THREE HANDS IN THE POPCORN BAG

THE HAMSTERIAN APPROACH TO TEACHING COLLEGE LITERACY: AN EXPLORATION OF DIALOGUE CONCERNING ZOMBIE TEXTS

2010-02-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

in a recent lesson concerning the basic elements of nonfiction texts, i used zombie movies as my platform to illustrate the structural dialogue found in main ideas and supporting details.

if we know that the topic of conversation is zombie movies, then, depending on the speaker, we may have various main idea sentences concerning that topic. for instance, my mother might think zombie movies are juvenile while my wife finds zombie movies disgusting. likewise, my more conservative christian friends might label zombie movies as pathways of demonic manifestation, while some more liberal theologians might consider zombie movies the perfect cinematic illumination of sin and hell on earth. each speaker possibly possesses a unique relationship to the topic, and thereby exists a plethora of potential main idea statements.

the main idea statement i shared with my classes concerning this topic was rather frank: i freaking love zombie movies!

at this point, once a main idea statement has been fully established, a conversation of sorts begins between speakers and listeners, writers and readers. as i state my claim on the value (or not) of zombie movies, my conversational partner (or reader) will now have one burning question that shapes the next stage of our dialogue or, in my classroom, the remainder of our academic text. and that question is simply: why?

"you say you freaking love or hate zombie movies? you say they are juvenile or disgusting? you say they are demonic or theologically curious? okay, i hear you saying that, but why?"

at this point the main idea must be supported by details: major details that support the main idea sentence and minor details that back up the major details. put together, we have a colorful conversation or text on our hands. here's the example i gave my students, complete with transitional expressions to indicate new major supporing details:

I freaking love zombie movies! For one thing, they're fun. Zombie movies are often not heavy dramas. Secondly, they're smart. Zombie movies offer opportunities for good social and political commentary. Finally, they're us! Zombie movies are about dead people, and all of us will eventually die one day, and who doesn't like to think about that?

a few of my students pointed out that i contradicted myself in the support of my first two major details. i begin by saying that zombie movies are not heavy dramas, but then i say that zombie films possibly offer good social and political commentary. what gives? are they one or the other? are they allegorical texts or are they no-brain laughfests? and the answer to all of these queries is simply, yes.

take, for instance, the little number i have brought for review today, Boy Eats Girl. very fun zombie flick. pretty light-hearted. bloody enough to earn it's R-rating. chock full of cannibalistic and slapstick humor to relax any college professor at the end of a long week. not to mention, the lead girl wheels in on a crowd of zombies with a tractor and then proceeds to fertilize the yard with mutilated corpse bits, leaving bottom trunks and legs standing while torsos scatter like sprinkler water over the front lawn. in another great scene, the film's antagonist bad-girl steals a scooter from an elderly woman, leaving granny as lunch for the zombies while she peels off on granny's vespa. yeah, i had a total blast with this one.

at the same time, Boy Eats Girl explores the awkwardness of puberty and the initial cravings of newly budded sexual appetite. set in a irish prepatory high school, the sudden outbreak of zombified cannibalism works as a metaphor for religiously suppressed, though raging hormones. we initally recognize the metaphor as nathan's mother (who, bless her heart, is responsible for turning nathan into a zombie via a botched voodoo reanimation ritual) speaks to nathan about his new condition: "nathan, i know what you're feeling. you're body is going through changes. you have new hungers and desires that you've never felt before." mom knows that nathan is a flesh-eating zombie, but nathan does not realize it yet, and he rejects her seeming approach to the birds-and-the-bees as a topic far too awkward for the breakfast table. however, nathan finally realizes the full extent of his zombie cravings while being seduced by the film's antagonist bad-girl, who to this point has been a thorn in nathan's side. as she presses herself on nathan - an unknowing zombie who has not eaten in days - he looks into her offered cleavage and announces longingly, "flesh." wrongly supposing this breathy exclamation an acceptance of her propositions, the girl proceeds to kiss nathan, heightening his hunger even more, until he is forced to pry away from her and run to safety - his safety as much as hers.

Boy Eats Girl is a brilliant little coming-of-age flick that feels like some wicked blend of Mean Girls and Shaun of the Dead. personally, i think the genius of the film is that it successfully explored the awkward onslaught of teenage sexuality without dissolving into a sexed-out skin-flick. this rare ability to explore a sexual theme without creating a sexual overtone made this little b-grade independent number a refreshing anomaly to the teen-scream genre.

with that said, i give Boy Eats Girl three supporting details out of five. this is text-book zombie film material: totally fun, totally smart, and totally full of dead people eating living people. (and it's available as a netflix "watch instantly" option.) i would show this to my classes if i knew i could get away with it. but i can't. so i won't. thus i'm writing this to all of you.

AVATAR and the Theory of Character Regression

2010-02-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna warn you ahead of time: there are going to be spoilers here. But everyone in America has seen this by now, so it shouldn't be a problem...

After seeing AVATAR last weekend, I've been running a kind of unofficial survey amongst the people that I know. It's really simple - I just ask what that person thought of the movie, being careful not to betray my own bias. Here's what I found: a good 75% of the time, the person's response is something like, "The visuals were amazing, but the story wasn't so great." Now, if you'll permit me to vent a little, here's a blanket statement for you: a movie that has a weak story cannot, no matter how pretty it is, be a good movie. It can't. If it has a bad story, then it's a bad movie. Story is still king, no matter if James Cameron is the writer or not, no matter if it's gorgeous or not.

I will give the film some credit, however (snarky credit, of course). Cameron does something in this movie that I've never seen anywhere, in any movie. He turns the concept of character development on its head, and his characters actually regress so blatantly that it has to be intentional on Cameron's part. These characters go from complex, interesting people that we may actually care about a couple of hours from now, to simple, illogical caricatures that we neither mourn nor celebrate with. Let's be a little specific.

Sigourney Weaver's character of Dr. Grace Augustine begins the film as the genius curmudgeon who resents a jarhead like Jake being assigned to her mission. She provides the counter-balance to Jake's bullheadedness and serves as the voice of reason to her superiors. As the movie progresses, though, Grace (who's not graceful at all, ha!) becomes increasingly irrelevant and serves no purpose other than to fawn over the Na'vi children. Science goes out the window right along with Grace's quirky smoking ritual. It's the same deal with Joel Moore's Norm Spellman who enters the movie as a brilliant scientist who is initially jealous of Jake's success with the Na'vi (which would have been an interesting plot device, but they chucked it after 5 minutes), but regresses into a gun-toting madman who throws himself in front of bullets. Isn't he a scientific genius? The best way for him to help was with a machine gun? Really? There wasn't some way to combine the Na'vi's knowledge of the science of Pandora with Norm's brilliance? Nope. Machine guns.

Even Jake, who has the most interesting character trait of all - the paraplegic who suddenly finds himself with legs - regresses into a faux William Wallace, spouting motivational gibberish from a mountaintop. Seriously, we couldn't explore this idea about how it felt for him to have legs again for, like, ten minutes? He runs around one time and it's old for him? Sidenote: what happened to the other avatars? The beginning establishes that there are a bunch of them. Where did they go?

And the evil Colonel Miles Quaritch, who begins the film as a reasonable military man who seems to understand the ins and out of in-theater operation, becomes a babbling idiot, whose military tactics make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Like, I don't know, maybe drop the bomb from really high up so that you didn't crash into trees and whatnot? Also, out of nowhere, he regresses into a crazed maniac who wants nothing else but to kill the blue folks. The mission doesn't matter to him anymore, he only wants be an exterminator. It doesn't make sense. The guy is career military; he makes a living in situations like this.

The best example of this idea of character regression, though, is Pandora itself (hey, Cameron makes it a character - why can't I?). The first third of the movie is concerned with this idea of the living planet in which everything is connected through a kind of neural network. Sidenote: Sigourney's monologue about the neural connections between the trees provoked out-loud laughing from both Janna and me. Totally ridiculous on a Mega Shark level. Then, later, when Jake is doing the William Wallace thing, he has to send everybody flying out to the other tribes? Why can't they just plug into the network and summon the others? Isn't that the point? And isn't it a rather large planet? It should have taken weeks to get all those warriors there, right? This is another example of the limitation of Cameron's writing - he can't close the deal. In the end, it's all just an action flick and darn the details. Continuing with Pandora, what's the deal with the body switching ritual? They just had this particular dance/chant/whatever ready to go in case they needed to switch bodies? Does this kind of thing happen regularly?

Here's why Cameron is no Tolkien (not that anyone is claiming that he is, of course). In films like THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, there is an internal consistency, an internal logic, to the created world. In AVATAR, there is none. Why do the floating mountains have waterfalls? Where does the water come from? Why does Eywa choose to wait three-quarters of the way through the battle to send the animals in? Why does Michelle Rodriguez suddenly care about the Smurfs? Are the screenwriters of DANCES WITH WOLVES and POCAHONTAS going to sue for plagiarism? And the big question: don't they know that the evil capitalists are just gonna come back with bigger guns and bigger bombs?

Anyway, I'll say it again. A movie with a weak story is a weak movie. It gets some points for being extraordinarily beautiful, but that's it. AVATAR gets 2 Resident Evil dobermans out of 5 (you go watch the Resident Evil movies and tell me that the dogs aren't exactly the same as the ones in AVATAR. Go on.). By the way, I reserve the right to upgrade this in the future if the sequels are better... and I hope they are.

BIRTHDAY FLYER - FEBRUARY 10, 2010

2010-02-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

i write up these little birthday flyers every morning and post them on my office door. a little tip of the hat to an my great teacher and mentor, dr. beefboy wink. i sent today's flyer to john barber, and he greeted it with enthusiasm. i thought i'd share the love with all of you. today is a special day because i am truly a huge fan of roberta flack and the early metallica era of cliff burton. i'll be watching The Wolf Man tonight.

Lon Chaney Jr. (1906) – You know they’re remaking your Wolfman film. Yessir, they’ve got that Benicio Del Toro playing your part. From what I’ve read, they said you set a standard, your face was wolfish already, and they’ve decided to use as much stop action transformations as possible to take Benicio from man to wolf. They were right about one thing: you set a standard. And every werewolf from Michael Landon to Michael Sheen has tried to bridge the gap between man and beast as authentically as you. Cheers for evolving a story of de-evolution!

Roberta Flack (1937) – I’ve said it multiple times before, and I’ll say it multiple times again: you are the most underrated female soul artist in music history. And that’s saying a lot from someone who swears by Gladys Knight and the Pips’ Imagination. But I’ve spent several late nights sitting up in the near dark spinning your First Take, sometimes repeatedly. I’m not sure what happened back then, if you walked in at the wrong time, if someone else beat you to the press, or if the attention of the country was somewhere else in 1969, pushing First Take into the periphery of the nation’s ear-shot, but, whatever misfortune happened, that album was overlooked as the masterpiece that it is, and you were unfortunately moved into the alcove as a peripheral artist. Maybe so at the time, but not in my home. You are greatness. You are a voice and talent to celebrate. So here’s to you, Roberta Flack, on red carpet and loud speakers, moving from the alcove to the center at last.

Cliff Burton (1962) – Since I was 13 years old, I have evolved through several different musical stages. There was the all-metal phase in junior high, the grunge stage in the early 90s, followed by the strictly Christian music phase of later high school. In college I teetered somewhere between indie rock and the Indigo Girls, finishing out my major on my dad’s Cat Stevens and classic country vinyl collection. I’ve tampered with hip hop, swing, classical, folk, Americana, and silence for years. My ears have jostled my brains these past 20 years like cerebral maracas set to the rhythm of obfuscation; however, since the first time I heard “Battery” in 1990, me and my ears and my jangled cerebral cortex always land back solid on one unwavering musical truth: Metallica. And I’m of the school that believes the best music Metallica ever created was during the Cliff Burton days. The band is still amazing. Still worth following. Metallica is still the gospel of heavy metal truth. But you were the fury of Metallica, the gory fuzz on their bitter edges, and when you left us in ’86 so did their dissonance and their blood raw intensity. It’s been near balladry, wrapped in the rabble of James and Lars licking their bus crash blues, ever since Ride the Lightning. Listen, here’s to you Cliff Burton, and the greatness that was pre-Newsted Metallica. This new Robert Trujillo sounds promising, but you were brutal. Thanks for the whiplash, and the “Whiplash”. I’ve got Master of Puppets spinning this morning in your honor.

SATISFACTION: A GUEST REVIEW BY TIFFANI RIGGERS

2010-02-08T18:52:00.001-08:00

"Satisfaction", starting Justine Bateman, Julia Roberts and Liam Neeson, among others, came out in 1988. Or as I like to call it "in the midst of my formative years." Because of that I remember it with great fondness and even use one of its lines fairly often ("where're the dips?" "all the dips are dancing") despite knowing that no one else has any idea what I'm talking about. Now that I have Netflix, I am able to relive these formative years with my grown up eyes and see if the movies stand the test of time.

Satisfaction is the story of a girl rock band, Mystery, who is hoping to spend the summer after high school graduation playing a gig at the beach. The band is made up of an odd collection of women (or stereotypes, as some might describe them) and a surprising amount of cowbell. And frankly, despite the presence of the cowbell and Justine Bateman's surprisingly low singing voice, the music isn't bad. Bateman, set up as the breakout star, plays the band's frontwoman who is also the high school valedictorian. Her best friend, the "slutty one" is played by Julia Roberts, who is as completely captivating and charming as she is in Pretty Woman (which released two years later). The "hoodlum" and "druggie" are also represented in this mix of girls that are inexplicably friends despite having nothing in common except the neighborhood where they grew up, a love for rock and roll, and some decent harmonies. To add some comic elements, after losing their keyboardist they recruit a nerdy dude (from Shag!) to drive the van and tickle the electric ivories.

There is a ton of drama crammed into this story: dreams crushed, dreams realized, sex, drugs, the obligatory rock and roll, attack dogs, broken hearts, classism, and a bar fight. Seriously. I think the main problem with this story is just that - there is too much happening at the same time, too many characters and too many stories. And I think this is why Justine Bateman didn't become the breakout star: though her thread in the storyline was almost interesting (mostly because young Liam Neeson is wounded and beautiful and compelling) the other stories distract from it, and every time Julia Roberts is on stage she overshadows the rest of the crew. Other summer movies from around this time (Shag, Summer School, and Dirty Dancing) manage to have one strong storyline and the side stories fit into it somehow. The side characters may fall in love, but the main point of the story continues. The side characters may grow as individuals, but the main character is the catalyst for the plot. Satisfaction, while a decent flick seems scattered and disjointed. I think you want to like this movie when you turn it on, but maybe it tries to hard to be all those other summer movies combined and never quite comes together around one important thing that the viewer can get behind (the way that Summer School made you want to rally around the summer class passing their exam, or the way that Dirty Dancing made you see how Baby and Johnny somehow fit and should be together).

Sentimentally, Satisfaction still rates 4 weirdly clanged cowbells out of 5 for me. But from a movie review standpoint, I have to be real with myself and you, and give it about 2 1/2 blue pills out of 5. If you like to see the stars before they were stars, or you like movies with music (like I do), then check it out. Otherwise, grab one of the other - better - movies mentioned above, pop some popcorn and enjoy some mindless summer fun sans Mystery.

RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF DISSENT

2010-01-29T06:19:00.000-08:00

I decided, on a whim, to take Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States with me to Rwanda a few years ago, and spent the better part of an afternoon on Lake Kivu reading this strange tale that I had never heard before, one of socialists during World War One, of the pacifists during World War Two, of the Native Americans during the colonial period. Chapter after chapter spoke to me of subaltern histories that my traditional history books hadn't really told me of. And what made this book revolutionary was that it was written in 1981, long before it was vogue to tell 'alternate histories'. Whole worlds opened up for me, worlds not only of other histories, but of how to tell other stories, how to see other worlds with other hopes and other aspirations.

As far as intellectual elitists go, Zinn was one with the goods. He was around at Spelman College during the Civil Rights movment, sponsoring the SNCC group on campus, and mentoring a little known woman named Alice Walker. He was fired from Spelman in 1963 for protest involvment around the Vietnam War, when he moved up to Boston. One of the collaborators with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Zinn continued his activism right up until his death.

Though probably not as well known around the Popcorn Bag as Mr. Salinger, Howard Zinn was for me the model of an academic who spoke his heart. I go back and forth about this: on the one hand, as anyone who's been around the academy knows, the academy is a pretty safe place to throw stones from. Once you gain some critical mass, intellectually speaking, even the most obnoxious voices can get difficult to dislodge. The man was not without his detractors, calling him "revisionist" in the pejorative sense of the world. My response to that is that we read the worlds we learn to see, and Zinn was in the business of helping us see a totally different one.

I won't go all the way and say that I agree with Zinn on everything; his Marxism gets obnoxious; he was devoutly materialist in many of his writings. And on that, he and I must part ways. But what I celebrated about Zinn's work was the manner in which he, as one of the ivory tower, turned his work not into an internal conversation with the academy, but as a vehicle for re-thinking the world. That world he helped rethink is poorer for his passing.

INDEED, TODAY IS A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH

2010-01-28T14:07:00.000-08:00

Jerome David Salinger

January 1, 1919 - January 27, 2010

chad pollock was on again about my needing to read salinger. he was in a tizzy about it. as usual, we had been hitting the yantai pijui pretty hard, and all things become greatly exaggerated in the chinese lamplight of more pijui. so whether it was chad that was angrily on about it or whether it was me melodramatically filtering chad, we'll never actually know. but i do know that i hauled myself to the foreign teacher's library the next day and checked out a blood red copy of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. and i know that, on the way home from the library, i bought a pack of qing liu cigarettes and a bottle of brandy at a kiosk, and when i sat down to read that evening i was already half drunk by page one.

i read the whole book in one sitting over the course of 19 chinese cigarettes, a bottle of brandy and a large yantai pijui. somehow, it only seems right that my experiment in reading under the influence would be holden caulfield's biography. and it worked. and even when i read the book again later that week, i remembered every detail to a tee - an intoxicated feat i've never quite accomplished since, even though i've tried several times.

but this is what i remember most about that night. i remember coming to the part in the book when holden sees the graffiti on the walls of his sister's school, and this pains him. and i remember holding my cigarette in my right hand, even though the ashtray was to the left of my chair. and i remember a large humming sound seeping into my room, as if from the very floors and not through a crack in the door or windows or walls. the hum rose from the ground up towards me, and as i looked across the room everything simultaneously shrank and jutted away from me, as if my chair had been suddenly sucked backward, my eyeballs torpedoed in reverse.

the entire episode lasted for about 20 seconds, long enough for my entire body to break into a sweat and for my cigarette to burn a hole in the carpet. i also remember thinking, as i recanted all doctrine of time, "is this what it's like to go crazy?" i was also a bit disappointed to that angels did not show themselves, but we can never custom order our episodes ahead of time. they grab us by lottery, and we know we win if we come out remembering our names.

i have told very few people this story. it's not the kind of story that you tell. like maud casey said about writers discussing their rare glimpses into invisible worlds, "it's not something you should talk too much about because it might disappear altogether, and because you start sounding like an asshole." some things you just gotta sit on and let fester between you and those walls that held the structure of secrecy.

but this is the thing i've never been able to let go of, and it's this right here. sometimes, in really dramatic romance stories, they talk of magical kisses containing fireworks or sparks or chemical explosions in the bottom of each lip locker's feet. and i sometimes wonder if such a moment, one of my great romantic surges, happened between me and salinger that night, crested down by a rising hum, sipping a bottle of chinese brandy while my ceiling bulb briskly retreated through the roof. i'll never actually know, but i think of that moment everytime i think of salinger. it would be an understatement to say he's haunted me.

if salinger is a hero to be celebrated, it is not because of the four books he published as much as for the people he created. had salinger been God, the whole world would be one giant manhattan, and every word ever spoken would sizzle on a breath of vermouth and olives. thank God salinger wasn't God, but he was close. the world and the people salinger created were real, and we feared them as much as we silently longed for their honesty and courage. i've spent more than one full night sipping my way through salinger's work, and i've more than once shivered at my revulsion and envy of his characters.

like everything else salinger ever did - his books, his seclusion, his secrets, my slip of momentary dimentia - he has now forced this event upon us as well. ascending the elevator. dripping and salty from the shore. laying down on his pillow. kinder and gentler than even his stories. like all things, he has forced his quiet exit upon us, and he didn't even bother to whisper "excuse me" as he left the room. defiance was always his style.

and despite all our other plans, salinger proclaimed this day a perfect day for remembering, and a perfect day for letting go. i suppose i can oblige him this one thing. God bless you, j.d.

V for VENDETTA? CAN I GET YOUR NUMBER INSTEAD?

2010-01-27T07:11:00.000-08:00

Instead of giving a full-length treatment of V FOR VENDETTA, one of my most recent Netflix treasures, I'll post this interview between Zach Galifinakis and Natalie Portman. I go back and forth on Portman. On the one hand, I can never forgive her for her involvement with the Star Wars saga: wooden acting, lame lines, culminating with the infamous "Hold you like me did next to the lakes of Naboo." I get shivers just thinking about it. On the other hand, she's really cute, and a Harvard grad, and lacks most of the Hollywood silliness. She tends toward more serious flicks, which I can appreciate.

So, in lieu of my analysis of the deep philosophical waters of V FOR VENDETTA, check this, this, this, or especially this out. Frankly, I found the parallels between 1984 and V pretty intriguing, especially when you consider that John Hurt plays Winston Smith (the hero of 1984) and the chief villan of V, a very "Big-Brother"-esque kind of character. And then, watch go watch this.

Apologies for having to go watch it elsewhere; I'm not tech-savvy enough to embed the video here.

NOTE BENE: With this post, we have the most productive month EVER for this site, logging 16 posts this month. Go celebrate or something.

THE PERILS OF FILM COLLECTING AND THE BEAUTIFUL AWKWARDNESS OF DANCING WITH JAMIE LEE CURTIS

2010-01-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

besides watching too many films and reviewing too few films, i also collect me some films. well, i try to collect films. because of my loose allegiance to his holiness the dave ramsey, i do not buy as many films as i would like. and i never buy new or full-priced films. i only buy dvds off clearance racks in rental stores or from the "what's hot" rack at best buy. half priced books gets a portion of my monthly allowance, though i refuse to pay more than $5 for a vhs or a dvd.

oddly enough, i'm quite finicky with what i put in my film collection. at the moment, i'm working on a reputable collection of 80's comedies, children's animation, and classic slasher flicks. the latter category is the most fun to shop for, and probably because classic slashers are difficult to find.

for instance, i searched for the 1980 jamie lee curtis scream-queen classic, PROM NIGHT, for nearly two years before scoring a vhs copy at a half-priced bookstore in austin, texas. unfortunately, my vcr was broken, so i could only stare at the vhs box, sending pictures of the angry jamie lee cover to john and myles with my camera phone. finally, and surprisingly, i found a brand new dvd copy of PROM NIGHT at a record store in kansas city. to his holiness the ramsey's chagrin, i paid $10 for the disc, never thinking twice about it.

(have i mentioned lately how much i love the jamie lee curtis? probably not. might as well not start here. but, wow, jamie less curtis . . . . . . )

so after all that searching, all that waiting, all that tripping up of dave ramsey's gazelle intensity, i really wanted to love this film. i wanted this to be the best slasher film i had ever seen. i was even prepared, possibly fueled by the romanticism of a long hunt, to pronounce PROM NIGHT's triumph over HALLOWEEN (jamie lee's debut) and FRIDAY THE 13th (my slasher debut). i was prepared to do something that perverse, awarding PROM NIGHT all manner of hamsterian hyperboles and jamie lee gusheries. but i was not prepared for how badly this film sucks.

and this film hella sucks. it's not the worst film on the planet (THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK) or even the worst slasher film i've ever seen (HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME). PROM NIGHT is just a boring, poorly executed, overly obvious crime drama. each attempt to confuse the killer's identity by way of a creepy school janitor or rumors of a prisoner escape only solidifies the killer's identity. as one reviewer for RottenTomatoes says, "it's quite easy to figure out the killer's identity by simply keeping track of who is off screen a lot."

regardless, in every one of these horrible slasher flicks there is always the one golden 4-minute scene crammed into the dreadfully dull 90 minutes of worthless movie. in PROM NIGHT, the golden scene is jamie lee's prom queen dance with the prom king. fortunately, i've saved all of you the misery of sitting through PROM NIGHT by providing you, in the screen below, with the best 4 minutes of the whole mess. the awkwardness of this scene is delicious, and i'm only sad that the video quality linked below does not show the david brent lip biting intensity on jamie lee's face. she's really giving it here, and not very well.

PROM NIGHT gets 2 uber-serious leslie neilsen's out of 5. after two years of searching clearance racks, bargain bins, thrift stores and garage sales, i expected (or hoped for) way more than this film delivered. but we live and we learn. we grow alongside our film collections. and though our collections reflect some weak moment in our financial history, we do not reflect our collections. i, for one, am exceedingly glad for this truth, as my PROM NIGHT dvd now sits alongside a copy of FIREPROOF.

dear Lord, do not tell dave ramsey where my gazelle intensity has scampered off to.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DANIEL JOHNSTON!

2010-01-22T07:01:00.000-08:00

A Tale of Two Documentaries

2010-01-20T08:19:00.000-08:00

"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."
--Alfred Hitchcock

"Every cut is a lie. It’s never that way. Those two shots were never next to each other in time that way. But you’re telling a lie in order to tell the truth."
--Wolf Koenig

Thanks to the miracle that is Netflix, I've had the pleasure of viewing two beautiful, but starkly different, documentaries in the past few days. One is a picture of brutality and hubris, the other a celebration of beauty and humility.
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I don't remember how I found out about THE COVE. But I do remember that when I heard about it I quickly added it to my Netflix queue, and then hit that all-important "Move to Position #1" button. On Saturday afternoon, I popped it in the laptop and became engrossed by the thermal camera images of dolphins being slaughtered that accompany the opening credits.

THE COVE is a film that details a small group of activists, people culled from various professions and walks of life, that see the wholesale and needless extermination of dolphins in Taiji, Japan. Led by Rick O'Barry (the guy who trained Flipper, and has since renounced dolphin captivity), this team is comprised of deep sea divers, special effects wizards, and ex-military who put their freedom and lives on the line to accomplish their mission. Their mission was to simply document what has been going on in Taiji. And what, exactly, has been going on? The fishermen in Taiji have a cove that is located along dolphin migration patterns. They herd dolphins by the hundreds into this cove, where trainers from all over the world select dolphins to be bought and transported to their various dolphinariums and aquariums. This process is viewable by anyone from the street. What happens next is that the dolphins that aren't selected are herded into a secret cove that isn't visible from the street. These dolphins are killed. All of them. Male, female, children. Their meat is harvested and sold. Approximately 25,000 dolphins a year are killed in Taiji.

This is the time for a disclaimer. I am a carnivore through and through. While not a hunter, I have no reservations about responsible hunting. Many of my friends are hunters, and they bring me meat from the deer or elk or fish or whatever. I am not a member of PETA or Greenpeace. This is not an issue of responsible hunting - it's people making money off of the brutalization of another species for profit, with no regard to the environmental or health impact.

If we were talking simply about an issue of hunting dolphins because, culturally, they are a desired food, there wouldn't be that big of a deal. It would still be sad, but daddy's gotta eat. The main problem here is that almost no one eats dolphin meat. In fact, (and I'll try not to spoil the movie for you) eating dolphin meat is terribly dangerous to your health. What O'Barry and the team discover goes way beyond an animal cruelty issue (although it most certainly is that, as well) and extends into a health crisis. Watch the movie.

It's hard to give a rating out of five to a movie like this. I understand that there is one point of view being portrayed here. I also understand that this movie is made with a strong agenda. Still, if it can soften the heart of this carnivore, it must be effective. 5 Private Spaces out of 5.

-----------

From uber-serious to uber-awesome. Here's the plot for IT MIGHT GET LOUD: put The Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White in a room together and let them talk about guitars. Fantasticality ensues.

I wish, wish, wish that I had seen this in the theater. I've got a decent enough TV, but I really wish that I had heard this on big surround-sound, thx speakers. The movie tracks these three guys from their youth to the time that they fell in love with guitars.

There is a great little segment on how they each got their first electric guitar, and it's absolutely precious to watch these guys talk about the instrument like it was a child. The Edge talks about his first electric guitar in the same way that I talk about Sam being born. Speaking of The Edge, my favorite scene in the movie is a short little snippet in which he is listening to the original four-track demos of Where the Streets Have No Name. In the background, you can here Bono counting. And The Edge, listening intently and obviously remembering this time, this time before everything got so huge, before U2 became really gigantic, he almost gets emotional. Almost, but not quite.

What I really loved about this movie was the three men, who represent three generations of rock and roll, all demonstrate an incredible amount of mutual respect and humility. It would be easy for Jimmy Freaking Page to not take Jack White seriously, but he watches and listens, and dang it if he isn't learning a thing or two. And Jack White, the poster child for irreverence, watches Page and The Edge with an awe that is remarkable. The Edge is steady throughout, serving as a kind of bridge between the generations.

The only complaint I have is that I would have loved to have seen more of them playing together. At the very end, they all play The Band's "The Weight" together - The Edge and Jack White trade off singing the verses (Page makes a comment about how he can't sing at all). It's pretty great. That four minutes is worth the price of admission.

IT MIGHT GET LOUD gets 4 Claudettes out of 5 - it loses one because I wasn't satisfied in the end. But then, that's what rock and roll is all about, isn't it?

THE TRIFECTA FAILS AS THE HAMSTER'S BRIDE PRAYS IN VAIN

2010-01-17T11:16:00.000-08:00

the only way i can imagine following up myles' recent posts concerning two finer film slices, as well as the three back-to-back "Best Of '09" lists by each Hockey Masker, is with a review of unapologetic fluff.

my wife is a sucker for a good action flick, which she refers to as "bang-bang-shoot-em-ups." and, whether she would admit this to your face or not, "bang-bang-shoot-em-ups" are her absolute most favorite film genre. granted, she is nearly always disturbed by the inherent violence of action films, praying "Oh Jesus!" everytime anybody gets shot. likewise, the required foul language in action films surprises and disgusts latonya each time, as she crinkles her forehead and solemnly declares, "if they keep this up, i'm turning this off." she's a lady who suffers an odd paradox for her art, simultaneously hoping the best and the worst for everyone in these film: she understands that people gotta get banged-banged-and-shot-up in action flicks, but she just wants them to do it nicely.

also, even more than action flicks, latonya's a sucker for john travolta. but, even more than john travolta, she's a total sucker for denzel. and still more than denzel, she's a wicked sucker for an action flick pitching john travolta against denzel. for latonya stephanie still, THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 should have been the trifecta of lazy sunday film watching. she even gleefully plopped back on her movie pillow as if this trifecta marked her birthday twice in a single year.

regretfully, PELHAM 123 did not deliver the trifecta it promised. there were bangs, so latonya prayed her reverential "Oh Jesus!" and travolta tried his best to cuss like nick nolte in a samuel l. jackson costume, so her forehead cringed. but the film lacked the most vital element of action flicks: tension. even with time running out and hostages dying and denzel running four-minute-miles in loafers and the gorgeous john turturro screaming his adam's apple off in the background, PELHAM 123 was a total flatline. i've felt more suspense waiting to see if all my microwave popcorn actually popped.

i think we both agreed that THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 deserves 2 travolta neck tats out of 5. roger ebert said it best in the opening line of his review: "There's nothing much wrong with Tony Scott's 'The Taking of Pelham 123' except that there's not much really right about it." save this for your next bout of flu or mono or dysentery. this is a great film for when you don't have time or energy for a film.

* * *

speaking of denzel, i would like to add that our very own guest reviewer, tiffani riggers, wrote a humdinger of a review for THE BOOK OF ELI on her personal page. the lady knows her way around a good film. i'm anxious to publish more by her in the weeks to come.

Top Five of 2009, Barber Style.

2010-01-15T16:26:00.000-08:00

This was the best year in a long time for movies (for me anyway, the Academy may disagree). It was a wonderful year for blockbusters and for little films. In fact, my top five list has some of both. Without further ado, here's the list, 5 to 1.

THE TOP 5

5. UP - It's not my all-time favorite Pixar film - that honor still goes to WALL-E, but it's a darn good follow-up. The scenes between Carl and Russell are beyond lovely. A kids movie that espouses the importance of family at the same time it's giving us talking dogs and flying houses... I loved it.

4. AWAY WE GO - I already reviewed this here, but a quick recap. This is a movie that has really funny funnies and really sad sads. It's completely ridiculous and you still by in for the journey. And the two leads are just great.

3. ZOMBIELAND - The one movie to end up on all three of our lists. This one had so much blasted joy in it, so much zombie-killing joy. If any film ever threatened knocking FRIDAY THE 13TH off its perch as our golden calf around here, it would be this one. I didn't see this movie until a couple of weeks ago, and from the opening five minutes, I knew it would end up on this list.

2. FANBOYS - I think I'm the only person that saw FANBOYS. Really. I've asked lots of actual Star Wars Fanboys, and no one has seen it. Come on, people! Seriously, what's the hang up? Just because it's a movie about four nerds breaking into the Lucas Ranch to steal an early print of Episode 1, does that mean it can't be funny? This is the closest thing we've had to a John Hughes movie since Watts was smooching Keith. And Kristen Bell wears the Princess Leia outfit. Come on.

1. THE HURT LOCKER - Will it win Best Picture this year? Maybe not. It's got a lot working against it - it came out early, it's got no Clooney-factor, etc. That doesn't make it any less powerful or compelling. It's not a movie about the Iraq War, it's a movie about people who are in the Iraq War. Please see this before Oscar season.

THE HONORABLE MENTIONS:

STAR TREK - As a life-long Trekkie, I was a little worried about the reboot. But after walking out of the theater, I couldn't have been happier with it. The brilliantosity factor comes in JJ Abrams ability too change all the rules without breaking any. This is a long-running franchise and it can go wherever it wants, without being beholden to history. Brilliantosity at its finest.

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG - Go watch it with your daughter. Heck, go watch it without your daughter. It's really good.

CORALINE - In a year filled with great animated fare, this one ranks up there with the Disney/Pixar stuff. Creepy, shoot, downright scary in places, this is more Tim Burton than Walt Disney. We own it...

FANTASTIC MR. FOX - Again, the kiddie stuff shined this year. Wes Anderson is still Wes Anderson.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER - This one is as remarkable for its structural innovation as for its story. Plus, Gordon-Leavitt outshines Zooey in it, and that's saying something

MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS - Yep.

THE MOST DISAPPOINTING MOVIES OF 2009

WATCHMEN - Meh. It was ok. And ok it not good enough for WATCHMEN.

FRIDAY THE 13TH - Why couldn't JJ Abrams do this one too?

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE - Again, ok. Disappointingly so. Why invent scene for a movie that you had to cut so much from?

THE OTHER TOP FIVE OF 2009

2010-01-15T06:20:00.000-08:00

Following the Hamster's lead, I'll dish out my top 5s in a few categories for 2009:

TOP FIVE FILMS IN THE THEATRE of 2009:

1) ZOMBIELAND--I didn't care for it as much the first time around, but with the guest cameos, the clever titles, and the role Woody Harrelson was born to play, this was unquestionably the winner.

2) THE WRESTLER--this comes in a close second, for a whole host of reasons. I've never cared for Mickey Rourke that much, but this film hits a home-run, if only because it's one of those rare films which has a vision of the world, and then unrelentingly plows forward toward the inevitable conclusion. I sat stunned after it finished. Technically, this was "2008" film, but I saw it in 2009 in the theater, so whatever. It was incredible.

3) I LOVE YOU, MAN--saw this one three weeks before the wedding with Matt Moser, and totally identified with this film. It's so true, and while the Hangover may have more laughs, this was a more likeable film than The Hangover. Paul Rudd can't compete with Zach Galifinakis for the comedic genius, but he's still pretty freaking funny.

4) INGLORIOUS BASTERDS--saw this for a second time the other night at Matt's, and upon a second watching, I like it better. It's a return of Tarrantino to story-telling, apart from the crap he's dished out for the last few films, and an excellent commentary on what is art, and how life and art implicate one another.

5) UP--I teared up a couple of times during an animated film. That alone gets it a mention. I hate the phrase "family friendly", but it fits. I should own this one.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
--Avatar--visually stunning, but the plot left a lot lacking.
--Star Trek--I'm a sucker for reboots. I love what Nolan has done with the Batman franchise, for example, and word has it, the same is in store for Spiderman.
--The Hangover--Zach Galifanakis.
--Julie and Julia--I heart Amy Adams, and Meryl Streep--how can you not love Meryl?

TOP FIVE RENTALS OF 2009:

1) LET THE RIGHT ONE IN--what Kevin said. This was subtle, and the kind of monster movie that is not restricted to a sub-genre.

2) THE KING OF KONG--can a documentary about video games get me jumping up and down? This one did. Sarah does not get it; I love her anyway.

3) MURDERBALL--another beautiful documentary that I alternately laughed and teared up while watching.

4) ATONEMENT--this film has me thinking about what narration is and does in completely different ways. I still haven't figured out how to write about this movie.

5) JESUS CHRIST, VAMPIRE HUNTER--plot: Jesus comes to rid the world of a vampire horde who is stealing all of Montreal's lesbians. Need I say more? It's really smart, and laden with Scriptural references, and surprisingly, Jesus comes off pretty great.

FIVE I DIDN'T SEE IN THE THEATERE BUT AM CHOMPING AT THE BIT TO SEE:

1) THE ROAD--once again, Waco stays true to form and keeps an apocalyptic film destined for an Oscar nomination out of the theaters.

2) UP IN THE AIR--on everyone's top 10 list, but I reference the reasons for #1.

3) THE HURT LOCKER--I feel like I'm getting repetitive.

4) A SERIOUS MAN--I do love the Cohen Brothers.

5) CRAZY HEART--Jeff Bridges in a much-talked about Oscar buzz role.

and, last but not least....THREE DOGS OF 2009:

1) TERMINATOR: SALVATION--all of the explosions, none of the plot nuances of the other Terminators.

2) GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA--I am so glad I only paid a dollar at the Red Box for this turd blossom.

3) WOLVERINE--I can't really talk about this. Too soon.

THE HAMSTER'S TOP 5 OF 2009

2010-01-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

you can imagine the chagrin befalling my hamsterian realization that the list of films i did not see in 2009 appeared more impressive than the list of films i actually did see. still, i took in some winners. total winners. winner winner chicken dinners. and i would like to present our Hockey Mask readership a few lists of the best and worst films of the hamster's year, as well as links to the reviews i wrote for each listed title. (in the case of I LOVE YOU, MAN, the link goes to a great review by myles - a review so nice i left it to the master himself.) enjoy.

* * *

THE HAMSTER'S TOP FIVE, IN ORDER OF PREFERENCE:

1. ZOMBIELAND - possibly the best zombie flick ever. tough to say because i'm so enthusiastically new to the genre, but i now gauge romero against ZOMBIELAND as opposed to the other way around - if that says anything.

2. THE HANGOVER - my new favorite comedy, after ANCHORMAN and maybe even MEAN GIRLS. the latter is still in judiciary conference.

3. THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT- the most heartfelt horror film i have ever seen. saw this twice in the theaters and now own it. this is great. and i disagree with all the gorehounds of the genre who declare the original as superior: this film is brutally beautiful. shucks, i need a review on this one.

4. STAR TREK - this film won me with it's ability to tell a huge history in such a cohesive voice. no small feat. not much of a trekkie, but this was greatness on every level.

5. THE WRESTLER - gut-wrenching. honest. and the redemptive return of two stars with the best still ahead. i loved this film. loved it. probably deserves the number 4 spot, but oh well. it's gorgeous.

* * *

THE RUNNERS-UP - NOT IN ORDER, AND NOT QUITE TOP FIVE MATERIAL:

- FRIDAY THE 13TH

- THE UNINVITED

- I LOVE YOU, MAN (mpm-w)

- WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

- INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

* * *

THE ABSOLUTE WORST FILMS OF 2009:

- TERMINATOR: SALVATION - this film should have never been made.

- THE COLLECTOR - this film was pitiful. no heart. no brains. no purpose. this film is the reasons the horror genre gets such a bad rep.

- THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - pretty scenes. nice acting. cute concept. but painfully awful. excruciatingly long. ridiculously dramatic. and totally unbelievable. plus, what's with the humanitarian plug at the end? stupid. the only redeemable element of this entire film was Taraji P. Henson's performance, which, of course, was never mentioned alongside the title. i would have accepted a 3 hour film that simply followed Miss Henson around acting like benjamin's mom rather than this piece of bull-turd.

* * *

THE HAMSTER'S TOP FIVE RENTALS OF 2009:

- LET THE RIGHT ONE IN - i wish this had been a 2009 film. it would have easily made #1. this is honestly one of the best films i've ever seen. unfortunately, it's categorized as a vampire/horror flick when, clearly, it's a romance. and it's lovely.

- KNOCKED-UP - even better than the sum of its recommendations. this was deliciously funny, and, surprisingly, one of the most touching films of the year. eat your heart out, della reese.

- THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS - quirky. socially awkward. devastating exploitation of one man's midlife crises and another man who's a total crises. i greatly enjoyed this film. and i cannot recommend it highly enough.

- THE HAMILTONS - this film proves that horror flicks can be artistic. this is a difficult film to digest, but there's a beauty here that supercedes the violence. and the ending twists like a corkscrew to the jugular. honestly, one of my favorite films of the year.

- REVOLUTIONARY ROAD - there is nothing wrong with this film. this is cinematic beauty from frame first to frame last. and the acting here is flawless.

* * *

2010 is off to a great start, but the competition from '09 is pretty fierce. here's to the year ahead: a hamsterian blessing on all your viewings.

THE CITY OF GOD AND THE CITIES OF GODS

2010-01-11T19:06:00.000-08:00

The three authors of this thing are compiling their "Best of 2009" lists, but I keep wondering how it is that the best movies I find to watch are from some other year. Netflix remains of the best things we've ever invested in, bringing in buckets of films that I would never have thought to watch before. I go back and forth on the cultural capacities of Waco, but with regards to film, there's a lot to be desired. Needless to say, my guest room is the best theatre in town 85% of the time.

CITY OF GOD is a film that will stay with me for months. Saying that this is the story of a Rio De Janerio slum, and the rise of two rival gangs is a really reductionist version of the plot. This is a story less about the leaders of the gangs, Knockout Ned and Little Ze, and more about a slum--the slum itself is the living, breathing, bleeding, heaving main character, vomiting up bodies and breathing out tragedy. Set in the outskirts of Rio, this winner of over 60 awards across the globe documents the ways in which one slum draws together two men by circumstance, and with them, a whole society which must hold sway under their violence. Bands of children roam the street fully armed, letting childhood rules of justice find full expression in guns. Drugs are water; death is bread; blood is religion.

The title of the film calls for me another City of God, the massive work by Augustine. In this work, Augustine beautifully lays out what he takes to be the central problem of human society: misdirected love. What we love, he says, we love imperfectly, so much so that human societies are necessarily made of competition and struggle, of inequity and death. What we love, we love in disproportion, and absolutely--we love the temporal, the sensual, and the gaudy, out of proportion. It's not that food or drink or sex is bad, but when they are loved absolutely, they become self-totalizing idols and impose death upon us, impelling us to sacrifice everything for pleasure or to rot our bones for power.

The tragedy of the slum is that it is of human making, a corral for the homeless to keep them out of the pristine Rio. And as such, for a time, it exists in perfect balance. There is no crime or robbery or rape, but only because behind the peace lurks Little Ze, the overlord who conducts his drug trafficking in absolute power, with petty crime an interference to his trade. When Ze's power trips across the line from the material to the human, from possessing a monopoly on drugs to possessing the power of life and death, a spark is ignited which consumes everything. Augustine watches as the banal ability to do things (power) swells, spilling over as people become things, and things become expendable.

Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund's film narrates this kind of society in heart-wrending detail, such that even those who recognize the temporality of power or the fleeting gravitas of the gun cannot ultimately escape what they have made. The City of God has become an all-consuming deity which opens its mouth and calls back into itself all that which seeks to escape, a god from our own hands and fashioned by our own desires. In the end, what redemption is there is marginal; the hero remains in the City, content to photograph its gasping, teeming, eternal life.

Five child thieves out of five. Kevin, I need to change my links at the side of the page.

EATING OUR WAY TO HEAVEN

2010-01-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

For years, I've been told that BABETTE'S FEAST was one of those must-watch films, and so, like film-lemming that I am, I put it on the Netflix queue and gave it a shot. With the new semester starting tomorrow, I'd love to say that our collective film-watching time won't go into decline, but who's to say? With that, I'm trying to get in some real heavies at the end of Christmas break, including CITY OF GOD, which Paste magazine rated the best movie of the decade, and, by all accounts a real downer.
**

For the first hour of the film, I wasn't convinced that this movie deserved any of the hype accorded to it. A fairly minimalist film, set in 19th century Denmark, in a small village on the coast, BABETTE tells the tale of a woman sent to board with two sisters, elderly daughters of a beloved departed village minister. The daughters, because of their belief in the austere religious life, had each pursued the path of devotion over against one rooted in temporal pleasures, of beauty and the arts. Thankfully, director Gabriel Axel had the good sense to not resort to the ridiculous religious stereotypes these kinds of setups usually engender. Exhibit A: most of Stephen King's books where the minister is a meglomaniacal puritan.

By contrast, the daughters and the rest of their friends (fellow congregants of the late minister), band together for purity's sake, seeking the kingdom of God, purifying the flesh for the sake of the soul. Enter Babette, a refugee chef from France, sent by one of the daughters' long-lost suitors. Babette is taken in by the kindly, aged sisters, where all is well for a time, until Babette receives news she's won 10,000 francs, prompting fears that Babette will leave them and return to France. Babette's assumed departure coinsides with the 100th birthday of the sisters' father, which Babette--as a thank you for their kindness--asks to cater. Over Christmas, one of my wife's brothers cooked a meal like the one displayed here, and in that eating, food becomes less nourishment than art form, less time than pure event.

The crux comes when the congregation, gathering to celebrate the minister's life, is faced with a dilemna: the meal promises to be lush, lavish, and extravagant, while their salvation is tied to austerity and piety--the lust of the eyes against the love of the immaterial; the sensuality of the stomach against the love of God. What is to be done?
**

In Catholic theology, which drenches this film, the sacramental life is that which proclaims that material realities can in fact be experiences of God's grace, that we are visibly transformed through the partaking of the physical good gifts of God. As such, there need be no competition between physical and temporal pursuits, for the love of God transforms the physical pursuits in a way that one can do all manner of things toward God, loving God in and through them. Conversely, physical pleasure reaches a limit it cannot rightly transgress without being made perfect by the spiritual, such that normal activities, when undertaken in the love of God and for the sake of God, find the perfection they were always meant for.

I won't spoil the ending, because it really was a wonderful half-hour, subtle and delicate in the execution. Too often, these kinds of films wind up becoming ham-handed morality tales or preaching exhibitions against religion, but I loved that the central message is that the enjoyment of the goodness of creation is not opposed to the love of God, but in fact, enables it. Good food, good film, good friends do not detract us from the love of God, but in fact create the conditions under which communion of the soul with God can happen.

4 Turtle soups out of 5. I take one bowl back for general pacing of the film (which left me watching this solo while my wife snoozed), but I'll be darned if soliloquies in the last 15 minutes on mercy and truth won't stay with me for days to come.

WRESTLING EXTREMES AND BREAKING MIRRORS: THE HAMSTER EARNS HIS OMATICAYA STRIPES

2010-01-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

AVATAR is film enough to deserve two reviews, if not more. personally, i would enjoy reading full reviews from the other two Hockey Maskers, as well as those trusted guest reviewers who have helped boost our nielsen ratings in the past few months. there's loads to say about this film. and since we can't order a big round of drinks to chat this one up over pints, Hockey Mask Inc. is a fine platform in lieu.

whether or not we all agree on the visual, narrative, character, and subtextual aspects of AVATAR, none of us can deny the enormity of this film. i've heard several men of my father's generation, including my pops, equate their AVATAR viewing experience with that of seeing STAR WARS in 1977: in both cases audiences left the theater shaking their heads, saying, "movies will never be the same again." i did not attend STAR WARS in 1977. (actually, i was in the audience but in the womb - my dad said i kicked and squirmed in utero the entire film and then popped out squawking and screaming like a tusken raider the very next day; i had a jedi calling to attend, it would appear). however, after seeing AVATAR today in IMAX 3D, i might understand the awe that ushered audiences from the cinema in 1977.

let me begin by declaring that, in my opinion, AVATAR deserves 5 kitty cat earlobes out of 5. and i award all five lobes to the entirety of the film, not just the visuals. granted, this probably says more about me as viewer than it does about the actual film. fine. i'm okay with that. in fact, that's exactly what i've been thinking about since i left the theater today, particularly in light of so much criticism concerning the shallowness of cameron's storyline and the paper-thin quality of his characters. these things never crossed my mind during the film. for nearly 3 hours, i was in that story and on that planet. i hated the humans. i loved the na'vi. i felt queasy on the heights. i prayed under that Tree of Souls. and, as shallow as this might sound, i bought into every bit of it as if i'd hooked my pony tail up to the film and leapt with it off a floating mountain.

i totally agree with sean cathey - AVATAR is why we go to the theater - but i disagree that the archetypes steal from the experience. perhaps the enormity of the human's militant greed and the na'vi's uber-pantheism feels a bit extreme, but i believe this is another reason we go to the theater or engage art: to wrestle extremes.

sure, i sometimes enjoy a believable set of characters and conditions. john hughes is fun for such relations. the duck man? i get him. i think i knew that guy in high school. john bender? i only wish i had been that punk rock once in my life. uncle buck? hell, i'd give anything for an uncle that made snow shovel sized pancakes! sometimes it's fun to shake hands with a screen name that looks and feels and sounds similar to ourselves, but eventually i want to make room for archetypes, for mythology, for extremes, even (or especially) at the cost of my own notions of reality. such archetypes and extremes force us to leave the mirrored reflections of who we are in order to stare down the possibility of who we are becoming, where we are going, what might happen if we don't break that God-damned mirror quickly. could AVATAR offer such a prophetic vision? it depends on the gullibility of the viewer, i suppose.

perhaps it's the horror fan in me that feels safe embracing archetypal extremes. or perhaps its the closet fundamentalist buried deep in my southern baptist roots that readily grants bullets in the battle between black and white, between paper-thin humans and the overly pristine na'vi. whatever the case, john cameron suckered me into AVATAR and i never quibbled one bit with surrendering to him every emotion. this is precisely why i bought my ticket in the first place. such a surrender is exactly what i hoped for when i walked into the theater. i am gullible like that. i want to be ravaged a la STAR WARS ' 77 by that oversized theater screen. i want to walk out with broader territories and more extreme notions of a plausible reality somewhere.

shucks, i might even love trees more today than i did yesterday.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE'S NOONE LEFT TO EAT

2010-01-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

sean cathey recently said something brilliant about the gluttonous pleasure of going to the theater during the morning. i liked his suggestion so much, i decided to try it for myself. and what better film to begin a new habit of morning theater goings than a dark and sinister vampire flick? a little coffee, a bite of lunch, and then two hours in a dark theater. yessir, this certainly feels like a day off, and this film made my day off feel like a freaking holiday.

DAYBREAKERS is proof that stephanie meyer has not totally staked all the heart out of vampire lore, at least not yet anyway. when one adds up the recent triumphs in vampire cinema - 2007's graphic novel adaptation, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT; the 2008 swedish masterpiece LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, based on the blindingly brilliant novel by john ajvide lindqvist (thank you again, kelly riad); and then this new undead gem - it becomes quite apparent that vampire lore is only getting better.

the DAYBREAKERS premise is simple but brilliant. it's 2019. the majority of the earth's population are vampires and the primary food source - which is harvested, marketed, and hunted by the military and major corporations - is humankind. however, the food supply is running low. the human population is depleting, which means that the major blood supply corporations are in danger of going bankrupt. this is where star vampire hematologist ethan hawke steps into the picture. his job is to create a blood substitute, a processed alternative to human blood that will sustain vampires past the extinction of humanity. however, ethan hawke is neither stoked about being a vampire or about prospering the vampire race. luckily for him, he runs into a group of renegade human beings who offer him a chance to mass produce a cure for vampirism instead an alternative food source. of course, this opportunity undermines the greater interest of big blood supply corporations, namely ethan hawke's boss, and this conflict of interests - between curing vampires or feeding them profitably fake blood - is where the plot thickens, congeals, and splatters all over the screen.

there's more i want to say about this, and maybe i'll work some of that into the ded-gum comments section, but for now the wife and i got some tickets to see AVATAR in IMAX. and as much as may have liked this little number, i ain't missing my engagement to write about the last one. overall, i give DAYBREAKERS 4 hamsterian gasps that ethan hawke didn't screw this one up out of 5. shucks, the wife is pushing me out the door and to the show. and all this time i thought i was the one excited about the blue folks

BEYONCE DONE GONE AND GOT THE FEAR OF GOD IN HER FINGERNAILS!!!

2010-01-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

okay, seriously, how could the hamster NOT see this film?

sure, i tried to play it cool for months. i turned my nose up at the theater poster, secretly wanting to sneak in an unnoticed afternoon matinee. i've pointed and jested at the blockbuster window decal, hoping the wife would suggest the film so i wouldn't have to. and when friends have asked me about that new "beyonce cat fight flick" i've always scoffed and said, "what? do you think i like bad movies?"

finally, the wife and i had a quiet sunday after our travels this past weekend. so we made a pot of coffee in the afternoon and searched the watch-instantly options on netflix (genius). i wanted something funny. she wanted something suspenseful. (it's a wonder we keep this ship afloat.) so i'm looking for something comically thrilling, and then i see the OBSESSED poster.

"we could watch the beyonce cat-fight flick?" (stated in question.)

"sure," she said. have i publicly praised my wife's freaking awesomeness lately? she be good.

as a side note, the stills are big beyonce fans. we own her entire solo career, even a few of her extended singles with unreleased tracks. and we both agree that SASHA FIERCE, though aptly titled, takes the backseat to B-DAY. and while most of my friends laugh at my love for beyonce, the stills are convinced that the woman is an unstoppable force, and every new beyonce video is the best video janet jackson never made.

so, yes, when beyonce tackles a cinematic chance to back up her vocal and lyrical prowess with some fierce acting, me and my house jump to witness the slaughter.

(just a side note: i'm concerned for beyonce. that girl is going to go baldheaded before she's 40. you cannot put that much relaxer and color in your hair over and over and expect to keep those locks. just ask salt-n-pepa - eventually your scalp fights back. your follicles throw up their hands. your hair burns off. i mean, God forbid, a scrawny white dude with receding lines would tell one of the most beautiful women in the world how to do her hair but, Lord girl, give it a rest! please! i mean, sure, most of it is probably a weave, but i still lose sleep sometimes.

i digress.)

let's jump straight to the verdict here: OBSESSED is no HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, and it's certainly not as frightening and intense as FATAL ATTRACTION; nevertheless, OBSESSED is very energetic and fun, and beyonce delivers exactly what every man fears most -the fear of God in perfectly manicured nails.

you know the story: dude has top-tier job. new temp joins the team. she's smoking. he notices. she notices that he notices. she likes his notice. he exercises all manner of supernatural restraint as she rubs it all in his face. he fails to tell his wife because, well, she's beyonce and she's got the Old Testament in her fingernails. then the normal kitten-and-bitch chase reverses on the temp's flipped gears and she's a case. so beyonce has to break out the nails and chip one on ol' girl's forehead. then the shit blows up real big, and i started apologizing to latonya for crap i've never done.

i love these cinematic cautionary tales for men. if we won't listen to scripture and dr. phil and tiger woods, maybe we'll finally listen to beyonce or glenn close or dawn o'keefe. and we should. if the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, they're first vindicated through the hands of the mother. and sometimes she's not as merciful as the Divine covenant.

on top of the fun-though-predictable storyline and the vengeful morality play, the entire cast here was top notch. idris elba's acting was flawless: the man simply had to pretend he was not aroused. of course, he was sharing scenes with beyonce and ali larter, two women he can't have in real life, and thus the battle on his face was the real deal. and i've loved ali larter since the first FINAL DESTINATION. she's a great thriller actress, but i think she could really be more than a scream queen if given ample opportunity.

all in all, i give OBSESSED 4 difficult to see black men in a dark room out of 5. this is a great film for a lazy sunday afternoon. and, if i do say so myself, it's a perfect date flick. this is the kind of film that puts appropriate power back in the woman's hands and bent in the man's knees.

young men, watch and learn, because i guarantee good ladies know this stuff instinctively.

An Ignorant Review by an Ignorant Guy

2010-01-05T05:10:00.000-08:00

Much has been made of this new flick, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG. It's historical, see? Some of Disney's most iconic (and by that I mean marketable) characters are the princesses, and the princesses tend to have one major thing in common - the color of their skin. With the exception of Jasmine (the Arab lovely from ALADDIN), they're all whiteys. And no, Mulan is not a princess. She does kick serious heiney, but she's no princess. Nope, almost all of the cadre of cartoon chicks are caucasian. So, when Disney announced that they were making a new movie with an African-American princess, it got interesting. There were various cries of 'hooray' and 'hallelujah', and 'it's about time'! There were criticisms too - when first announced, our heroine was not Tiana, but Maddy, and a chambermaid to boot. Which seems like the kind of thing a bunch of old white guys in a board room would come up with. After some protestations, changes were made. Maddy became Tiana, and the chambermaid became an aspiring restaurant owner.

As an ignorant white dude who's always been an ignorant white dude, I tried to put myself in the position of an African-American lady who has grown up watching these Disney princess movies and walking through the toy store down the princess aisle and seeing only white faces (cause Jasmine almost never gets toy love). I tried to imagine what it's like to be told as a little girl that the most beautiful women are Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella. And you know what I realized? I realized that I can't imagine it. I have no idea. At the end of the day, I'm still an ignorant white guy.

So I changed strategies. I decided to just watch the dang movie through my own ignorant eyes and the eyes of my six-year-old white daughter. And here's the deal: it's a really good movie. Beyond all of the racial and societal issues, it's a great flick to watch with your kid. It's got scary bad guys and great music and awesome animation and talking alligators and fireflies and a fat guy and good writing and, well, you get the idea.

The basic story line is about a girl who has grown up poor in New Orleans and wants to realize the dream of her father - to own a restaurant. Tiana is an amazing cook and a hard worker. She's saved up her pennies and dimes to buy her own place. And just when her dream is about to come true, the bad stuff starts happening. There's bad dude called The Shadow Man who meddles in dark forces. Folks get turned into frogs (naturally). And it all turns out pretty well in the end. The music is excellent - Randy Newman meets N'awlins jazz. It's a sondtrack worth buying.

Now, you'll hear me complain from time to time that I don't get to see many grown-up movies at the theater these days, but after a film like this, I should be raving about how I get to see so many kids' movies. THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG gets 5 Evangelines out of 5.

And you know my favorite part? Laney didn't even mention that Tiana was black. She just talked about how pretty she was.

POUR ME A PINT - ALE OR COFFEE - AND SET ME IN A WINDOW SEAT: I MIGHT BE HERE AWHILE

2010-01-05T00:36:00.000-08:00

one day i would like to be "well read." i would like to walk into libraries and have librarians ask me for recommendations. i would like to complete an entire crossword puzzle or "non-sequitor" comic strip without calling in reinforcements. label it pride (which it is) but my life is ridiculously short, my brain is shrinking with every B-flick film, and there is only so much time and energy to know and read what i hope to know and read.

(i've been working on the same flannery o'connor biography since august, shooting it down and chasing it with shots of malcolm gladwell and gulps of this new stephen king, by gods i am. and page by page i've been bragging on myself, as if each chapter were a new leg on a treacherous mountain climb. geek pride is the worst pride.)

with that said, there are a few prior knowledge schemas that possibly could have helped me enjoy SHERLOCK HOLMES way more than i did. a few things i wish i had known walking into the film include:

- a better grasp on sir arthur conan doyle's stories and holmes' character,

- a deeper and wider appreciation of guy ritchie's work (which i've never stomached for some reason),

- why the blokes in parliament wear those white wigs,

- a general sense of british culture that stretches beyond fish-n-chips, "bloody hell" and "fuckin' wanker." i ain't so mod savvy, even though some of my best friends in china were brits. we just learned to drink lager more efficiently.

still, the dullard i am carried in enough sense to enjoy SHERLOCK HOLMES greatly. i knew a few things going in:

- the robert downey jr. is making quite the comeback - hurrah for him,

- i like that they included sherlock holmes' martial arts background,

- i dig the sights of small nerdy types beating the queen's english out of bloody huge blokes,

- i love any film that begins dark, pans out in dark, and ends in dark,

- fountain pens and sinister journal sketches turn me on,

- the wife and i lived three years on Holmes Road in kansas city,

- if rachel mcadams served me nasty tea, i'd drink 12 cups of it.

with this brief and quite unliterary knowledge under my belt, the wife and i walked into an afternoon showing of SHERLOCK HOLMES, and i walked out a knocked-kneed sweaty mess.

point blank: i loved this film. i loved this film on nearly every level that i could love a film. great visuals. flawless acting. fantastic storyline. a battle between science and black magic. tons of gunpowder. loads of fist fights. mcadams taking and delivering punches. shabby and dodgy scenery. murder and resurrection. chemicals and odors. acrobatic escapism. an english bulldog pudged in for comic relief. classic holmes' uncanny deductive reasoning. mcadams in purple. the whole film was electric and exhausting.

on the whole, i give SHERLOCK HOLMES 4 crotch pillows out of 5. the film looked good. it felt good. it made me tired. and, after all that, i drove home from the theater hungry to read. and, honestly, that's my actual desire: not for brilliance as much as for hours and days hunched over black coffee/fine ale and good stories. over science. over reasoning. over the magic of transferred wisdom. over words. yes, i can buy that last little bit there.

in fact, i have some stories about some brits i once knew in china. like that one day when chad, simon and i bought a bundle of yantai pijiu in the market and lit up a pack of qi lui cigarettes on my balcony . . . . .

TILL I TURN BLUE: A GUEST REVIEW BY SEAN CATHEY

2010-01-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

I woke up early on Saturday morning to see the first showing of the day of Avatar. Why so early? I love movies in the morning. There is no better way to convince your mind that you have a day off from work than to start the day off with an indulgence. Some people start with three fingers of bourbon, but those people end up in jail a lot, too. Plus, I do my best thinking in the morning, which is probably why I turned a critical eye to this movie from the start. It’s kinda sad, actually. The last movie that I enjoyed with that 5 year-old boy-style raging enthusiasm was LOTR. Avatar is similar to LOTR in many ways. James Cameron, with the creation of the planet Pandora and its inhabitants, has fashioned a richly beautiful platform from which to tell a story. Unlike LOTR, Avatar’s story is mostly devoid of substance and delivers a watered down message that is perhaps not worth the effort.

The main character, paraplegic marine Jake Scully, has been chosen to be part of a corporate and military joint project on another planet where, through the wonder of fictional technology, his mind will embody a being that is made from both human and alien DNA. I love geeks! He can then live in this body as he would live in his own skin, but for only short periods of time. Oh, and his legs work now. He is soon enough bounding around the forest with his new alien friends learning their customs and proving himself worthy of their acceptance.

Pandora and the Na’vi, the intelligent species that inhabit the planet, are Cameron’s greatest creation. This world is unlike anything ever seen before… with the exception of everything James Cameron saw while thousands of feet deep in the ocean filming his documentary “Aliens of the Deep”. The influence of that experience in this movie is very obvious. With Pandora, Cameron seems transfixed by the wonder of bioluminescence, as he has given almost all of the plants and creatures this mesmerizing quality that is common to ultra deep-sea life. I can’t help but think of the recent popularity of LED backlit computer screens right now. Huh. Cameron frames thrilling action scenes in the context of this world perfectly. There are moments such as when Jake Scully is attempting to capture a dragon-like creature that will serve as a private plane/ BFF (just go watch the movie), where all elements of good movie making are put together seamlessly and the result leaves you shaking your head not knowing whether to get up and cheer or vomit.

The story is basic good v. evil. Humans, with the exception of 5 people, are evil. They are spilling their pollution, mining for resources and exterminating whoever stands in their way, that is, after reasonable negotiations of course. Then there are the Na’vi. The Na’vi are good. They embody our ideals of love and selflessness and this is how we relate to them. They live in a utopian society, and their only perceivable desire is to follow their own traditions and protect their perfect world. How could we have a problem with that? Cameron unnecessarily spends a lot of time and dialogue spinning spiritual vagaries into the Na’vi persona. This made me scrunch my forehead together and down toward my nose, and my nose up with my bottom lip turned upward. Yeah. I’m confused too. Ultimately, the aliens in this movie where too, er, alien for me to relate to. Too perfect is a problem for me. The Na’vi lack the flaws inherent to humans. Although someone who possesses my ideals can inspire me, I can only connect to those who have similar struggles as I do. I suppose this is the role Jake Scully was supposed to fill. But his transition from “once a Marine, always a Marine” to superhero of the Na’vi was almost imperceptible. He grew a beard. Must have been a rough patch he was going through. Equally troubling, Cameron invokes our memories of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war on terror. It’s a cheap trick to rope in some emotional buy-in.

Despite all of its flaws, Avatar is a good movie. It’s an example of why we go to the theater to see a movie, as opposed to waiting for it to arrive in our mailbox. The story may not be that compelling, yet somehow it grabs you by the brain stem and injects $500 million dollars worth of seizure-inducing exhilaration for the better part of 3 hours. Pass the lithium, please.

Favorite Song of the Year

2009-12-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

I got lots of great music this year. The Avett Brothers new record is tops on that list, but my favorite song of this year was one that I didn't find until a couple of weeks ago. My good friend Lauren Tripp hooked me up with this little youtube video and, who'd a thunk it, I fell in love with these boys from London. Check it out.

ALEC BALDWIN RETURNS TRIUMPHANT

2009-12-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

I have to announce that 30 Rock is quickly becoming my new favorite show I didn't catch the first time around. Alec Baldwin is unbelievable, and this show gouges all kinds of issues, particularly race. I mean, it skewers race issues in ways that no comedy I've ever seen has done. Take that, Cosby:

One of my professors led a seminar this Spring on race and theology that I hated to miss, including wonderful pieces by Cornel West, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, bell hooks and others. And while there can be no substitute for critical, clear thinking, once again, I'm convinced that the comedic can be a great way to disarm people into talking honestly about that which scares us to death to talk about most of the time.

THE FREAKING AWKWARDNESS OF FAITH: A HAMSTERIAN REACTION TO JESUS CAMP

2009-12-12T17:36:00.000-08:00

alright, let's just get one thing straight up front: JESUS CAMP is a freaking weird little film. actually, "freaking awkward" may be a better descriptor. yes, let's say that JESUS CAMP is a freaking awkward little film that unsettles viewers at nearly every angle of viewing. admittedly, it's freaking awkward to see people raising children to believe something you do not believe or, on the flip side, to believe something you personally hold dear but in drastically different ways. in either scenario - as a distanced outsider of non-christian belief or as a fellow participant of Gospel faith - JESUS CAMP is a freaking awkward little film. and i love freaking awkward little films.

one of the most freaking awkward aspects of choosing to believe in God / a god / a goddess / some gods / this totally unfeasible gospel of miraculous birth followed by an even more unfeasible miracle of continuous redemption and resurrection is that, by making the choice to believe one path, you nix every other possible road to Paradise. also, by choosing a particular Path to follow, you simultaneously choose to become tragically narrow-minded, socially disheveled, perpetually repentive, potentially offensive, and hypocritically incapable of upholding the statutes of your chosen faith. awkwardness and close-mindedness come with the faith territory. they're unavoidable. fervent belief in one thing leads one to firmly believe all other possibilities are not. and it's that last bit right there that really pisses people off.

me and latonya are narrow-minded believers of the Gospel of Jesus. all that immaculate conception, resurrection and ascension, gifts and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, authority of the Bible, communion of the saints, coming of the Kingdom, power of forgiveness and blessings, the tragic nature of christian music, we believe it all. and we are awkwardly narrow-minded enough to believe that Jesus is the only way to the Father, just like the freaking weirdos in JESUS CAMP. me and the wife have bought into this jacked-up and nonsensical Gospel of Jesus hook, line and sinker.

and we have also committed, like the weirdos in JESUS CAMP, that when we have children - all four of those little caramel skinned mulattoes - we will teach them what we believe. to skirt around the issue and not teach them what we believe would be a sure sign that we do not really believe what we say that we believe. and as narrow-minded and awkward as it may appear to raise little caramel skinned mulatto children on Bible verses, worship songs and hopeful prayers, it is what the wife and i agreed to the day we buckled and relinquished our common senses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

and God only knows what a documentary about our christian parenting would look like: little Social Distortion shirted half-black girls with bright purple clacker balls and skull-n-crossbone stockings praying cancer out of the neighbor lady "in the name of Jesus." they'll be locking us up one day for sure.

so, back to the documentary. obviously i viewed JESUS CAMP as a fellow participant rather than a distanced peruser. still, by the end of the film i felt a combination of great hope and great sadness. great hope because i personally find children desiring God a beautiful sight. great sadness because i personally do not believe the Gospel of Jesus is as melodramatic, difficult, busy, and militant as the adults in JESUS CAMP pressed upon these children. and while i enjoyed seeing children excited about scripture and loving Jesus, i also knew that the pressure of faith forced upon their youth would haunt them one day, and many of those children will have long painful paths of learning to forgive those who presented faith so harshly in the beginning.

when i look into the Gospels, there are images of Jesus gathering up the children, calling them to Himself, speaking blessings over them. there is a tenderness that woos the children to Jesus, one so light that it caused the disciples to envy and rebuke the children. that tenderness and wooing was not evident in this film. far from it, in fact. and that lack tenderness, that absence of necessary wooing, i fear, could scar any child raised beneath a viciously aggressive Gospel.

the Gospel of Jesus is one that promises peace and blessing but has been revealed prominently by a history of war and division. for this reason, the film also looks at the militant Gospel training of young people through the eyes of fundamentalist political power and uber-conservative republican doctrine. the political talk in JESUS CAMP feels out of place until the viewer realizes that the way we view our authority - ie. our God/god - is the way we view our powers. and the way we view our powers decides how we treat our neighbors, our friends, our enemies. this is where, i suppose, the lack of tenderness in training children to believe in an all-powerful God becomes more scary than sad.

overall, i give JESUS CAMP four dc talk cassette tapes out of five. for all the film's awkwardness (and there's loads of it), and in spite of my personal reactions (which were flaming fierce), JESUS CAMP does capture an earnestness in faith that is phenomenally more pure than its expression. this purity is difficult to see in the midst of so much holy-rolling oddity, but it's there, bedrocked beneath the surface, deep down under a whole heap of human weirdness. and perhaps that's the beauty, rather than the horror, of the whole affair. after all, at the end of the day, i trust my righteousness to be determined far more by my faith than by my ridiculously failed attempts and approaches.

Lord God in Christ, i'm banking on it.

A MEDITATION ON FORBIDDEN LOVE

2009-12-09T06:04:00.000-08:00

Kelly's great review below begs the question: What does it mean that love is forbidden? Can we rightly compare ROMEO AND JULIET with TWILIGHT? Are they talking about the same thing?
To this end, a little brief, historical comparison...

****

Let's go medieval for a moment, with A KNIGHT'S TALE. Having re-watched this with the folks recently, I was struck by the ways in which, once again, this is a tale of forbidden love--a humble thatcher masquerading as a knight to gain the love of the royal maiden. Heath Ledger does a good job portraying William Thatcher, the knight-to-be, to Shanynn Sossaman's lady. BTW, whatever happened to her?

Anyway, the tension in this one exists because of societal boundaries: there's a fairly rigid 'caste' system of sorts, codified because of divine right of kings and centuries of tradition, such that people are what they are. However, in Chaucer's day, these rules are breaking down; knights are rising up to nobility; merchants are moving up into a new middle-class; royalty are no longer respected as royalty if they're total pricks. But the point is this: what makes the love between Heath and Shanynn 'forbidden' is a global device, a societal vision which is, in a sense, totalizing. There is no other Europe other than the one they live in, and so, if you're going to fall in love, you have to fall in love according to the rules of Europe, which means "no love across class lines".

Heath and Shanynn, thus, have to pursue their love, not in spite of the rules of society, but deceptively through the rules of society. Their love comes to completion only as Ledger ascends to knighthood and joins the ranks of nobility, and some sense, making their love no longer forbidden.
**

Fast forward a couple of centuries past Chaucer, and we come to the Grand Maul Seizure of forbidden love: ROMEO AND JULIET. Say what you want about the 1968 Zefirelli version; I thought the Baz Luhrman version with DiCaprio and Danes was phenomenal. But in any event, let's examine what it means here for love to be 'forbidden'.

The emphasis of R&J is on the family role of 'forbidden love'. These star-crossed lovers are kept apart, not by societal lines, as this is the 16th century; societal boundaries are really fluid; monarchies are dying off left and right, and the middle-classes are making their case to be the new nobilities. See Shakespeare's OTHELLO for the ultimate example of societal movement during this time. In R&J, what keeps the lovers apart is not societal regulation, but family regulation. In the absence of a firm, uniform world as in the Middle Ages, families become the new boundaries within which 'forbiddenness' can be established, more or less. In any other circumstances, barring the names of 'Montague' and 'Capulet', we have a comedy, but because of the regulation of love by family contraints, this one turns into tragedy.

Granted, 'family' depends in part on where in society they fall. Had Romeo, for example, been a commoner, Juliet's family would have objected for other reasons; thus, Paris is the perfect match in their eyes for Juliet, as he's the bachelor-of-the-month (played by a young Paul Rudd in Luhrman's version). But what I want to point out here is that the guiding rubric for 'forbidenness' is that of the family; the family has imbibed their understanding of acceptable love from society, to be sure, but as far as who adjudicates the boundaries of right love--this falls to the family and not society at large.
***

Moving on to the modern-day CAN'T HARDLY WAIT, one of the understated gems of the early 90s, we find the endgame of 'forbiddenness': the forbidden love posited by and against one's self. Whereas in KNIGHT'S TALE and ROMEO AND JULIET, love is forbidden by forces or persons external to the individual, by modern-day, the rules for true or forbidden are posited by the individual themselves, apart from family or societal considerations. Notice, for example, that you never see the main character's families in CHW....

God bless Jennifer Love Hewitt. In this film, both positively and negatively, the 'right' love is that which is given the character by themselves: Amanda, despite her societal standing, rejects the tool Mike Dexter in search of the real deal; Preston Meyers decides that Kurt Vonnegut is awesome literature and pursues the dream girl that he knows is the true love of his life, Amanda Beckett. The two are drawn together in spite of who? Not society, which they defy, nor in spite of families, which do not exist in this film, but in spite of themselves. Both Amanda and Preston struggle to hold faith to an ideal which exists outside their vision, and to deny the tendency to choose that which is before them, in pursuit of that which is beyond them. In other words, their greatest fight is the one that they have with themselves, to pursue love which they know is ridiculous, but which they desire anyway. Maybe a better example of this would be the Seth Green scenario in which he winds up with his ultimate nemesis, the wankster falling in love with the literature nerd, two souls finding each other, despite themselves.
***

I submit that NEW MOON is of this last kind, the great postmodern forbidden love story, in which the true oppressor is not society, not family, but ourselves. Granted, the stakes are slightly higher here: should love conquer the self, somebody's getting a brand new set of glittery skin for Christmas. But in the end, the lovers in NEW MOON have only themselves to answer to and to overcome in order to achieve their 'forbidden love'.

NEW MOON AND THE PEPTO BISMOL SCHOOL OF ACTING: A GUEST REVIEW BY KELLY RIAD

2009-12-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

“Here, here will I remain with worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here will I set up my everlasting rest; and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh.”

There’s a reason Shakespeare has endured the ever-changing map of humanity. The man (or men, depending on whichever conspiracy theory you subscribe to) could write. His mastery of words painted pictures so beautiful, that he invoked emotions the heart knew not it had. His plays have been recreated on stage and screen; either left alone or twisted and transformed to adapt to the current state of society.

Those words above came from his decidedly most famous play, “Romeo and Juliet.” It was said by author, Stephenie Meyer, that the play had inspired the second novel in her best-selling The Twilight Saga series, NEW MOON.

Let’s just start there—Saga. The word means any narrative or legend of heroic exploits.

Against two warring families and age-old mutinies, two teenagers found love, lost loved ones and each other, and yet despite all their obstacles, not even death could keep them apart.

It’s brazen, at best, to compare NEW MOON to Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers. Despite the lack of heroics, what’s really at loss? The soul? The humanity? Fortunately both were safe since I didn’t see either in this movie. What I did see was young Hollywood’s attempt to be taken seriously and falling far from the mark.

But they cannot solely be to blame. Some, if not a lot, of the fault lies within the pages of the books themselves. Let me say this. I was a faithful follower, preaching the gospel of TWILIGHT to any who would listen. Passing the books around, I might as well have been wearing a white, short-sleeved button up dress shirt with a black tie, riding a bike from house to house. The first movie cured me of this madness. The second was like trying to smoke a cigarette after years of having quit—it just made me gag and left a terrible taste in my mouth.

My friend, Aubrey, and I decided to make a day of our NEW MOON watching experience. We took a half-day at work, had lunch at this great burger joint called Twisted Root, where you’re given a character’s name to pick up your order. She was Cindy Lauper. I was given Bella Swan. It was kismet.

The matinee of NEW MOON could otherwise be known as the Walk of Shame showing. The patrons were all older, there were a few couples. Even in the darkened theater, you could see the guilt on their faces. We staked our seats in the middle, propped up our feet on the chairs in front, and huddled in for worst.

Simply the opening had me rolling my eyes. Aubrey and I giggled, snickered and snorted (well, I snorted) through most of the movie. On more than one occasion, I felt the urge to call an ambulance for Kristen Stewart’s eye-fluttering, nostril-flaring, heavy-breathing, epileptic histrionics. While this story is supposed to be about pure, passionate love, if someone looked at me with the twisted, constipated face Robert Pattinson’s Edward looks upon Bella, I wouldn’t shed a tear to see him walk away.

And then there’s Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black—well, at least he made eye contact while delivering his lines.

The scenes of tortured dreams Bella suffers after Edward’s leaving apparently translated into sounds of actual torture on the screen, with Stewart sounding more like she was in labor, then love’s labour’s lost. And somewhere in all of this, was the complete lack of emotion. The “Ouch. Paper cut” acting depicting a tale that has prompted a maelstrom of emotion from its readers, to the point where women tattoo the words on their bodies, girlfriends dump their boyfriends, and people are divided into “teams,” and yet the characters move from scene to scene with little more than a blip on the emotional radar.

This has already been said, but it’s one of the few things worth noting about the movie. The Volturi were the lone beacon in this dark, moonless night. Michael Sheen is mesmerizing. His very small amount of time on screen is the only break you receive where you can actually get lost in the story, where you forget you’re watching a bunch of twenty-somethings play make-believe. Dakota Fanning, with few lines but much more spoken in the simple expressions on her face, restored faith in the future of Hollywood and entertainment. You watch her and sigh, thinking, “Thank God, she will endure.”

The movie ended with Aubrey and me standing up and nearly bolting for the exit. We usually linger awhile in our seats, enjoying the music of the end credits, letting the whole experience sink in before we leave the movie world and re-enter reality.

I honestly don’t know what it is about the books that has made them literary crack. The characters are flawed, and not in a way that makes them endearing or relatable. Bella is boring, somewhat psychotic, and completely submissive. Edward is possessive, controlling, and melodramatic. Jacob is manipulative and inconsiderate. The story’s been done before—even Meyer’s admitted the books that inspired her. There’s no real sacrifice. Should our hearts break for Bella because her high school boyfriend dumped her? And yet we couldn’t get enough of the books. We couldn’t, until we saw the movies.

I give NEW MOON 1 Kristen Stewart lower lip bite out of 5. NEW MOON is the girl you pick up in a bar you thought was hot—you get hammered and go home with the book; you wake up sober with the movie.

THE CROWNING JEWEL OF THE JUDD APATOW CANON AND THE REKINDLING OF JOHN HUGHES' TORCH

2009-12-04T07:39:00.000-08:00

this film has come to me on skyscraper high recommendations from nearly every angle of my community. still, and somehow, i have only just now gotten around to seeing this film last night. it's silly and preposterous that i have waited this long, and i walked away from the film wondering what good i have accomplished with my life, and what other great jewels i've deprived myself of, these past few years.

i'm with myles: judd apatow delivers the hits. and, ironically, even though his movies have the expected apatow crassness and blushing humor, they also tackle unique struggles in my generation's need for maturity. 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN taunted our obsession with sexuality. SUPERBAD grabbed high school by the poop-mouth dirty tongue and jangled our notions of identity. PINEAPPLE EXPRESS smoked our dependencies on medication while also defining solid friendships. and TALLEDEGA NIGHTS (which apatow produced) reminded us that applebee's is a 5 star joint if you live a 2 star existence.

it's easy to dismiss apatow's movies as nothing more than filthy bathroom and boy humor, never realizing that, despite the necessary hollywood hyperboles that overgeneralize gender and age stereotypes in apatow's films, the man has diligently catalouged a faithful history of our current generation. it's as if apatow picked up where john hughes left off, fast forwarding suburban white culture from the 80s and turning the camera on us again in the new millenium. in that sense, we could feasibly celebrate both filmmakers for their anthropological achievements alone.

not to mention the ways hughes and apatow both taught me to cuss and banter better.

with that said, KNOCKED-UP, in my opinion, is the crowning jewel of the apatow canon. as myles already beautifully stated, everything that apatow does well finds it's apex in KNOCKED-UP. the overly exaggerated boy humor and girl fretting. the blinding addiction to self. the adult bodies trapped in middle school mindsets. the larger than life crisis that forces everyone in the film to re-evaluate their own lives and their need for others. these are signature apatow moves just as much, if not more, than the autoerotic jokes and dookie references.

i do think KNOCKED UP is the funniest film in the bunch, far exceeding some of the cheaper laughs in SUPERBAD (i also peed a little in that one) and the dirty-for-dirtiness sake of 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN ("you know how i know you're gay?"); however, it's the film's heart and tenderness that stood out most to me.

for instance, i was completely taken off guard when we learn that pete's (paul rudd) actual infidelity with debbie (leslie mann) was a fantasy baseball league and solitary film nights. after the film, i told latonya that i believe the wayward desire in most married men is not for a bimbo as much as for a little return on that long lost bachelor freedom. in the film, pete did love his wife. he loved his kids. but there was that aching wanderlust that needed other men and some solitude from time to time. of course, the message here is that pete and debbie had dissolved into a place where pete's request for such personal time would translate to debbie as a call for divorce. we see this in her immediate assumption that pete's having an affair. debbie jumped to the conclusion that pete no longer wanted her, not even considering for a moment that maybe pete just wanted a bit more pete. i thought this scene was brilliant, and i tip my hat to apatow for not relying on the typical man-wants-other-woman scenario. it's moments like this (and there were several in KNOCKED UP) that illustrate apatow's ability to abuse and transcend his own signature stereotypes.

all in all, this is a great film. it's funny and warm and, like the great john hughes' films of yore, it reminds us that we all have a little growing up to do. as with myles, i cannot recommend KNOCKED UP highly enough. it definitely deserves 5 googled murder searches out of 5.

WOLFMAN

2009-12-04T07:25:00.001-08:00

THE WOLFMAN

This looks incredible. I love Benicio del Toro. Pairing him with Anthony Hopkins is like putting awesome sauce on an awesome burger.

NO, I'M NOT USING THIS POST TO MAKE SOME BIG ANNOUNCEMENT

2009-12-03T14:26:00.001-08:00

I've been a fan of Judd Apatow, well, since I saw Knocked Up. I knew absolutely nothing about this movie, aside from the fact that it was by the director of 40 Year-Old Virgin, which I saw and loved, but thought it was because 1) I was a virgin, and 2) I think Steve Carrell is hilarious even when he's playing a serious role. But once I saw this, and the more recent Pineapple Express, my tune changed, and I realized that--sure, there was probably some deep, latent identification going on with Steve Carrell, but more probable was the fact that Apatow and his rotating cast of awesome make some really hilarious movies.

So, what is it about Apatow's films that proves to be such a draw? Let's run down a few suspects.

1) DUDE COMEDY--I don't remember the last time I sat around making a joke about pubic hair or bongs. But I've got more than enough stories about getting stepped on in the middle of the night or getting hit in the unmentionables. I in no way resonate with any of Seth Rogen's friends, except that I've lived in my share of crappy houses with way too many guys, and confused a framed poster with high art on occasion. Case in point: I have a seven foot U2 Rattle and Hum poster sitting in the front foyer with absolutely no place to put it in our apartment. But I can't bear the thought of just throwing it out.

2) PREGNANCY--Like I said, not trying to make a statement here. But like a friend of mine points out, babies are God's reminders that life is not controllable, that life gets through the cracks in our plans and poops on our shoes. I love the aspect of this movie which is an unseen actress who is the catalyst for all kinds of plot changes. Consider the fact that the baby is the one steering the ship of the entire plot, and we only see her in the last four minutes.

3) GUY GETS GIRL WAY OUT OF HIS LEAGUE--THIS I can resonate with, and I'll speak for the other bloggers here, that this is nearly categorically true. All men wind up with women who are way too good for them, and far prettier than us.

4) GOOFBALL TURNS INTO A GOOD GUY--Again, I resonate with this. One of the things I love about this film is that you have true moral development. Seth Rogen becomes a better person. He starts reading the baby books; he takes responsibility for his life and for other lives; he rises to the occasion. Does he still make awesome one-liners about bongs? Yes. Does he still deliever epithets about the gynecologist that make me rewind giggling? Yes. And in it all, he rises to the occasion.

This is a slam dunk. I can't recommend this movie enough except to give it 5 furry stuffed animals out of 5. It's tremendous.

THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS

2009-12-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

the point i was trying to make in class today was this: facts alone are boring. straight, rigid, cold data is meaningless without the perspective of an expert or artist to help us know how (or maybe even why) to digest certain information. writers like Annie Dillard, Malcolm Gladwell, Natalie Angier, Jon Stewart, and all those folks at the Schoolhouse Rock have a boss way of looking at blank facts and asking the question, "what's the story here?" and the story these writers pull out of hard concrete data is nothing short of mesmerizing at times.

recently, i tipped my Hockey Mask to one such writer: Mary Roach. the literary tricks this woman performs with human cadavers are enough to make George Romero eat his own skin. not to mention the way she sent me to the bathroom with a mirror and flashlight to find my own clitoris. (it wasn't there, mind you.) nevertheless, these are examples i shy away from in my reading classes. you gotta be careful where you talk about your labia.

so as an example of life breathed into dead-knob data, i showed the trailer for THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS (and i highly recommend watching the trailer immediately.)

for all purposes, based on sheer facts alone, this is the worst premise for a documentary film ever conceived. the bare-bone details declare:

- some dude named Billy Mitchell set a the world record score for Donkey Kong in 1982.

- that score went unchallenged for 20 years

- until a middle school science teacher named Steve Wiebe desired to excel at something: namely beating Mitchell's Donkey Kong score

- an arcade game database of official scores, Twin Galaxies, presided over the event and recorded the scores

- Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong world record was beat twice by Steve Wiebe

again, there is nothing in this premise that should send us to netflix with our queues in flux; however, the story created by the cameras and by the careful eye of the filmmakers, transforms the worst possible documentary scenario into one helluva great movie.

THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS is not merely about video games and world record scores. it's a film about integrity. it's a film about strange obsessions. it's about the desire to succeed when every other attempt has failed. it's about a midlife crisis and a wife supporting her husband's need to see this one thing through. it's about the real life david brent, who needs to be put down like a gimp tongued family dog. and it's about a supporting cast of extremely awkward arcade fanatics.

THE KING OF KONG takes a depressing cache of facts and breathes a riveting narration of glorified geekdom into their gills. of course, just like Mary Roach writing about corpses and vaginas, these filmmakers hit the jackpot of jackasses with billy mitchell as a primary character. everytime this dude opens his mouth, i immediately cringed, even before he spoke a single word. and although the filmmakers never shied from their bias towards the underdog wiebe, the star of this film is billy mitchell's world record donkey kong sized ego. i'm already chomping at the bits for a sequel just so i can cringe at this guy some more.

i gladly give THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS 4.5 statue of liberty neckties out of 5. i can't think of a witty way to end this, so here's some free frogger.

PIRATE RADIO: A GUEST REVIEW BY KELLY RIAD

2009-11-29T17:55:00.000-08:00

My father was born in August, 1950. He would have been the prime age to appreciate the British music invasion of the 60’s. He would have helped usher in the era of long hair, short pants, and hip-cat glasses. That fleeting moment of cultural time right after the swell 50’s and just before the cynical 70’s when Vietnam was real, but had not yet come home. When hem lines shrunk, kids started to rebel, and music began to cross racial and coastal lines to blend together and become real music. He would have, had he not been perpetually stuck in the 30’s and 40’s.

For some people, music was, is and always will be their life. It is the therapy to which they turn when they need to connect with someone else on a deeper level. There is a song to go along with every moment of their life. And most likely they got this from their parents. I was not one of these people. Music was played in my house to make you happy. It kept up the beat of the everyday. Never did I lock myself up in my room and wail along with a sad song because, well, let’s face it, the music of the early nineties kinda sucked. I’m sure many appreciated the harmony of Boys 2 Men, but I didn’t.

It’s all about what you’re exposed to. The music my dad had playing out in the garage while he worked on this or that was usually swing or big band. I sang along to “It Don’t Mean a Thing” and “Bei Mir Bistu Shein”…please let me explain. Seriously. There’d be a little Ricky Nelson, he was a fan of Sam Cooke, and of course, he did order me a cassette tape of “The Best of The Monkees.” As far as the music he should have passed on from his generation—The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who—well those were a bunch of long-haired hippies.

My husband comes from a family where his father was a roadie for The Doobie Brothers and his mother worked for Rolling Stone. He had bands betting on whether he would come out a boy or a girl. Music has always been a part of his life so there is a source from where his appreciation comes that I simply don’t have.

I say all of this because PIRATE RADIO could be a movie about music. Indeed, you could say that the music plays a supporting part, should be credited after Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nighy. And if anyone else was writing this review, it would be about the music. But you are stuck with me. And I can only write about the characters, the story, and mention that the movie has a kick-ass soundtrack.

Tonight was the second time I bought my over-priced ticket and saw PIRATE RADIO—this time with my mother. That speaks volumes. The last time I saw a movie twice was the first time Christian Bale donned the Batman costume.

The advertisements for PIRATE RADIO are misleading. You are lead to believe that Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the star of the movie and don’t get me wrong, he is a beacon in the role he plays so well of the laid-back, indifferent, too-cool-for-school music maven. But the storyline actually follows Young Carl, played by the much lesser known Tom Sturridge. He actually may only be known to many as the best friend of one ridiculously famous teen vampire, but it is Mr. Sturridge who really sparkles. And not in the lame way that word suggests. The story of Young Carl is that of an eighteen-year old man sent by his mother to live on a boat anchored in the North Sea where rock and roll is broadcasted to the 25 million British citizens who are deprived of the music by their own government. Carl has since grown up without ever knowing his father and now that he has reached the pivotal point of his life, standing on the dock of adulthood, he finds himself on a ship where any one of the crazy cast of degenerate characters could be his father. It is here where he finds acceptance, loses his virginity (the occasion being announced over the airwaves to the million listeners,) and discovers a family.

Brought to the screen by the same folks who made FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL and LOVE, ACTUALLY, this movie is wonderful, actually, because of its subtleties. In one endearing scene, Carl has been given an opportunity by Dr. “Love” Dave (Frost), albeit a slightly immoral opportunity, to finally embrace manhood and lose his cherry with one unsuspecting young lady. Under Dr. Love’s insistence of urgency, Carl assures him in a very meek, high-pitched voice, “I think we can both be pretty certain I’m going to be quick.” They hug—both stark naked at the time—and Carl is sent to his doom.

This movie is character driven and the characters are cast spectacularly. Hoffman is the man, the Count of Cool. Nick Frost is charming despite his chunky physique. Rhys Iffan is gaspingly funny. Kenneth Branagh does evil like only the British could. And how could you not love Bill Nighy, who could make a phone book reading sound interesting? Each actor plays off the other with such ease, that you easily get lost in the movie.

Like I said before, I don’t really know music, but I know a little about acting and I’ve always had a love affair with movies. Unfortunately, I know a movie has lost me when I can picture the actors reading from a script and working to hit their mark. Once that happens, it will never pull me back in. PIRATE RADIO sinks you in the story, throws you in a life boat with the characters, and sails off into the sunset.

I give PIRATE RADIO 5 “F” words over the airwaves out of 5. You’ll smile when you’re not laughing, you’ll giggle every time Kenneth Branagh says that guy’s name, and you’ll want to see it again. Oh, and the soundtrack is pretty kickass, too.

The End of the World as We Knew It

2009-11-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve seen two end of the world movies this year. One was KNOWING – you can see what I thought of it here. 2012 is the other one, and dang it if this wasn’t an awesome flick. The crazies are right, the government lies to everybody, rich white folks are evil, and the puppy makes it out alive.

There’s not a whole lot to say about 2012, except that it’s the best disaster movie ever (except for GIGLI, that was a huge disaster! Zing!). The special effects are incredible – possibly the best I’ve ever seen. The first of the disaster scenes includes Cusack drives a limo through the disintegrating city of Los Angeles. After that scene, it never stops. There is never a lull in the action. The movie is 158 minutes long, and 152 of them are action-packed. There is always a huge wave, or a crack in the earth, or a crashing airplane, or something else heading toward out heroes. They run a lot.

Also, John Cusack, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Danny Glover are all at the tops of their games. And let me take a minute to say something about Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ever since I saw that dude in SERENITY, I knew I liked him. Then I saw him in CHILDREN OF MEN and I liked him even more. He’s fantastic in this. And I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce his name.

I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on 2012, but it’s a great popcorn movie. I’m gonna dock it a star just because it’s a little long, but, for what it is, it’s pretty much a perfect movie. 2012 gets 4 Yellowstone volcanoes out of 5. Go see it. It was really expensive to make, and they need the cash.

CONFESSIONS OF A CLOSET TWIHARD: A GUEST POST BY MISHA PERKINS PARKER

2009-11-25T15:18:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful, chilly July afternoon in South Dakota when my two year old staged the temper tantrum of the century. Our youth group was posing for a group picture in front of Mt. Rushmore and Miles, furious at attempts to prevent him from climbing the wall and hurling himself to his death in the amphitheatre below, protested so shrilly that he managed to clear all tourists from the viewing porch. He “expressed his disappointment” continuously as my husband dragged him all the way back to the parking garage, with my daughters and I following at a distance of about fifty feet.

“Someone should teach that kid a lesson,” a fellow tourist said to me, disgusted. “Yeah, someone should. I wonder where the mother is.” I replied.

Go ahead and judge me. It’s okay. Really.

I adore my son. Privately, I find many of his faults endearing. But sometimes I’m embarrassed to be associated with him in public.

That’s kind of the way I feel about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.

*****************************************************************

I only picked up a copy of Twilight because the girls in our youth group could speak of nothing else for weeks, and I wanted to know firsthand what had inspired this frenzy. I finished the book in two days. I ordered the rest of the books in the series from Amazon the next day. I told no one.

The Twilight Saga is not great literature. I cringed reading these books. I rolled my eyes. I laughed out loud at parts that weren’t supposed to be funny. And then I turned the page and kept reading.

Twilight bashing is a favored pastime of men, critics, the literary set, and particularly of male literary critics. How dare Stephenie Meyer girl-ify the sacred (er, profane) genre of vampire and werewolf lore? Vegetarian Vampires?! Sunshine Sparkly Vampires?! FOUL! Werewolves that transform at will?! FOUL! (Nerd alert: Actually, in book 4 we discover that the Quileutes are really shape shifters, not werewolves, so that makes it feasible)

Note to these guys: the whole vampire/ werewolf dynamic is just a plot device, the means through which Meyer builds characters with superhuman abilities, places Bella Swan in constant danger, and juxtaposes desire and restraint. This is not a vampire story. It’s a love story, a fantasy that appeals to a fanbase of teenage girls and former teenage girls. And since, to my knowledge, vampires don’t exist anyway…who cares?

For better or worse, these books make me feel half my age. And it’s not about the gorgeous guy characters or the fact that Bella is the center of the universe, the target of every villain, constantly being rescued by above mentioned gorgeous guys (pssst…this is like crack to a teenage girl). It’s because my teenage experience was so Bella-esque (except for the part where all the guys wanted to date me…yeah, that never happened). I wasn’t comfortable at dances. I was clumsy. The more hedonistic teenagerish pursuits held no appeal for me. I read Shakespeare and Austen because I wanted to. And I was thoroughly convinced of my own ordinariness. That’s the feeling Stephenie Meyer exploited to make me love her characters. Bella is the one person in the world whose thoughts Edward Cullen cannot hear. She is the lone mysterious female on the planet, so she captivates him. She doesn’t change a thing about herself, yet he loves her sacrificially. Why? Because he discovers what she does not see—that she is, in fact, extraordinary. She is pure, selfless, noble, and lovely. She is nothing like the rest.

Cha-ching!

Fellas, this is what most of us ladies long for. To be chosen above all others by a worthy man, just for who we are.

For this, I willingly overlook all the melodrama, the co-dependence, the poorly written prose, and Bella’s total lack of upper level thinking skills. I.e., Jake, the Quileute werewolf: “Remember that story I told you about “the cold ones” and the wolves? Well, I can’t tell you why I’ve transformed into a giant, half-naked, super-heated man-boy because it’s against the rules. Think, Bella…you know this…”

Spare me. Please.

I will also concede the fact that Meyer’s heroes, with their male model looks, superhuman strength, and complete devotion to Bella’s happiness, set a standard with which no man, and certainly no hormonal seventeen year old boy, could compete. In a sense, this is porn for girls, particularly in the case of Edward Cullen, who has frittered away the past century by racking up multiple graduate degrees, memorizing the complete works of Shakespeare, becoming fluent in several languages, and formulating the perfect product to maintain his signature hairdo. Oh, and he’s also a master composer and pianist, though when the lullaby he composed for Bella is brought to the screen in Twilight, it sounds exactly like an excerpt from a John Tesh CD. FOUL! But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Here’s the straight dope: My husband is a youth guy. I hang with teenage girls. And I have watched helplessly as young ladies I love have cheapened themselves, have given themselves away and been used and tossed aside…for NOTHING. They don’t know what chivalry looks like. They don’t believe they’ll be receiving any better offers. I want the bar set higher.

****************************************************************

And now, a few thoughts about the Twilight movie franchise:

I think any time a book is adapted to the screen there are both gains and losses. I appreciate many of the changes that made Twilight and New Moon watchable (btw, I think New Moon far exceeds Twilight in terms of watchability). I flipped past whole chapters of New Moon, for example, because…yes, Bella, we get it. You’re miserable without Edward. You can’t breathe. There’s a hole in your chest…blah blah blah. Thank you, makers of New Moon, for sparing us some of this angst. The action and fight scenes were exciting under Chris Weitz’s direction. Sceenwriter Melissa Rosenberg made a good call by adding some violence to the Volterra sequences.

Some reviewers have suggested that this entire generation of fans will watch these movies again as adults and realize just how terrible they are. Of course they will. And they’ll keep watching them.

Consider Saved By the Bell. This show was horribly acted. They aired the episodes out of order. One week Zack loves Kelly Kapowski. The next week, it’s Stacy Carosi or that girl wrestler or (fill in the blank). They’re awful. But do I own every single episode, including the feature length specials? Yes, I do. Do I sniffle a little when Zack and Kelly exchange vows in Las Vegas? Yes, I do. My grandmother has a similar relationship with The Rockford Files. It’s pop culture, folks. Nobody ever said it would be anthologized and handed down to future generations.

The CGI wolves of New Moon were hilariously un-scary, which is just the way Matt (the youth guy husband) and I like it. The special effects in Twilight were equally bad. The scene where Edward runs up the hill to the meadow with Bella on his back is just plain silly. But then, the whole premise behind this saga is just plain silly. Once you make peace with that, the hokey moments (i.e. Jacob Black removing his shirt for the first time to reveal his anabolic steroid use) become your favorites.

On the other hand, the Edward and Bella of cinema are not the lovers who live in the pages of the books. These two are described in the book as old souls, and you can see why they would end up together. Bella does all the grocery shopping and cooking. She reads Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Shakespeare for fun. She cleans the house. She’s separate from the other kids because she’s just not into teenagerish activities. Kristen Stewart’s Bella, on the other hand, is a sulky, dreary, tomboy with some kind of nervous tic who is too cool for everything. For his part, Rob Pattinson captures the tortured aspect of Edward Cullen’s existence, and that’s about it. Meyer’s Edward is charming and eloquent and witty. He speaks (and thinks) like a man from another time. And he smiles from time to time, too.

Because I write for a publicity firm, I feel like I can spot focused, intentional messaging when I see it. Frankly, Meyer’s Bella is a politically incorrect model for teenage girls—too needy, too dependent, and too traditional in her domesticity. The Bella we encounter on screen presents the other extreme. She’s almost emotionless. She’s too cool to be vulnerable. She’s a vegetarian (not that I’m hating on vegetarians) who delivers lines like, “Take control…you’re a strong, independent woman.” This line was inserted for a reason, and I understand why. But in making Edward the undead James Dean and Bella the empowered, stoic feminist, the filmmakers have made the silly premise of this saga even less plausible.

In short, the movies are too cool to really tell the story. The real Edward and Bella are a couple of squares who get to know each other the old-fashioned way. We don’t witness this courtship in the film. Consequently, there is little magic between these two. When compared to the much more convincing onscreen chemistry between Bella and Jake (who also bests Edward’s physique and is not shown getting his butt kicked in Italy), viewers unfamiliar with the books wonder why this is even a competition.

All that being said, I will be pre-ordering the DVD of New Moon on Amazon. I can’t help myself.

THE HAMSTER SEARCHES HIS OWN RACIST-RODENTIALISMS

2009-11-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

i made a joke today on facebook today about an interaction with one of my students:

Kevin Still

had a white male student write on his homework: "Everyone is free to do what they want and to become what they want in America! The sky is the limit in the USA!" To which Kevin replied in the margins, "Who's been feeding you Sugar Puffed Bullcrap O's for breakfast?"

the question this student was to answer asked: How would you describe American culture today? when i originally gave the assignment, i asked the students to write their answer as a letter to a non-american. previously, i had experienced this exact same awkward responsibility in china when groups of chinese students circled around me and asked, "what is america like?" they had only seen america in the movies. likewise, i had only seen america through the eyes of a caucasian male.

there's a good chance my sugar-puffed student sloughed off the homework. maybe he waited till the last minute and did not really want to engage the question. perhaps he thought i wouldn't really read his work, nor did he expect that i would challenge his response. whatever the situation, my student's response illustrates a pervasive caucasian and upper-class perspective about america. and, sadly, there's a good chance that this student - white, male, upper-middle class, christian - actually believes what he wrote.

* * * *

i grew up in smalltown south arkansas. not exactly a hotbed of gang warfare, but my hometown quivered like a pressure cooker of racial tension. i was taught not to trust black people. i was taught to appreciate them but not to closely befriend them. as you can see, from the places the blacks live, we should reach missions to them. and you can see from the way they dress and speak, we should fear them. and i did appreciate black people. and i did fear black people. and i did force my way into some distant intimacy with the few "close" black friends i made at el dorado high school.

* * * *

chemotherapy kills all the cells in the cancer patient's body. with no intelligence to distinguish good from bad cells, chemotherapy kills skin cells that regulates UV rays, as well as hair follicles. teenagers respond to baldness with decorative headpieces. i chose bandanas.

i was 14 years old, rail thin, and filled to the brim with strict racial mistrust. one day at a shopping mall near the children's hospital in little rock, at a mall that had recently made primetime news for gang violence, a young black man saddled up beside me in a music store and asked me what the navy blue bandana was about.

"nothing. i'm sick."

"well, sick boy," he said, pulling in close to my ear, "there's two niggas out in that hallway right now that will shoot your ass dead for wearing that rag, and they won't give a shit that you sick."

then he walked away. laughing. and he called over his shoulder as he left the store, "good luck, sick boy! hope you make it to the car!"

* * * *

you might think that i got the last laugh on my hometown, my own race-heavy stories, and my instructed mistrust by marrying a black woman, by spending major holidays with my black family, by simply growing up and leaving those tired old thought patterns behind me.

but i have not.

i still fear black people at times. i still expect the worst of other races - asian, latino, indian - in social situations. i find myself narrow-mindedly wondering when those people are going to get it together. when will they speak english? when will they assimilate? and my wife and i still have long, long, long conversations in the car about our families when we drive away from saint louis and austin.

as a white american man, i publicly confess that my heart is not fully healed or completely right, and i confess that on my best days my understanding of other races is as narrow as my student's sloughed off homework answer.

* * * *

latonya and i watched CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA this past wednesday. and while i'm not much for documentaries, this was definitely one of the best documentaries i've ever seen.

the title is misleading. this is not a film about gangs as much as an exploration of south central los angeles' effect on young black men. chronicling the urban structures set in place by governing white forces. as far back as the 1950s, the film suggests that california has clamped down more vicious racial segregation for the past six decades than the deep south ever did.

the film discusses the roots and causes for the 1965 watts riot, and then reveals the white government response. interviewed riot participants declare, "you stuck us in these brick streets. you imprisoned us in these old broken buildings. you guarded the streets and wouldn't let us leave. so now, we're throwing these bricks and buildings back at you."

gangs rose up in LA as a response to the ignored dilapidation of neighborhoods and businesses in urban areas. after the primary black speakers of the civil rights movement were either imprisoned or assassinated, during an age when white america was content to skyrocket forward in suburbs and skyrises, young black men and women were forced to form their own social movement systems, usually in the form of gangs. there was still a need to survive. to eat. to make money and fill the hours of the day. but the response of governing forces in los angeles was to rid the streets of the appearance of evil: a.k.a. black men.

like the 1965 watts riot, the 1992 LA riots ignited in response to white america once again stealing the upper-hand in the black community. with the same bottled rage built from generations of concrete imprisonment as their predecessors in watts, young black people used their own homes and neighborhoods as weapons against the white abiding forces. in the aftermath, government officials promised millions of dollars in renovation efforts, as well as urban rebuilding programs that offered jobs to men and women in the community. such optimism even brought rival gangs together in peace. however, as is the pattern with white-collar spin-doctors, the government pulled their money and resources into other areas of interests, once again leaving the community unemployed and disheartened. they even turned the young liberal media to something far more pressing than the plight of urban life:

tipper gore's supreme court battle against explicit song lyrics.

* * * *

consider the following scenarios:

- a recent study discovered that school aged children in south central los angeles display more symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome than children of the same age bracket in afghanistan.

- because rival gangs hold such a grip-lock on their neighborhoods and streets, it is possible for young urban men and women never to exit a five block radius of their homes for years. children growing up ten minutes from the ocean have never set foot on the beach due to the heavy hands surrounding them.

- women in these neighborhoods are feeling the full brunt of the violence as they realize, no matter how much they love their sons and grandsons, boys need men in their lives. with a vast chasm of men in the home, these young boys gravitate to the only men in the neighborhood they can find. and the women lose all voice and all authority in that child's life.

* * * *

beneath the quippy little one-liner i tossed at my student on his paper, i wrote:

"Seriously, you need to know that guys like me and you - middle-class white dudes in good health and with no criminal background history - have more privilege in this country than we will ever realize. Now, I am asking you, look at the question again, think about what you are being asked, and write a new answer."

there is a conversation worth having here. one that is difficult and, at times, awkward. i can't blame my student for his perspective. he's lived his whole life seeing one reality and not realizing that another very different reality exists even in his own hometown. but i want my students to see the dividing lines between people. i want them to see that what's happening in south central los angeles is an honest hyperbole for something that's happening in bryan, texas. and i think the best place to begin seeing these lines, to begin accepting these realities, is to admit that our own vantage point is skewed, and it's the reluctance to challenge our viewpoints that perpetuates the dividing lines between people in our own communities. what's happening in LA is happening everywhere in smaller degrees, and my response to this film needs to work itself outloud in larger degrees.

i give CRIPS AND BLOODS: MADE IN AMERICA 5 skiddish little cancer kids in the record store out of 5. this film is available on netflix as a "watch instantly" offering.

WHEN MARY ROACH WROTE ABOUT CADAVER RESEARCH, I DECIDED TO DONATE MY CORPSE TO SCIENCE. NOW SHE'S WRITING ABOUT SEX AND ORGASMS - DARE I SAY MORE?

2009-11-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

when mary roach writes anything, i know i'll be donating or selling or christmas wrapping some part of myself for a future generation. she's honestly that persuasive. the first time around it was cadaver research, and i made latonya promise me - over dinner, no less - that she'd give my leafy little rodential body to a school or a lab or a film crew. that was the first time i read mary roach. this time, she's writing about sex and orgasms. i can't even begin to imagine the conversations around the still family dinner table over the next few days.

"honey, mary roach finally helped me find a scientific use for my four inch nipple hairs!"

okay, maybe that was unnecessary, but if you can't joke about your own nipple hairs, whose nipple hairs can you joke about?

simply stated, mary roach is delightful. she speaks directly to my inner geek by digging into questions i would never admit to wanting answered. as i told a friend today, this woman has a super sick sense of humor and a relentlessly guilt-free curiosity, so much that i let the "perversely" twisted side of my nerdiness off the leash to romp about vicariously in her books. she's like that one super cool mom who takes the neighborhood kids to heavy metal shows and horror flicks because all the other parents are total prudes.

for instance, roach's first book - STIFF: THE CURIOUS LIFE OF HUMAN CADAVERS - explores the possible scientific destinies (and automotive fates) of corpses donated to science. sure, it sounds morbid (and it is), but mary roach has a way of turning the details of decomposition and disembowelment into one of the funniest books i've ever read. the bit about crash test subjects being outfitted in leotards and adult diapers was nearly too much. and i think of those poor seeping stiffs often while strapping on my seatbelt. because of mary roach, the hamster will never rot in a box or an urn - this temple will be studied and jabbed and prodded and unlayered and joked about for years to come.

or, if i had it my way, they'll toss me in a ballerina's get-up and i'll crap my innards between a brick wall and a mercedes benz. one can only dream.

* * *

just this past week in class, we read one of mary roach's article about the amount of insects the FDA allows in our common food products. the students squirmed and revolted, but i could tell they secretly loved every gratuitous detail roach provided. one student even came up to me, rubbing his stomach and making a nauseated face, and said, "mr. still, i wish we could read more stuff like this. i've never lost my appetite while reading before."

in the process of preparing the article for my classes, i found that mary roach recently published on the only topic more fascinating to me than death and defecated innards: sex. and not just regular old christianized marital sex, but sex research, sex science, sex in the laboratory, sex between the sheets of statistics and on the cold slab of hard concrete data.

i picked up BONK: THE CURIOUS COUPLING OF SCIENCE

AND SEX yesterday in our school library, and while i'm not certain it actually happened or if it was just paranoid placebo effects from a college teacher carrying around a SEX book, i'm pretty sure the librarian cut me a curt little glance. and i bet he likes cleavages, too.

yes, ma'am, as i matter of fact, i do like cleavages.

even though i'm at the last quarter of two really great books right now, i couldn't resist peeking beneath the covers of mary roach's sex book last night, and i have not put it down since.

because i have only just begun reading BONK, this post is not a review. rather, i'm bringing you a preview of mary roach's exploration of sexual science. as a taunting little peek, i'd like to share the first paragraph of the first chapter, titled "The Sausage, the Porcupine, and the Agreeable Mr. G: Highlights from the Pioneers of Human Sexual Response" -

Albert R. Shadle was the world's foremost expert on the sexuality of small woodland creatures. If you visit the library at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, in Bloomington, Indiana, you will find six reels of audio recordings Shadle made of "skunk and raccoon copulation and post-coitus behavior reactions." (Nearby you will also find a 1959 recording of "Sounds during heterosexual coitus" and a tape of the "masturbatory sessions" of Subject 127253, which possibly explains why no one ever gets around to listening to the raccoons.)

with an opening paragraph such as this, you can only expect things to get better. and they do. trust me, they get much better.

* * *

by the way, since this is a film site, i would like to include a little film clip of mary roach chatting up rare facts about orgasms. personally, i love how much we can hear mary roach giggling at her own jokes and at the sheer absurdity of saying words like "imitation ejaculate" and "stimulation of the pig vulva" in an enormously packed mixed gender auditorium. this clip alone gets 4.5 orgasmic monkey faces out of 5.

(okay, you're right, there was no need to rate the video. i really just wanted to say "orgasmic monkey faces" in public, and i don't have a packed auditorium and a microphone to really give the phrase justice. one can only dream.)

CAT'S EYE: THE CROWNING MARBLED JEWEL OF HORROR FILM ANTHOLOGIES

2009-11-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

sadly, horror film anthologies have gone the way of stinkin'-dirty horror synth tracks: total '80s obscurity, half-priced book store bins, library friend day sales, thrift stores, blockbuster nostalgia, tacky blog sites that scour the cinematic refuse pile for such filthy cheap no-namers.

and right there at the bottom of the barrel, this nearly forgotten little screenplay from stephen king (who just released his umpteenth new novel since announcing retirement) ranks at the tippy-top of the horror anthology film chart.

CAT'S EYE cinematically illustrates three separate stephen king short stories, each starring the same telepathetic pussycat. the first two stories were originally published in king's first story collection, NIGHT SHIFT. the final piece was an original screenplay written specifically for a freshly potty-trained drew barrymore.

(ain't it strange how drew barrymore rocked way hard as a lisp-lipped child actor? it's like she's de-evolved over time. give me ALTERED STATES drew, E.T. drew, FIRESTARTER drew, IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES drew, seven year old youngest host of SNL ever drew over anything she's done in the past 15 years. the girl freaking topped out before age ten!)

i digress.

* * *

QUITTERS INC.

james woods plays a schmoe that wants to stop smoking, so he signs up for an extreme quitters program. the bit starts with the crazed quitters inc. CEO busting up james woods' cigarettes, and then he shows james woods a cat bouncing and pouncing on an electrified metal cage floor. james gets pissed about the fried cat paws and demands the CEO guy to leave the cat alone. then james woods says, "so if i smoke again are you going to put more cats in the electric cage?" and the CEO guy laughs and says, "no. your wife."

the CEO warns james woods that someone will be watching him at every moment. he tells him that he might see some of the stalkers some of the time, but he won't see all of the stalkers all of the time. that night james woods finds a bloke in his office closet, hiding behind the golf clubs and the rain coats - and he finds him right as he's lighting a cigarette!

king obviously wrote "quitters inc" as a commentary on his fight for sobriety. and because the story (and screenplay) are so autobiographical, king takes liberties to poke fun at himself and his own work through james woods' character. in a scene after james woods gets home from the quitters inc office, all stressed and disturbed from watching the cat's feet sizzle, he sits in his recliner, sipping scotch and watching THE DEAD ZONE, a 1983 cronenberg adaptation of king's 1979 novel by the same name. woods' wife startles him, causing him to spill his drink on his shirt. when he jumps and leaves the tv, his wife says, "aren't you going to finish your show?" and woods says, "no, i don't even know what they're saying. who writes this crap anyway?" classic.

quitter's inc. gets 4 charred pussy-foots out of 5. great short. better than most of the CREEPSHOW bits.

* * *

THE LEDGE

so there's this high-rolling, big-betting, white-collar badass who finds robert hays (from AIRPLANE) running around with his wife. with the help of some hard-hitting cronies, the crime-lord kidnaps robert hays and says he wants to place a wager. the crime-lord says he knows about the skeezing around with robert hays. says that's fine, she's a good woman, a good looking woman. who wouldn't want her? then the crime-lord places the wager:

A) a big bag of heroine was just put into robert hays car. robert hays can walk out the door, get in the car, police will find him, and he'll spend his life in prison being some other crime-lord's wife. "When you get out, you'll be more worried about your arthritis than your libido."

B) robert hays can walk the entire perimeter of the crime-lord's high rise building on a five inch ledge. if robert hays succeeds the perimeter alive, the crime-lord will remove the heroin from robert's car, give him some ridiculous amount of money to leave town, and the crime-lord will throw in his wife, too. it's a good offer, if he can survive the walk around the building.

i won't give this one away, but it's got a super great ending. also heavy on the drug charges, drug avoidance, ultimate freedom equals freedom from drugs theme, which seems to be prevalent in king's writing at the time. THE LEDGE gets 3 ankle pecking pigeons out of 5. not as suspenseful as it wanted to be, but not totally dull either. a good yarn to stick plum in the middle of two great stories.

* * *

(Final Story)

untitled and unpublished before hand, the last short in this anthology was a real treat. the most basic synopsis i can give is this: a cat catches wind of a troll stalking drew barrymore; cat moves in with drew barrymore's family; mom thinks cat is a bird killer; troll comes out of wall at night and kills family parakeet; mom kicks cat out; dad tells drew barrymore that it's okay the cat is gone cause cats steal children's breath; troll keeps coming out of wall to steal drew barrymore's breath; thus, the cat's been framed TWICE; still, the cat knows this is happening, escapes his termination fate, and takes on the troll in a bitter paw fight that involves ceiling fans, muppet babies helium balloons, a Police vinyl on high speed, and a box fan. i will not tell you the end. i'll only tell you that this little short was freaking awesome. this is the kind of story children tell their parents, "a troll lives in my wall and keeps knocking my shit over in the middle of the night! you gotta believe me!" one of the better stephen king shorts i've seen.

the final short in CAT'S EYE gets 5 troll toothpick daggers out of 5. this is one of the best horror shorts i've seen on any anthology - CREEPSHOW 1 and 2 included.

* * *

personally, i think we need more anthology films. let's cut the crap that fills most of these 90-plus minute films with gratuitous sex and partying and "tension building." let's cut all that crap and get straight to the story, straight to the precision perfect scares and disturbances.

overall, i give CAT'S EYE 4 pre-teen drew barrymores out of 5. i'm glad to own this one, even on vhs. seriously, if you love cats, if you love a pre-teen drew barrymore, if you hate cigarettes and electrified metal flooring and adultery and heroin crimelord cronies and pet euthanasia and wall-banging trolls as much as i do, then pounce on this film. we can only hope that stephen king's retirement produces a sequel.

* * *

and this review of CAT'S EYE from brock at THE ROUGH CUTS on YouTube is worth the watching. i've got subscription to THE ROUGH CUTS. totally great reviews from a weird bunch of film addicts.

Happy Birthday, Myles!

2009-11-10T17:20:00.001-08:00

THE BQE - A Sufjan Stevens Film

2009-11-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

Unlike the MEGA SHARK VERSUS GIANT OCTOPUS review, this one is about the kind of movie that you will almost never find on this site. Here we usually revel in cheese and bad production values. Myles, the hamster, and I generally do not make forays into the world of artistic visionary kinda stuff. If it’s not playing at the local multiplex, we usually stay away. But when I found out that Sufjan Stevens had made a movie, I was all over it.

Sufjan is an all-time favorite of mine and Seven Swans (and Come On, Feel the Illinoise, of course) occupies a place in my personal hall of fame. The thought of him making a film (about an expressway, no less), was completely intriguing. Here’s little bit of backstory: Sufjan was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to create a film about Brooklyn. Stevens, a Brooklyn native, was fascinated by the idea of making the film not about the borough, but about the street that runs though it. He quickly set about filming and scoring a movie about the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The music was first performed in 2007, with 35 musicians and interpretive hula hooping.

The movie, just released last month, is a visual and auditory banquet. It opens with a panoramic shot of the BQE while a drone fills the audio space, almost as if the orchestra is tuning up for the performance. Then, as the scenes start to change, the scope of the project comes into view. The whole film is presented with three separate panes of film, sometimes joined, sometimes unique. The effect is a triptych, almost a trinity, of image. Three visuals, three words, three hula hoopers – yes, the Hooper Heroes join the film. These lovely ladies play the roles of Botanica, Quantas, and Electress (BQE, get it?) and provide the human element to counterbalance the grit and concrete of the Expressway.

Sufjan provides sweeping vistas of sound juxtaposed against grainy, dirty, and beautiful buildings and street life. The visuals present a melting pot of imagery - the modernity of McDonalds alongside shoes hanging from power lines next to the shells of tenement buildings. The three panels often show the same scene from three distinct vantage points, but even when they are joined to form a unified image, it’s never seamless, always fractured; it's never whole, but still complete.

About a third of the way into the film, Act II starts, and the hula hoopers take center stage. The music turns introspective, shots get tighter, and the actions slows. The hooper scenes serve as salve to eyes overindulged on urban sprawl. Seeing humans soothes and smooths away the harsh edges of concrete we’ve been watching. At the halfway point, the main musical theme returns to close ups of trucks and cars on the BQE, along with shots framed in such a way the birth canal imagery is impossible to miss. In an interview with Paste Magazine, Sufjan said, “If skyscrapers are the ultimate phallic symbols, then the urban expressway is the ultimate birth canal, the uterine wall, the anatomical passageway, the ultimate means of egress, and the process by which we are all born again. The BQE is the Motherhood of Civilization, the Breast of Being, the fallopian tube, the biological canal from which all of life emerges in resplendent beauty, newborn and newly fashioned with the immaculate countenance of a baby.” And he doesn’t beat around the bush with it – Sufjan proves to be the Georgia O’Keefe of New York Expressways.

The film continues and we get some visual trickery, a kaleidoscope effect, some night shooting, etc. In fact, my favorite scene is of fast motion of lights at night along with the hoopers in fast motion - the confluence of lights and speed creates an effect that looks dramatically like graffiti.

The film comes to a slide that says THE END. Don’t believe it. There’s still more. In fact, if THE BQE is a love letter to Brooklyn (and I believe it is, much like The Beastie Boys’ To the 5 Boroughs), then there is definitely a postscript. There is a very tender scene involving Sufjan and friends in the environment where we were just immersed. Still no voices, just visuals. But to the faithful who stick around for the PPS, there is a small coda on the end of the film featuring vocals over more beautiful imagery of The BQE.

I know this is long, and forgive me. But I could say much more about this film. Keep in mind, this is not a documentary – it is a museum piece. There are no vocals until the very end. No dialogue, only music. It runs a short 51 minutes and yes, it does get monotonous (and monotonal) at times, but that only serves to remind the viewer of the traffic on the BQE – monotonous. This is unlike anything we usually talk about here, and it’s a little difficult to put into words. It is a piece of art. It’s not something you invite your buddies over to watch with you (unless they’re big nerds like me who dig this sort of thing), but it’s really, really, really good. It’s the kind of film that people win awards for. Not Oscars or Golden Globes, but important awards.

THE BQE gets 5 Coney Islands out of 5 for the quality of the film. As for recommendation? Well, I highly recommend it, but you might not like it as much as I did. But it’s worth a shot. Seriously.

SKIP BURNING THIS FILM AT THE STAKE - JUST BURN THE DAMN THING!

2009-11-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

the wife is currently teaching a unit in her eleventh and twelfth grade resource english classes about the salem witch trials. so far, they've read THE SCARLET LETTER and they've watched THE CRUCIBLE. it's a good unit. it's a profitable study in america's literary, religious, and superstitious past.

sometimes the students say really dumb stuff to my wife - their teacher - like, "mrs., this stuff don't make no sense. this ain't got nuthin' to do with my life."

the my wife says something brilliant back like, "well, let's think about this. have you ever met someone who believed something different than you? or have you ever been wrongly accused of something? or have you ever felt like an outsider and like all the insiders were against you?"

then the kids bite their lips or roll their eyes. and then they say, "well, yeah, but, mrs. . . . . . "

and my wife says, "then this unit about the salem witch trials applies perfectly to you. let's move on."

i'm telling you: this woman can verbally burn those kids at the stake before they even realize their shoes are smoking!

* * * * *

this past week an uber-excited eleventh grade girl comes up to my wife and says, "ooo! mrs. still! i have this movie at home that is just like THE CRUCIBLE!"

my wife, ever compassionate and ready to encourage the youth, says enthusiastically, "well, bring it to me and i'll watch it."

so the student did bring it. and my wife did watch it. and i watched it with her. and we laughed through most of THE COVENANT at how totally just unlike it is from THE CRUCIBLE.

bless the poor kid's heart for trying.

* * * * *

THE COVENANT is the perfect example of a good story ruined by a horrible film. good concept. great massachusetts' landscape and antique setting. potentially nice bridge between classic gothic fiction, a la hawthorne and poe, and modern dark masters of the macabre, ie. neil gaiman and stephanie meyers. (that latter name was a joke.) however, all the promise in the film was completely overshadowed by ridiculous exposition, contrived dialogue, bad acting, a constant eyeful of young male and fresh female abdomen and arse, and enough melodrama to scoop in a bowl and dip with ruffled tater chips.

i will give the producers this: they knew their niche market. aimed at a dramatic, tasteless high school audience, the people behind THE COVENANT banked on their viewers having recently studied the salem witch trials. even though the salem witch trials is merely nodded to two maybe three times in the bleak chatter of confession wafer-thin characters, their aim proved true as illustrated by latonya's student's enthusiasm. this is where the failing american education system meets a dull-minded hollywood, and they get totally sloshed out behind the prom on mad-dog 20-20.

there is one seemingly redemptive aspect of the film: laura ramsey from THE RUINS, which was one of my top films of 2008. ramsey offered a piercingly authentic performance in THE RUINS that rivaled jena malone's starring role in the same film. but even ramsey could not work a single fleck of magical pixiedust out of THE COVENANT'S script. give rembrandt a palate wheel of skittle spit watercolors, and he may only produce a skittle spit watercolor. give laura ramsey THE COVENANT, and she still cleared more after taxes than i will in the next five years combined.

i give THE COVENANT 1 spider in the nostril out of 5. ridiculous. trite. sinfully spell-less. i felt bad the young lady to receive her film back from latonya. for all my wife's fine qualities, she is not a good actress. and i'm not sure she could have thanked this child for the dvd loan with a straight face.

some secrets are better drowned in the river than displayed prominently across our faces. i praise my wife for her inability to lie, even to protect the self-respect of the youth.

"HAVING A BOO RADLEY MOMENT, ARE WE?"

2009-11-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

here's how the conversation went in the middle of the Halloween afternoon:

WIFE: I want to watch a movie.

HAMSTER: Great. I'm in the mood for something Halloweeny.

W: No. I want something sweet.

H: (grimace). Something sweet? It's freaking Halloween. I want to watch somebody cut somebody.

W: Well, I don't like scary. I'm in the mood for something sweet, even if it is Halloween.

H: (a few minutes later, after some scheming) Okay, here's my votes: THE UNINVITED, HALLOWEEN H2O with Jamie Lee freaking Curtis, or the Michael J. Fox classic THE FRIGHTENERS. Look Peter Jackson made that Michael J. Fox one, and you like Peter Jackson.

W: (scanning the options) How about SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE or BENNY AND JOON? I like both of those.

H: It's Hallo-freaking-ween, Latonya. We can't watch SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE on Halloween. Let's try to meet in the middle.

W: (crunching in eyebrows and perking lips to the side in serious thought) Okay, then we can either watch ALIENS or PREDATOR. That's in the middle.

(the hamster grimaces some more. pouts. grimaces. super pouts. wife goes down to get lunch. she comes back upstairs and the hamster has secured a vhs tape in the player. the wife doesn't know what it is. he's still grimacing, slightly pouting. she saddles up next to him and ignores his mood. "ignore the behavior" they say in special education. the movie starts and the opening theme song comes up. the wife is surprised.)

W: You put on BENNY AND JOON? I thought you would have put on ALIENS.

H: I'm not in the mood for ALIENS. Besides, there's a scene in this where Sam gives Benny and Joon a jack-n-the-box. And those things scared the poop sticks out of me when I was a kid. Jack-n-the-boxes and ventriloquist dummies. So, on some level, this is a scary movie.

(and then they watched happily together, sipping the last of the riesling and the final bottle of flying dog's gonzo imperial porter. this, dear friends, is the way the still family celebrated halloween this year.)

* * * * *

and, by the way, if you've never seen BENNY AND JOON, it's absolutely delightful. i remember this being the film that convinced me of johnny depp's supernatural acting powers. also, mary stuart masterson is cute enough to put on a shelf. i do love this film, and i recommend it uber-highly when given the chance.

without hesitation, i give BENNY AND JOON 5 dangling window wash stands of 5. an instant classic. a heartwarming triumph. a story of love superseding sanity. there is nothing lacking in BENNY AND JOON.

HANDS DOWN: SAW 6 IS THE BEST SAW SEQUEL SINCE SAW 2

2009-10-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

it's tough to take the Hockey Mask stage after john barber's last post, especially with such a mainstream and seemingly cliche film as SAW VI, but the newest installment of Jigsawian madness needs all the attention this site can afford.

i've said it several times before and i will say it here again: SAW VI is the best sequel in this franchise since SAW II. although i did not care much for SAW III, IV, or V, i am a huge fan of the first two SAW films.

SAW and SAW II walked a taut tightrope between the genres of horror and crime drama, offering enough bloody edged predator tactics to be somewhat scary, while also building enough cat-n-mouse tension to attract a large non-horror fanbase. the franchise marginalized itself within the opening five minutes of SAW III. (my wife, who admits to enjoying the first two SAWs, walked out of SAW III before jigsaw's voice perked up to define the first "game.")

although the SAW mythology has expanded with each film, the p

lot has stretched increasingly thinner with each sequel. yes, SAW III questions amanda's devotion to john kramer and shows us the death of major players in the jigsaw puzzle. yes, SAW IV gave us tons of back story on why john kramer became jigsaw. yes, SAW V deepens the characters of john and jill, while also advancing the depraved apprencticeship of mark hoffman. still, and regardless, these are not good films. they're barely worth the price of admission and stand only as descending stepping-stones in a modern day DIVINE COMEDY.

however, and just in time, the producers of SAW have given us a film worthy of its origin.

this one film successfully explored more background story and character development, while still offering the most meaningful life-and-death game traps, than any SAW sequel to date.

(the SAW theme song helped me write this review, so i hope it helps you read it.)

1.) BACKGROUND AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. in this SAW, we learn about the deception between amanda and mark hoffman, as well as the full history of amanda's involvement in john's creation of jigsaw. also, we see jill, john's wife, as a primary accomplice in the whole scheme, as opposed to her existing like a silent bystander in previous films.

mark hoffman's character soars in SAW VI as a primary principle. from his initiation into the SAW mythology to his freshly tested survival, mark hoffman reigns as a character to anticipate in subsequent films. and, yes, SAW VI ended on a note necessitating a SAW VII.

2.) PLOT. the primary game in SAW VI revolves around the CEO of an insurance company, a man who has developed a formula to rate the long-life probability of new insurance applicants. according to the CEO's formula, if the individual looks like a money maker, keep them. if they look like a cost to the company on any level, ditch them as rodents in the sewer. jigsaw, thereby, takes this man through a series of games that make the CEO fully responsible for choosing the life of one (or more) over another. removed from mathematics and comfortable desk chairs, the CEO finally comes face to face with the death of individuals, causing him to act in ways that may contradict his previous career philosophies, which brings us to the next theme in the SAW films.

3.) SAW "GAMES." the last three SAW films have felt like montages of vigilante justice. games are not fully concurrent with the sins of the player. traps are not always truly purgatorial as to absolve the player's specific sins.

in SAW VI, however, the traps do not match the victims in the traps as much as they match the player: the insurance CEO. a man who has determined the longstanding survival rates of policy applicants must now choose, within moments, the fate of co-workers. formulas for survival rates are erased as the player literally holds life and death in his hands. given the choice of deciding who lives and who dies, the CEO must lean on something more primitively human than anything he has worked with on a daily basis thus far.

for example, the scene on the merry-go-round (featured in the poster below) is the first SAW trap that actually felt frightening to me. most traps are so ridiculously far-fetched that i have never felt affected by their grotesque mechanisms. however, this merry-go-round trap messed me up. the merry-go-round holds six people, but only two can get off. the CEO has to choose which four die and which two live. that's all i'll say for now, except that i was all over my seat in this scene. this was one of the most disturbing scenes i have seen in a SAW film yet. and i still recoil at the thought of it.

i give SAW VI an overall 4 reverse bear traps to the jawbone out of 5. though not enough to top the first two films, it definitely succeeded the past three sequels by a long shot. see this in the theater. go somewhere dark, somewhere sinister, somewhere in total solitude. see this film alone on a tuesday night in an empty auditorium. nothing makes you feel closer to SAW than an empty auditorium, echoing with the synthesized energy of abduction, of entrapment, of playing for keeps.

"let the game begin."

Why This Site Exists

2009-10-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

I've seen a lot of bad movies. And I do mean A LOT. Like, way more than you have. Watching bad movies is a unique art. It's like going to the used record store and hunting through the Bargain bin. You may go ten times and look through hundreds of albums before finding anything good. But when you do... oh, man. It's like Christmas. In the same way, there are thousands and thousands of bad movies and most of them are nothing special. They are simply bad. But, every once in a while, you come across a movie like MEGA SHARK VERSUS GIANT OCTOPUS. And I'm gonna be honest with you - if the title of this movie doesn't get you excited, you might as well just quit reading now. 'Cause you're not going to care. And that's ok. But what you need to remember is that this website was created by three guys who love this kind of junk. We freaking love it.

Once you get past the title of this one, pay attention to the stars - Lorenzo Lamas and Debbie Gibson (I know, it's supposed to be Deborah, but I can't bring myself to call her that) - and yes, it is that Debbie Gibson (insert Electric Youth joke here). It doesn't get better than this, folks. Lamas and Gibson are like the Bogie and Bacall of bad movies.

Here's the plot. And no, I'm not making this up (kudos to writer/director Jack Perez, who also has films such as MONSTER ISLAND, THE MARY KAY LETOURNEAU STORY, and LA CUCARACHA to his credit, for dreaming up this masterpiece). Debbie Gibson is a marine biologist/submarine pilot/love interest who studies whales, or something. Then some other stuff happens. Then a giant (sorry, Mega) shark jumps out of the water and attacks an airplane. In the sky. A passenger plane. I know that I tend to be guilty of overstatement, but I promise I'm not here. THIS. SCENE. IS. THE. BEST.

Anyway, more plot. Turns out that there's also a giant octopus out there. Both shark and octopus are terrorizing the world and killing lots of people, so Debbie Gibson and her crew get hired by the government (typical "kill-em-all" types, epitomized by Lorenzo Lamas) to help catch the beasties. Of course, the brown shirts wanna kill the creatures, but Debbie and Co want to capture them. They come up with a typical "attract the beasts with pheromones" plan, which (predictably) goes awry. So, science be darned - everyone agrees that the only way to end the problem is to get shark and octopus to fight each other and fix the problem themselves. Hence, MEGA SHARK VERSUS GIANT OCTOPUS.

A couple of things about the movie. The plot is ridiculous. Wonderfully, amazingly, hysterically, ridiculous. But totally self-aware about its ridiculousness. Also, the special effects are spectacularly bad. The scene where the shark eats the Golden Gate Bridge is worth the price of admission by itself. And man, I haven't even shown you the octopus yet! Again, Lamas and Gibson are totally in their element here. I can't wait for the sequel. And there will be a sequel. There will be.

Movies like this are why Three Hands in the Popcorn Bag was invented. I can't recommend this highly enough. Seriously. If you've got Netflix, you can watch it online. If not, go to Blockbuster or your local Redbox. Invite your friends over. Pop some corn. Delight in the wondrous badness of MEGA SHARK VERSUS GIANT OCTOPUS.

This gets 5 "Shake Your Loves" out of 5.

HAMSTERIAN HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: THE KOREANS USE LESS WORDS AND MORE SCENERY

2009-10-19T21:58:00.001-07:00

i wrote the following review on june 23, 2008 and published it on another site i once managed. good review, if i do say so myself. this is one of my all-time favorite films. totally beautiful. absolutely soul-wrenching. i cannot say enough good things about this. and even though i dreaded the american remake, i ended up really enjoying THE UNINVITED as well. now i own both, and i'm looking forward to a double feature night to play the korean original next to the american remake. john and i agree on A TALE OF TWO SISTERS.

* * *

After one viewing of Kim Ji-Woon’s A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (2003), I knew this film was prime candidate for an American remake. As is, the film is too slow and complex for American audiences. So I searched the film on-line and, sure enough, THE UNINVITED, a re-titled American version of this brilliant South Korean film, will hit American theatres January 2009.

 This is what we do these days: we remake really good horror films from Asia for American audiences. By remake, I do not mean that we look to them for inspiration or new ideas – no, we completely translate them into our language, expectations and blonde haired faces. Same script. Same exact plot. Even at times, as in the case of THE GRUDGE and THE RING, same Asian directors. The few changes made usually dumb them down to suit genre-spoiled Americans.

 In A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, Kim Ji-Woon has not created what Americans typically consider pulse-stopping horror. Rather, he crafts a visual fairy tale, complete with fairy tale tenets and torments: two young girls; an evil stepmother; a heavy-browed father incapacitated by guilt; a beautiful house looming with shadows in the brightest light of day; a haunting family secret. This modernized Korean folktale develops slowly, focusing on its characters while exploring the shaky foundations between memory and actuality. This form of cinematic storytelling stands in stark opposition to typical American horror that bounces between cheap scares, gratuitous sexuality, gory special effects, and quippy one-liners.

 Don’t get me wrong: I love modern American horror as much as any dude sporting a Michael Myers t-shirt from Hot Topic. These films are great. They’re fun. But, admittedly, they leave something to be desired, something meatier and more complex than leather aprons and dolls with swirly cheeks. And it’s because we are in this rut of remakes and shallow storied torture-porn that we look to other countries to fill-in our gaps.

 Kim Ji-Woon’s A TALE OF TWO SISTERS - void of American gore, sexuality and fast-paced effects - requires more from its audience than listless viewership. It requires the ability to suspend both reality and expectation, to leave questions unanswered and the thin scrim curtain between life and after-life swaying with rips in the fabric. Good storytelling requires good story reception: allowing the fairy tale to utterly unravel and remain heaped on the ground at our feet.

 What unravels in American theatres January 2009, with yet another Asian remake, will serve as commentary on America’s expectations of film. After all, this is what we do these days: we mindlessly translate foreign literary explorations into big-screen money makers. What becomes lost in translation will only be regained when we learn to view foreign art for what it is, not what it could be in American hands. Until that day, it’s the same script. The same exact plot. Planting our flag in another person’s front lawn, hell, that’s just the American way.

A Two-Fer. 'Cause I Like to Party.

2009-10-18T17:56:00.001-07:00

Janna and I have been lucky lately. Twice now, we've gotten away kid-free to go to the Downtown West Theater to see something lovely. Downtown West is the cinema equivalent of Death Cab for Cutie - all indie, and all awesome. This is the only place in Knoxville you can see these kinds of flicks, and that's cool with me. I can handle the $12 for popcorn and a coke, if this is what I get in return.

AWAY WE GO

Seeing this movie was a direct result of one of life's great truths: John is a dummy. We wanted to see PAPER HEART. I looked at the times, we went to the theater, and somewhere in between, I screwed up, remembered the times wrong, and we got to the theater 20 minutes late for PAPER HEART. So we decided to see AWAY WE GO instead. Enter another one of life's great truths: Despite John being a dummy, things tend to work out ok. This time, things didn't work out ok, they worked out beautifully.

This is a movie about two people (John Krasinki and Maya Rudolph) who love each other very much. They find out they're pregnant, and set out on a journey to figure out the best place for them to raise their child and really become a family. This is a movie about finding your own way in the world. It's about asking your friends and relatives what they think about what you should do, and then doing the opposite - because you look at them and think "your life is awfully screwed up. Why would I want to listen to you about how to do life?"

AWAY WE GO is episodic, and at turns, the episodes are tragic or funny or sweet. I don't want to get too specific because it would take away the fun, but Maggie Gyllenhall's character is wonderfully awful, and Krasinki and Rudolph's response to her is delightful. Really. And that's

just one little part. Go see this with your wife (or husband).

AWAY WE GO gets 5 trampoline sleepovers out of 5.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER

This one was our most recent venture and lemme tell you something. What is says on the poster there - "This is not a love story. This is a story about love." - the poster tells the truth, man. That's exactly what it is. This one tells the story of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, a man who measures his life by relationships. The day he meets Zooey Deschanel's character (Summer - hence the title) is Day 1. There's not a lot of specific plot to talk about, so let me break down one specific scene for you. In this scene, Tom (Gordon-Levitt) is going to a party. The scene is shot in split screen, and on the left, the screen is labeled "Expectation" and on the right, the screen is labeled "Reality." The two scenes are shown concurrently, what he is hoping for, right alongside the reality of the scene. I've been watching movies for a long time and I gotta tell you, this scene is brilliant with a capital BRILLIANT. There are some films that will be studied in film class for years and years, and this is one. Even the way the film is structured is innovative. Also, there's a scene involving Han Solo that literally had me weeping with laughter.

This is a different movie than AWAY WE GO. AWAY WE GO is a love story. (500) DAYS OF SUMMER is not. But it's still great for taking your significant other to. This one had Janna and I talking for hours about both film and how relationships work.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER gets 5 artistic piles of poo out of 5.

WHERE'S MY HORN? OH, YEAH....AT HOME WITH THE TATTERED REMAINS OF OUR SCRIPT

2009-10-18T15:32:00.000-07:00

I love Goodwill for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that they provide jobs and training for a number of folks that need it. However, dear Goodwill, you've become a little too high on yourself.

Exhibit A: the new location in Waco? Yeah, taking remainder clothing from GAP and selling shirts for 15$ instead of 35$ isn't what I would call the "Goodwill ethos".

Exhibit B: the VHS quality has plummeted. One could once expect to walk in and find a used copy of STRANGE BREW or maybe even an old version of PULP FICTION, but when the best you can proffer is a second-rate children's movie, I'm cashing out.
***

I never saw THE LAST UNICORN as a child, and frankly, I'm glad. It's way creepy, complete with morphing animals, a bull on fire, mythical animals vicerally mauling old hags, and naked animated ladies with full-length hair. Oh, and creepy skeletons and cats with peg legs. This film is a virtual George Romero, minus the undead and plus a really terrible soundtrack by the wonder that was America, aka "the horse-with-no-name" band.

Instead of giving this a full-length review, I'll do what the original creators of this poopstand should have done and give it a script. Sure, the original film is based on a crack-fueled 'artistic retreat' vision by Peter Beagle, and accordingly has limited room to breathe, and yes, it has the voicings of everyone from Jeff Bridges to Alan Arkin to FREAKING ANGELA LANSBURY, but this movie was awful from the word 'Go'.

....and so, a THIPTB first: a screenplay.
***

The last unicorn, painfully aware that she is sorely alone, heads to the local pub and quickly downs a gin and tonic en route to the tattoo parlor to get her ink touched up, drowning her sorrows at being the last remaining mythical creature by getting permanent eyeliner etched above her horsey-eyelids. Makeup firmly in place, she trots out to the Forest of Regrets, immediately rethinking her decision to get green eyeliner sewn into her face.

In a fit of despair, she leaves the Forest, getting caught by a travelling Mary Kay convention, who proceed to give her beauty tips, fashion secrets, arcane visions of netherworld beauty accessible only by trailer parks and VH1. Caught up in visions of pink Cadillacs and mascara, the Unicorn is befriended by a bumbling fashion consultant named Ray, who, after a brief career in geriatric surgery, has taken to selling cosmetics to make ends meet. The two inexplicably escape the convention, without cause or provocation, mumbling something about fair trade.

At some point, the two pick up token comedic relief, and a romantic interest in the form of a well-meaning royalty. Some time later, having lost all audience interest, the unicorn hooks up with Ken, leaving Malibu Barbie to sort out why in the world there is a castle falling into the sea, a 15-foot bull on fire, and a stampede of sea foam charging up the mountainside.
***

Apologies to those who loved this as a child, including those who have wet their pants at the prospect of this being made into a live-action film. I think I'd rather watch SCREAM 3 again with director's commentary on. Negative one drunk skeleton out of five.

BUILDING FORTS AND TEARING DOWN IGLOOS

2009-10-17T22:41:00.001-07:00

(there was more written here, but i'm working on a project and i needed these paragraphs. i'm still leaving you the last bites of the review.)

the film is good. there is no plot, except that which we bring into the theater and project beneath the light. there is magic. there is violence. there is the haunted reality that the good guys can still devour you and that kindness still explodes in erratic emotions. the film declares that running from problems does work, but you still have to return. i've done my equal parts running and returning. well, maybe equal parts.

i give WHERE THE WILD THINGS are 4 belly-swamp raccoons out of 5. this story was already a classic: the film just reminded us why.

ZOMBIELAND REDUX: THE SLOTH RESPONDS TO THE HAMSTER

2009-10-16T06:06:00.001-07:00

On occasion, the authors of this blog will have divergent opinions on a cinematic masterpiece. Such is the case with ZOMBIELAND. Have no fear, faithful reader; this doesn't mean that Siskel is losing his grip on Ebert, or that Bert is ditching Ernie for a condo, or that the Lone Ranger is getting hung out to dry by Tonto. It only means that art has done its job and produced a plurality of readings.

So, tip your glasses to art, and enjoy the read.
***
Kevin,

Went to go see ZOMBIELAND for the second time last night, just to give it a fair viewing. I'm still very much a novice when it comes to the scary movies, and so, a moment of self-psychoanalysis. When I watch a scary flick for the first time, even if it is SCREAM, I have to remind myself going in that it's only a movie, that everything is being done with a cameraman, sound tech, 'best boy grip' (whatever that is), and balding director fully sequestered from view, even while Drew Barrymore gets eviscerated. My mental projections are pretty busy.

So, I always approach scary movies with a little more self-imposed distance than I would when watching, say, GHOSTBUSTERS or WHAT ABOUT BOB?. That being said, I don't really get comfortable the first time around usually, as much as I might like immediately something like LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

All that self-disclosure aside, I stand by most of my initial assessment of ZOMBIELAND. It's way fun; Woody Harrelson is over the top and awesome; but let's take this point at a time.

1) Woody Harrelson is awesome. I liked him in WHITE MAN CAN'T JUMP, but it's been a long time since then since he's been a goofball I cared to see on screen. I loved how they even incorporated his pot-smoking into the movie.

2) STILL thought some of the casting was bland, but we'll talk in a later point.

3) I still don't really care for Emma Stone. Don't get me wrong; the eyeliner gets me almost every time. Maybe it's the glam rocker in me. But I think you're right about her being the next Demi Moore, but I don't take that as a compliment, meaning, she'll get by on her looks for a few years and then start churning out forgettable clunkers like CHARLIE'S ANGELS 2. Emma, if you're reading this, turn back now and start doing character films.

4) You're right: Jesse Eisenberg is better than Michael Cera. I love Michael Cera in ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, and you will find me in line at midnight when that film comes out, but Michael Cera's "awkward teen antics" are wearing thin for me. Jesse Eisenberg has better comic timing, with a little bit more muted neuroses. I'll look forward to seeing what happens with him.

5) And YES YES YES: I do love Abigail Breslin. I hope she's able to make the turn to grown-up films and not do a Drew Barrymore or (fill in the blank with child star gone nowhere).

6) SEAN OF THE DEAD is the best zombie film ever made for two reasons. First, it does the zombie themes and the comedy, and secondly, it does it while not abandoning a central theme which ZOMBIELAND entirely overlooks--and this is where I totally disagree with you about ZOMBIELAND over SEAN. In SEAN OF THE DEAD, and 28 DAYS LATER, and any number of other zombie films, one of the key elements is this tripping the line between human and not-human. There's a moment in the aforementioned films when the hero has to put someone they love on the other side: Sean's mom or roommate, whoever. It's that moral ambiguity that makes zombie films tragic, even when they're funny. ZOMBIELAND misses that part entirely, because from the start, the people are loners--they have no connections, and so, they have no moral compunction about wasting zombies.

That being said, the killer action scenes almost made up for the lack of moral deliberation that makes zombie films so interesting to watch. The scene with Woody Harrelson in the cage was awesome. And the guest cameo makes me giggle just thinking about it. I too regret GARFIELD.

7) Loved the IBS. I like it when the heroes have some chronic problem that threatens to overpower them that's something as innocuous as a dump.

8) HIGH FIVE to Metallica. The soundtrack to this whole movie really was awesome.

9) Liked the realism of the zombies. They were in the early stages of decay, making them all the more human. WHICH, brings us back to #6, and why I think ZOMBIELAND could have been better than SEAN, except that it missed a prime opportunity to capitalize on the human/zombie distinction. The makeup job set it up perfectly; even the guest cameo sets it up when they say that they can mimic the zombies with a makeup job! Wasted opportunity.

Liked it a lot more the second time through. But I still, with the albatross of Emma Stone, human/zombie distinction, and the fact that it clocked in at under 1.30, am compelled to give it 4 Louisville Sluggers out of 5.

HAMSTERIAN HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: TAKING NANCY DAY TO THE MOVIES AND MY FAILED ATTEMPTS TO BE SMOOTH

2009-10-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

with all the buzz on Hockey Mask, Inc.'s comment section (and we generate just enough buzz to barely rouse a single housefly) about wes craven's 1997 film SCREAM, i thought the title deserved a place in the annals of the hamsterian halloween countdown.

first of all, i find it hysterical that the twisted mind who gave us nauseatingly legendary classics such as LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, turned around and gave us SCREAM. wtf??!!! there's just something grossly ironic in the line up of craven's filmography.

of course, the thread that ties all four of these very different films together is craven's ability to reset the course of the genre. all four of these films created a new era of horror films. each in their own day.

this can especially be said of SCREAM.

craven released SCREAM almost as a tribute album to the great films of the genre. through the telling of the horror film rules, craven tipped his hat to films such as CANDYMAN, THE HOWLING, PROM NIGHT. and throughout the film, references are made - through dialogue, symbolic allusion, or background imagery - to a list of other films that crafted the genre: THE EVIL DEAD, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, HELLRAISER, THE FOG, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. if for no other reason than it's tribute flavor, SCREAM should own real estate in every horror fans collection.

********

i saw SCREAM in the theater with my good friend nancy day (now nancy day harrell). it was the end of my sophomore year. we coursed the curvy path to hot springs from arkadelphia for a night on the town. in an effort to exercise spontaneity (and in an effort to impress nancy with my spontaneity), we decided to take in a late showing of SCREAM. we played cards in the hallway outside the theater waiting for the film to open. a crowd of hot springs high schoolers gathered around us, chiding and insulting us for playing cards in the lobby. but it wasn't long before nancy and i both had to tell the kids to stop helping the opponent. with the guys bunched up over my shoulder and the girls over nancy's, we nearly turned a hand of gin rummy into a full contact battle of the sexes.

there was a hope in the back of my mind that the film would freak nancy out, so much so that i could be her comfort and her protector. but i squealed and squawed and grabbed the dude next to me a dozen times at least while nancy - to my knowlege because i forgot about her five minutes in - never made a peep.

at that time, i was not very well versed in film whatsoever. by the spring of 1997 i had only watched a handful of disney films and maybe a few chucky movies in highschool. film was not important to me. never had been. and the little bit of horror that i had seen, way back in junior high and even younger, had always been cheesy and far fetched and totally staged in a realm in impossibility.

for this reason, i completely freak the shit out during that opening scene with drew barrymore. this was the most real, most visceral thing i had ever seen on the big screen. this thing i was watching here was not the freddy kruger of dreamland or the chucky doll of voodoo; rather, this thing in SCREAM was totally plausible and totally too close for comfort.

i think i cried a little bit. nancy never knew that.

later in college, while student teaching at a rural K-12 school, i overheard the students talking about dressing up in capes and SCREAM masks and rollicking about their neighborhoods scaring people. this didn't bother me until i began to find traces of my students, after i had been away from the house, at our trailer in the woods. they might leave toilet paper on the trees or a dead bird on my doorstep or my lawn chairs out on the highway. and this was all fine and dandy, but the thought them showing up at my window in a SCREAM mask was nearly enough to send me fetal curled in the corner of the room sucking my thumb and praying to whomever could come save my ass first. i spent nearly a month in total terror every night, watching the windows each evening for little faces in the shadows outside our trailer.

i recently watched SCREAM again and found it rather laughable. even the drew barrymore scene felt campy, in spite of drew's very believeable terrified screams. at this last viewing, i walked away thinking that SCREAM had every mark of a classic, and it's obivous why craven's teenagers gone bad deathfest inspired enough knock-offs (I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, URBAN LEGEND, IDLE HANDS) to reignite a new late-90s horror era.

i will also say this about SCREAM: although i now find it laughable and even kinda fun to view as a piece of cultural antiquity, i still think of it nearly everytime i see a secluded house set just off the road. especially if that house is a nice house with large trees and a long driveway. when i see those houses, when i pass them on the road and look up to see them set just a stone's throw apart from society, i always think, "that's the kinda place where drew barrymore could scream and scream and scream, and never be found until she was hanging from a tree."

THE HAMSTER RUNS THIS TOWN (OR AT LEAST SOME BONUS POINTS)

2009-10-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

my classes are currently working through a unit on inferences. it's a tough unit, especially if you have learned to thoughtlessly consume art. i've realized this about my students. they are smart. they can rise to nearly every new bar you set for them. but they do not intrinsically know how to engage concepts or the abstract. (shucks, sometimes it seems they can barely handle the concrete.) this is a major disadvantage in our current lesson because inferences, and the process we must engage to make good inferences, is totally conceptual and abstract. there is nothing black-or-white here, even when we try to boil it down to multiple choice and true/false questionairres. so i've taken up quite a daunting task as an instructor: teach these people how to engage art.

the following is one example of my efforts. i tried to write this assignment in such a way as to entice them to do it, but also (hopefully) to shape their future dealings with art and the conceptual. we'll see. this is merely for bonus points, but, if you could see the rest of the stuff we do, i expect they'll be jumping on this. i'll pass this out in class starting this afternoon.

* * *

BONUS POINT OPPORTUNITY
* Good for a FREE homework grade *

Jay-Z is at it again. And he was right to bring Rihanna in for the chorus. She adds an edge to this that Beyonce just can’t handle. Not to mention, after years of knocking Kanye (and all those who love the Kanye – “Kanyeists” I call them), I have to admit that he delivers a duo with Jay-Z in this new song that makes "Diamonds are Forever" sound like a Sesame Street letter-game song.

Anyone who’s followed Jay-Z’s career can testify: the man knows what he’s doing. Jay-Z is very purposeful in everything he says, everything he produces, and everything he shows the camera. For this reason, Jay-Z is a superstar who can say, without blinking an eye, “Bow down to the . . . . greatest!”

For the reason of Jay-Z’s purposefulness alone, we should pay close attention to what he’s saying and showing us. It’s far too easy to put on a Jay-Z, Rihanna or Kanye record or video and just rest under the umbrella of the music, never thinking about what these creative and purposeful artists may be implying.

The following assignment is completely voluntary. I realize that not everyone enjoys hip-hop music, and I also realize that some people may be offended or uncomfortable viewing images of mob violence. Likewise, some may not appreciate explicit lyrics. Therefore, this assignment is voluntary.

Still, even after all these disclaimers, the music video for Jay-Z’s new single “Run This Town” offers an ideal exercise in making inferences.

Your assignment, if you choose, is to watch the “Run This Town” music video (possibly several times). Consider the context of the video. Consider the tone of the images. Consider visual details such as those we’ve discussed thus far in class (colors, background, character action, the relationship between the leaders and the lead). Remember, Jay-Z is very purposeful. He knows what he’s doing. And with this in mind, look carefully for an image Jay-Z flashes the camera of a famous political leader.

To receive the bonus points in this assignment, you must complete the following:
- identify the political leader by name, political party, geographical location, and time frame;
- discuss this leader’s importance: (what did this leader accomplish? what did this leader contribute or destroy in order for his/her name to be historically significant?);
- based on the context of the video, infer what Jay-Z might be implying by flashing this particular leaders face towards the camera;
- your assignment should be type, double spaced, 1 ½ pages, 12 point Calibri font, and you should probably take it to the Writing Center for assistance;
- the deadline for this bonus point opportunity is the last class session before our next test.

NOTE: In NO WAY whatsoever should we suggest that Jay-Z wants to emulate this leader or that Jay-Z wants to reinstate this leader’s political reign in reality. That is NOT what this assignment is about. However, within the context of this particular video, we may easily infer that Jay-Z has good reason for using this person’s face. It adds something to the story he’s telling. That’s what I want you to find.

You may find the video by typing in this address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVA-xTBeHyM

Or you may simply go to http://www.youtube.com/, and type Run This Town Video into the search box.

“Victory’s within the mile / almost there, don’t give up now”

NEW ZOMBIE SERIES

2009-10-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

A new zombie series starring Jon Heder? "Tina, come eat your brains!"

Verdict is very much out on this one.

Go here to check it out.

HAMSTERIAN HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: A JOHN BARBER CLASSIC RETOLD

2009-10-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

john barber's wife's husband,

i finally got around to THE BURNING this past weekend. you were right: this is, in the words of my good friend pepe guzman, "winner winner chicken breakfast"; however, i did not think it was, in your words, the best slasher film ever made.

i did like how this film somehow felt like more than a slasher flick. at times, it felt like a drama. here we are at camp being awkward, looking for love, not finding love, trying to grow up, not doing such a good job of it, getting picked on by the older greasey guy, etc. etc. half the film is dedicated to the heartaches and hijinks of summer camp. this i liked.

but, at the same time, i did not like how dragged out the film felt. there were long stretches of the film when all i could think was, "okay, come on, come on, get with it." had the film maker been able to build better tension during those long stretches of exposition i may have felt a bit different. but he didn't. he didn't even use all that screen time to build the characters or deepen our sense of hope and mercy towards them.

all in all, THE BURNING's primary glory was also it's downfall: the sucker was just too long. for an 80s summer camp flick, this was fun and cheeky, but it never really got anywhere or explored anything worthwhile. for a slasher flick, i waited too long for too little payoff. there were a few good kills, but not enough, i felt, to elevate it to cult classic status.

it was fun to recognize pieces of FRIDAY THE 13th and HALLOWEEN in THE BURNING. you could vividly see the filmmaker's influences. at the same time, the burning of the sadistic counselor, as well as some of the scenery, looked exactly like the original NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. i can't help but wonder if wes craven was uber-inspired by the THE BURNING's visuals, particularly at the end.

overall, this was a good one. i'd gladly see it again. admittedly, i watched this in two sittings, so i might feel differently if i viewed it in a single sitting. as for now, i give THE BURNING 3 pairs of inappropriately short running shorts out of 5. i'll gladly revise my review this in the future if the single sitting theory works.

- hamster

ps. say, in your review, you mentioned that THE BURNING was responsible for "a violation of a MAJOR horror movie cliche." what in the world are you talking about? i was even looking for it, but never found it.

HAMSTERIAN HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: THE BEST FILM OF 2009

2009-10-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

dear myles,

mark my words: ZOMBIELAND is the best film of 2009. i laughed harder and cheered louder in this film than anything else this year. and after months of proclaiming THE HANGOVER the funniest film of the year, ZOMBIELAND took the final cake. from the opening montage (the big lady and her beanie babies blasting through the windshield, the stripper zombie with pastis and a client trying to hold his beverage intact while running - awesome) to the very end, there was not a single moment of this film to debate.

here's some thoughts, cut and pasted and elaborated straight from an email i sent to kelly riad after the film on saturday:

1) i usually do not love the woody harrelson, but he nailed it in this film. with the exception of NATURAL BORN KILLERS, woody harrelson has done nothing for me since CHEERS. he's just such a schmoe in real life, and he perfectly brought that to this role. this was the real woody amped up to 11. he was priceless.

2) i completely disagree with you that the younger cast were "Way too bland, cardboard and emo." i liked the cast. thought they were perfect. as the following notes indicate in more detail.

3) i heart that emma stone. she's the new demi moore of this young acting generation: husky voice, bad ass attitude, communicative eyes, multi dimensional, beautiful but dangerous, sweet but aloof. i think of early 80s demi everytime i see emma. we have great things to expect from this girl. she may not have as elaborate a career as demi moore (who else could?), but emma stone definitely has a talent and look that suit comedy and horror-comedy like a zombie wig on bill murray.

4) jesse eisenberg does the michael cera thing better than michael cera. way awkward, but not annoyingly over the top or repetitive. this jesse kid knows when to amp it up and tone it down. after ZOMBIELAND, i'm stoked to see what ADVENTURELAND. i'm liking this guy.

5) dude, there is nothing "too bland" or "cardboard" about abigail breslin. the kid is good. loved her in SIGNS and LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, and i thought she was everything she needed to be in this. i'm hoping somebody handles her career better than they've handled dakota fanning's.

6) yes, like you, i too love SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but i may have liked ZOMBIELAND more. there was more action. there was the "top floor of the A-list" cameo appearance. and there was that apocalyptic feel to ZL that i adore in films. SHAUN didn't have that end of humanity bit. sorry, but i'm a sucker for the apocalypse.

7) may i please express how gratified i felt to finally have a cinematic hero blaze his winning trail through a series bout with irritable bowel syndrome? that felt good. that felt real. i have never even felt that represented by a presidential candidate. when he started talking about the vulnerability of the john, my gut replied. tina turner once said, "we dont' need another hero." i disagree. and i embrace the heroics of an IBS inflicted zombie killer.

8) metallica in the opening sequence: genius.

9) i thought these were the best looking zombies i've ever seen. very real. they all looked so freshly deceased. sometimes romero's make-up dudes over do the craftsmanship and make them too freakish, too inhuman. but, dude, those little princess zombies were the real deal!

i easily give ZOMBIELAND 6 blasted twinkie caches out of 5. this is THE film of 2009. can't wait to see this again.

now, it's your turn.

- hamster

THIS

2009-10-12T06:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.deezteez.com/funny-t-shirts/460/turn-into-a-zombie-t-shirt.html

I've got posts on SCREAM and SCREAM 2, as well as HAPPY, TEXAS coming up, but let this t-shirt tide you over.

THE HAMSTERIAN HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: REDEEMING 1980s NERDS ONE VAMPIRE MULLET AT A TIME

2009-10-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

perhaps i'm beginning this a little late here, but late is better than never. besides, it's the perfect day to begin something like this. it's friday. the sky is leaking profusely. the sun is taking an extended lunch break. i had one class this morning and was done by 9. sure, i have loads of work that needs my attention. papers need grading, lessons need planning, jen borden needs clean sheets in the guest room when she gets here tomorrow. but it's friday, and the sky is leaking, and coffee tastes way better when the sky leaks. so i'm taking the day off. if the sun can take the day off, the hamster can too. and, with all this free and glorious time, perched near the window with my coffee, i shall begin this here little project.

ladies and gentlemen, my fellow hockey maskers, sabbatical sun, today marks the launch of a great hamsterian venture. beginning today, i shall countdown the calender to halloween by reviewing a horror classic each and every weekday until the day of the great pumpkin. and i could not think if any better film to get us started on the road to horror madness than

THE LOST BOYS.

okay, right. you're right. THE LOST BOYS is not exactly what you would call a "horror" film classic, but it's still freaking awesome. and you can't talk about vampire films without talking about THE LOST BOYS. it's solid gold. it's got super-true vampire lore. it's got the corey and corey. it's got a bleach blonde keifer sutherland with a flat top and mullet. i freaking love this movie! one time myles and aaron bell and dave johnston and i all crammed on one little dorm bed (they were small dorms, you couldn't have much furniture) to watch this, and we all thought we were invincible for the rest of the night. shites! i can't believe i'm writing about this and not watching it.

i had to start the hamsterian halloween countdown with THE LOST BOYS because this flick was straight lethal for little boys in the '80s, especially if you were a nerdy little boy. like me. THE LOST BOYS was more to us nerds than a horror-comedy, for us it was a how-to documentary preaching the glories of comic book wisdom and dirt bike coolness. everything late '80s nerd kids loved and knew about life was contained in THE LOST BOYS. you had comic book geeks riding cheap-ass BMX bikes, punk rock vampires wearing trench coats at the carnival, hearts exploding on stakes in beach caves where the vampires sleep upside down with little bat feet, a dude eating maggots, water guns full of holy water, bathtubs full of garlic, little kid vampires shooting up through the fireplace, a house booby trapped with the weapons of vampire lore, keifer sutherland impaled on deer antlers, that creepy children's choir song, that smokin' '80s jami gertz - good people, i ask you: how can one film encapsulate so much amazingsomeness?

this movie rocks. even if you're no longer a late 80s little boy nerd, this movie totally rocks. THE LOST BOYS easily gets 5 buff black saxophonists out of 5. if you haven't seen this movie yet, you've got a lot of closet nerdiness to redeem.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE HAMSTER

2009-09-28T07:01:00.000-07:00

This:

SUPPORTING THE SUPPORTERS: THE HAMSTER CELEBRATES ONE OF THE OVERLOOKED AND UNDERAPPRECIATED

2009-09-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

today is september 25, 2009. it is the birthday of several noteable people in the arts, plenty of artists that each deserve their own postings today. just a few who will celebrate births today include:

- Mark Hamil
- Christopher Reeve
- Shel Siverstein
- Will Smith
- Catherine Zeta-Jones
- Santigold

a rich list indeed.

however, i would like to take this opportunity to celebrate one of the most overlooked actresses in hollywood today. a young lady i first encountered fleeing from alien teachers in the hallways of her high school. a young lady who usually plays the outcast, the loser, the quiet sufferer who never achieves a climatic triumph. she never plays the lead. she never wins the day or the dude. she is the constantly defeated, the consummate victim. and regardless of her past cinematic accelades, she may never land the breakthrough role that will allow her to shine.

even when you look through her IMDB filmography, you will probably not recognize or realize she was in half the films you have seen on her list. she was the other girl. the supporting actress. the one who made the lead look that much better. and just like jennifer grey was "oh yeah, you meant that girl with the nose" before she became patrick swayze's "baby," this young lady is "oh yeah, you mean the girl with the jaw."

ladies and gentlemen, today i would like to celebrate the september 25 birth of a name i am always excited to see in the opening credits to a film: miss clea duvall

and to celebrate miss duvall's birthday, i am linking a video from the film that introduced me to clea duvall, The Faculty. if you have not seen The Faculty, shame on you. kick it to the top of your que. it's ridiculously hip and Hilfiger, but it easily deserves 4 just-add-water-sea-monkeys out of 5. total blast.

happy birthday, clea duvall. may you land you much deserved lead this year.

DYING ON SCREEN

2009-09-24T06:15:00.000-07:00

Obit magazine has a peculiar little story on the top ten deaths on celluloid. You can read it here.

Thoughts on what they missed? My immediate thought was that they missed Willem Defoe's death in Platoon, which still haunts me. I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time last night, and agree with the writer that it belongs on this list.

ANNIE HALL DEPOSES THE LAST EMPEROR

2009-09-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

As promised, this review will encompass two never-before-attempted tasks on this site: 1) two disparate movies under one umbrella, and 2) a timed writing done before going to see UP at the dollar theater. The wife gets off work in 25 minutes, so let's get cracking!

***
It's easy enough to say that loss comprises a good deal of human existence. This morning, I awoke to find myself minus a left arm, completely numbed from laying on top of it for who knows how many hours. As I mulled over the implications of being the next Dave Mustaine, the next artist having to retrain his limb from having slept on it wrong, I realized that if indeed this arm was gone for good, leaving me with a phantom for a left appendage, I'd be up a creek. Sure, I'm right-handed, but really--I thrive on speed. I thrive on being able to get thoughts down in one shot, and not having to do second-takes in my writing. As the blood resurged to my arm, leaving me pins shoved under my nails, joy returned, and the feelings of loss ebbed.

But faithful readers, this post has little to do with loss of feeling, and more about the loss of pretty much everything else non-appendage. Loss is a downer, and we all know what it's like, so why dwell on the fact that yes, Woody Allen's probably going to do something massively stupid to mess it up with Diane Keaton (looking even more splendid than her turn as Mrs. Godfather--for the record, Diane Keaton is a good-looking older woman; I'm throwing that out there for consideration). History is written, and we're marginally sure that, yes, Manchuria is going to get its touchey kicked from opium field to opium field by the Japanese. So, what's to say about these films together? How can we speak of them?

We speak of these two good films BY PITTING THEM AGAINST ONE ANOTHER IN THE ULTIMATE GRUDGEMATCH OF SORROW! Embrace their message and medium, I say!

***

Point: Diane Keaton and Woody Allen share sweet intimate, powerless moments, culminating in one of greatest analogies of a terminal relationship: the dead shark. I loved it.

Counterpoint: little babies getting put in places of power is totally tragic. They cry and pout and poop their pants, and come off looking completely weak on the world stage.

SCORE: HALL 0, EMPEROR 1

***
Point: Diane Keaton looks like New York bohemian for the majority of the film, spotted with moments of New York hip. This is juxtaposed to Woody Allen's generally schleppiness.

Counterpoint: the emperor constantly looks constipated, wrapped up in way too many layers of yellow chiffon and sashes.

I have to give it Diane on this one. Woody just brings her attitude down splendidly.

SCORE: HALL 1, EMPEROR 1

***
Point: Woody Allen's neuroses are truly tragic. Normally, I find them overwrought and banal. But in this flick, the fact that he falls for an activist moments after he breaks it off with Annie Hall is too much. You find yourself rooting for him to just be found out and get some professional help.

Counterpoint: the emperor gets deposed by the Chinese army while playing tennis in white trousers, AFTER LABOR DAY. The ultimate combination of bad style and ironic juxtaposition of brute force and refined out-of-touchness.

Point to the emperor on style sense. SCORE: HALL 1, EMPEROR 2

**
Point: Annie Hall and Woody Allen truly love each other, making their interactions that much more heartwrenching. Their neuroses subconciously seek each other out at a subatomic level, and make truly beautiful, Freudian music together. I gave this one 5 dead sharks out of 5.

Counterpoint: the emperor is a truly selfish individual, turning his country into an opium den for the Japanese and selling out the ones who ever cared for him. I would have shoved him in the Forbidden City with a tube of toothpaste and a bamboo salad and told him good luck long before the final credits. Cinematography: 6 rising suns out of 5; overall film: 4 cheating mistresses out of 5.

FINAL SCORE: HALL 2, EMPEROR 2
**

In the final tally, you can't compare sadness or spoils. The philosopher Marilyn McCord has this brilliant book called CHRIST AND THE HORRORS in which she makes this point: that some tragedies defy our categorization of them, and need to not be explained, but rather outlived.

With that in mind, I'm still hoping that sometime in the near future, Woody Allen calls Diane up, having ditched his adopted daughter/lover, and tries to resurrect in reality what on the screen was truly neurotic and flickering beauty. Point, set, match: ANNIE HALL.

AWESOME WITH THE PROMISE OF TOTALLY STELLAR

2009-09-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

i've been shocked recently to learn how many people have never heard of this book. i remember CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS being a classic at westwoods elementary school in eldorado, arkansas. and eldorado was never known for being ahead of the times when it came to the arts. (we were a bit more steeped in heavy metal occultism and pine woods ghostily urban legends, to be quite honest.) still, CLOUDY was famous in our library. i remember drooling over the illustrations when mrs. beene read this to us in second grade, and i remember later at recess bryan stevenson and i had a competition to see who could draw the best portrayal of pancakes smashing our school. (his picture was better than mine.) i heard this book read at every grade level except fourth, and that's only because mrs. dorsey believed we were too old for story time. (pshaw!) we loved this book. we loved it as much as we loved WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS and almost as much as SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK.

sadly, meatballs falling on a fishing town didn't resonate to south arkansans quite like dead people driving tattered cars through the woods. heavy metal occultism nabbed us at an early age in eldorado.

still, a fond flavored nostalgia of the book led me to scoop up a few extra bucks so the wife and i could see CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS yesterday in 3D. and it was fantastically more fun than either of us expected.

CLOUDY takes the cake as one of the most visually vibrant films i've ever seen. raining cheeseburgers, castles made of jell-o, a spaghetti twister, a STAR WARS style sarlacc pit made of peanut brittle, a kung-fu army of grilled cornish hens, and an avalanche rushing and rumbling an all you can eat buffet through the streets whirl together to make this film an optically glorious feast. toss in a sappy father-son story and the triumph of the anti-hero, and you've got an everyman's saga that may explain why our theatre was packed exclusively with adults instead of children.

besides the animation, i appreciated CLOUDY's lightheartedness. this past week in my classes we've discussed the various genres of film and literature in order to explore how genres build expectations in us as participants. every single class mentioned disney's insistence to explore heavy issues in animated films, issues like the death of a parent, the loss of civilization, the sadistic nature of the neighbor kid towards combat carl. and while this is surely great, sometimes i've thought that kid's films are a bit deep for kids. i've even noticed friends screening kid's films, trying to determine which issues they will need to introduce or discuss (or which scenes to skip altogether) before viewing the film as a family. CLOUDY, although featuring a few touching moments, never felt heavy. even as it explored issues of self-efficacy and greed, CLOUDY remained lighthearted, to the point, and far more dedicated to the visual topography of its initial storyline than with getting bogged down in morality boosters or animation therapy. it was nice to make it all the way through a kid's flick without getting choked up for once.

(not that such things matter to other people, but i nearly lost it watching BOLT in the theatre, and i hate all that burning throat swallowing you have to do to not cry in public. plus, sometimes it makes my nose run a wild gusher. i didn't pay to be this uncomfortable!)

for all these reasons, i glady give CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 5 baby brent booty-shots out of 5. if you love a good larger than life animated explosion of nostalgia and feel goodiness, do NOT wait for this to hit video. like mama cora's famous mac-n-cheese at thanksgiving, CLOUDY should not be experienced in small-portioned leftovers on the home dvd system; CLOUDY was made for the big screen in every dimension possible.

I am Really Interested in Most Phases of Data Processing

2009-09-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

Dating Montage
by smithy00101

I have no comment for this. It's not a film review. It's just wonderful.

GUEST TRIBUTE: TIFFANI RIGGERS REMEMBERS PATRICK SWAYZE

2009-09-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Dirty Dancing came out when I was in 8th grade. I don't remember what I thought or felt when I first saw it, but I remember this - I loved Patrick Swayze from that moment forward. I loved that he played this wounded, complex character in a movie that so easily could have been bubble gum. I loved that he wore very little clothes for most of it. And I loved that he sang a (lets face it) cheesy song on the soundtrack. That soundtrack and movie would accompany me for the next twenty+ years. And when I think of epic, heroic movie lines, my favorite won't ever be, "I won't let go" from Titanic, or "You had me at hello" from Jerry McGuire or even "What if he admitted he was a daft prick and begged you on his knees to reconsider if you would in fact, reconsider?" from Notting Hill... but will live on forever as: "Nobody puts baby in a corner." When Johnny stood up for Baby, I fell in love. I still want someone to make a dramatic gesture like that for me...perhaps that's why I'm still unmarried. That notwithstanding, there is not a single Swayze movie I've seen that I did not enjoy thoroughly: Ghost - funny, romantic, and exciting movie with a great love scene and great ending; Point Break - no one, not even Johnny Depp - could make me want to root for a bad guy more than Swayze (who also made me want to learn to surf); North and South - Classic actor in a classic story; The Outsiders? How could I forget the Outsiders - that movie made me weep and I was in elementary school! Patrick Swayze will be missed; but thankfully I have the collectors edition of Dirty Dancing on DVD, so he will never be forgotten.

- Tiffani Riggers

ROMERO REMAKE?

2009-09-16T07:25:00.001-07:00

I've been neck-deep in the new semester, and yes, I've got a killer review I'm thinking up about ANNIE HALL and THE LAST EMPEROR, but let this tide you over...

A George Romero remake?

PETER WAS DROWNING IN THE WATER AND THEN NOAH CAME BY IN THE SAINT LOUIS ARCH

2009-09-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

tyler perry is the most predictable film-maker this side of quentin tarantino. anyone familiar with tyler perry's films knows to expect the same conventions everytime:

- overly exaggerated stereotypes of black families, churches, and relationships;

- cranky old black men and women, all played by tyler perry himself;

- a hearty dose of family values and self-efficacy sermons;

- personal redemption stories marked by a rebirth into healthy relationships;

- juxtaposed images of broken and redeemed men and women;

- the healing of deeply ceded and long-silent scars;

- a nearly Broadway-style focus on gospel, soul, and R&B tunes used as voices in the sermonizing efforts;

- the triumph of forgiveness over vengeance, innocence over perversion, peace over turmoil, sobriety over addiction, confession over silence, and blessings over curses;

- the foreknowledge that, even though we know exactly what we are getting into with tyler perry, we will gladly jump in again and again and again.

even while featuring these same old tyler perry conventions, and even while tackling similar issues from previous films (drug addiction, adultery, child molestation, the plight of the orphan, the healing power of divine and human love), and even with Madea's same old curtly abusive language ("Girl, I was in prison, and I will shank you!"), even after all this, two out of two stills agree that I CAN DO BAD ALL BY MYSELF is tyler perry's best film to date. it's a rare occasion for me to walk out of a movie theatre uplifted and inspired, seeing as how i usually look to brutally depraved films that call for a shower and a confession booth. but my wife doesn't appreciate the depravity, and she reminded me today that i have always enjoyed tyler perry's cinematically simple, yet personally profound, redemption stories. heck, i think i even got choked up a few times in there today.

don't tell anybody.

regardless of perry's normal happily, sappily good-vibrations, I CAN DO BAD's biggest selling point, for me, was the musical cameos by mary j. blige. it's a little known hamsterian fact that mary j. blige's album THE BREAKTHROUGH was in my top 5 of 2007. i love mary j. blige. in fact, she might be my all time favorite R&B diva. the woman is freaking lethal. she's beautiful. she's a powerhouse. and, in this movie, mary j. turns a tiny little platform stage into a wild geyser of "oh, hell no!" the only disadvantage of seeing this film in the theatre was the inability to rewind and watch the mary j. bits on repeat. praise be these things hit video sooner than later.

tyler perry's I CAN DO BAD ALL BY MYSELF gets 4 radios in the bathtub out of 5. sure, mary j. singlehandedly added an entire point, but i still really liked this film. although predictable, slightly cheesy, and redundantly repetitive, tyler perry still knows how to jump on the altar and testify to mercies that never grow old. and to that hope and that conviction in an artist, i can only offer one reply every single time:

keep that same story of goodness coming, bro, cause we obviously cannot hear it enough.

GETTING AWAY TO NARRATIVE BLISS AND A NICE SET OF PEAFOWL: A REVIEW FOR THE CAPTAIN

2009-08-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

my dearest captain redbeard -

on the recommendation of your twitter feed, the wife and i caught a showing of A PERFECT GETAWAY tonight. i do not remember precisely what you said about the film, but there was some mention that you might have liked it. and liked it a great deal. since you've never led me astray (in films, music, or mexican eateries), i trusted you once again. and once again you proved true to your word.

i liked A PERFECT GETAWAY. it was a bit more lighthearted and predictable than i expected. steve zahn did not serve a good thriller, but milla jovovich won me over ten fold and then some. not to mention the sweet georgia, kiele sanchez - who spoke sweeter than fine southern sweet tea and picked the fight when the fight needed confederate picking. in this film, the ladies completely outshined the menfolk, and they showed surprisingly little skin to do so.

A PERFECT GETAWAY would have reminded me of you even if you had not recommended it. there was that night on your porch. pipes and rye ale and cider. you told me about your disdain for comedy in the zombie film genre. you said there's nothing funny about zombies. you said zombies show us something about our culture, about ourselves, about our lives pre- and post- and wrapped up in our theologies: we were dead, yet we live; we will die; yet we will live. and the zombie film capacity to remark on this reanimation, you thought, superceded any need to make SHAUN OF THE DEAD jokes about the living dead.

i disagreed, but we smoked some good pipes.

then here in A PERFECT GETAWAY, we have a dern near classic slasher flick that practically boils over with literary pomp and narrative circumstance. the subtext here overshadowed the text (which felt nearly absurd at times) and made every line of dialogue speak more like tennessee williams than sean s. cunningham. i had finally chocked slasher flicks up to comedic relief: the punch line at the end of the horror genre, packed in nicely and cymbal counted after all the possession cases, haunted houses, maniacal killers, rabid animals, japanese retellings, nightmarish clowns, cultish children, and man eating plants. slasher flicks are usually at the bottom of the horror genre food chain. jason and freddy and michael, although pretty in retail, are actually bottom-dwelling shrimp . . . . . which are also pretty retail in the frozen dinner section.

but A PERFECT GETAWAY did something a bit different. the writers and directors used this film as a platform to discuss writing and directing. they allowed the process of the narrative to speak about the narrative process. and that was fucking brilliant, as well as wickedly refreshing and fun.

just today i read "The King Of Birds": an essay by flannery o'connor from her nonfiction collection titled MYSTERY AND MANNERS. while reading the essay, this bit she had written about deformed bantams and strutting peacocks, i found myself enraptured by the idea that this here, in my hands, was flannery o'connor writing about writing. she was showing me how to put it together, how to line it up, how to fit the pieces so that the pieces matter. and she used this platform on peacocks to exercise her own writing, to concretely capture her zealous love for odd fowl. and i'm sure she never intended any of this, except the love of odd fowl part.

now, don't go thinking that i'm equating A PERFECT GETAWAY with flannery o'connor. nor should you think that i'm suggesting the film as fine as the peafowl essay. however, what i am trying to say is that A PERFECT GETAWAY offered some oddly literary sway that is uncommon in the slasher genre. you and i may be the only blokes on this block to agree. i feel that most people - 42% according to rotten tomatoes - will think that this film is bonk. they will think it is too predictable and too simplistic.

fine.

let them think as much.

personally, i thought A PERFECT GETAWAY spoke a great deal about the enduring (even jugular) quality of narrative. stories guide us. stories shape us. the stories we tell and the stories told of us work to define us. and the right story, or the wrong story, could reshape a notion in our existence we hoped to hold a bit safer. to scale a bit closer.

truth be damned: we're talking narratives here.

i give A PERFECT GETAWAY 3 out of 5. for all the reasons explored above, but also for milla jovovich's surprisingly redefined character role. that lady has come a long way since RESIDENT EVIL. she's breaking her mold, and doing it fiercely. she might ought to consider collecting bantams as a good start to a new literary life.

let me hear your thoughts, good man. i miss your porch.

- hamster

THE HURT LOCKER - Find it and see it.

2009-08-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

Have I told you yet about the Downtown West theater in Knoxville? Well, then, let's do that. It's a little hole in the wall cinema set behind Target and just around the corner from the mall. It's nestled like a little pocket of art in a suburban wasteland. And, for the record, it is neither Downtown, nor West of anything in particular. It's where I saw SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, and, now, THE HURT LOCKER. It's a place of wonder and awe.

--------------------

THE HURT LOCKER opens with a quote. "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug." - Chris Hedges

This movie is a movie about the Iraq war, but it has nothing to do with politics. There is no scent of snarkiness toward Dubya, nor is there a pro-war agenda here. What THE HURT LOCKER does is to reduce the war to the bare conflict - soldiers against stuff that can kill them.

I usually do a quick plot summary at this point. But let's just leave it at this. THE HURT LOCKER is about the guys who disarm the bombs in Iraq. Pretty much the toughest guys on the planet.

The lead guy is Staff Sergeant William James (played with understated abandon by Jeremy Renner, who has a Best Actor nomination locked up). James is a mystery to his men. He takes risks that are unnecessary, putting himself in harm's way over and over and exposing his men to dangers that could be avoided.

There's an interesting dichotomy in this film - you constantly find yourself wanting to critizice James for his recklessness, but on the other hand, there's the opening scene. SPOILER HERE: The opening scene of THE HURT LOCKER is shocking and fascinating. In what proves to be a short cameo, Guy Pearce (who is a personal fave of mine) is in charge of the crew disarming an IED on a city street. When something goes wrong with the robot that is deliveing the charge to the IED, Pearce puts on the full bomb suit to apply the explosive. After Pearce puts the charges in place, the bomber activates the IED and, despite taking every appropriate precaution, Pearce bites it. They use the robot, they secure the perimeter, they use the full body bomb suit, and he still dies! Why allow yourself to judge a soldier for not following procedure, when the procedure is as likely to get somebody killed as not?

These are the kinds of questions that THE HURT LOCKER asks.

The main issue here, though, is explicity stated in the opening quote. The fact is, James loves his job. He adores potentially getting blowed up - so much so that he keeps a box under his bed with things that could have killed him - a trigger, a piece of shrapnel, etc. James is addicted to the danger. His men don't get it, and we don't either, at first. One of the really brilliant things about this movie (and there are many) is the way that it unfolds. We get very few hints of his personal like until almost the very end of the movie, and the scene is a killer. After finishing his time in Iraq, James goes home to his wife and two year old son. The scene is in a grocery store, where James' wife asks him to pick out some cereal and meet them at the check out. He stands in front of the huge row of cereal boxes and is absolutely lost. He grabs the first thing he can and makes a beeline for the door. Then, home again, he tells his wife that because they really need the money, he's going to volunteer to deploy back to Iraq. Next thing we know, he's back disarming bombs - with a huge smile on his face.

Man, I could seriously keep writing this, but it's already too long. I need to write about the friendships and levels of trust between the soldiers. There's an amazing scene involving a Capri Sun that could get 500 words by itself. There's another character - a young boy who sells DVDs on the street - that's integral to the plot and to James' character. Maybe I'll do another post when the DVD come out...

Anyway, go see this - you'll wish you had when it gets nominated for Best Picture. THE HURT LOCKER gets 5 body bombs out of 5. Go see it. Seriously.

ONE OF THE ONLY THINGS I LIKE KIRSTEN DUNST IN

2009-08-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

It's true: when Kirsten Dunst turned 18, I stopped thinking she was all that great. I didn't care for her as Mary Jane, as cute as she might have been, because in my book, she quit acting and starting getting by on looks. Prior to this, however, she turned out two great gems: Interview with a Vampire and the film under review today, Drop Dead Gorgeous. I might add that this is the only film I've ever liked Deniese Richards in as well: not my favorite actress. Call me a hater of the cute film stars. You might be close to true, except that a very young Amy Adams is also in it, and I find her downright adorable.

What makes all this even better is 1) watching this on VHS that I 2) purchased at Goodwill 3) for 1 $. With investments like this, I should be retired by May of 2010.
***

There's something of true beauty in being able to pull off a dark comedy well. In Bruges, with Colin Farrell and Ralph Feines comes as close to being pitch black a comedy as I've seen in a long while, but somewhere along the line, making light of slaughtering midgets crosses some invisible line in comedy that I can't really go with. DDG, however, hits the notes right in terms of being both comedic and devilishly dark.

In a dark comedy, as exemplified by most of the Coen brother corpus, there's a few key elements:

1) Death-made-hysterical. This doesn't just mean 'death' in the abstract, like making jokes about funerals, but actually making funerals or actual death sequences into moments of comedy.

2) Trauma-made-hysterical. This doesn't mean, again, making jokes about amputation, but making actual trauma funny. Like getting a beer can fused to your flesh, or putting an anorexic girl in a wig.

1) and 2) are designed to get you to the point of feeling really bad about yourself, because you're laughing at things that no decent human being should laugh at. You're finding humor in stuff that if someone at prayer group told you about, you'd have better sense (hopefully) than to crack a joke. Unless you have no desire to see said person giving said prayer request again. Then, suggest that they watch Fargo and watch their eyes turn to stone.

But #3 is the kicker: mockery of resolution. The plot cannot fully resolve itself, or if it has resolution, the resolution has to be of the most shallow kind possible, like in Burn After Reading where the bureaucrats close up the folder and congratulate themselves on the incinerated bodies.

In all three cases, DDG succeeds tremendously. It makes me feel guilty and warm all over in one single viewing. 4 vibrating tractors out of 5.

POSSIBLY THE MOST DISAPPOINTING FILM I'VE EVER SEEN IN THE THEATER

2009-07-31T22:33:00.000-07:00

i will not even dignify THE COLLECTOR with a review. the concept was great; the execution was disastrous and unnecessary.

0.3 foreboding spider profiles out of 5. do NOT see this film.

DID ANYONE ELSE THINK THAT THE CONSTANT MENTION OF CHEKHOV'S "THE LADY AND THE LITTLE DOG" ACTUALLY REFERRED TO KATE SHAGGING THE BOY? JUST WONDERING.

2009-07-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

latonya and i watched this entire film tonight. i hit stop on the remote one time so that we could shimmy downstairs and scoop a bit more of latonya's come-and-take-it texas style taco salad. then we finished watching the film. watched the whole thing. from minute one to minute 124. from the first blazing nipple to the last big toe . . . . . . . . and that's really all i've got to say about THE READER.

1.2 adult literacy programs out of 5.

MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE INTERESTS, UTILITIES, AND VALUES OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON WHILE TRYING TO COME OUT ALIVE ON THE OTHER SIDE

2009-07-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

i work in a college writing center. during the summer, while we wait for students to tutor in writing, we have been asked to read and respond to various articles from certain college english journals. the following is a response i recently jotted. several of my close friends have thought it humorous, at one time or another, to get two or three beers down me and then ask my opinions on hunter s. thompson. from what i understand, they think it's funny to watch me get so riled up about one man and his books. well, this was written all under the influence of french roast coffee and flourescent lights. and some of this was written with an adopted air of thompsonian irrerevance. read with a light-heart and fire-side humor. and enjoy.

*************************

Stiles, Stefani, and Randy Harris. “Keeping Curious Company: Wayne C. Booth’s Friendship Model of Criticism and the Work of Hunter S. Thompson.” College English 71.4 (2009): 313-337. Print.

I found Stiles and Harris’ (2009) article exploring the possible textual-friendship between literary critic Wayne Booth and journalistic sociopath Hunter S. Thompson vastly entertaining on several levels. First of all, the authors spend a great deal of time explicating Wayne Booth’s definitions of literary friendship, which I found interesting because literary friendships are not really any different that regular friendships except that literary friends are ethereal and real life friends are anatomical. Or so I thought. Booth had way more to say about literary friendships than I ever imagined could be said. And Stiles and Harris also said way more about all the way-more Booth said than I figured necessary. While I found this bit of the article interesting, I thought Stiles and Harris junked-up the over-jargon just to say “literary friends are like pen-pals you’ve never met, and who don’t actually return your personal letters.” Wouldn’t that have been sufficient? Of course not, because art, while it does imitate life, also requires way more words than real life demands. In real life, I might be tempted to say, “Hunter S. Thompson was my friend, even though I never met him, because we both like Bloody Mary mornings, cuss words and gold-plated lesbians”; however, such basic commonalities in art merely click the razorblade on the dusted mirror because, as Booth attests, there is much more available to the willing literary friend.

According to Booth, three categories of literary friendship exist: “those based on shared pleasures or interests; those based on utility; and the third, the most perfect kind, ‘complete friendships,’ which may begin in one or both of these other kinds of friendships, but which are complete only by virtue of deeply shared values” (Stiles and Harris, 316). In my example of literary friendship with Thompson, it appears that I shallowly rested at Booth’s first criteria for friendship (even though I don’t actually like Bloody Mary mornings or cuss words) by simply equating my pleasures and interests with Thompson’s. Luckily, Stiles and Harris have now craned Booth over my literary shoulder and charged me, through Booth’s voice, to give Thompson’s utilities and values a quick glance. I can only reply to such a charge: say what? The man leaped on his friend’s back to avoid stepping in a pool of pterodactyl blood, and he considered such caution a viable way of life! What values could we possibly share?

Therefore, and secondly, the article interested me because Thompson was the kind of man who would leap on his friend’s back to avoid stepping in a pool of pterodactyl blood. Though I fear Hunter S. Thompson (and loathe his writing) I cannot help harboring an intense fascination with all things “Gonzo.” In fact, two nights ago I picked up a four pack of Flying Dog’s Gonzo Imperial Porter, and I stared long at Ralph Steadman’s illustration on the beer’s label of Thompson’s skull biting a cigarette holder. It was classic “Gonzo” paraphernalia, filling me all at once with both wonder and the willies. In the title of their article, Stiles and Harris refer to literary friendship with Hunter S. Thompson as “Keeping Curious Company.” Curious company? I’m shocked any of us leave Thompson’s literary finales in a single piece: ethereally or anatomically speaking.

Finally, and going back to the article, I found it interesting that Stiles and Harris strayed so far in the end from their original thesis. What began as an exploration of Wayne Booth’s critical ideas concerning literary friendship quickly dissolved into a near whimpering mess of teenage angst and buzz-kill academic-party fouls. Stiles and Harris write with a chip on their shoulders. Somebody in the English department obviously mocked their Ralph Steadman tattoos. Somebody in the History department actually appreciates Nixon. Someone in the journalism department wrote a wicked good report on the Kentucky Derby that never mentioned photographers vomiting on rich ladies’ shoes. Stiles and Harris walked into this paper with a cheese tray of invitation and enlightenment, but flipped it all over to reveal blazing guns and jilted fists. In the next to final paragraph, Stiles and Harris declare:

The central intelligence orchestrating the characters, events, and commentaries reveals the weakness, delusions, and self-absorption that doom all who cannot put Thompson’s manic surface narrator into the appropriate perspective and draw the deeper lessons he offers for living well. The selves that we become as we read the best of Thompson’s work, finding nuance and clarity alongside scramble and chaos, are people who are more capable of understanding the world, our place in it, and the direction in which we need to move, always, to make it better. (335)

From literary critics to eighth graders pissy they can’t wear My Chemical Romance t-shirts to church youth group, Stiles and Harris lose the brilliance of their Booth presentation in a last ditch effort to blow their Gonzo cannons. I appreciated Stiles and Harris’ thesis, as well as my introduction to Wayne Booth; however, I also appreciate my own caution and unwillingness to award Hunter S. Thompson any golden thrones in American letters. Likewise, I do not consider myself weak, deluded, or self-absorbed for tightly holding to such a reading of Thompson. He was a fascinating figure, like a beetle sporting unnatural color patterns, but the directions he suggested in which we need to move, always, went no where better. He feared the nuance of actuality and loathed the clarity of sober relationship, so Thompson hid behind words, drugs, alcohol, and his own self-destructive prophecies. And it was from this place that he eventually dissolved himself altogether, fulfilling his own dream of the ultimate deconstructive act.

Perhaps, in some ways, Thompson strikes too close to home. Perhaps, like any good artist should, Thompson holds up a mirror rather than a window to his reader’s face. If that be the case, through reading Thompson I have watched myself leap on a friend’s back to avoid stepping in pterodactyl blood. I would not be surprised. However, if such a revelation holds the introductory ground where I met Thompson, I choose, as opposed to embracing Thompson, to run the other direction quickly. Thompson is not the one to seek for counsel out of such places. So while I thank Thompson for the literary mirror, I’ll be looking for other windows to escape such fates.

My Name is Ash, umm... Bruce!

2009-07-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

I come from a long line. A tradition, if you will. I am but one of many who, at a young age, underwent a ritual of sorts. I don't remember where it happened, exactly. But I do remember this: the lights went down, the voices hushed. The assembled crowd had been initiated before. I said, "What's going on?" Someone answered, "Oh, this must be your first time. Dude. We're gonna watch EVIL DEAD!"

You show EVIL DEAD to a 35 year old guy, and you'd probably get a healthy dose of ho-hum. But show it to a prepubescent young man, and it's world changing. You've never seen anything like this before, I promise. It redefines what movies can be. It allows you to love a film that has nothing to commend it. No matter how bad the production values, the acting, the special effects, it's still reall great. That being said, EVIL DEAD II is way better - and Bruce Campbell puts a freaking chainsaw on his stump after he loses his hand. ARMY OF DARKNESS, the next one, is pretty good too, but it's hard to top EVIL DEAD and it's sequel/remake/reboot/whatever.

I tell all of this to convey that I am a Bruce Campbell fan. I've seen most everything - from the sublime THE ADVENTURES OF BRISCO COUNTY, JR. to the tepid MAN WITH THE SCREAMING BRAIN to the rollicking greatness of BUBBA HO-TEP. Therefore, I am the target audience for MY NAME IS BRUCE.

Campbell directed himself in this one. He also plays himself. He also makes fun of himself. And his fans. And the movies he's been in. And it's a whole lot of fun.

The basic plot is this: Bruce is shooting a typical Bruce flick - CAVE ALIEN II - when he is abducted by his biggest fan. Said fan, who lives in a town called Gold Lick, is a little fuzzy on the whole "fictional" concept, and believes that Bruce is the best person to help rid the town of Guan-Di, an ancient Chinese God who has come back to wreak havoc on the citizens of Gold Lick. Bruce, who is a boozer and a loser, thinks that the town has hired him to act (shades of THE THREE AMIGOS here) in some sort of indie film. Once he figures out that Guan-Di is real, he tosses a little old lady out of her car and makes a run for it. In typical film fashion, he comes to his senses. I won't ruin the ending for you, of course.

You have to understand that this movie has nothing to do with a quality script, good acting, passable special effects, or even good continuity. It's got none of that stuff and it's still boss. MY NAME IS BRUCE is about one thing: Bruce. And it's absolutely crawling with Bruce. Bruce is all over MY NAME IS BRUCE and for that reason, I loved it.

Are you going to love it? Well, let me ask you something. Do you love Bruce? If so, then yes. If not, then go rent EVIL DEAD, invite your closest friends over, turn off all the lights, and watch. 'Cause there's only two kinds of people in this world. People who love Bruce, and people who are going to love Bruce.

MY NAME IS BRUCE gets four burning copies of Fangoria out of five.

STEPHEN KING AIN'T NO WHERE CLOSE TO "THE END"

2009-07-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

if you had asked me two years ago to name my favorite writer, i would have said, without blinking a single eye, stephen king.

however, i've broadened my reading these past two years. writers like annie dillard, flannery o' connor, raymond carver, billy collins, donald ray pollock, amber haines, joyce carol oates, and jonathon safron foer are reinventing the limits of my language. they just do. and they did. consequently, i now read stephen king under a new lamp.

let's get one thing straight: stephen king is a good storyteller, and only a fool would deny his campfire mystique. and it is without shame that i confess still curling my toes near the bed and second guessing sleep sans light while thinking of stories like "the nightflier," "popsy," "the raft," "the mist," "i am the doorway," and "the boogeyman." not to mention, i learned the value of physical text-structure while reading the bachman novel, the long walk. and i still esteem carrie and salem's lot among the greatest novels i have read. plus i am haunted daily, sometimes more, by king's advice to young authors in his book on writing, titled on writing. stephen king is a great storyteller. he's a visionary, a plush garden crop of odd characters and dark wonder. and the man deserves every decibel of protesting baptist voice that he's ever received - praise God, he surely has.

and, if nothing else, stephen king has afforded a plethora of films fit for a site just like this. he's every hockey mask incorporated reviewers dream come true.

however, my beef with stephen king resides directly in his key charm: he is so overly prolific. all joking aside, the man has produced more work since announcing retirement than many writers produce during their careers. meanwhile, dedicated king readers have admitted to me that most king novels stretch 200 pages too long. likewise, many of king's short stories bulge 15-20 pages over the belt-line of good reason. when the man writes, he writes. and when he produces plot, he often produces more than we may need.

unfortunately, this level of abundance often steals from king's pacing, his tension, his ability to pull me taut and pluck me thin. he still hits all the minor keys. he still punches the light switch and makes the rabbits howl, but i find that he rarely devastates me the way i want literature to devastate me. and i want literature to devastate me. one way or the other - overjoyed or overkilled - i want to be devastated by art.

with that said, imagine my surprise when king's newest story - "morality" - completely devastated me.

published in the july 2009 issue of esquire, "morality" is a huge story. and it's huge because it's scope is so small, so precise, so taut and plucked thin. also, as myles and i have already discussed, king achieves a new understanding of violence with "morality" - perhaps a more theologically significant violence - than he has ever explored before. sure, i love the cell-phone infused zombies of cell, the shepherding shape-shifter of the cycle of the werewolf, the soul-slurping gas-guzzler in christine, and the crazy-lady with the riding lawnmower in misery; however, the monsters in "morality", as well as their broken retributions, are damn near biblical.

consider this post a "5 dying favors out of 5" recommendation to follow the link for a free-reading of "morality" on the esquire website. i'm not sure how long the link will last, so brew a fresh pot and get there soon. if "morality" is any indication of king's future, retirement may be the best season of his career thus far.

ps. thanks to slayer and testament and fat tire amber ale for seeing me through this review.

BURN AFTER READING? EH...RETURN AFTER RENTING

2009-07-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

Netflix has been one of the best things I've done in a long while. Aside from getting married. Getting married tops all contenders for the foreseeable future. But Netflix was pretty much a great idea from the word 'Go'. We decided on the two-at-a-time deal, so that she could rent a musical and I could rent a badass documentary and all would be well with the world. Mutual enrichment, broadening of our collective consciousnesses and all that.

BURN AFTER READING is not the Cohen Brothers best outing. Above this one, I'd put NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, RAISING ARIZONA, and probably FARGO (though I've never really had a taste for it personally--this is purely political placement to to pacify all our readers who'll give me the 'Fargo was effing brilliant!' Sure it had William H. Macy, but it didn't do much for me, Steve Buceimi aside.)

The movie centers around Malkovich's character, a mid-level CIA spook, who has been canned, and endeavors to write a memoir about his experience. Madcap antics ensue, and two gym employees (Pitt and McDormand) come into possession of it, endeavoring then to blackmail Malkovich with it. Throw in George Clooney as a philandering government agent who meets McDormand through an online service, and you've got the making of yet another Cohen film rife with unexpected violence and dark, sick, and shocking humor. Like I say, not their best, but on a scale of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN to THE DA VINCI CODE, this one warrants a rating of DUDE WHERES MY CAR--good concept, funny moments, pretty okay execution.

But this film had its moments of pure genius.

Genius Moment #1: the casting of Brad Pitt as a really bubbleheaded personal trainer. This move was brilliant. If you've not seen it, I won't spoil the film, but Pitt's final moments on screen was the most shocking of the entire movie, and perfectly played.

Genius Moment #2: George Clooney as a neurotic, sex-obsessed government drone who smiles way too much. The more I see Clooney, the more I like him. His turn in Michael Clayton was really good, and his character here reminded me of his time as Ulysses Everett McGill in another Cohen Brothers outing. (Addendum: O Brother Where Art Thou? was better than this one).

Frances McDormand's character got a little old for me. I feel like she plays the same character in every Cohen film, and thus, she was almost a liability, except for the fact that she, like Pitt, is completely vapid and perfectly cast. The plot was sufficiently interesting, but not really that gripping. John Malkovich, who I generally like, was angry most of the time. Again, the funniest thing is the violence, and the Cohen Brothers' ability to use horrific violence where slapstick would go in another film, and with shocking effect. It's like they've been hanging out with Chuck Pahluniak, though for my money, the Cohens know how to pull the 'violence-for-dark-comedic--effect" off way better than the aforementioned novelist.

Three trick phalluses out of five.

KATE AND LEO: NAMING THE CHINESE BEFORE GOING SINKING, SANK, SUNK

2009-07-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

the first day of classes in a chinese university can be quite entertaining for the english language teachers. on the first day of class, the foreign teachers traditionally introduced themselves, telling the class about who they are and where they're from and what they do in their spare time, speaking slowly to acclimate students to the various american voices. afterwards, once the teacher had spoken, the students introduced themselves. in an effort to become immersed in english language and western ideas, students often chose english names for themselves, which they usually obtained from western films and books. occasionally some students missed the mark altogether (perhaps intentionally) and chose names like "stonebreaker" or "doodoo" or "pony." corey green once had a class that named themselves after the ingredients of a salad bar. he had a watermelon, an apple, a lettuce, a tomato, a celery, an orange, and so on and on. in these rare cases, teachers pulled students aside, inquired about their names and suggested possible changes. "stonebreaker" and "pony" kept their titles; however, i was able to talk "doodoo" into becoming "melissa", which she later changed to "hillary."

the two most popular names in our english department were jack and rose, as inspired by the love story in the film TITANIC. every class had one jack, and every class had at least a dozen girls who wanted to be rose. how the one rose in each class was determined, i'll never know, but they all wanted it. like ladies squabbling over the bouquet at the wedding, i imagined that they fought tooth and nail for the right to be named after kate winslet's hocker spitting heroine.

and who can blame them? i have only seen TITANIC the one time in the theatre, and i remember sitting in the back of the theatre weeping like an insulted child. but my tears had nothing to do with jack and rose. no, i was bent on all the images of old people nestling together in their bed while the water ascended in their cabin and the mother reading to her children as the flood levels reached their bunks and the musicians who all returned to the deck as they could go down playing music together. not that any of those images were true to history, mind you, but i'd just had the cancer, and i was delicate to the notion of facing death with a smirking glare.

i also thought kate winslet was smoking. so maybe there was some of that in my emotions as well.

fast forward to two weeks ago when the wife comes home with a copy of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD from the redbox machine (dear God, what a great invention). suffice it to say, i'm not much for the drama genre. i don't care for love stories or films about families deconstructing. if i want a good love story, i watch something by john hughes. if i need domestic deconstruction, i watch FAMILY GUY. but in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD we have the return of the power duo, the kenny rogers and dolly parton of the silver screen. and after biting my t-shirt in titanic agony once before watching kate and leo, i had to see what they were up to again.

for the most part, i do not suspect that many english teachers in china will have hordes of franks and aprils in their classes this fall. nor do i predict that rings of chinese girls will go to fisticuffs over kate winslet's new namesake. wherein TITANIC we watched the steaming, sweating love of jack and rose soar above a sinking ship, in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD frank and april's love is the sinking ship, and children and neighbors and real estate agents and schizophrenic friends all go down with them. this thing starts on a high plane and swan dives into a ridiculous depth of despair and marital mutilation. this film offers no opportunities to walk away with warm fuzzies, unless you call emotional nausea a "warm fuzzy."

still, there is something in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD that demands consideration. apart from the fact that both lead performers - kate and leo - totally upstage their entire careers up to this point, and besides the fact that the direction and music and narration are impeccably spot-on, the story here is uniquely surprising. to simply suggest that REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is a film about one couple's marriage dissolving beneath its own self-propelled floodwaters is a short-sighted dismissal of the film's starkest claims, particularly what it speaks concerning traditional gendered roles. i don't want to say much more than that because the intricacies of frank and april's relationship, as unfolded through hopes wrought and hopes deferred, blew my mind. and i like when people go have their own minds blown. i don't want to steal that from anyone.

all in all, i give REVOLUTIONARY ROAD a 4 out of 5. as a person who prides myself on not being easily shaken by art, i was shocked by how hard this film ran me over, particularly the ending. this film gnawed at me for several days, and even this morning, two weeks later, i'm still grappling with the magnitude of where frank and april led one another. although it may not offer many chinese namesakes or win a spot on the AFI's top films of all times, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is definitely a vessel worth riding all the way to its relentlessly grimy bottom.

Requested by the New Hubby

2009-07-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Per Myles' request, here's the video I did for church this weekend. It's pretty self-explanatory.