitty Natividad and Glover is chased around by a crazed S&M madame. Bobby starts moping, figuring he'll never lose his virginity, which is kinda implausible since he seems like he's 25 and he looks like the pretty boy from Xanadu. Enter Caren Kaye who is hired to live in their guest house and tutor Bobby in his French. After secretly watching her skinny dip in their pool a few times (despite the pool being in the family's backyard, she's constantly skinny dipping) he becomes fixated with his tutor. It isn't long before Bobby's getting tutored in French (well, off screen 'cause neither actor can speak any French) as well as the ways of the bedroom.

Much like Coach, the other movie in this collection that deals with boys fucking their superiors, no big hoopla erupts around this affair between Bobby and his considerably older tutor. Bobby's father even finds out about it and still it isn't milked for any drama or third act conflict. It makes me think that our cultures current obsession with all things "Cougar" is actually the by-product of a much more conservative moral climate, not the opposite. The image of an older woman sleeping with a younger man seems a much more provocative idea today than as it's presented in these 80's films. In Coach and My Tutor, the idea of a younger man wanting to sleep with an older woman and vice versa is just a given and doesn't even need to be explained.

Review // ZOMBIELAND - Is it too much to ask for some zombies?

I'm a zombie nut from way back. I grew up watching Romero's Dead Trilogy, and re-watching it, and analyzing it and eventually making it highschool English thesis project. I've thought long and hard about the ins and outs of this horror scenario as created by the legend Romero, and copied endlessly ever since. As a zombie nut, I eagerly anticipate new entries into the genre, and yet oddly enough, Zombieland isn't a film directed towards me or my kind.

Zombieland is a horror-comedy that would much rather be a comedy and as a result neglects the horror element to such a degree that it completely recedes into the background and almost disappears. The movie's not called Funnyland, so I don't think the fact that it's a comedy excuses it from failing to develop the horror base with which to launch its jokey premise. When you put the word "zombie" in your title, you create a certain expectation. When you follow "zombie" with "land" your viewers are naturally going to expect to see a land full of zombies, not a bunch of two-shots of people exchanging snarky barbs without a care in the world. To this end, Zombieland feels like a quick cash-in on the zombie-craze, and not an entry made by people with any particular affinity for the genre.

Zombieland's premise is pretty simple, in fact, I can almost guess the elevator pitch used to sell it to the studio: "Woody Allen and Woody Harrelson from Natural Born Killers team up to survive the zombie apocalypse". When you say it like that, it doesn't sound half bad. And it isn't bad, it's just not that good either. It starts off with a super stylized, super slo-mo credit sequence of zombie attacks, which ends up looking like a Korn video directed by David Fincher. It's pretty, I must say, but the zombie action kinda peaks there. This eye-catching credit sequence (set to Metallica I think) hypes you up for a balls-to-the-wall blood fest, but unfortunately the movie never delivers on this promise. It's not that Zombieland doesn't do anything right, it certainly generates some laughs in spots and has its fun with film speeds, but all the jokes and slo-mo in the world can't make up for an almost total lack of story.

Jesse Eisenberg, the actor standing in the hunched, thin shadow of Michael Cera, plays the young Woody Allen-ish phobia-nerd who teams up with Woody Harrelson's more mellowed version of the gun-toting psychopath he played Natural Born Killers. It's the kind of unlikely pairing that movies are made of, and it clicks for the most part. When this duo encounters grifter sisters played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, they become a survivalist team facing down the apocalypse. The problem is that none of these characters really develop past their one-line descriptions and the apocalypse in question seems like an afterthought and doesn't really appear to be too tough to survive. There isn't enough conflict or excitement and the characters in the middle of it aren't all that interesting so all your left with are the jokes.

I'd say Zombieland is a 60/40 split between funny and not funny. Eisenberg's phobia's in the face of extinction count towards the 60, and offer something unique to the genre--an explanation for why a certain type of person might be predisposed towards surviving. However, Woody's endless bleating about twinkies becomes a dead horse joke that the film beats into the unfunny 40% split and is evidence of when the films sense of humour dips. Oddly enough, the most talked about thing in the movie is the surprise cameo of Bill Murray. It's cute and knowing, but this joke takes up around 20 minutes of screen time and that's another long stretch of zombie-less inaction that helps to sink this movie as a horror-comedy. In this cgi-driven era I fully expected Zombieland to break out the wideshots, bubbling with hundreds of digital undead extras. The fact that such a shot never appears is a somewhat shocking ommission. Where are the fucking zombies, where is the action? A final siege at an amusement park is underwhelming and too-little-too-late.

As a Friday night rental, you could do a lot worse than Zombieland. But if it seems like I'm maybe riding this movie a little too hard, its because I think genre entertainment on the whole has taken a huge nosedive over the last decade and Zombieland is yet another film that fails to capitalize on a premise that actually doesn't seem all that hard to nail. Shaun of the Dead is an obvious reference for this film, but it's not nearly as funny and definitely not reverent of the genre enough to connect with horror nerds. Return of the Living Dead manages to deal in black humour without ever losing sight of its horror roots. Zombieland doesn't really have an excuse.

Review // EDGE OF DARKNESS - Kiss the dildo

I found this one because of my excitement over Mel Gibson's return to gun-wielding in the upcoming Edge of Darkness movie. Turns out its a remake of a BBC mini-series from '85, also directed by Martin Campbell. I figure I'd check it out and get ready for the Mel version, but after devouring this superb 6-hour thriller I no longer have much hope that the new Edge of Darkness will be fit to kiss the old Edge of Darkness' dildo. Kissing dildos? I'll get to that.

Ronald Craven, played with intense burning eyes by Bob Peck (the "clever girl" raptor food guy from Jurassic Park) is an inspector with the Yorkshire police. On a rainy night, he picks up his college-aged daughter Emma from a political rally and they are ambushed on the steps of their home by a crazed gunman. The man shouts Craven's name, but then Emma runs forward and is shot and killed. Understandably, Craven's life falls apart in that instant and all that is left is the ache of grief and a rage that sets him upon singular path of revenge.

Craven has a lot of enemies, men he has put away. He believes the gunman was after him and Emma just got in the way, so do his superiors in the police force, who run up a list of potential enemies from Craven's past. But as he wanders through his daughters empty room in a daze of grief, touching her things and breathing in her scent, he discovers something strange. And he does something even stranger.

First the really strange thing. He is trying to soak up what remains of his beloved daughter, holding her childhood teddy bear, smelling her clothes. As he sits on her bed, Craven opens the drawer of Emma's bedside table and discovers her dildo which he holds up an eyes with surprise. It's a genuine moment, a realistic discovery that a father might make in a similar situation. It makes him realize that his little girl, was after all a woman, and not a little girl at all. What does he do next? He kisses the dildo. HE KISSES HIS DEAD DAUGHTERS DILDO. When this happened my brain basically exploded and I had to pause the movie and collect myself. It was very tough to recover from this small, but utterly fucked up and perplexing act. I thought I knew exactly what I was watching when I pressed PLAY on the DVD, but all that went out the window when lips met vibrator. I had a hard time understanding the characters motivations for that act, but chalked it up to extreme grief and after some considerable head-scratching, was able to recover. It's not that I was disgusted or creeped out by the act, it's that I just didn't understand what was going on in the heads of the writer/director/actor that led to that bizarre dramatic choice. I guess you could say it took me out of the movie for a few minutes. I've since learned that I wasn't alone in my reaction, and that Craven kissing the dildo is an infamous moment in British TV.



Ok, now the strange thing that Craven discovers besides his lack of parental boundaries, is a geiger-counter and some radiation gauges among Emma's pamphlets from Gaia, an anti-nuke, eco-conscious political organization she belonged to. He also finds a gun. When he holds the Geiger-counter up it begins crackling to life. Craven pulls a lock of Emma's hair from his jacket pocket, a last memento he cut from her head as she lay cold on a morgue slab. This lock of hair is tripping the gauge. Emma was irradiated. Between this discovery and the gun, he begins to think that maybe the gunman wasn't looking for him afterall, that he was there instead for Emma. Why?

The "why" leads Craven on an intense hunt for the truth, and it's a journey that takes him to parliament buildings, MI-5 corridors, the Scottish highlands and even hundreds of feet below the earth. Helping and manipulating Craven in equal parts, are two shifty British spies and an American CIA operative played by the great Jo Don Baker, who threatens to steal the whole movie with his southern charm belying a world-weary political soldier with blood on his hands.

The interesting thing about Edge of Darkness is that it doesn't try to obscure the answer to Craven's quest or litter the road with twists and turns that end up feeling cheap or contrived. It's pretty clear who is responsible for Emma's death from almost the first episode, the trick becomes proving it. The enemy here is the nuclear power industry, and the high-level executives who show the world a benevolent face, but work behind the scenes to double-deal and circumvent the provisions put in place to stave off the nuclear nightmare that haunts the world. These sharks in three-piece suits are playing a very dangerous game and they are backed by billions of dollars and crooked politicians. Craven, who wasn't particularly political before, now sees what his late daughter was fighting against, and becomes determined to see her plan through. While he is helped along the way by Jo Don Baker's CIA operative and the British spies, they each have their own agendas and use Craven's grief as a tool for exacting their own plans. Craven may be the fish out of water in this cutthroat world, but he's no fool, and allows himself to be moved as a pawn in so much as it positions him closer to his enemies.

This thoroughly excellent series, expertly written and staged, presents viewers with a really interesting and seductive take on political espionage, one where all the players are aware of each other and even mingle at the same parties, lying through smiles as they ruthlessly work every angle. These puppet masters exchange pithy one-liners and knowing jabs while they patrol the invisible political borders that separate allies from enemies. Character actor Jo Don Baker as Darius Jedburgh (best name ever?) pulls this off wonderfully, with a gleam in his eye and a nonchalance towards matters of life and death. His character has been all over the world, played cards with warlords and pulled the strings of despots from the jungles of South America to the deserts of Afghanistan. He enjoys being the gregarious Texan in the button-down world of London and he knows his booming voice and large stature makes it impossible for him to blend in, so he doesn't even try.

Jedburgh and Craven have some great scenes together that explore their mutual respect as well as distrust for each other. One particularly good scene has them discussing the differences of their nature over a fine bottle of wine and a meal in a bomb shelter hundreds of feet below the earth. This episode, which has Craven and Jedburgh descending into the tunnel system below a nuclear power plant is a series highlight, wowing with its production values, ratcheted tension and body count.

Not simply content to deal in noir-ish action and topical politics alone, Edge of Darkness works as a fine drama to boot, with Craven continuing a series-long dialogue with the ghostly memories of his daughter, both as a child and as a young woman. He pieces the case together by talking with her, arranging the facts as words out of her mouth, but in doing so he also keeps his heart an open wound. Peck's performance as Craven is amazing, expressing more intelligence and emotions with just his eyes than most actors can muster with their whole bodies. Another fascinating element of the story is the almost mystical element in the form of the real life Gaia theory (that the Earth is a single living organism and will do whatever necessary to ensure life) weaving its way into the plot. In fact, as I found out in the special features, the writer Troy Kennedy Martin had intended to end the series with Craven transforming into a living tree, but this was squashed by nervous producers. The ending that was chosen is no less mysterious, mythical and satisfying.

I was pretty hyped for the Mel Gibson Edge of Darkness, but after seeing this totally kick-ass original, the trailers look as if the whole story has been boiled down to a simple revenge tale. This is a shame, since the miniseries is so dense, rich and engaging because of its multi-faceted narrative. I'm pretty sure Mel won't be spelunking in nuclear caves or kissing any dildos. It's a shame that this BBC miniseries has extinguished the fire I had to see Mel's version, but on the plus side, it gave me one of the best pieces of television I've ever seen.

Review // JOCKS - The wild side of tennis

Jocks is my third film from the Too Cool For School collection (12 shitty teen films on 3 discs)








If you're thinking by the title that this movie is about rowdy football players binge drinking and going on panty-raids, than your half right. The jocks of Jocks are binge-drinkers, and are all about panty-raiding, but they happen to be a rag-tag tennis team. That's right, tennis is given the 80's underdog/party animal treatment in this xeroxed copy of about a hundred similar films from the era.

The movie begins with LA College dean Christopher Lee chewing out awesome character acotr R.G Armstrong because their school is slipping in the sports rankings. It will take all of their various teams firing on all cylinders to bring their average up. This includes the tennis team, the "pansies" as Armstrong calls them. When the dean orders star player, "the Kid" reinstated after a suspension, Armstrong pleads, "but their animals, their degenerates." So it's that kind of a movie.

When we meet "The Kid" his legs are dangling out the back of a rusted wrecker car as it squeals into the parking lot driven by some babe he bagged before passing out drunk. So far, so awesome. "The Kid" goes on to practice hung-over, hitting trick shots through his legs and showing that he's a super pro-star. "The Kid" is all about drinking hard, nailing broads and taking names on the tennis court. But he's just the focal point of a team, led by the coach played by Richard Roundtree, aka Shaft.

Here's the team:

The Kid - pro star lady killer

Tex - wears a cowboy hat in one scene, so you know "tex".

Jeff - teetotaler nerd

Andy - jerry-curled obligatory black guy played by Stoney Jackson

Ripper - this guy:

and Chito - who is Mexican. That is the extent of his character.

This wild and crazy bunch of tennis misfits travel to Las Vegas for some important tennis competition that all their scholarships are riding on. Of course they encounter two preppy douche bags that will stop at nothing to see that they lose. On a nerd-note, one of these preppy douche bags is played by a young Tom Shadyac, who went on to direct the comedy masterpiece Patch Adams.

Basically, this plays out exactly how you think with the misfits of LA College kicking ass on the tennis court by day and getting into hijinks at night, complete with lots of beer and lots of boobs. They even find time to punk on their nemesis R.G Armstrong by entrapping him with hookers and trannies.

The tennis matches are filmed in such a way that they don't draw a lot of attention to the fact that none of these actors could likely play tennis at a competative level. Most of the matches are quite boring, but one stands out. The LA College underdogs face off against their nemesis school and each player of the team is matched by an opponent that mirrors them exactly. The Kid plays their best player. Tex, who likes to throw his opponents off by wagering big money on matches, plays against a rich kid who doesn't blink at throwing down cash. Chito, who does a culturally-insensitive prayer before each match, is matched with an orthodox Jew. Ripper plays against a giant just like himself. And Stoney Jackson, who likes to pretend to be gay to throw his opponents off is matched with a flamingly gay player wearing lipstick. Stoney, who basically prances around in gay-face for the whole movie for some odd reason, proclaims "I'm getting beaten by a fag!" Oh, the 80's.

Jocks basically ruled from the moment it started right up to the end. It's hyped me up for the rest of the collection. For some reason these crappy b-grade teen movies are ageing well. In fact, they probably play better today than they did when they first came out. In the mid 80's, movies like Jocks were a dime-a-dozen plague at the multiplexes. They basically made the John Hughes fare seem like Bergman. But today, they work as hilarious time-capsules, and comforting escapes into simpler times.

Review // SURROGATES - My surrogate and me

I was really looking forward to this one. I'm a real Bruce Willis nut so I'll follow him anywhere, even into a hack sci-fi universe where people replace themselves with robot avatars so that they don't have to wash their hair, or in Willis' case, so they can have hair.

Through news clip exposition, the film tells us that something like 98% of all humans on Earth have opted to let a robot stand in for themselves in the daily grind of life. The "meatbags" stay at home in their sweats and bathrobes, controlling their avatars from "stim chairs" while the robots populate the streets, doing the bidding of their incredibly lazy masters. The problem with Surrogates is that from the moment it starts, you're filled with about a hundred questions that the movie never answers. So do Third World countries have robots walking around being poor for their poor hosts? Perhaps the simplest and most important question the movie never answers is: "why is surrogacy good?". The film of course tries to show why it's in fact bad (duh) and Willis' character slowly comes around to the idea himself and embraces his quest to put an end to it. But the movie never really explains why people thought this was a good idea in the first place or why it was allowed to completely reshape civilization.

While everyone stays at home strapped to their chairs, letting their facial hair and body odour run rampant, the world outside is supposedly a crime-free utopia where blandly attractive robots walk around like extras in a Mariah Carey video. Again, I can maybe see the appeal of Surrogacy if you were an overweight social retard, but what if you already looked like a blandly attractive extra in a Mariah Carey video?

Willis plays a cop and the robot cop version of himself. You can tell the difference because human Willis is bald and has grey in his goatee. Robot Willis is wearing a hilarious hairpiece and has his skin smoothed out with CGI. Willis is investigating one of the worlds first murders in some time, a robot who got fried by some mystery device that also ended up killing the host human. The host human happens to be the son of the reclusive inventor of surrogacy, played by James Cromwell. Naturally, this isn't Law & Order: Roboticide, so the murder investigation leads Willis into a conflict with a much bigger scope, implicating the robot manufacturer, a radical anti-surrogate movement, and the military industrial complex. All the while Willis is trying to convince his wife to unplug from her robot and give him some human love.

Willis doesn't have much to work with here, his character is pretty non-existent, I can't even remember his name. They give him the obligatory dead child to try to inject some pathos into the mix, but it doesn't do anything but give Willis a few scenes of moping. The unfortunate side effect of telling a story in a world full of robots that simply go to work for humans who lie around in recliner chairs, is that it's an incredibly dull sci-fi platform. Pretty tough to tell an exciting story with these materials I would think. We're not talking about exoskeleton terminator robots running amok in a bombed out world, it's more like Abercrombie & Fitch models stiffly walking to work.

Anyway, there is a twist that only a moron doesn't see coming and then a bunch of explanation as to the "why" of things, but I actually stopped paying attention and really only perked up to catch the action scenes (which aren't good at all if you're wondering). The reason I checked out on the movie is that my son Harry was lying on the couch between my wife and I, and despite me politely asking him to "keep it down honey, mommy and daddy are trying to watch some Bruce Willis" he started getting really lively and animated. Being new parents, we of course stopped paying attention to the movie playing in the background and started hanging off Harry's every flail and squirm. In fact, I came up with two new nicknames for him "Homo Flailus" and "Squirmus Erectus" which I think are pretty clever. We kept making goo-goo eyes at him and he would smile (which is relatively new) and make funny little noises.

At a certain point, after contorting my face in an effort to milk a reaction from Harry, I realized something. Harry is my surrogate, my avatar for experiencing or re-experiencing the world. Every facet of life will now be filtered through him. Both big things and little things that you take for granted everyday. I've been smiling just fine on my own for 30 years now, but suddenly smiling is this big deal in my house. We try on new kinds of smiles to try to get Harry to smile and then when he does we delight in the fruits of our labour. Through Harry's ears, I become conscious of sounds I would normally have tuned out. Through his little body I become aware of the temperature in the room and decide whether it suits us.

Anyway, Surrogates is pretty shitty.

Mystery // Code of Silence pump-action shotgun toy

As an "adult" I am a reasonably well-adjusted, empathetic pussy. As a kid I was a total gun-nut, gore-hound violence-junkie, and spent my childhood either watching movies where people get blown apart, or running around with toy guns pretending to blow people apart. I had a toy chest, one of those wooden crates with a padded seat on top that flipped up to reveal toy storage. It had Disney's Pinocchio on it. It was filled with toy guns. It was more like a war chest, not a toy chest.

I had toy guns of every description, cheap cap guns, expensive replica ones that had actual loading clips, water guns, battery-operated fully-automatic water guns, sticky-dart guns, and guns that didn't really do anything except look exactly like real guns. All of these guns were either black, gun-metal grey, or shiny silver, just like real guns. This was back in the days when toy guns looked like real guns and weren't required to be neon coloured or have those little orange caps on the barrel to prevent kids from getting shot by cops.

Speaking of kids getting shot by cops, that's almost exactly what happened to a kid in my neighborhood when he went waving a toy gun around in front of a window in his apartment. I was maybe 8 or 9 and was walking home with aunt Judy when I heard this odd rhythmic pounding. We turned around to see a SWAT team running single file along the sidewalk directly behind us. We had to get out of their way or risk getting run over by this suped-up armed-to-the-teeth version of the law. As they passed by us I saw they were clutching M-16 machine guns and had smoke canisters hanging from their belts. I was like "cooooool". Mesmerized, we watched them march down the street and suddenly do an about-face at my house, marching right inside. "Holy shit" I thought, "somebody found my secret cache of GI Joes that I shoplifted from the Galleria Mall". Turns out the SWAT team wasn't there to negotiate a safe return of the GI Joes, but were instead using our house as a command post. Apparently some old lady called 911 when she saw a kid walk past his window holding a gun. Our house was directly behind the apartment in question, separated by our backyard, a junkyard and a lane.

It seemed obvious to all involved (including me) that the kid was simply playing with a toy gun, but the SWAT guys said they had to treat it like a legitimate threat anyway. This was fine by me since dudes with fucking machine guns were drinking coffee in my living room and tracking their dirty boots all over our carpets. I was in heaven. A real live action movie had taken over my house. It was basically the coolest thing that had ever happened to me and I could not wait to tell all my friends.

Despite the fact that nobody thought the gun was real, the SWAT guy who was working the phone and talking to the kids mother was speaking really sternly to her and saying some pretty harsh shit. He kept saying, "we realize that its only a water gun ma'am, but if Ricky (I don't remember the kids name) comes out the front door holding it, we will be forced to open fire". I was really confused by this. In the same sentence the SWAT guy was saying he knew it wasn't a real gun, but was also saying they would basically kill this poor kid if he came out holding the not-real-gun. I kept thinking of my mini-arsenal of not-real-guns upstairs in my bedroom. Anyway, the SWAT team didn't end up getting into a shootout with the water gun wielding kid so that was good. But it did give me a moments pause to consider how many times I'd been out in public waving an Uzi in one hand and a silver Beretta in the other.

I used to mod my guns out by attaching flashlights to the barrels with black electric tape, or painted paper towel roles to make grenade launchers, or I'd duct tape a handgun to the end of a machine gun to create a mega dual gun. On Saturdays I would stand over my war chest and agonize over which guns to take with me to my friend Andrew's house. I'd carefully select some pistols, a shotgun, some machine guns and then pack them all into an army green duffel bag and ride the subway uptown for an all-day shootout with my friends; the back lots of apartment high-rises our battlefield.

One of my favourite guns, was a black pump-action shotgun that made a satisfying click sound when you racked it. It shot rubber sticky darts. I purchased this gun at the Pop Shoppe store around the corner from my house in the west end of Toronto. This was 1986. The strange thing about this gun (although I didn't find it strange at the time) was that it was a movie tie-in. The movie was Code of Silence starring Chuck Norris and directed by Andrew Davis, who later went on to direct Above the Law, Under Siege and The Fugitive. It came in a plastic bag with a cardboard tag that read Code of Silence and had a picture of Chuck carrying the shotgun. The gun itself had a sticker on the handle that read Code of Silence as well. This is how I know it was a Code of Silence toy and not a figment of my imagination.

Code of Silence is not really the kind of action movie that you'd think would spawn a toy tie-in. It's about a cop taking on the mob and corrupt cops. It's a gritty, R rated movie set in Chicago (like most Davis movies). The kung fu of Norris is downplayed in favour of shootouts. It's violent and deals with the drug trade. Why the fuck would someone make a kids toy out of a movie that kids weren't allowed to see and presumably shouldn't have been watching?

In any case, somebody did and I owned this thing. So when I became adept at Internet sleuthing and nostalgia hunting in the wilds of ebay/youtube/imdb etc I began looking for this Code of Silence toy gun. I have found nothing. It's starting to bother me really. The Internet has made us accustomed to the cataloguing of every aspect of pop culture, no matter how useless or fringe. Not being able to turn up a single hit for this toy gun is disturbing me. Can something like this just vanish completely? Did anybody else own this thing but me? Is this Code of Silence toy shotgun my Rosebud?

At this point, to find some shred of evidence that this toy existed would probably make me feel dizzy. Like my SWAT story, the toy gun is just a memory that has been filed away for ages and only recently dusted off. The very fact that I can't turn up any mention of it anywhere is disorienting, since it was such an important artifact to me. I'm starting to wonder if both the story and the toy gun are just creations, a natural patch job my brain has performed, filling in the blanks with fiction to account for details that long ago slipped away. I haven't talked with anyone in my family about the SWAT incident since... well, since it happened I think. If I asked them about it now would they stare at me blankly? The Code of Silence gun seems such an improbable toy for a kid to be playing with, like a stuffed rabbit based on Fatal Attraction or a Wall Street toy briefcase . But in retrospect, if it did exist, it fell into the perfect hands. If it did exist, I have to find it.

Review // COACH - Kyle Reese fucks his basketball coach like it ain't no thang

Coach is my second viewing from the Too Cool For School collection, which is 12 awful teen party movies from the 70's/80's grouped onto 3 double-sided discs.



To recap: The first flick I attempted was Cavegirl which was just so irredeemably terrible that I ended up fast-forwarding through the entire thing looking for all the boob shots. Based on Cavegirl, I figured getting through the next 11 movies in the set would be an endurance test or a masochistic act of stupidity. But Coach kinda won me over and now I'm almost looking forward to where this collection will take me next. Presumably somewhere with more partial nudity.



Coach is about a losing highschool basketball team who become reinvigorated when a new coach comes on board. The new coach, Ricky Rawlins turns out to be a smoking hot blonde chick, an Olympic Gold Medal runner who also happens to know her hoops (for some reason that is never explained). When we first meet Randy, she has just won gold in an olympic running event. The sequence is both beautifully cinematic and bargain basement cheap. The camera is placed far away and then zoomed into a close-up of Randy's face as she crosses the finish line in super slow motion, the sound of her breathing is exaggerated and the only accompanying soundtrack. It's kind of mesmerizing and has a very hazy 70's beauty about it. But you don't see any other runners, or the cheering crowd, or the track for that matter. And when Randy is being awarded the gold medal, a similar trick is employed, simply shooting Randy in a low-angle close-up. No one else on the podium is visible, in fact there is no podium. They probably shot this "Olympic" sequence in a parking lot before calling lunch. Randy is played by Cathy Lee Crosby, who is a quintessental 70's Farah-esque babe that I've never seen or heard of before.

The explanation for why Randy is allowed to coach the basketball team is pretty ludicrous and has to do with her name, leading the faculty to believe she's a man. And when she shows up and turns out to be a woman, they balk, but Randy calmly explains that they promised her the job sight unseen and to deny her now would be sexual discrimination. It's never really explained why Randy, an Olympic Gold Medalist is fighting so hard to take a shit job at a highschool. Nevertheless, the faculty, led by great character actor Keenan Wynn, relent and Randy gets the job. At first the boys are all "WHA???" and "BONERS GUY!" and "BUT SHE'S A BROAD!", but they soon realize that she's got the goods and rally behind her leadership to become champions.

Micheal Biehn stars as Jack Ripley, one of the kids, a point guard or something. Biehn is one of my childhood heroes because of his wicked roles in James Cameron's in The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss, so I was excited to see him in one of his first movies. Here Biehn is a supposed to be a teenager (although he's probably in his 20's) whose charm and good looks help him woo coach Randy and they have a love affair that is pretty significant in the way that the movie doesn't treat it with any real signifigcance.

This coach is fucking one of her teenaged players and the movie never really acts like it's a big dark secret, or something they should try to hide. This is either tremendously irresponsible handling of sensitive subject matter or the filmmakers correctly assumed that a teenaged boy screwing his hot teacher is cause for some high-fives, not hysteria. If this movie were made today, Coach wouldn't climax with the boys winning the big game, but with Randy's high-profile trial for raping a minor. For the nonchalant handling of this affair alone, Coach rules. The other highpoint of the film is the early scene where actor Keenan Wynn sits court-side and watches the game. His awkward head movements and facial expressions suggest that he'd never even heard of the sport basketball and had no idea how to act like he did. It's priceless.

Review // THE FUGITIVE - warehouse-farmhouse-henhouse-outhouse-doghouse

So my weird, out of the blue Patriot Games viewing the other week of course led me to The Fugitive, Harrison Ford's biggest non-Indy/Han Solo hit movie. I haven't seen this in probably a decade, but I remembered it as being one of the stand-out action movies of the 90's. Not a thrill-a-minute kind of thing or balls-to-the-wall, just a really solid entertaining ride.

The key ingredient here is Ford himself. His Richard Kimble is a guy you root for, and your investment in his quest to find his wife's killer and clear his name is the lynch pin of the movie. This film is a real testament to Ford's mega-wattage star power. If Kimble were instead played by Richard Gere, or Mel Gibson, or Kevin Costner, The Fugitive just wouldn't be the same. Ford plays all the sides of Kimble perfectly, the desperate, frazzled fugitive on the run, and the intellectual problem-solver, a man who believably stays one step ahead of the law and his enemies. Once again, I was reminded that Ford is not just a movie star, but an effective actor in roles that play to his strengths as a completely likable guy. However, I have my doubts that he could pull off something against his natural grain, like say a vicious pimp with a greasy ponytail, gold teeth and a lisp in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Although, I'd fucking love to see him try.

Anyway, The Fugitive is good and you know you like it already so nuff said.

Review //JULIE AND JULIA - Mastering the Art of Coattail Riding

My mind was definitely made up before I even pressed Play on this one. I sat down pre-judging. It just sounded like such a colossally bad idea, inter-cutting an account of Julia Child's creation of her seminal cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, with the story of a whining blogger trying to master Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Yes, we are now living in an world where they make movies about people blogging. We are now living in a world where studio executives think that a woman writing and complaining about a blog is at least as interesting as a woman writing a groundbreaking book and changing the face of American cuisine.

The box office success of Julie and Julia (Julia Child gets second billing in the title no less) will probably spawn a glut of blog-related films. Look for the Cinema Con Carne movie this summer. The part of Danny Onions will be played by Topher Grace. My wife Jenn will be played by Charlize Theron. Harry will be played by five different stunt babies. Frequent commenter Swazz Perkins will be portrayed by Tyrese Gibson. Here's a scene from the script:

Danny Onions: Did you read my blog yet, honey?
Jenn: Oh, um, not yet, I've been too busy with Harry. I will today.
Harry: (farting noise)
Danny Onions: Ooh look! I got a comment on one of my reviews, it's from Swazz Perkins.
Jenn: What's it say?
Danny Onions: It says "You don't know what your talking about, fag. Paul Blart Mall Cop is the Citizen Kane of fat-guys-falling-down.
Jenn: Can you take Harry, my arm hurts?

Anyway, it sounded like a bad idea and every one I know that saw the film confirmed it for me as well. I think my friend Annabelle said it best with respects to the Julie half of the film, "I wanted her to fail, I wanted her to suffer, I wanted everything to turn out bad". Julia Child as played by Meryl "fucking" Streep is a person you want to spend time with. She is charming. Larger than life. She has an effervescent personality and a taste for life and she infects everyone she comes into contact with the same kind of zeal. Julie Powell on the other hand, is not someone I want to spend any time with at all, and yet director Nora Ephron handcuffs Meryl "fucking" Streep to this utterly unappealing character like some kind of chick-flick version of The Defiant Ones .

From the moment we are introduced to Julie Powell, she is an annoyance and as the movie goes on, she becomes a structurally and thematically imposed annoyance. We aren't allowed to view and event in Julia's life without an unwanted answer from Julie's. It becomes a deflating call and response routine where just as you are brought high by a formative episode in Julia's story, you are then brought low by Julie whining about her 900 square foot apartment, or how she's ever going to be able to bone a duck, or whether anyone is reading her blog. Julia Child is a powerhouse. Julie Powell is a wimp.

And Amy Adams as Julie is pretty awful, which is shitty because I don't think Amy Adams is a bad actress. There is something about her delivery and oh-so-precious mannerisms that are really grating. The Julie character and the Julie half of the script is a classic case of Bad Movies Happening to Good Actors. But poor Amy Adams doesn't have the consolation of company as she goes down with the ship. Meryl "fucking" Streep is absolutely killing the shit out of her Julia Child, canoodling with Stanley Tucci in Paris and taking on the gastronomical establishment in a perfectly light, entertaining little biopic. Amy Adams is stuck in a movie about a fucking blog.

And let's examine the actual blog for a moment. Julie Powell is blogging about her adventure cooking 524 Julia Child recipes in 365 days. Take away the gimmicky time constraint and you have a movie about a woman following recipes. Julia Child WROTE Mastering the Art of French Cooking and somehow that only warrants 50% of the movie, with the other half devoted to a chick simply using Mastering the Art of French Cooking for its intended purpose, and complaining every step of the way. I feel like Nora Ephron completely fucked us all over, and not just because of her past sap-crimes. No, by making Julie and Julia instead of just Julia, she has denied us a proper biopic of Julia Child, who it turns out is really interesting and cool (I know other people already knew this, but I didn't). No one's going to make another Julia Child movie now. No other actress is going to step into Julia's gigantic dresses after Meryl "fucking" Streep made this definitive version. It's a bummer. It's a waste. I just learned that Julia and her husband Paul might've even been spies in their early days. You're telling me that wasn't as interesting as some chick following a beef bourguigon recipe? I know they made two Truman Capote movies and two volcano movies and two asteroids-destroying-Earth movies, but I just don't see the metro-sexual coke addict neanderthals of Hollywood greenlighting a second Julia Child movie, especially after they famously declared last year that they would stop making "women" movies.

Adding insult to injury, in the last ten minutes of the film, as Julie is featured in the New York Times and her life seems to be getting tied into a neat little bow, she finds out that the real Julia Child has turned her nose up at the blog. So let me get this straight: Ephron sells Meryl "fucking" Streep short with half a Julia Child biopic, and it turns out that the real Julia Child even thinks Powell's blog is a fucking gimmicky waste of time? Shouldn't that have given Ephron some indication that maybe Julie's story should've just stayed a blog? It does provide the movie with a satisfying punchline though, I must say. Watching Amy Adams' face fall at the news has the effect of Julia Child speaking from the grave and saying exactly what is on the audiences mind. It almost makes the Julie half of the movie worth it. Almost.

Review // CAVEGIRL - FastForwarding to the tits

So I rented this thing called the Too Cool For School Collection. It's 12 b-grade teen comedies from the 70's and 80's, spread out over 3 double-sided discs. I can't really say why I did it, I'm certainly not going to have the chance to watch all these movies in the week that I have it for (but Swazz Perkins is burning them for me so I'm not in a big rush). I guess it's because I'm a sucker for this period, I love the styles and music and just find it comforting to tuck into these washed out, simplified worlds where guys rip apart beer cans with their teeth and girls sit around naked in steamy change rooms like it's no big thing. Plus I figured that with 12 movies, I'm bound to find one stone-cold culty-classic. But after watching Cavegirl (or sorta watching it) I'm pretty sure I'm in for a brutal slog.

I watched the first 20 minutes of Cavegirl while feeding Harry, and basically it consists of Daniel Roebuck (Rivers Edge and about 100 other things) as an uber-nerd stumbling around in some terrible slapstick. His cooler classmates bully him blah blah. Standard set-up, except the execution is so insanely cheap and amateurish. I was expecting B, but this seemed more C.

The sound tipped me off immediately that I was watching a really, really cheap movie. The sound is terrible, practically no background ambiance, just dialogue and crap SFX. You know your watching a really cheap flick when the sound is awful. The opening scenes take place at a high school, but it seems like they didn't have the money to film at a functioning one, so this school has about 7 students attending it. The only highlight is when Roebuck gets locked in the girls changing room and a pack of totally hot early 80's chicks strip down after PE and then chase him around with tennis rackets.

Anyway, somehow Roebuck gets sent back in time to the cavemen era because he touches a red pulsing crystal at the exact moment that a military chopper fires a missile in the desert. I know it sounds like I'm just glossing over some details and making the set-up sound nonsensical, but I'm not. That's what happens and it's never explained as far as I can tell. Roebuck runs into some hairy cavemen who chase him around with bones and then he runs into a super hot blond sex bomb cavegirl who is not in the least bit hairy or dirty. He tries to communicate with her, but she merely grunts and smiles. So what does he do? Touches her tits.

I kept with it for another 5 or 10 minutes, but it was so bad and so boring that I ended up doing something that I haven't done since I was about 12 years old. I fast-forwarded the entire movie looking for tits. I knew more were in there, I knew that tits were the entire reason Cavegirl existed, so I just decided to forgo all the painful filler in between and just experience the essence of the movie. In a happy accident, as I tit-trolled, the lazy attempts at broad physical comedy ended up benefiting from the 2x speed increase.

I have 11 more of these movies to go. I'm in deep shit.

Review // THE POSTMAN - Kevin Costner saves America by delivering letters

This is a very special review for me, I finally finished this movie after re-watching it in little doses over the last month and a half. I have a lot of history with The Postman. When I was in high school, I worked in a very old, very cool movie theatre on the main street of my hometown called The Regent. http://www.theregenttheatre.org/ This was a very magical place for me and I'll save my Regent Love Letter for another post, but needless to say I watched a ton of movies while working there and The Postman was one of them.

We normally couldn't get first run movies at the Regent; it only has 1 screen, it's in a town of about 4500 people and we didn't really have any clout with the distributors. We typically had to wait at least 3 weeks to a month before pulling in the top Hollywood fare. But for some odd reason Warner Brothers let us have The Postman on opening day. Hmm...strange.

In the week that we ran it, I probably watched it 2 full times (that's 6 hours of Postman for anybody counting) and then just wandered in and out of it for another 5-6 screenings, catching my favourite parts. I was a big Waterworld fan so I was excited that Costner was going back to the post-apocalyptic well. Waterworld was fun and funny, driven into all sorts of ridiculous places by Costner's powerful ego. The Postman is on a whole other level though.

Directed, produced and starring Kevin Costner, The Postman is one of the all-time greats among misguided vanity projects. Costner even contributes a fucking duet over the credits with shitty 90's pop chick Amy Grant, the very lyrics of which act as a paean to Costner's incredible virtue. The entire movie exists to extol the heroism, altruism and good hair of Costner, every minute of its 3 HOUR running time!

Costner plays a wasteland drifter who gets forcibly drafted into the army of tyrannical warlord, Bethlehem (Will Patton). He soon escapes though and in the middle of a frigid rainstorm, comes across shelter and warm clothes in the form of a crashed mail truck and the skeleton of a postman. With the postal uniform fitting nicely, Costner decides to pretend to be a real Postman, claiming to be a representative of the restored United States Government in order to gain food and shelter from charitable villages. Not only does this work, but the sight of Costner in uniform gives everyone who sees him an earth-shattering hopegasm.

Before you know it, people have gone totally postal and start swearing themselves in as letter-carriers, with routes opening up across the countryside. The simple act of sending and receiving letters snowballs into a bright light of hope shining through the chaos. Soon townsfolk have found the courage to stand up to the murderous Bethlehem. Costner as the original Postman, is not just a hero to the people, he's basically a god, the only one who can usher the country out of this dark age.

In the climactic battle, hundreds of post-people, armed and on horseback are led by Costner in a face-off against Bethlehem's army. Costner asks the question "Wouldn't it be great if wars were fought just by the assholes that started them?" And so instead of a large-scale epic battle, we instead get Costner and Will Patton rolling around on the ground in slow-motion to straining orchestra strings. And I literally mean rolling around. There is no real fight choreography or excitement. It looks like a bar fight where both combatants are too drunk to even throw a punch. It's fucking hilarious and utterly anti-climactic after 3 fucking hours of build-up.

The Postman was savaged by critics and ignored by audiences. I think it lost something like 60 million dollars. I wish I could say it was embraced by junk-hounds, but aside from my friend Andrew (who has a laminated Postman poster hanging on his beer fridge) and I, I've yet to find a cult who belong to this movie. From a normal critical perspective, The Postman is obviously a gross failure. It's sentimentality, syrupy storyline and indulgent length would test the patience of all but the most devout Costner fan (if such a think existed) . For connoisseurs of bad cinema like myself, its a delight, but at 3 hours, impossible to sustain the stoned WTF-ness of watching Costner use an 80 million dollar movie to jerk himself off.

There are so many astoundingly hilarious moments of hubris in this film it would be impossible to list them all, but here are some of my favourites:

-Local town hottie Olivia Williams slow dances with Costner at a village jamboree and she looks him in the eyes and says "I want your seed."

-Costner performs Hamlet to an adoring crowd. Hamlet! Kevin Costner!

-I counted five separate times when characters saluted Costner with tears of admiration in their eyes.

-Costner casts his own teenaged daughter as a fellow letter carrier and in one scene shows her trying to work up the nerve to act on her crush and ask him to dance. His own daughter!!!

-And this, hands down the funniest scene in the movie:


Ok, some Youtube asshole pulled this clip so I'll have to describe it: In slow motion, accompanied by the sound of an orchestra having an emotional breakdown, Kevin Costner on horseback rides by a kid and grabs a letter out of his hand. This simple act of grabbing the letter is meant to represent Costner's selfless contribution to the salvation of humanity. We know this because it dissolves into the future, civilization has been restored and a bunch of white people are unveiling a bronzed statue of Costner in the act of receiving that symbolic letter from the little kid. A grown man (who looks remarkably similar to Costner) sniffles at the sight of the bronzed kid and says "that was me". It's amazing, trust me.

I really hope that Kevin Costner kept that statue and has it somewhere on his Aspen ranch. I can just picture him wandering outside on a summer night, scotch in hand to sit beneath it, staring up at his bronzed likeness and reminiscing on a time in his career when he had so much power he was allowed to direct, produce and star in 3 hour love letters to himself. It must have been a glorious time for him. But really, in retrospect, he probably should've just made another baseball movie. A 3 hour baseball movie. Oh shit!

In a world where chaos reigns, one man will keep hope alive... by playing baseball. Kevin Costner is The Pitcher.

Review // THE HURT LOCKER - Short films about bombs

The main draw for me with this one was director Kathryn Bigelow, who I've been a fan of since I was a kid when I saw her vampire masterpiece Near Dark.

The Hurt Locker works first and foremost, as an absolute white-knuckle actioner. In terms of other thrillers and action movies this year, none can hold a candle to its sustained tension, wrung not from CGI spectacle, but from crack editing and pacing. As a character drama, I think it's maybe a little less successful, but Bigelow doesn't seem to engage in heavy-handed character psychology, so this isn't a real misstep, she makes action movies and that's exactly what this is.

A lot of Internet trolls and a few critics have blasted Bigelow, accusing her of taking a gung-ho approach to the Iraq war and engaging in propagandist politics (or perhaps abandoning political correctness). Tarantino came under similar fire for his perceived handling of World War 2 with Basterds. I guess they've come to this conclusion because the movie doesn't seem to be stridently anti-war (like most war movies are supposed to be I guess) and her characters never really resort to sentiments like "I gotta get out of this shit hole" or "what are we even here for?". In fact, they may even like what they do for a living. Bigelow is using the Iraq war to tell a specific story, one that despite its setting, is not a political one. The same is true for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, which is not a movie about World War 2, but a movie about World War 2 movies. Both films have different agendas, more pop than political, and apparently many believe modern war movies should only strive to say that war is bad.

The fact that Iraq is the backdrop for Jeremy Renner's character to ply his insanely dangerous trade, is not all that important. He would be functioning exactly the same if he were in any other conflict, in any other part of the world. For him, staring down the makeshift engineering of an explosive device tunes out politics, emotions, and duties to family and country. The disarming of a killing device becomes a contest to see if he can not get killed. And he is addicted to playing the game. Facing down these bombs is an intellectual test, as well as a test of endurance--how long and hard can his adrenaline pump to keep him one step ahead of the bombs timer?

The ingenious aspect of The Hurt Locker is its episodic quality, structured around the disarming of each bomb. Each mission and its bomb is like it's own self-contained short film. Sometimes these shorts are almost silent, devoid of dialogue. Bigelow and her cinematographer shoot the hell out of these sequences, and use sound in effective ways, ratcheting up the tension.

The problem with the critical hype and awards season speculation surrounding The Hurt Locker is that it may lead people to think that it an "important" movie, or a "message" movie, or that it will sort out your messy feelings about the Iraq conflict for you. It isn't and it won't. It's an action movie, expertly staged and executed and sometimes that's enough.

Review // ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO - Are you a Mexi-can or a Mexi-can't?

I've seen this twice now and I still have no idea what it's about. A President, a General, a Drug lord, a Cop, and ex-Cop, a Johnny Depp, a guitar player who shoots everyone, then 2 more guitar players who shoot everyone and some kind of coup. That's about all I got. From the moment it starts, you get the feeling that writer/director Robert Rodriguez doesn't want the audience to get too worried about following the plot. He just wants you to have a good time. I'm not sure however that he intended his viewers to abandon the plot right away, but that's what I did, and for the rest of the movie I had no idea how any of the characters were related to each other. I also had no idea that Salma Hayek's character (ha! "character" she is basically a skirt and tits, she doesn't even have lines) is only appearing in flashbacks and that she's actually dead and Antonia Banderas is just remembering her. This was lost on me despite watching her death scene repeated over and over in slo-mo.

Now I dug El Mariachi, and its more polished remake-y update-y thing Desperado. But I think Once Upon A Time In Mexico proves that the guitar/gun virtuoso premise is not exactly trilogy material. I'd say that by the time you see a remote-controlled explosive guitar case on wheels, sharks are jumping over themselves.

The best part about this little air-filled puff pastry is Johnny Depp, who essentially plays the part of Johnny Depp, a charmed movie star who gets paid millions of dollars to ham around in left-over wardrobe from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. I'm not even one of those weird-o's who kisses the ground Depp walks on either. It's just that Once Upon... is essentially a remake of Desperado, which is essentially a remake of El Mariachi, and just as I realize that I've spent over 10 hours of my precious life watching Antonio Banderas wear leather pants and shoot people with a guitar-gun, Depp appears in a ridiculous getup and says something utterly bizarre and I lose track of this depressing thought.

Anyway, Mickey Rourke sleepwalks through a few scenes carrying his Chihuahua, and Willem Dafoe loads up on bronze tanner to look like a Mexican, so there is some bright spots here and there. But this small amount of good, is balanced out by Enrique Iglesias doing a musical number and a nonsensical parade of plot twists and cheapie-looking action scenes that ape John Woo-style bullet ballets a full 10 years after it was cool.

Basically, by the time it was done, I was fully numb, but Harry was still awake and feeding in my lap so I went ahead and watched the Special Features docs, hosted by Rodriguez himself. And damm if I wasn't totally entertained by them! The first, 10 Minute Film School, has Rodriguez explaining how he shoots movies so quickly and cheaply and while I don't really dig the final products, I was really impressed with his ingenuity, and he comes off as pretty low-key as he shows you all the tricks he employs. He clearly doesn't think he's some kind of genre genius. The next doc is a tour of his movie studio, which is actually his garage and this too was really impressive. Rodriguez is a home-body work-a-holic who saunters out to his garage where he edits his films, writes and records the scores, records foley effects and does sound design and even some special effects work. It was damn cool. He's essentially a movie industry unto himself in the wilds of Austin Texas.

The final doc was 10 Minute Cooking School, where he explains how to cook a traditional Mexican pork dish featured heavily in the film. Fuck me, is there anything this guy can't do? You know besides, stop beating the shit out of dead horses like El Mariachi and Spy Kids?

Review // FUNNY GAMES - Actors are fucking weirdos

Case in point: Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. I would say both these actors are reasonably comfortable, sitting on some low millions, probably multiple house owners. They aren't at the top of the pack, but they aren't at the bottom either. They can pretty much do what they want at this point, taking a pay cheque in a run-of-the-mill studio picture, or doing an off Broadway play. So why in god's name would they choose to be in Funny Games?

I think the answer is that actors are not like you or I. And I don't just mean because they are telegenic and rich. No, I mean that they are like a mutated species of human who actively seek out the emotions and experiences that regular people live their entire lives hoping to avoid. The Actor Species are either brave, depraved or blank slates that need constant rewriting and aren't all that picky about what gets imprinted on them.

Beyond this explanation, I can't really figure out any other reason why Watts and Roth would willingly subject themselves to such torture in a project that seemed destined to be overlooked from the start. Funny Games is a reportedly shot-for-almost-shot remake of a grim and relentlessly mean "thriller" meant to shame the audience for feeling thrilled. It's made by the same director, Michael Haneke, who crafted the polarizing original.

I believe both actors are parents in real life. So when Watts' and Roth's characters completely break down emotionally and physically after watching the murder of their young son, I couldn't help but attribute their realistic performances to some actor-y method where you imagine how you would feel if your own child was murdered. WHY IN THE FUCK WOULD ANYBODY WANT TO DO THAT?

And another question that kept coming up for me: What kind of sick fuck wants to make a movie like this--twice?

The film itself is a very strange experience, memorable I guess in it's own awful way, but not something I could say is entertaining. Which makes sense, since Haneke seems to be telling us that finding entertainment in the perils of fictional characters is a shameful, twisted cultural pastime. I guess movies have some other purpose for him that I don't know about. There are some genuinely effective and disturbing cinematic choices here, and I don't mean the more blatant and experimental ones that come later in the story. I'm talking about the kinds of creepy shots that would be highlights in more traditional horror fare.

The most effective scene for me came right at the beginning. Roth pulls the family SVU over next to the high security fence of a neighbours summer house. He sees Mr. and Mrs. Johnson standing on their front lawn, two young men in preppy attire, white gloves, stand beside them. He just wants to confirm their tennis game for the next day, but Mr. Johnson's responses seem a little terse and Mrs. Johnson never speaks at all. Neither do the young men, they just stare. Knowing what we know about the movie, and what is going to the happen to the Johnson's as soon as Roth pulls away, makes it an exceedingly creepy, yet subtle opener. But the subtlety sorta ends there. Later on Haneke rubs our noses in any excitement or tension his premise may have wrung out of us by making us stare at the dead body of the boy and his blood splattered on the wall and TV for TEN MINUTES. Come to think of it, Nascar racing was playing on the blood splattered TV, I wonder if that means something?

I haven't seen the original Funny Games, in fact the only other Haneke movie I've seen is Cache (I didn't find it terribly tense) so I can't really comment with any certainty about the nature of his filmmaking. But based on what I've read about him, and my own joyless viewing of his Funny Games Redux, he seems like a really cheery guy. All of his movies seem to be about terrible people doing terrible things to upper middle class people. He seems like he doesn't have a very high opinion of humans and uses his films to put them through the wringer and exact some terrible judgement on us all. In this way he kinda seems like Roland Emmerich, who has taken a more CGI-route, but nevertheless thinks very poorly of the human race and as a result has been trying to murder us en masse in one disaster porn movie after another.

At what point does a director stop examining misery and start causing it himself?

Anyway, I can't reasonably review this film since it was another late-night watch with Harry in my lap, giving him his bottle. Really bad idea. The second half of the movie becomes quite quiet and consists of Watts and Roth communicating through whimpers and sobs, and Harry was taking turns whimpering and sobbing in my lap so I was very disoriented. I was basically experiencing whimpering and sobbing in 3D!

Holding my own son in my arms while watching this family get tortured by psychopaths added an extra layer of disturbance. What would I do in this situation? How would I react? What if Harry grows up to be an effeminate, white-gloved torture-freak dandy? Best not to think about such awful things, I mean it's not like I'm an actor.

Review // GLADIATOR - The good one, not that other one you're thinking of

(Stupid Youtube thinks I'm talking about that other Gladiator, so I can't find a trailer for this one, the good Gladiator)

Tommy Riley moves to the projects of Chicago with his reformed gambling addict dad and quickly finds that the only way to survive at his new school, as well as keep away the loan sharks looking for his dad, is to join an underground boxing league run by a super fucking evil Brian Dennehey. Yes, it pretty much seems like every dude at his high school, no matter how scrawny, is moonlighting as a boxer-for-cash at night, and Tommy quickly gets sucked in. This would seem a brutal initiation for a teenager to have to endure simply for living on the wrong side of the tracks, but the fact that both Tommy (Twin Peaks' James Marshall) and Cuba Gooding Jr. both look around 29 makes it seem a little less harsh.

After a few matches, Tommy (who is practically a stoic, teenaged Man-With-No-Name) realizes that he and the other boxers are just meat for the grinder, and Dennehey is turning the crank. There is a boxing montage to a really shitting early 90's rock song and then Tommy is pitted against Cuba, his friend who has recently sustained a dangerous injury, so Tommy refuses to fight him. This incurs the wrath of Dennehey, a former boxer himself, who climbs in the ring to teach Tommy a hard, barefisted lesson. Tommy beats the shit out of him and the movie ends.

I saw Gladiator twice in the theatres in 1992 (at the Hyland, RIP) and for some reason I liked it a lot. I was pretty sure my 3am viewing this morning (with a squirming baby in my lap) would add it to the list of childhood favorites that have not stood the test of time, but was pleasantly surprised at how well it held up. It's not amazing obviously, but there's something about the simple approach, browny-grey tone of the rundown Chicago setting and a great asshole in Dennehey, that makes it all stick together. I distinctly remember getting pumped up by the opening, Seal's "Crazy" (haha) playing over shots of Chi-town. Also, Dennehey looks almost exactly like my dad so that kinda adds another weird layer to the movie for me where I'm talking to the characters on screen, "don't let my dad talk to you like that Cuba Gooding Jr." or "Get him Tommy! Kick my dad's ass!"

Review // THE INVENTION OF LYING - The Absence of Funny

I can see where those involved probably thought this concept was funny as they were taking it from pitch, to script, to done deal. But when I watched the actual finished movie, I got the feeling that Gervais and Co. had a change of heart, realizing as they filmed one limp scene after another, that the concept is not actually all that funny (or at least the script isn't), but had to soldier on anyway. I mean, the whole crew is standing around, you have all this studio money to spend, you can't let a little thing like un-funny jokes stop you from making a comedy.

My wife Jenn and I didn't really genuinely laugh once throughout the whole thing. I tried valiantly a few times, pushing out air at stuff that I thought could be funny, even if it really wasn't. I wanted to laugh, being that I was watching a comedy, so therefore I decided to laugh despite the movie.

I am a fan of Gervais' TV stuff obviously, so it's not at that I don't find him funny, it's just with both his attempts at Hollywood crossovers (this and Ghost Town) he seems to be spending his comedy capital in the wrong place: high-concept territory. Fellow movie-addled junk hound, Swazz Perkins and I have argued many times over Ghost Town. Ghost Town arouses a surprisingly vitriolic hatred in Perkins, whereas I just think its mediocre and not as funny as you expect something to be with Ricky Gervais starring. I did laugh a few times and for some insane reason, I actually cried (in the scene where Gervais assuages a construction worker's crippling guilt over the deaths of his buddies). Despite my medium like of Ghost Town, I still think it was an odd fit for Gervais and was a bad idea for his first foray into American movies. The Office mined big laughs from a universal scenario-working everyday with people you don't particularly like. With Extras, Gervais set his sights a little higher, but essentially went back to the workplace again, albeit an atypical one-the movie set. So it seems odd that when he made the move to Hollywood films, he picked gimmicky projects that seemed intended for the likes of Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler, ones with Sci-Comedy plots of ghosts and alternate social frameworks.

The Invention of Lying (exciting title, eh?) is about a parallel world where everybody tells the absolute truth and no one even knows what a lie is. Gervais' character is the first person to figure out how to tell a lie and he uses this discovery to become rich and famous, and yet is too principled to lie his way into the heart of Jennifer Garner. Watching the forced, stunned look of sweet innocence on Jennifer Garner's face throughout this movie reminded me of just how awful a job acting can be, even for someone who is a star and really shouldn't inspire pity in anyone. The jokes consist of everyone unblinkingly calling Gervais a fat loser. That's about it. Maybe the third time will be the charm for Ricky Gervais, I don't know.