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.

...Gonna Be Busy...

...Can't talk...Playing 'Grand Theft Auto 4'...gotta run...sorry...

"I'm gonna smash your face...to a jelly!"

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (B+)

The most successful 'Sit-coms' in recent history, like 'Seinfeld' and 'Arrested Development' worked because they're more comedies of manners than the traditional situation comedies. In the case of 'Philadelphia', the four main characters behave like proverbial bulls in china shops when it comes to violating the aforementioned manners. They blackmail one another, verbally and physically abuse one another, and screw each other over on a regular basis.

I guess if I had to sum it up, it's what 'outrageous' characters in a 'traditional' sit-com get up to in a regular basis, only these selfish, shallow, mean-spirited characters live in the real world.

So the question comes up: If it's a show about four losers who are trapped in the downward spiral of backstabbing, abuse, cruelty, and betrayal, why would anyone watch it?

Because it's funny. Scratch that, it's fuckin' funny. Their reactions to the misery that they've created of their own lives are so over the top, it fills me with a tremendous glee. Plus, as a bonus, you get Danny DeVito coming in season 2 in full-on sleaze ball-Louie-the dispatcher mode as two of the characters (step) dad. Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. I guess you'd describe it as "I'm alright, Jack" humour, as the viewer is so insulated from the characters, it's okay to laugh at their misery from a high place.

25 Great Movie Moments...

(note: these are just off the top of my head and not the definitive greatest moments in movie history, mmkay? Anyhoo, see what you think o' these...)

1: (oh, these aren't in any order, either.) The entire audience, in gap-mouthed shock, as the opening number of Franz Leibkind's 'Springtime For Hitler' comes to an end.

2: That electric moment in Oldboy when ex-prisoner Dae-Su Oh discovers who his lover really is...

3: "Hey, Marvin, What do YOU think?"

"Man, I don't even have an opinion!"

"Well, you gotta have an opinion! Do you think God came from heaven and stopped the bull-" Bang! -from Pulp Fiction.

4: "Osgood, I'm a man!"

"Well, no one's perfect!" -from Some Like it Hot.

5: Silence of the Lambs: When the prison-garbed body is taken out of the elevator shaft by the S.W.A.T. team. "Where's Dr. Lecter?"

6: "Hello. I'm Dr. McLuhan. You know nothing of me or my work!" "Boy, wouldn't it be great if life was really like this?" - from Annie Hall

7: Theo walking out of the shot-up building with the mother and the baby in Children of Men.

8: In City of God: the entire sequence setting up 'Rocket's' inability to enter into the criminal underworld.

9: "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War room!" -from Dr. Strangelove

10: Jack's experiences in the 'Living with Cancer' therapy group-especially Chloe, from Fight Club.

11: The fist fight between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen that runs the length of the village in 'The Quiet Man'.

12: "She's my sister-SLAP!-my daughter-SLAP-my sister-SLAP!" -from Chinatown.

13: Red finding Andy Dufrene's note by the wall in The Shawshank Redemption. (Yeah, I know, director Frank Darabont wanted Andy's escape from the prison drain tunnel to be the movie's 'trancendent' moment, but- ugh...)

14: Randall reading off the increasingly obscene order list in front of the woman and her kid to the movie retailer in Clerks.

15: Christopher Walken. Dennis Hopper. Their only scene together in 'True Romance'.

16: Dave Bowman 'killing' HAL 9000 in '2001'

17: Rutger Hauer's death scene in 'Blade Runner'.

18: The half-hour silent robbery scene in 'Rififi'.

19: Raymond Burr notices Grace Kelly signalling, thinks for a moment, puts two and two together - then looks straight at the camera! Oh shit - now we're gonna get it...Rear Window...

20: The first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. No, I don't mean the bit of prologue business at the very beginning; if Spielberg took that out, it'd be a far better film...

21: Blondie gets the grave's location from the dying lips of Bill Carson. But only Tuco knows the name on the grave stone... from 'The Good, the bad and the ugly'.

22: Sam Lowrey's dream sequence in Brazil

23: Holly Martins meets Harry Lime under the streets of Vienna - from the Third Man.

24: Daniel on the rope bridge, singing the British Army song - from The Man who would be King.

25: The U-boat starts to rise to the surface, finally. -from Das Boot.

There Will Be Movies...

I finally saw There will be Blood, (B-) and I can say this movie is a bit overrated. It's not bad, just disappointing. I should preface this review by pointing out I'm not a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson as a filmmaker. He's been compared to Stanley Kubrick, and I'd agree. Not that that's a good thing, mind you. Like Kubrick in his later films, Anderson tends to set up his scenes in very formal, very static images. His films aren't bad, just really stiff.

It's about a turn-of-the-century oilman named Daniel Plainview, and how his drive for wealth and power in California drives him insane. In that regard, it's been compared with Citizen Kane. Though I'd say it's got more in common with Raging Bull. Both movies are essentially character studies of men who's reach exceed their grasp. In 'Blood's case, Plainview's character has Anderson's view-and I suspect,- actor Daniel Day-Lewis's view stacked against him. For instance, when Plainview engages in spiteful and selfish behavior-like when he snubs the young minister Eli Sunday- we have no reason to understand where this streak comes from. I also don't quite buy the common view that Plainview adopts a dead co-workers boy as his own simply so he can pass himself off as a family man to the rubes he's buying the land out from under. (We can clearly see he harbours some genuine affection for the boy.)

I understand it's a rough adaptation of the first part of an Upton Sinclair novel, "Oil". So I'm assuming it's view of Plainview's capitalistic behavior is condemning. Problem being, given how labour was usually treated in the early 1900's, Plainview seems more like Major Barbara's Andrew Undershaft then one of Sinclair's plutocrats. (Compare and contrast, folks, this movie with John Sayles' Matewan...) There's no real connective tissue between scenes through the whole movie. So for instance, when Eli Sunday is pleading with an enraged Daniel in the movie's last scene how "We're old friends, Daniel!", you think to yourself, "Since when?" The main drive in the movie is the petty rivalry between Eli and Daniel, and I'm to assume it's because both men have figured each other out as a phony and a liar.

The main reason I took so long to see this movie is because I'm also not a big fan of Daniel Day-Lewis as an actor. However, I'd say that this is the best role he's taken on in a long time. Definitely better than his showy 'Bill the Butcher' in Gangs of New York. It's because the character is so repressed through the whole film, than when he lashes out at his deaf grown son and Eli towards the end, it's like watching a pipe burst. Here's the problem I have with Day-Lewis, the actor, though. In his recent roles, I'm reminded of Pauline Kael's comments on Dustin Hoffman in 'Rainman'. That is, he's an actor watching his character from an audience's point of view in order to modulate his performance, rather than just act. (I admire the role, but in a way I'd admire a clever piece of engineering...) Put it this way: If Day-Lewis has to spend two years researching a character who is all a front, to even his adopted son, the character has no ground. (I'm to assume the accident at the film's beginning that gave him his limp twisted him inside, but that's all I have to go on.)



American Gangster (C+) Standard slovenly-cop-vs.-dapper-gangster movie glossed up as only director Ridley Scott can. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe play off each other okay, but the movie's problem is that there's no theme here, really. Well, there's several themes, but it's all so hazy, and I suspect, the racial implication is so timidly hinted at, that the movie loses a lot of its power. Is the movie saying that a black man can only succeed by co-opting Whitey's methods? Haven't we seen Russell Crowe's Ritchie Roberts-angel-with-a-dirty-face in far too many movies before this? (There's a sub-plot involving a custody battle with his ex-wife which adds nothing to the movie.) Is Washington's character Frank Lucas really supporting the community of Harlem by selling them heroin? (top-grade junk at lower prices, but still..) When the writing's on the wall, why doesn't the usually clever Lucas quit while he's ahead? He's too smart to let his pride override his common sense. I'm being a little harsh on the movie, I know. But given the talent at work here, I'm a little disappointed... Still, worth a look at least once.