| Custodies |
[Nov. 6th, 2008|11:42 pm] |
They drug them, you know. Like racehorses.
Presidents.
And the gladhanded hopefuls.
They jack them full of seething highballs: uppers to keep their eyes as wide as a Disney rodent's and their jack-o-lantern grins as tight as drums, downers to dull the bitter sniggering poisons and razor-wit barbs of the jackal press, and hallucinogens so they can get through another day of being Macy's balloons pumped full of lies and propaganda dangled on strings by ancient vampire powermongers before an unending herd of buffalo Americans.
We know what to expect now from the freakshows and headcases who seek the nation's highest office.
Regardless of what kind of men they were before they sought the Grail, they are transfigured by their quest. Glassy-eyed with drugs, pockets stuffed with Krugerrands and promises, they stumble into darkened cells underneath the Pentagon and learn the Rules before they shake their first hand in Iowa.
Rule #1, established 1797: A President-to-be must have a lust for power that overwhelms honor, friendships, and once-treasured principles. You can always recant on your deathbed.
Rule #2, established 1881: Lie as much as you must. A lie is not a lie if it's told about your opponent, your beliefs, or the future. The Fourth Estate will admire your will to power, and the people will accept the lie as a truth for as long as they need to, a period beginning when you print your first derogatory pamphlet and ending when they pull the vote lever.
Rule #3, established 1913: Wars will always pique the American lust for blood and treasure, but only to a point. If the entire world is in crisis, promise to keep Americans free and content until involvement becomes unavoidable, at which point you must emphasize your desire to fight like a proud screaming eagle and bring justice to foreign shores.
Addendum A, established 1960: If there is no global crisis to gun-butter American voters with, one will be created for you.
Rule #4, established 1933: Reach the widest audience possible, infect the culture. When you reach voters through their favorite opiates, they become even easier to sway. It's easier to say memorable things when they're recorded and repeated ad infinitum. And it's easier for the handlers to spike you full of drugs in a studio than at a whistlestop.
Addendum B, established 1960: The revolution will be televised.
Rule #5, established 1969: The better man is the one who walks away with the loser's testicles crushed in his hand. There are no rules of conduct; no truth, no future, no mercy. There is the prize to win, and the dimwits who must be herded into voting booths with your name branded on their forebrains in order to win it.
Addendum C, established 2000: If some waterhead weakling is going to win with some sort of mythical "popular" vote and a slate of reasonable ideas, have your family get the fix in.
... and that's what they do. They scrap like pitbulls and shoot ludicrous adrenochrome cocktails between their toes and snarl through grins smeared with shit and Vaseline and totter around the country until their brows are furrowed like beet fields with their honest concerns over the plights of egg farmers, paperhangers, and oil heirs.
That's how the Game is played.
But this guy ...
This guy cheated.
I don't know how Obama managed to do this. I've been watching the Game get nastier and edgier every year since I've been old enough to vote, a spooky bitter feeling like walking in on a game of Life just as it becomes a game of Russian-Roulette Clue. But he walked into a situation where he should've been eaten alive and came out riding an incredibly unlikely landslide.
I don't know how he managed to make me feel hopeful and proud of American democracy for the first time since I was old enough to pronounce the word "Nixon".
I know the fact that he never, ever talked down to me is part of it.
And the fact that he seems to smile like he knows exactly what he's getting into.
And the fact that Tatsuya Ishida loves him.
But no matter how smitten I might be with this political juggernaut of hope, I'll be keeping an eye on him.
Vruba said that even if Obama turns out to be just another grinning drug-addled scumbag, he'll have made the great contribution to American politics of treating voters like human beings.
But that's not good enough for me.
If Obama turns out to be part of the machine, I'm going to feel god-damn betrayed for the first time since I started voting. And that sting is one that I won't take lightly. I'll make the furious spiders of Mirkwood look like god-damn Zen Buddhists if I get stung like that.
The children of the Revolution are watching you, Obama.
Oh, yes.
You've made us watch you with your glamours of hope and Canaanical promises of change.
So we'll watch you.
There's enough of us watching that we can watch you all day every day for the next eight years.
Yes, we can. |
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| No, I won't not never forget nothin'. |
[Jul. 12th, 2008|03:03 am] |
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...
"UNLESS."
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn't guess.
That was long, long ago ...
.. but each day since that day
I've sat here and worried
and worried away.
Through the years,
while my buildings
have fallen
apart,
I've worried about it -
- with all of my heart. |
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| Seven Things You Can Say About George Carlin |
[Jun. 23rd, 2008|03:12 am] |
Shit - "Edgy" comedians ain't got shit on you, George.
Piss - It pisses me off that you die and Dick Cheney gets kept alive with unholy machines.
Fuck - Fuck you, world.
Cunt - If God's a she, She's a real cunt.
Cocksucker - I can't believe that you had to get your first obituary from that cocksucker on Entertainment Tonight.
Motherfucker - You and Hunter have both left us here alone, like rats from a sinking ship, you motherfuckers.
Tits - But if I can get back to that cocksucker for a moment, at least the girl I heard fake-frowning her way through a halfwit report on your untimely death had nice tits.
That was a man who left nothing to apologize for. |
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| Reel of Fish IX (somewhat belated) |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|11:25 pm] |
Seriously, you guys are the worst audience ever. I can barely even keep track of what day it is aside from the little scraps of paper I keep by my bed with my schedule written on them so I know when I'm supposed to stagger to my feet and wake ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92) to drive me to work, and no one reminded me that I'm now an extremely impressive 8 weeks behind in my totally arbitrary quest to review 51 movies. Weak, audience. TOTALLY weak. I even SAW movies, and haven't gotten around to reviewing them because I thought I was one or two weeks behind. I don't know WHY I thought that. I assume it was the same coping mechanism that allowed me to ignore stressful papers and burdensome tests until a few short hours before they were due/scheduled.
How am I supposed to deal with this kind of neglect? Is it by attempting to write 6 half-assed reviews in a single week to get most of the way caught up before the world's most awesome movie premieres Friday? I think it is.
Week 9 of 51 - Doomsday
Director: Neil Marshall, brought to you by the letter D.
Starring: Sexy Imperial halfbreed Rhona Mitra, tattooed stuntwoman Lee Ann Liebenberg, motivational speaker Craig Conway, grizzled private eye Bob Hoskins, and Malcolm McDowell, that was Alex.
What It Is - The year is 2037. The world has become a tattered patchwork of warring corporations and magical nation-states, ruled by dragons, elves, and men with robotic arms, each making use of dark, street-weary mercenaries known as Shadowrunners to ...
... wait, wrong timeline. The year is 2037, though, and it's been 30 years since a lethal strain of skin rash broke out in Scotland and killed nearly everyone in as gory and blood-vomitous a way as possible while those who weren't quite dead fought to be gunned down by stolid British border guards in adorable berets. After the carnage, the rocky Highlands have been sealed away and forgotten, and the United Kingdom has gotten on with its business of becoming a decaying and crippled world power. Now the virus has shown up again during an everyday heavy-armor police raid on some anonymous homeless encampment near Picadilly, and the Prime Ministry has decided to lock up and flood all of central London, killing however many million Cockney chimneysweeps live there, to contain the disease. However, hope springs eternal, as ubiquitous movie satellites have spotted living people in the contaminated zone of Glasgow. A team is sent to capture these lost Scots and find their secret for surviving the dramatically-named Reaper virus.
What follows is an methamphetamine-soaked homage to Mad Max, Escape from New York (two of the soldiers in the movie are named Miller and Carpenter, after the directors of both films), 28 Days Later, Highlander, Outbreak, and any number of Hammer horror films. Our cyber-eyed heroine is a tough-as-nails Scottish orphan raised by Bob Hoskins and the Met, and willing to do whatever it takes for Queen and Country. She is accompanied by an exceedingly tall dusky sergeant with a sharp sense of humor and a bunch of vanilla London boys in tactical armor who get brushed out of the way in the first few minutes after their arrival in scenic post-Apocalyptic Glasgow.
Their first target is a creepy abandoned hospital where a mysterious doctor was performing experiments up until the final days. Naturally, the entire hospital is crammed full of mohawked cannibal rejects from the Thunder Dome, and the whole party of loyal Beefeaters are driven apart and hacked to pieces and set aflame, leaving just a few plucky ones to figure out what's going on. They fall into the hands of Sol, a charismatic lunatic who looks like Sid Vicious on steroids and is the spiritual heir apparent to The Warrior's Cyrus. He finds the incursion of the British to be proof of his crackpot theory that there's life on the other side of the robot guns that guard the Scottish border.
Various homicidal hijinks and the devouring of human flesh ensue, and our heroes escape with the help of two gentle Narnian hippies and find the other community of Scottish survivors, living under the cold imperious silver-bearded rule of noted droogie Malcom McDowell at a year-round Renaissance faire castle and wearing doublets and carrying crossbows they picked up from the Medieval Times gift shop, firing upon our doughty English virus-hunters like angry Northerners upon the Deadites. Truly, Scotland is a warm and welcoming a tourist paradise in the searing aftermath of viral holocaust as it is today.
They manage to escape to an underground military warehouse where the Scottish Ark of the Covenant was no doubt stored, along with the corpse of the Faerie Queene,the Gae Bolga, and Sean Connery's head. Also stored there is a pristine Bentley, a moment that would be the best anachronistic product placement since Demolition Man if Bentley actually did product placements (instead, the producers just bought three of them for a cool $150K apiece), which they use to escape onto the main roads back towards Britain, becoming involved in the best car chase since Bullitt. Explosions that would leave Mad Max goggle-eyed rock the landscape, headless bodies fly hither and yon, and eventually everything reaches a tender denouement where evil is hypothetically served its just desserts and the protagonist goes to live in the rubbly virus-ridden hotbed of Glasgow with her new army of fanatical cannibal followers.
Comment il Rouler - Doomsday is not a movie to see if you are now, or have ever been, made even slightly squeamish at the sight of, say, luau pork or extremely rare steaks, or the bloated corpse of a dog exploding in the mid-day sun. For while most of the killshots in the movie are quite graphic - nail-riddled board to the face, arrow to the eye, horrific exploding car - they're not too far over the limit if you've been exposed to modern cinema or even the good old-fashioned gore-fests of the grindhouse era. One thing Neil Marshall DID push the limits on was the most over-the-top horrific depiction of cannibalism I've ever seen. Some old British scientist is burned alive and then his roasted flesh is sliced and torn off the bone by eager hands, and in some way that's even worse than the way David's organs are ripped out of his stomach in Shaun of the Dead or the delicately horrible manner in which Ray Liotta's brain is prepared in the exquisitely underrated Hannibal. This is really raw, vicious stuff. I don't know what they used for the cooked human body - I would assume some kind of treated pork, but it looks stomach-churningly awesome as they rip off and devour hunks of it. Just an FYI before you rush out and buy a copy.
If you can live with that kind of carnal feasting, though, you SHOULD rush out and buy a copy, especially if you've ever enjoyed a John Carpenter movie. This is over-the-top chainsaw madness of the old school, a nonsensical headlong rush through a storyline which makes only the smallest amount of logical sense while providing almost limitless opportunities for absurd shots of crudely-built rock and roll stages, cannibal go-go girls, escape locomotives and Malcolm McDowell in velvet tights. There's not a lot to be said for the acting chops that are laid on the platter - even the usually ebullient Bob Hoskins can only struggle against a script this stilted and absurd. But you don't come to a movie with a soundtrack by Robert Zombie expecting writing by Robert Altman.
The movie is an homage to the destructive sugar-rush madness of the 1980s and the creeping bio-horror that's so in vogue now. It's an homage to driving a stolen car at a zillion miles an hour down an abandoned road and smashing through an exploding bus. It takes our vague fears of government-created plagues and makes a cartoon mockery of them, splattering V for Vendetta imagery across the walls with a wet crack like a sledgehammer hitting a watermelon or a zombie skull. Man's innate talent for savagery is writ large across the face of this boldly obvious film. It's no quiet noir crackle in the dark; it's an exploding helicopter of alienism, portraying the downfall of society as a Technicolor Hanna-Barbera Lafflympics race where everyone gets decapitated. "Subtle" isn't even the dictionary that the two-dimensional characters in this movie use to bludgeon each other to death - but that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun.
Incidentally, Malcolm McDowell? Extremely underrated as a character actor. He has all the gravitas and cold menace of Christopher Lee with the chilly aloof arrogance of Ian McKellen and the well-trimmed Van Dyke of Ian Holm. Even when he looks like he's hanging out by the turkey leg vendor in a muddy field outside Tampa,
Endgame - The product placements aren't even product placements, the rock and roll atmosphere is marred by the grimmest cannibalism scene this side of Rob Zombie's seder, the heroine is a girl but she never has a proper sex scene, and almost every shot is an homage, adapted, a sly reference to, or outright stolen from another film. And it takes place in Scotland, which has about as much claim to fame as an action movie haven as Hong Kong has to Victorian fog operas.
But for all that, it's worth 9 bucks. |
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| Reel of Fish VIII |
[Mar. 16th, 2008|02:29 am] |
The hell? It's March 16th already? That doesn't make any sense! How can it possibly be that far into the year? I've barely even had time to think about the vast, horrific gulf of time spreads like a pool of nothingness between the beginning and end of time in which man and all his useless works are but the flutter of a dying hummingbird! I've hardly meditated at all on the feeble pointlessness of human life and the hollow emotions they lay claim to and the tintype souls to which we cling so desperately as to baffle the gods when the things are hardly worth the ectoplasm they're printed on! I haven't even mastered the Soldier's rocket jump in Team Fortress 2! And here it's already St. Patrick's Weekend. Which means I have to start thinking about dying my underwear green and how to get cans of Guinness into the Apple Store.
Well, one thing you can be sure of, children of the Revolution, and that's that there'll be a fresh edition of Reel of Fish every week and that I'll be drunk as hell tomorrow.
Two. Two things you can be sure of.
Well, okay, I might be a week or two behind in my Reels, so I guess I was right the first time. But that's one more thing to rely on than any church, lover or government can offer, baby.
So here we are at number 8, slowly catching up to the elusive, arbitrary goal I set for myself. And what better way to celebrate than by reviewing a movie that I spent 12 months swearing before God and Heaven and any saints who had a moment to spare that I would never see? But that's what happens when you're out on the town, cruising scenic West Palm Beach in the cool dappled midnight, driving around in a retrofitted police cruiser with a half-mad Army veteran and a Puerto Rican with a transplanted heart. It's either catch the midnight show at the Regal 18 or go to the Monkey Bar. But I wouldn't want to go to the Monkey Bar unless I was drinking banana daiquiris. And contrary to what you might be led to expect by their name, their banana daiquiris are TERRIBLE. Actually, I don't like most banana daiquiris. If I am to be honest with myself (always an exceedingly dangerous proposition), I think what I really want when I order a daiquiri is the Banana Kong that TGI Friday's used to serve, which was basically a banana milkshake with a tankard of rum poured in.
And this week, the midnight show at the luxurious and neon-laden Regal 18 (which is, if you'll go back a few sentences, what we're talking about) was none other than the much-heralded instant classic:
( This one's a bit flashier than the last seven. ) |
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| Reel of Fish VII |
[Mar. 9th, 2008|09:50 pm] |
Why, children of the Revolution, do you make me hit you?
I don't want to hit you. I love you! But you MAKE me hit you when you do this to me!
You let me get all lazy and useless. You let me go THREE WEEKS without a single prodding comment about missing Reel of Fish! You know, Reel of Fish? The light of your life, the hop in your step, the maltodextrose in your coffee, the motivator of your turntable, your raisin de otter?! Instead I just play video games and collect interesting new wireless mice and go drinking with my no-good tech support buddies. And no one says a THING to me about how you're not up-to-date on the latest flicks, the realest reels, the movingest movies, the sinful cinema brought to you by your host with the most. This is why I gotta hit you, baby.
Now let's talk turkey. And then you can go make me a sandwich.
In re: my life, nothing of consequence has really occurred. I'm still employed at Apple and have a nice mid-day schedule and a few peons to boss around ("Go ring up that guy who wants a nano, tell Dane he can take his 15 after that phone call, and chop some more lumber so we can build another ogre ship." "Zug zug!"). I'm currently taking a full-system antibiotic to kill a minor ear infection I've been unable to rid myself of - and we're talking here of drugs so strong that I can't go out in direct sunlight for long periods of time or eat too much iron or anything terribly hard to digest, since all the organisms that help process those vitamins and minerals and nutrients have been killed in the pharmacological genocide I've inflicted on my own gentle person in an effort to make my ear stop itching. That's how medicine works. At least it was free. Anyone who says America has no socialized health care has never been to Publix, where you can get locally-made generic drugs on the cheap and free antibiotics as well as really good fried chicken and orange blossom honey and Double Stuf Oreos and Tide and meat thermometers.
In re: the cinema, you've all caught up on the Oscars and read my earth-shattering revelations from the last edition of Reel of Fish, and are thus now all fully aware of my prognosticative (prognosticatonal? prognosticateral? progsis?) powers, and will tremble in fear at the truths and mysteries I will reveal to you. Sadly, I cannot stop (except for a couple of weeks at a time, whereupon I gotta hit you, baby), as I am, like Destiny, chained to my fate, doomed to read the future and then post it with links to IMDB.com. Unlike Cassandra, however, people listen to me. Like Cassandra, however, none of you ever comment on my freakin' LiveJournal entries.
Not that I'm bitter. I'm sweet. Sweet like beet sugar. And I'll beat you, sugar, if you don't shut your big yap and let me get back to Reel of Fish:
( And where the hell is my sandwich? )
Well, that was fun. Now I'm tired. This Cipro I'm on reacts with beer to make you really, really sleepy and spin-headed, so I went ahead and had two Sam Adams Winter Ales (mmm, gingery), so it's actually a bit hard to see the keyboard now, but y'know, still fun.
Now, to clarify, I saw Vantage Point a bit over a week ago, and I saw another one this week. Tomorrow I'll watch one more and then post both reviews to get caught up to last week. Then this Friday you get the star-spangled tenth edition of Reel of Fish! AWESOME. EXALTEDLY AWESOME.
Don't lie. You know you're excited. I can sense your arousal from here.
Be sure to tune in tomorrow as we go back in time to Saturday when I saw a movie I was meant to see the Friday before - and review the ridiculously overhyped 10,000 BC!
Be there - or be sacrificed to the God King!
* We've all failed our saving throws vs. Heartbreak with the loss of GG, and deal with it whatever way we can. |
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| Reel of Fish VI |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|02:05 am] |
Wow, it's almost like I don't write anything BUT these movie reviews, and they're always later than I promised they'd be! It's almost like my life is a laughable failure! Ha ha ha! Ahhh. Ha.
Anyway. How about those Oscars? (Yes, that's why I'm about a week late. The Oscars. It's all part of my Grand Design. You can't be expected to understand the Grand Design. You don't have the drugs for it.) It was very important that I watch the Oscars, which I definitely did. It's not I like I lay in bed all night watching suicide_sam_e play Team Fortress 2 and eating a Brooklyn pizza from Domino's and then read the Oscar results online later. No. I put on a tuxedo and drank a glass of overpriced champagne and politely applauded for the Lifetime Achievement awards and other such bullshit and when I got up to use the can I paid my brother a buck to fill my seat. That's how serious I was about the Oscars. And do you know why? Well, let's go back to my last illustrious and critically-lauded edition of Reel of Fish, where I said - more or less:
No Country for Old Men is definitely going to win a ton of Oscars, including Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and Best Supporting Lunatic for Javier Bardem. If these things are not true, may God strike me down with a thousand bolts of vengeful lightning, and may he do the same for my enemies if these things do come to pass, as they must, so it is written, forever and ever, amen. Also, on a seemingly unrelated note, Daniel Day Lewis will get another Oscar, this time for his role as a Timothy Dalton impersonator in what I think is some sort of B-movie horror flick called There Will Be Blood.
And everything I predicted has come to be, putting me into the same category as Mother Shipton and her horseless carriages, the Mayans and the end of the world in 2012, and Nostradamus and the famous worldwide war waged by the forces of good against the evil of Hister.
So clearly, my dedication to the Silver Screen has granted me some kind of SUPER POWERS. And that is why today I will tell you about a movie that I can tell you - concretely, such that you could place money on it - will go down history as the finest movie about midgets and death since Time Bandits.
Week 6 of 51 - In Bruges
Director: Martin "Doc" McDonagh
Starring: Colin "Dopey" Farrell, Ralph "Grumpy" Fiennes, Brendan "Sleepy" Gleeson, Clémence "Whose Line Is It Anyway? Jokes Are Only Funny For So Long" Poésy, and the extremely underrated Jordan "Howard T. Duck" Prentice, who also played a Giant Bag of Weed in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, thus launching him into immediate contention with Warwick Davis for the illustrious title of my favorite Hollywood lilliputian.
What It Is - Boy, that's a tough one.
In Bruges is rather like three totally disparate movies jammed into 107 minutes. There's an eccentric British crime comedy, along the lines of a Guy Ritchie picture; there's a surrealist Gonzo piece, full of drug-addled sequences, long mindbending camera swoops, and dwarves in Eton schoolboy caps; and a black-grin, twisty study of the dark-sweet lure of suicide and the horrors of dramatic irony.
Colin Farrell, for whom I have gained an enormous new respect after years of relative indifference bordering on dislike (viz: Miami Vice, Alexander and Daredevil), plays the highly emotional and thoroughly Gaelic hitman Ray, freshly off his very first and badly-botched job for the British mob run by the half-East End half-Klingon Boss Harry, played ably by the thoroughly insane Ralph Fiennes. Brendan Gleeson plays the mob's conscience, scholarly mob heavy Ken. Ken and Ray are in hiding in Bruges, Belgium's most well-preserved and famously boring city, until the heat goes off them for a bad hit. While touring the city they meet the lovely narco-nymph Chloë and the bitter dwarf actor Jimmy, and have an astonishing amount of madcap misadventures, illegal drugs, and violent psychological traumas until Harry shows up to kill everyone.
Comment il Rouler - In Bruges is a movie that brings us the basest Irish humor and the most delightfully imbecilic fat jokes coupled with painfully honest studies of what in life is worth dying for. It's a movie that celebrates cocaine and Belgian beers. It's a fairy tale and an urban legend and an O. Henry twist. It celebrates and belittles the eerily beautiful city of its namesake. It's a lazy, smoke-scented mid-morning dream and the slick gleaming barrel of a pistol across the face, shattering your teeth. It's got quite a lot of midgets in. I've written before on the subject of midgets in cinema - it's a subject I feel quite strongly about, and is central to the plot here.
Colin Farrell, to his everlasting credit, embodies my strange love of the little people with his combination of outright admiration, morbid fascination, and doofy grinning when he's in the presence of such an honored personage as Jordan Prentice (who, lest we forget, played Howard the Freakin' Duck). There's just something fascinating about a midget in a movie, and writer/director McDonagh ever-so-cleverly places the midget in this movie as a midget in a movie (or did I just blow your mind?). For his part, Prentice perfectly plays the arrogant American actor and insecure paranoiac dwarf, and provides some of the most memorable hilarity in the movie, as exemplified in every trailer for the movie ever played anywhere ever ("You don't know karate - UGH!" "You just gotta know where to look for 'em. Brothels are good.").
Hilarity abounds in the movie. The polarized Odd Couple banter between Ken and Ray crackles and wanders far afield. Fiennes is nothing short of genius in his role as the psychotically honorable family man/London capo Harry, smashing the scenery so he can chew it more readily. There's snapping, vicious wit and delightfully humorous bouts of ultraviolence (I particularly enjoyed it when Ray blinded a skinhead by shooting a blank in his face), and wry sarcasm and dry European humor and a whole smorgasbord of lightly blackened laffs. The bit where jowly avuncular Ken takes a gram of cocaine off of Ray and goes to the bathroom, only to return and peer at little Jimmy over Ray's shoulder, both of them with eyes like gimlets, makes me giggle even when I think about it now.
Of course, parceled with all that high-quality British jesting, you get the vast bitter ocean of dramatic irony, the "black" part of the black humor (the black humor, you no doubt remember from your various Classics courses, being black bile, or melancholy, of "and the Infinite Sadness" fame), and an awful lot of grim, gory, fantastically unpleasant deaths for a lot of very nice people. See, I picked In Bruges because I was hoping to break the trend of the last 6 movies I've reviewed, all of which featured the usually-nasty deaths of 85-100% of the involved protagonists by the final reels. "Ah, good," I mused to myself as I lazed over my eggs (côté ensoleillé vers le haut) and sirloin (medium rare with a light balsamic glaze) one bright morning, paging through the New York Times movie section, "A light-hearted Snatch-esque criminal romp featuring Voldemort, Mad-Eye Moody, AND a drunk midget! This should be a delight!"
And it was, don't mistake me! The movie had me larfing hard enough to spew Sprite (I'm on diet soda every day of my life now, for which my teeth have graciously thanked me, but I need lemon-lime at the movies and they just don't serve it Diet. I'm going to have to start packing flasks of illicit Diet 7-Up) through my nostrils. It had some genuinely heartwarming bits and, as I may or may not have mentioned, a hilarious dwarf (he played Howard the Duck). But it was, sadly, the Seventh Seal in the long line of movies where - alarma del interceptor aerodinámico - every-god-damn-body dies.
Although to its credit, In Bruges kills everyone as part of what is actually a pretty clever joke. Looking back over the movie, it almost seems like McDonagh was sitting in a pub and suddenly had an idea (spoiler alert again - the idea was about midgets) that was so funny he had to sit down and write a movie about it, a movie which kept growing more and more absurd and twisted as he forewent sleep and inhaled massive doses of powdered acid washed down with absolute gallons of stout, but which was ultimately building towards the one moment of purely Euripidean tragic irony.
To be even fairer, not everyone dies, maybe, although the ending is one of those vague fade-to-black-with-vague-narrative ones that sometimes make me want to gnaw the armrests of my theater seat, glazed with ancient buttery topping and the salt of thousands of clammy palms though they may be. But quite a few people die, in ways both beautiful and ugly, symmetrical and jarring ... well, I guess it's all ugly and jarring, but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, if you're willing to look at it in that creepy glaze-eyed American Beauty way ... or if it's in Bruges. If nothing else, Martin McDonagh has convinced me to add Bruges to my TTDBID list, my "bucket list" (to borrow a term from a movie I have no intention of seeing without heavy medication). Just as Harry muttered, the city's just like a fuckin' fairy tale.
Endgame - It is safe to say that you will see things you have never seen before In Bruges. You will laugh at jokes you'll wish you'd never heard and you'll see some truly unspeakable things happen to some genuinely nice people for no good reason. You'll probably learn some things about bell towers, the Belgian film scene, the dangers of blank rounds, and the consequences of punching Canadians. At the end you'll be left with the faintly uncomfortable sensation that you've just been to a party you weren't invited to; a lingering feeling of unease, a thorough hangover, and your conscience's seersucker coat rumpled with the wallet left in the wrong pocket. It's a movie worth seeing, but it's not all karate chops to midgets and Colin Farrell making jokes about retarded farmboys. You'll laugh 'til it hurts, but there'll be times when you'll want to cover your eyes, to look away, or to just get up and leave. Don't give in. An eternity in Bruges may, as Ray suspects, be what Hell is like, but an hour and forty minutes there can do you a world of good. |
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| Reel of Fish V |
[Feb. 15th, 2008|02:17 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Five Star Motels", The Agoraphobic Cowboy, Rick Moranis | ] |
This is an important edition of Reel of Fish, and it comes only a week late.
Five is a seminal number. A crucial one. A 5 is 2 and 3. A 5 is a hand, a foot, the senses, the circlepoints along the Revealed Man, the mystic pentacle and the dire Pentagon, the eerie Silent E, the elements, vast and mighty Jupiter, and enough weeks spent on a pointless activity to justify some sort of dramatic introduction, with bold text and blatant references to the Principia Discordia.
Five is significant. Five means you're committed. Five is, in this case, just about a tenth of the way there. That's good. That's a round number, and round numbers are heavy. They have weight. Yes. Quitting now would leave a bruise to my vast ego. Not the contusion I would get if I quit at 25 or the crippling neuro-agony I'd get at 40, but certainly a bruise. Five means you've got a whole poker hand in, by gumbo, and you're gonna sit there with yer belly on the felt until the last chip is tossed. Are these poker metaphors working for you? Well, I hate them.
Five. Yes. Mach 5. Five easy pieces. Golden rings.
And what better movie to review than one that has been nominated for five* Academy Awards?
Week 5 of 51 - No Country for Old Men
Directors: Award-winning auteurs the Brothers Coen
Starring: Award-winning cowboy hat enthusiast Tommy lee Jones, award-winning rugbyist Javier Bardem, award-winning Goonie Josh Brolin, award-winning cannabis consumer Woody Harrelson, and award-winning 34B-23-36 Peter Pan Kelly Macdonald.
What It Is: Llewelyn Moss, the Welshiest cowboy in five counties, is out hunting antelope or some damn thing out in the vast endless flat Mordorlands of Texas, strolling across infinite plains under roiling emotional skies when he finds a little circle of trucks and a big heap of dead Mexicans and pitbulls, an imperial ton of movie-grade heroin, and a sinister and moderately-priced black briefcase filled with cash. This leads him on a run away from his rural Rio Grande trailer park to the big shining suburbs, where he hides in a series of crummy motels while his hot Scottish wife goes into hiding with her mom, who looks vaguely like Carol Burnett dressed up as a comical old hag. Llewelyn is fleeing the relentless attentions of hired killer Anton Chigurh, although he doesn't realize that right away, and it's also not terribly clear who's paying Chigurh, if anyone, since he seems to kill everyone he comes into contact with, including his Mob boss/evil corporate/seedy druglord employers. Llewelyn isn't just some weedy clerk, though; he's a gen-yoo-wine cowpoke, with a bunch of guns (although no silenced supersonic shotgun like Chigurh's) and a dead eye, so the game becomes a bit more interesting and a lot of colorful Texans get gunned down in the crossfire as hangdog Sheriff Ed Tom Bell mournfully surveys the various piles of corpses and makes like Sheriff Andy Taylor in a Tarantino flick.
Comment il Rouler: The Coens are clearly taking their shot at the Academy with this one. After a string of offbeat stoner favorites and IFC fodder and the careful construction of a cult of cinematic fame, they're engaged in Serious Business. All cinematic stops are pulled out; vast trackless wastes in the heartland of America, thunderous skies, the crushing realities of the modern world, frighteningly memorable villains and stalwart heroes working an amoral grey area, hyper-consequential violence, philosophies about the transience of life and the significance of death, old men in ruined homes, a script that seems to build to a hugely cinematic climax and then wanders off into meandering no-man's-land, and people enjoying milk. Nothing is held back. The Coens' implication is clear; if they don't walk away with several significant Oscars for this picture, Anton Chigurh will personally limp into the palatial homes of every member of the Academy and murder them in their beds.
The movie is good enough to merit the attentions it has received. Absolutely it is. It's brilliantly shot and framed like Remington art and holds your attention like a rivet to the forehead from the opening sequence. I barely managed to finish my popcorn since I was so busy staring at the silvery phantom genius unreeling in front of me that I could hardly scoop up a handful of greasy golden kernels and shovel them in. Some movies manage to do that, to reach through your skull and seize a handful of your brain, twisting it like a horse's reins to keep your focus on every frame. These movies are the ones that become the immortals, the ones that easily secure a spot in the AFI lists and leave the rest scrabbling in the contender's dirt. There is no doubt in my mind that No Country for Old Men will get a Criterion Master's edition and a shower of the laurels and moistened panties of a thousand critics and accolades in Paris and comparisons to every film about quietly insane hitmen and greedy noble-hearted cowboys that might be shot in the future. It's good. You should see it.
It is not, however, a lot of fun.
This is not to say there were not laffs, even amidst all the gunplay and exploding cars you remember from the trailers. The audience we saw the movie with in the Regal 18 was mostly older folks in nice going-out clothes and a few dating couples, and even they enjoyed the darksome gags about drinking the milk the killer had left out and Moss and "Sugar"'s snarky banter over a Mexican payphone and the half-naked and wounded cowboy staggering into the store where he had earlier bought a pair of Larry boots, clad now only in those boots and a hospital gown, only to be asked by the polite old salesman "How are those Larrys workin' out?".
The Coens' particular genius is creating absurd situations and eccentric, endearing characters and then combining the them in surprising and dramatic ways. They do that here, undoubtedly. From the sad-eyed one-man Greek chorus of Sheriff Bell with his Hamlet-in-the-Mayberry-graveyard wit to the hawk-eyed fierce independence of the desperate Llewelyn Moss to the maddening deadman's smile and relentless guns of the lunatic Chigurh, even the teary-eyed spunk of little Carla Moss and the shit-eating grin of Woody Harrelson's day trader/bounty hunter, these are characters that will stand the test of time. Their situation is unique and perilous and compelling, and the use of plain motels and quiet suburban streets as settings for dire, explosive action is inspired. They put their bold and dangerous and quietly-quipping characters together in these unique settings, and then ...
( Yarrr, here there be spoilers. )
Endgame: There is no doubt in my mind that you should see No Country for Old Men, just as you should see The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Casablanca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wizard of Oz, The Muppet Movie, Duck Soup, and A Fistful of Dollars. You can't be a proper cinephile without it. Just don't walk in expecting to see the Dude drinking White Russians and George Clooney pattering about Dapper Dan. This movie is Serious Business, and it leaves scars.
But it's worth it.
*Actually, 8, but who's counting? |
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| Reel of Fish IV, part B |
[Feb. 13th, 2008|09:45 pm] |
Howdy, pardners.
This here's gonna be another whatcha might call truncated piece, bein' as it's t'other half of th' fourth week's reviews, goin' up late under the influence of a whole passel a'leftover poison an' rotgut. Meantimes - an' they're mean times, brother - yer erstwhile hero, has had hisself a reckonin' an' fought through th' night, doin' a bastard's heap o' labours, workin' like a coolie under the whip of ol' Boss Apple.
But now that fat bastard has gone down under the guns-a' this fat bastard, and after a few restful hours o' shut-eye against the warm flank of my ol' dog Trey, I'm back in the saddle, limberin' the timber, makin' heads into canoes, and wonderin' just how long I kin stretch this piece o' dialectical fluff while I review:
Week 4 of 51, part B - 3:10 to Yuma
Director: James Mangold, The Washingtonville Kid
Starring: Russell "Boot Hill" Crowe, Bateye Christian Bale, Alan "Washoe" Tudyk, Ben Death-That-Walks Foster, and Peter Fonda, The Two-Gun Zombie.
What It Is: Bateye Christian Bale makes hisself out to be one Dan Evans, a failin' rancher somewhere out in the wilds o' Arizona, just one more dusty homesteader dyin' in the dirt with his skinny cows and faithful wife an' whipcord pups. He has th' added character flaw o' a missin' foot, left somewhere on th' battlefields o' the Civil War - which, trust me, weren't too damn civil - an' he's stubborn as a gub'mint mule. This becomes increasin'ly relevant as he crosses paths with Ben Wade, po'trayed here by ol' Boot Hill Crowe, the baddest outlaw in the entire-ritty o' th' Wild Wild Westerns. Well, Wade and Evans, bad men both if at varyin' degrees, cross paths, an' what with one thing an' another it ends up that an unlikely group o' cowpokes includin' Evans, Washoe Tudyk the nervous town doc, The Bible-thumpin' Two-Gun Zombie (suckin' chest wound an' all), and the grinnin' henchman o' the town's richest jerk end up haulin' Wade up to a town called Contention to catch th' title o' the film. Along the way, they find thisselves in all sorts o' trials an' travails, includin' encounters with crackshot Injuns, the heathen Chinee, a tobacco-chawin' Luke Wilson - the heartless bastard o' the feared Wilson Boys - various stabbin' implements, an' Evans' son, who looks like th' godless kin a' Christian Slater an' Cillian Murphy. Along the way the posse is exposed to th' rather unique philosophizin's o' the surprisingly deep outlaw poet Wade and is pursued relentless-like by Death-That-Walks Foster, playin' a dapper young maniac named Charlie Prince, an' the rest o' Wade's colorful gang of cutthroats. An' somewhere between Evans' crappy ranch and the dusty Western stunt show town o' Contention, this stupid Western dialect broke a knee and was shot in the back of the head with a Remington.
Sorry, son, it had to be put down.
Comment il Rouler: I think I liked 3:10 to Yuma for two reasons above any other - one is that I haven't seen a Western with so many great lines since Tombstone (although, much as I might have enjoyed this little celebration of America's love affair with train timetables, it ain't no Tombstone). These are some witty, thoughtful, droll fuckin' cowboys. They quote the Proverbs and introspect and say deep and disquieting things about the brief and brutish lives of the outlaw and the starving rancher alike, and then when the time comes they gun motherfuckers down like Samuel L. Jackson on a bender in SIn City. I like that. There's no line with quite the resonant immortal bite of "I'm your huckleberry.", but "Even bad men love their mommas." has a certain enduring beauty to it, and coupled with the sudden brutality of the scene which the line caps, it'll definitely be a keeper.
Secondishly, this movie was a pleasant reminder that just because I've liked Christian Bale's last few movies more than I've liked Russell Crowe's recent batch, that doesn't necessarily mean I like Bale more than I like Crowe. Don't get me wrong - the character of Dan Evans is a case-hardened bad-ass with some wicked lines and a savage Bale glare and an apparently magic Winchester rifle. But Russell Crowe introduces the first outlaw I've fallen in love with since Doc Holliday. He's smart. He's lethal. He's merciless. He's witty. He's cunning. He's dapper. He has a cool hat and a gun named the Hand of God. He draws hawks and leaps rooftops and kills people for being rude. There's nothing about Ben Wade not to like except for the fact that he'll kill you and everyone you care about - but in that, he exemplifies the secret dream of the American West, and provides an intriguing segue for me to explore in this next paragraph.
There are two basic alpha male archetypes that dominate Western thinking; James Bond and Jesse James. James Bond represents the British fantasy - elegant women with nice teeth eager to have filthy but completely sanitary sex with you, all the expensive cocktails you can drink, cars that aren't laughable Minis or puttering Renaults, and the license to kill those who you deem to have trespassed upon the sovereignty of your nation. The latter is very important - Bond is a rogue and a gentleman killer, but he's one that has all the appropriate paperwork and government chitties. A self-reliant killer who can, ultimately, rely on his beneficent government. Jesse James, on the other hand, is just the opposite. He embodies the spirit of the American West - the man who goes out past where the law can reach him and becomes a law unto himself. He wasn't a mad dog killer by any means; that wouldn't fit the fantasy. He killed those who opposed him with the unspoken understanding that any such were cowards, law dogs, or fools. I'm always going to side with Chaos against Law, even when Chaos wears a shiny badge like Wyatt or the Doc's. And that's why I like Ben Wade so much in this movie, and why he could kick James Bond's ass. Except maybe the Daniel Craig Bond.
Coupled with an excellent script and some powerhouse performances by larger-than-Yankeedom characters, 3:10 to Yuma has the added advantage of an excellent linear plot with plenty of tension and a giant train at the end. Combined with a rooftop chase, guest appearances by railroad-pounding Chinese and the aforementioned deadly Indian savages, a gun with a curse on it, and a horse that comes when whistled up, this movie comes perilously close to being the perfect Western, the one Plato would sit down to watch while eating the exemplar of popped corn and sitting in the perfect form of Chair. Sadly, it's still short a dance hall with a fiery blonde saloon girl, a mysterious man with no name, a lightning storm and an axehandle from being completely perfect. The action is sharp and shot with a beautiful Sergio Leone clarity which is a nice change of pace from the hallucinogenic violence of Sunshine and the jittery Handicam terror of Cloverfield. Gunshots are bright and vivid in the bright sunlight, and men die in the dust with true grit and real Hondo bravado. There are some excellent touches to the shooting that have been the hallmark of Mangold's limited but sterling career. Watch Copland and Identity, brilliantly scripted mangum opi that become all the richer thanks to clever shooting and strong direction. It's hard to film a Western that doesn't look like either a knockoff of Gunsmoke or The Magnificent Seven. If there was any one thing 3:10 to Yuma really reminded me of, it was Brisco County Junior, arguably the cleverest Western series ever filmed. Bright, sharp, lots of steady movement and establishing shots, and lots of quiet reflective moments between the bursts of gunfire.
It's by no means perfect, mind you. Some of the characters are kind of annoying, the motivations are a little muddy, and even the brilliant Bale and Crowe's characters seem to act a little impulsively at times as they rush natural interactions to their conclusion in order to catch up with the script as it chugs along. Also there's quite a few loose ends, and some parts of the story don't make any sense unless you watch the DVD special edition and catch all the deleted scenes. It really grinds my gears (Fuck you, Griffin, my name's Wheel and I'll take that phrase if I fucking well want it, you fat animated prick) when directors cut out important bits that leave big gaping bleeding holes in the story - cuts that no director in his right mind would have made 20 years ago - because NOW they know the scenes aren't really gone, they're just going to the DVD. Here's where I turn on Mangold like a drunken cobra; he's a damn good director, but he's fallen prey to the laziness and idle greed of the Special Features menu. There was a time when you had to THINK before you cut a film, knowing that every frame was expensive and every word meant something at the time. Editors were like assassins, hired to kill the right word at the right time, usually in the dead of night when no one could stop them, and serious directors demanded final cut so they knew they'd be able to save their baby on the operating table before it was hacked up by butchers. Now any blind yokel with a Macbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro can slash apart a feature film and let it be released into theaters like a crippled butterfly, and directors let it slide, knowing that their art is all still intact on a million shiny discs, twinkling in the future. This, I think, heralds the end of the movie theater as we know it, the end of quiet dark spaces and greasy popcorn slicks on the unseen floor and previews with green MPAA bars and the soft ratcheting hymn of the projector. In the future, every home will be a theater, and every last man a projectionist.
Endgame: 3:10 to Yuma - it may be a damn good cowboy movie, or it may just be the Antichrist. |
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