Loud, Fast, Dumb, and Out of Control

Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried: My Life As A Revolting Cock - (D) Being a fan boy when it comes to the WaxTrax! legacy of industrial music, this book seemed like a godsend to me. It's Revolting Cocks/Ministry flunky Chris Connolly's look back on his time in the Al Jorgenson circus. Unfortunately, he's just not a good writer. Also, since Motley Crue's and Neil Strauss' 'The Dirt', these type of books have a standard of sleazy entertainment to live up to, and this book just doesn't cut it. Observe:

A condensation of 'The Dirt'

Nikki Sixx: Yeah, so I was in the back seat of the sports car Tommy Lee was drivin', gettin' my dick sucked by 'Molly Mounds', that week's headliner at the Spearamint Rhino, and eatin' some Popeye's fried chicken! Meanwhile, Vince Neil's in the front, next to Tommy, and he's just sulkin' away and sluggin' back some Jack Daniels and snortin' ketamine.
Vince Neil: I'm gettin' drunker and more pissed, cuz when we was at the Rhino, Miss Mounds was like, all over me. Then we get into Tommy's car with Nikki, and she starts goin' down on him! I mean, what the fuck, girl? And she's trying to impress us all by makin' noises like a suckling piglet, and Nikki's slurpin' and chomping away on his take-out, to accentuate the gobbling noises that she's making just to annoy me!
Nikki : Ha, ha! Yeah, so finally, Vince can't take it anymore, drops trou, and starts to try and climb into the back, loudly and drunkenly demanding that Molly let me and him have a 'swordfight' in her mouth!

Tommy Lee: Heh, that was funny. Thing is, Vince's drunken squirming bumped me while I was drivin' and I crashed the car into one of those illegal immigrant Mexican kids sellin' bags of oranges by the side of the road! The kid's parents start screaming and cryin', so's I hadda pay 'em a hundred bucks to shut them up. Then Molly starts gettin' hysterical and cryin', so's we booted her ass out on the freeway. I think she o.d.'ed on Drano and baby laxative a couple weeks later.
Vince Neil: Good times, man. Good times.

Vs. a condensation of 'Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried: My Life As A Revolting Cock'

"...so our tour van pulled into the parking lot of the community center, and we did some meth to sharpen up for the show, and we did the show, and about fifty skinhead kids showed up, and there was a fight in the parking lot, and after the show some kid puked on the ground, and Al Jourgenson's an egomaniac, and then I read a book and fell asleep until our next show in Pigfuck, Iowa. Oh, and a friend of mine o.d'ed on some drugs, and he died..."

Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll is supposed to be fun, innit?




Rambo (D-) It's like a parody of the Rambo series, only... it's actually a Rambo movie! Seriously, if they added some cameo appearances by bottom feeders like Paris Hilton and that Clay Aitkins guy, and a bunch of jokey pop-culture references, they'd have a 'Meet the Spartans' type movie. But no, your only enjoyment will be watching a sixty-one year old Stallone hobble around in the rain until it's time to unleash his party piece. And that is to climb up onto an M-60 and shoot up hundreds of bad guys. And to make matters worse, it looks as if they CGI'ed the hell out of this one. Furthermore, the CGI is so badly done, I'm thinking that the same people who did it also did Stallone's eyebrows. Really, look at his eyebrows in this! He's starting to look like his mother! Bodies just don't sprout bullet holes, they blow up like ants under a magnifying glass in the hot sun! Buckets of CG'd blood rain across the screen! Boom! Splat! Gush! I swear I even saw a bloody turd bolus fly out from an unrestrained lower intestine!

Looking back, I'm starting to think that it's Sly's revenge on all the people who wanted yet another Rambo movie. "Oh, so's yuh wan annuder Rhambo, ehs? Oh, ho, hoooo...I'm-a gunna give youse all annuder Rambo, see! Heh-heh-heh... Dere! Dat shud shudem all ub."

Indy with an 'F', and Heroes with vices

For the past -what, twelve-fifteen years now, we've been subjected to the Independent-with-a-capital-I movie. I think it was the combined success of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Stephen Soderburg's Sex, Lies and Videotapes that got producers thinking that there was in fact, gold in them there arthouse productions. As a result, a lot of the marketing campaigns of many smaller-budgeted productions tend to focus on the stories behind the cameras. How many times have we heard about Kevin Smith selling his comic collection to make 'Clerks'? Or Robert Rodriquez working as a test subject to finance 'El Mariachi'? (And he only spent $7000 dollars on it! Wow!) This promotion technique reached the apex of absurdity back when Sylvester Stallone appeared in 'Copland' twenty pounds overweight- and proceeded to do the talk-show circuit blathering about his 'struggle' to be 'taken seriously' as an 'Actor'. (I believe he was also trying to make a go of being a faux-primitive painter in the George Basilitz-Julian Schanbel-Jean Michael Basquat 'school'. Ugh.)

The problem with movies trying to set themselves apart from the pack by trumpeting their 'independence' is that even in the age of digital video and Youtube, even a first-time feature that's looking to get on actual movie screens and not some burnout's bed sheet in the basement is going to cost at least a million dollars. Any one who thinks that their heartfelt coming-of-age pic of a young girl sitting in her living room and discussing her latent lesbian tendencies which they shot with their dad's Betacam is going to Sundance, or even Slamdance-the 'Indy' independent film festival... Is going to be horribly disappointed.

For me, a real independent filmmaker is someone like Derek Jarman or Kenneth Anger. That is, someone who's creative impulses put them in the position of the 90 year old virgin. They aren't selling it out, but no one's buying anyways. And let's be honest, if your interests, like mine, veer towards the odd, the quirky, the out-of-the-way... you have to sit through a lot of shit to find the true gems. I suspect if you hypothetically gave both Stanley Kubrick and a whinging art-film school twit a phone with a video camera on it that holds five minutes of footage- Kubrick would still turn out something more engaging and thoughtful then the twit would. So I really don't think bragging about the lack of money spent on a film is really a virtue.

Which is what turned me off Juno (C+) initially. Combined with the above hype of low budget 'integrity', it tried to make the previous job, stripping, of screenwriter Diablo Cody (the pen name of Brooke Busey, who worked at an ad agency longer than she did as a stripper.) one of its selling points. The whole exercise came off as tremendously condescending to me. So she was stripping while she was writing this movie? So what? Should movie executives start hanging out at Hooters or Score's or the Peppermint Rhino to find that next William Goldman? Fortunately, Busey seems savvy enough to start downplaying this aspect of her life and wisely went off the radar after her Oscar.

As for the movie itself, it's actually not too bad. The enjoyment comes from seeing the characters, as well as the audience, have their initial takes of the other characters brought into question. Juno's parents don't flip out or come off as clueless dolts, the adoptive mother (Jennifer Garner) isn't the yuppie bitch we and Juno thought, and the adoptive dad (an awesome Jason Bateman) comes off as ultimately more childish than Juno herself. Juno's pregnancy is handled without any melodrama, and we get to see her Groucho Marx sense of humour masks her genuine anxiety.

So why the C+? That damned soundtrack, which is so cloying and faux-naif, critic Theo Panayides hit the nail on the head when he commented that director Jason Reitman, " unwisely fills the soundtrack with songs that sound like they're written by Phoebe in "Friends". They make that 'Hey, Delilah' song sound like a Magnetic Fields track...



Iron Man (B-) How to film a movie based on a comic: 1: Keep the nudging, winking, and smirking out of the script and out of the direction. They play it straight in this one, and really, that's the only way to play this particular comic book hero. (I'll let the Stan Lee cameo slide, since Marvel probably has a rider for these things in their movie deals.) 2: As I've said earlier, if you're going to have a drunken prick as your protagonist, who better to play him then Robert Downey Jr.? (Unlike Peter Parker, Tony Stark isn't a superhero with personal problems, he's a superhero with VICES.) 3: Three big action sequences is far better than ten little ones. The extended buildup between Tony Stark's capture and the appearance of Iron Man Mk. I gets the adrenaline a-pumpin'. 4: Speaking of the action sequences, this is only the second comic book movie that I've seen- Batman Returns being the first- that has a sense of proportion to them. While Brett Ratner might say, 'Fuck it, we'll have them throw bridges at each other.", in this one, director Jon Favernau's best tension moment has the suit seizing up owing to Stark getting ice on the thing. Oops.

What not to do: 1: 'Good lord! (choke!) My best friend and father figure was the one who betrayed me! How couldn't I have seen that coming in a story taken out of a comic book?' 2: Yes, Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Fury. That's important for the sequel. Why they left it after the credits is beyond me.

In the case of Iron Man, it's the type of movie that could have been a disaster if the aforementioned Ratner had worked on it, so you come out more relived then energized. If this is the template for future comic book movies, they could do a lot worse. ( I believe Marvel is setting up a whole franchise around the Iron Man-Avengers-Nick Fury-Hulk axis.) By the way, if you were looking for a subtext about the morality of the American military picking fights with brown men in Iraq, and Afghanistan- this isn't the place to be looking. Matter of fact, the minute we start to get a judgement call on the Armed Services 'over there', or even have Stark confront his drinking problem in the inevitable sequel(s), the whole franchise will crash and burn.

...The American Dream...

Grand Theft Auto IV -(A+) Yes. Fuckin' A. Yes. In building its franchise for the next-gen consoles, Rockstar has showed that better gameplay mechanics and story go hand in hand with better graphics. There's less of the abstract stuff, like collecting hidden packages and rampages. And there's a deeper, richer storyline in this version. Not only are you a stranger in a strange land, trying to carve out your slice of Success Pie, you're put in the middle of a honest to god living, breathing, city. Even people you pass by on the street are living out their own dramas.

Let's look at the various elements, shall we?
Gameplay: Challenging, with only the minor frustration at getting killed near the end of a mission tempered by the fact you get to replay the mission immediately. I wouldn't mind quicker access to weapons and armor, though. The area's easy to navigate, owing mainly to the fact that each vehicle you drive has an onboard g.p.s. system. The 'sandbox' element, for me, is the most fun. I've been playing this game almost non-stop and I've only discovered a tenth of the city so far.

Visuals: Incredible. I'm gonna sound like a audiophile raving about Glenn Gould's 'Goldberg Variations' here, but having a background in graphics and art, bear with me. The level of detail in this game makes me think that the art staff at Rockstar must all have O.C.D. The lighting at various points of the day, the weather effects, the ragdoll animations when you or people you hit with your car fly and crumple, the explosions... Wow. Just, wow. The big controversy, the violence in this game, is tempered by the pg-13 depiction of blood.-puffs when a bullet or shotgun shell finds it's mark, the occasional pool when you execute someone gangster style, spatters on your monitor when you get hit. It's more abstract, yet more chilling then earlier versions of GTA.

Sound+Music- Ambient noise is well-done. As a whole, the whole game brings all the details together to give you an experience that drops you into the game without hitting you over the head over the level of craft in the environment. As well it should be. Parks and open spaces dull the roar of more populated areas, and you feel the sense of place in each region of the map.

The soundtrack ties into that earlier observation about the level of detail being so well-done, you don't notice it. While I suspect the primary motivation for the (extensive!) music playlist is that the GTA franchise doesn't need a boost from star musicians, it has the added benefit of introducing previously unknown genres of music- classic jazz, world music, to the player. I'm not too sure about the inclusion of 'Goodbye Horses' by Lazarus Q, however. 'Scuse me while I tangent...

"Goodbye Horses" is what's known as a 'Ruined Song'. That is, it's presence on GTA4 distracts us from the game by making us remember that it's the song playing during that scene in 'Silence of the Lambs' where the killer dons a victim's scalp and tucks his junk tween his legs and- you get the idea. It's no small consolation to the band members that their most commercially successful song has such unpleasant connections. Kinda like that instrumental by the Revels that's playing during Pulp Fiction when Marcellus is getting raped by the hillbillies. Thus, a song like 'Goodbye Horses' is not a good idea to use as background unless one wishes to make similar connections to 'Silence'. Anyways...
Story- While the satiric element is as much a part of this game as the previous ones, the actual story is tinged with a genuine sense of melancholy, particularly in the story threads of some of the supporting characters, like Dwayne, Kate and her brother Packie, and Niko Bellic, the protagonist himself. What it does is inform the player's choices in this world, and the consequences of his actions. (Spoiler alert: Don't kill Dwayne, or you'll really hate yourself.)

It's Game of the Year, as far as I'm concerned.