Hick_N_Hixville Reviews

A Walk in the Woods (2015)

A Vanity Project That Still Generates Laughs

[23 March 2017]

Robert Redford cast himself as an 80 years old writer hiking the Appalachian Trail.

That ought to be worth some laughs, and it is.

I went into the movie not having read the source material, so unlike probably about 80 percent of the reviewers, I had no frame of reference for calling out its heresies. And who says movies have to be exact to their source material anyway? Kubrick's The Shining will always be better than Stephen King's own mediocre, but very faithful, miniseries version.

The ages of the actors didn't bother me. It added to the humor. No, very few people Robert or Nick's age hike the AT, but a few do. Every year. If the movie had been about college age buddies hiking the AT in their stylishly correct trekking gear, it would have been boring. Nothing interesting in seeing that.

So how could the movie have been better? Casting certainly. Who? Well, how about the middle aged gang from Sideways? Call it Walking Sideways in the Woods. Paul Giamatti as Bryson, and Thomas Haden Church as Katz. They are closer in age to the source material, and could have done more than believable justice to the roles. Cast Jessica Hetch (Victoria in Sideways) as Bryson's wife, and Sandra Oh as the annoying lady hiker.

Who for the randy motel lady with a thing for Bryson? Virigina Madsen of course.

What about Katz's laundromat wannabe lay? Cammi (Missy Doty) from the BBQ joint of course. And the same husband (M.C Gainey) as her monster truck driving husband here.

Miles' mother (Marylouise Burke) could have run the hiker hostel, or been the waitress at the "Sorry We're Open" Choke and Puke.

That probably would have been a better movie. Well I know it would have.

But it's funny the way it is, just not as funny as it could be.

Gattaca (1997)

A Beautiful Penis

[8/10 · 9 August 2012]

With all due respect to Ron Howard and John Nash, that could be the subtitle of this movie. For it is that randomly endowed aspect of the protagonist's genetically "imperfect" body that probably ultimately saved him.

Ethan Hawke, at 27, was arguably at the peak of his own physical (and sexual) prowess when he made this movie in 1997 (and found in costar Uma Thurman the mother of his own first set of randomly generated spawn). The admiration for Hawke's character's junk induced in the doctor/lab tech who regularly observed and tested his "borrowed" urine would ironically pay off in the end, when this same corporate functionary looked the other way after Hawke's character got caught without his genetically engineered sponsor's pee during a random test right before he was to blast off for Titan.

Despite the veiled and not so veiled references (in a movie featuring the late Gore Vidal, no doubt) to penis size, it was probably this white coat's homo-erotic attraction to Hawke's character, as much as his admiration for Hawke's ability to overcome his genetically assumed fate through sheer Nietzschean will that lead him to smile and tell Hawke, "You'll miss your flight," after he failed the pee test and revealed his true identity. As far as this man is concerned, Hawke had already revealed enough of his "right stuff" to warrant being given a chance at fulfilling his dream of space flight, despite his state sanctioned biological shortcomings.

This movie is interesting, but its view of a potential eugenics dystopia is typical fantasy. Do you think a society so advanced that any genetic imperfection could be removed from lab generated babies could not, also, using advanced stem cell, or other therapy, cure the accidental paralysis of Hawke's genetically perfect sponsor?

Also, how can you account for the almost universal access to this technology? Hawke's parents appear to be folks of modest means, yet they can easily make a "designer" child out of his younger brother?

The reality with this sort of thing, if it ever comes into being, is that in a Randian society like ours, it will only be available to the very rich for generations at best, then afterwards the upper middle classes, but never everyone, unless government policy (and money) ala National Socialism promote it as a universal method of procreation (and only then likely for certain government approved ethnic or existing socioeconomic groups).

And certainly the premise (reinforced by comments from Hawke's penile admirer in the conclusion while discussing his own "perfect" son) is that this method of making babies may not be all it is cracked up to be.

Do you think a society where a large segment of the people can choose the traits of their children will, in the end, be one composed of hardy souls able to adapt to whatever fate may throw at them? Or easily resist conquest from a society of folks who make babies the old fashioned way?

If thoroughbred horses are any example, people is this type of society will likely be very beautiful, never bald, mostly blonde, everyone will play the piano like a virtuoso, and they will all be fragile. I doubt, in the end, their technology would save them from the barbarians at the gates, or their own underclasses. But, of course, that is the point of this movie.

Cthulhu (2007)

One "Queer" Weird Tale

[5/10 · 22 November 2009]

For anyone who isn't a "fan," this movie is an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's campy, but classic 1931 novella, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a master of what is called the "weird tale." I cannot think of anything weirder, and ironically perhaps more appropriate, than making a homosexual version of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. After all, most of Lovecraft's stories, written in prissy overblown prose, were full of sexual repression, and dominated by the lurid tension of forbidden and unspeakable couplings. That is why they are so "weird," and for their time (and even our own) so uniquely interesting.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is just such a story, and the chief weakness of this movie is the filming locations aren't consistently decadent enough to capture the mood of its inspiration. The house where the modern Marsh prophet of the "Old Ones" resides is weird enough, and the wharf-side warehouse is acceptable, but the other scenes of night time ramblings through what looks like suburban tract housing blows the mood badly. Capturing Lovecraft well is about capturing his non linear backdrops more than anything else, and the scenes used aren't sufficiently irregular.

Other than this problem, the appropriate sexual tension is there and the rest of the film is creepy enough to almost pull it off. The drugging and "rape" of the gay heir to an unspeakable genealogical legacy by rapacious Tori Spelling in full bimbo mode, assisted by her redneck husband, and done so he can be compelled to fulfill his destiny and spawn subhuman "inbred" descendants for the cause of world domination is a particularly campy and interesting homage to Lovecraftian sexual themes.

Also compelling is a scene later near the end of the movie where the nerdish (and presumably fully) human brother-in-law of the gay man (the actor playing the in-law bears a passing physical resemblance to Lovecraft himself) is shown crucified to a tree in front of the family home. This occurs on the day when the earlier generations of mutant townsfolk slither in from the ocean for an "Old Home Day" reunion, and sacrifice ceremony to their "Old One" gods in preparation to take over the world. Most Lovecraft purists who don't like this movie will say this is a sly way the filmmakers tell the audience they are "crucifying" Lovecraft's work, but I think they just wanted to show he was killed presumably because he was not man enough to spawn inhuman scion with his buxom inbred wife. In the end, it took a "queer" to make "queer" babies for this "weird" tale.

Lovecraft's writings have acquired a cult following among their own version of the "trekkie" sci fi con type, but the man himself was not interested in inventing a "mythos" for role playing gamers. His stories were extended metaphors for his racist views about the ethnic "degeneration" of Yankee New England because of pre-quota era immigration, and the Shadow Over Innsmouth is directly related to what he would have regarded as the undesirable infiltration, and ultimate demographic domination, of traditional Anglo Protestant fishing villages, such as Gloucester, Marblehead, etc., by Portuguese, Italian, and other Southern Europeans, and their "foreign superstitions" (Roman Catholicism).

Lovecraft softened his parochial racist views late in life, and some of his better works, such as "The Colour Out of Space" represent the emergence of the modern science fiction story, and transcend this sort of thing. He was regarded as a hack writer during his lifetime by the literary establishment, but like many complicated and visionary types, his works have been reappraised by academia to the point he is now regarded as a sort of twentieth century Poe.

Sicko (2007)

A Devastating Indictment of the American Heath Care Industrial Complex is Itself Devastated by a Typical MM Stunt.

[6/10 · 22 November 2009]

I don't believe Michael Moore is a Communist. I don't even believe he is a seriously committed ideological leftist. What he is, fundamentally, is an immature and overly zealous aspiring provocateur. He is, though, one that is capable of fits of comic brilliance that sometimes elevate his otherwise smarmy and unsubtle undergraduate level audio-visual activism. "Sicko," like most everything else he has done, is both brilliant and ultimately self destructive.

This movie will make you laugh out loud in the face of greed induced misery, and at its creator's collegiate stunts, but it will not advance the cause of meaningful health care reform in the United States. It will not do so because Moore, like he always does, goes too far with his stunts and gives his enemies all they need to effectively disregard anything meaningful he says as they discredit him. Consider this. If you really want to convince the millions of public educated, hard working, patriotic, service-jobbed Americans who are the most abused by Big Health Care, you can't use "Che" Guevara's daughter to help make your case for reform. All you will do with this is give a good "Christian" red state pickup truck demagogue like "Not Ready Freddy" Thompson the opportunity to chomp on a Montecristo with all the B-movie bluster he can muster, and wipe you out with a nicely drawled red herring like, "Michael Moore thinks you and I ought to go to Cuba to get our health care." No, Michael Moore probably doesn't think that, but he should have stayed away from Havana.

The movie works only when Michael stays Stateside, wallowing in the ennui of middle American HMO Hell, and the corrupt politics that sustain it. When he visits friendly "socialist" paradises like Canada, Britain, and spends time with the interminable French, he starts to cook the books too much for his own good, then he finally runs his ragtag flotilla of uninsurable American rejects completely aground in what looks like Castro's own private hospital.

Michael Moore recognizes the problem, but like most everyone else, he can't follow through with any viable solution in a way that makes logical sense. He falls into the most basic polemical trap used in debating this issue, that: of comparing alternative systems by using objective statistics that don't conform with his own stacked deck of anecdotal evidence. He is not unique. The reactionaries who defend the current U.S. system do the same thing.

Everyone has heard it a thousand times. Canadians have to wait months for CAT scans and by-pass surgery, etc. Maybe sometimes they really do, but apparently they only have to wait 45 minutes to see a primary care doctor in a clinic. Band-Aids are cheap. Is the homey private room in the British maternity ward typical of what awaits the average NHS hospital patient? I'm skeptical.

There is no question that the life expectancy in Sweden, Canada, Britain, etc. is higher, and the infant mortality rates are lower, than the same figures for the USA. "Socialized" medicine probably has a great deal to do with this. Here is why.

If you are a bank president or a lawyer or member of Congress in the USA, you will get much better medical care than the average person would get in Canada, Sweden, Australia, etc., but you will not if you are one of the millions of Americans with no health insurance, or the even greater millions of working class types who are marginally insured through cut rate HMOs.

Even the most buck-toothed Brit in the NHS would fare better than these Americans who are on the margins. That is the key to understanding the statistics. Moderately mediocre care for everyone that stresses preventing illness is better, at least for the statistics, than no care, or really bad reactive care for a sizable chunk of a country's population.

There is no solution to America's Health Care woes without a solution to the whole dysfunctional and mercenary American consumer culture of which dysfunctional health-care is only a logical part. This is the bizarro world where fat people super size it at McDonald's, then go home and take their handful of cholesterol, blood pressure and ED pills, the same ones they saw advertised on TV just after the McDonald's commercial. The American system is really all about making you sick, keeping you sick, and making money off of both ends. It ought to be, of course, about making you well, and keeping you well.

"Socialized" medicine, of some sort, will eventually come to the USA. Thirty years, at least, and counting, of the creeping "fascist" medicine of HMOs have psychologically conditioned the population to accept it.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

A Funny Movie That Could Do Without Jason Segel's Unsightly Penis.

[7/10 · 11 October 2009]

You will never see Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise bear all in front of a camera, but actors who have big flaccid penises are not afraid to wag them on screen nowadays. Ewan McGregor does, and now Jason Segel torments us with his. If you can stand looking as his bratwurst flop about harmlessly while his girlfriend outlines the reasons she is dumping him, then the rest of this movie is pretty enjoyable.

I don't really get why this is necessary. Jason Segel is not some ripped stud that anyone (straight woman or gay male) would likely want to see naked and unerect. Maybe it's because the writers of this movie thought it would be FUNNY to see a moderately flabby beer buddy type like Jason Segel lounge around naked and limp on screen. It's just boring. If I have to see a penis, I would rather see an audience in a theater laugh at some matinée idol's small one being fleetingly displayed. Suck it up Tom, and just do it.

Obsessed (2009)

Dancing Around the Ebony Maypole

[5/10 · 11 October 2009]

"Obsessed" is a curious movie that discreetly avoids its obvious mythic pitfall. Even though the plot centers around a petite blond women's sexual enthrall to a handsome, muscular African-American man, there is never any overt reference to her, say, worshiping at the altar of his Big Black Penis.* The movie sets out deliberately to avoid this, and does, so it never veers into full blown camp, but it also lacks the punch such "black" (no pun) humor, even if handled carefully and creatively, could deliver, and the flick remains basically a formulaic "fatal attraction" type thriller that just presents the story mechanically.

The story revolves around how the woman, a temp secretary at a high dollar investment firm targets the man, an ace portfolio churner there, after they encounter each other in the elevator on her first day coming into work. The way they interact is indeed funny at times for sure, mainly from the unintentional laughs of typical lazy scripting, and the Nordic vixen's best efforts to outdo Glenn Close for over the top craziness. The obvious joke in such a setup, though, is never approached. You'd think that when the victimized guy's friend at work (white actor, and consummate white bread frat-boy Jerry O'Connell) remarks in an offhand way one day in the break room that he's lucky she is "not my type" that he might follow that up with a dry chuckle and something like, "of course why should she settle for my lil' smokey when she can have your Bun Size Ball Park Frank?" Nothing so tastelessly tasty ever happens here.

:*The title of a book by Shawn Taylor, an African American (male) writer who explores the culture and history of this racist stereotype, and its effects on black men's attitudes and behavior over the years. Yes, he does so with a sense of humor.

State of Play (2009)

Viva la Americana!

[8/10 · 16 May 2009]

The real star of this movie is not an actor, but a piece of real estate.

Back in 1999, I went to see "Arlington Road," a thriller filmed in the Virginia suburbs and DC. Just a couple of months later I was in the DC area, staying at this old motel in Crystal City while trying to seduce a friend of mine (only one of several reasons I was there).

Now, ten years later, I am back in a theater watching another thriller set in DC and the Virginia suburbs, probably just months away from another trip to DC to try and seduce a former co-worker (she is hotter than the friend and much less likely to be responsive, and if her marriage is still intact, I won't even try), and what do I see on the screen? The "dump" I stayed at back in '99, very meticulously portrayed too.

The Americana Hotel is not exactly a "dump." It is a legendary tourist class motel literally minutes (during non rush hours) from the capitol. If you are a church group from Iowa looking for a cheap dig with shuttle service into DC, and no nonsense information about how to get around, this is your place. It's old, but at least ten years ago, the rooms were spotlessly clean, I would say cleaner than the rooms at the Marriott next door, so clean I had no reservations about soaking my hemorrhoids in the bathtub (not a spot of mold on the sparkling tile), and the beds Jason Bateman grumbled about in "State of Play" were actually very comfy. It was run by this older gent with a curt nasally Yankee accent and brisk manner who otherwise was quite helpful in his reserved way. Calling it a "hotel" is a stretch, but in the internet age that slight deception likely makes the old motel seem more important from a carefully designed website than it otherwise would be.

I was actually thinking about staying in Georgetown this next trip (trying to be more impressive since she is hotter), but now after seeing "State of Play" I might stay one night back at the Americana, just to see if things are still as they were.

Otherwise, "State of Play" is a very good political thriller. Russell Crowe is pitch perfect as an arrogant, slack, primo uomo reporter with a "past" intimate to the principal conspirators, and who (at least before the movie ends) presumes himself too much of a professional to try and bed his pretty younger female reporter partner.

Ben Affleck, likewise, is perfectly cast as a slimy politician buried up to his eyeballs in lies and corruption.

This flick is not exactly "All the President's Men," but there is one close call in a parking garage (or as Jason Bateman's sexually omnivorous lounge lizard character would say, in a "gay rage"), and the writing and acting in "State of Play" are well above average, enough to make it a very worthy way to spend an afternoon enjoying its vicarious, guilty pleasures. After seeing it, I can't wait to hit the Metro again, even if she won't answer her phone, or bother to return my voice mails.

The Reader (2008)

"The Reader" Delivers the "Goods" That "Milk" Failed To Fake

[7/10 · 4 February 2009]

When I went to see this curious combination of art-house sex romp and period mystery, it was playing on one screen in an 18 screen multiplex theater right next to "Milk." What irony.

I first took notice of "Milk," when I read that Gus Van Sant made Sean Penn and James Franco wear huge rubbery fake penises for "love" scenes and other nudity. I figured I would go see that, get the audience reaction, and see if I could keep from laughing and embarrassing myself. It's one thing to laugh out loud during Rambo IV when Stallone starts blowing apart the Burmese, but quite another to do the same in a theater (likely) full of many older, worldly gay men there to see a "serious" cinematic tribute for Harvey Milk.. After I read that all the "strap on" scenes were cut out, and that there was no honest depiction of the bath house debauchery the period was famous for, I skipped it.

I went into "The Reader," without having read the book, and not knowing much about it except that it dealt with Nazis, war criminals and sex. That was enough to interest me. Shades of "The Night Porter" maybe? Not really, but the penis had definitely moved over from next door, and it didn't look fake either. Completely flaccid (absolutely necessary to avoid an instant NC-17 tag), certainly not huge, but a realistically ample "shower." It was attached to a barely 18 year old little known German actor who looked like a brown haired version of Prince William fused with a lanky Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and who partook in quite a few of those slow, extended "European" type explicit sex scenes with 30something lead actress Kate Winslet, who also showed off almost all of her body except the beav. I was the only male in a sparse audience made up entirely of middle aged, and older women. The movie was not funny, but I did laugh quietly at the thought of the dilemma this might pose for many of the gay men next door if they really knew what was going on so close by.

I also laughed a bit because the other Winslet flick, "Revolutionary Road" was playing just a couple of screens on down. Here a stiffly clothed Winslet gets two of the most incompetently mechanical screws in modern film. If "The Reader" is all about sexual fantasy fulfillment for "mature" straight women, "Road's" adaptation of Richard Yates' 1962 suburban "horror" novel is an explanation for why the Stepford men in Ira Levin's later horror tale turned all their women into programmed robots. It was the only way those 30 second wonders were ever going to give them an orgasm.

"The Reader," beyond its relaxed Eurosex themes, is also a lame thriller. Lame only because it isn't very thrilling. The secret of the story is very easy to spot early on. The core plot involved Kate Winslet and her brief, lusty 1958 relationship with the German youth, aged 15 to 16 then, and how their lives and interactions play out through 1995. Seems that before she became the cathartic lover of an impressionable and lonely teenage boy, Winslet's character was an SS guard at Auschwitz and other camps during the War, and she is charged and convicted in 1966 of commanding a unit of female guards in 1944 that killed around 300 Jewish prisoners by burning them alive in a church (a trademark act of Holocaust brutality) during the retreat from the camps as Soviet troops advance.

The decently hung German kid plays the male lead character both as a 16 year old, and as a 24 year old law student in 1966 during Winslet's trial. The 1958 scenes are lushly detailed period recreations, complete with bucolic and romantic "wandervogeling" between Winslet and her boy that vaguely evoke similar earlier scenes in "Cabaret." The scene involving the penile money shot is a lingering one where Winslet slowly bathes the youth's taut, naked body as he stands awkwardly inside a claw foot tub in her dingy flat. No, she can't scrub away her sins doing this, but it is gratuitous eye candy for a select audience, both watching it, and missing it in the theater next door.

The male lead as an older man is played by Ralph Fiennes, whose persona is so radically different from that of the younger actor that it's hard to suspend disbelief and accept the two as the same person. Fiennes does his usual; he whisks about in well tailored suits and looks consistently constipated, and sexually aloof. He is more like the duds Winslet is dealing with down the hall on Revolutionary Road than the shy, eager stud she bedded years earlier.

I am also a bit leery of the "good German" approach of the film. These Germans seem a bit too eager to prosecute their own kind for war crimes, but as "good" Germans will do, they justify their desire for justice with a lot of awkward, rambling philosophizing about the difference between morality and law. Just like they did years earlier when opportunists like Heidegger bastardized Nietzsche to justify acts they now admit are crimes. One thing this movie does well is it shows how it was mostly illiterate working class types, such as Winslet's character, who get what tepid justice is meted out, rather than say, a mayor, or Bundestag legislator, or some AG CEO or chairman, all of whom would likely go deliberately undiscovered and unpunished. Even at that, for someone convicted of "murdering" 300 Jews, and sentenced to life in prison, she's up for release within twenty years, and with all the tender support the state social services agencies can muster to help her readjust to life on the outside. Despite all the sex, and decent mounting of the historical periods this movie delivers, I still like "The Odessa File," and maybe "Marathon Man" better.

September Dawn (2007)

The Morman Male as Metrosexual Psychotic (cue laughter)

[6/10 · 4 February 2009]

Do a Google search for the words "Mormon" and "castration" and you'll get links to variations of a story about an old Church Bishop who, during the 1850s in Utah, took a fancy to a young lass in love with an LDS buck near her own age. She naturally spurned the old fart's advance because of her love for this boy who also steadfastly stood by his own affections for the girl. Now a powerful Bishop in a Patriarchal religion such as Mormonism, you might expect, is not easily denied matters of the flesh, regardless of how many wives he may already possess. Soon the young man is set upon by allies of the aged and horny Saint, and roughly de-manned. His severed genitals were nailed to some wall in a public locale as a crude warming to men and women alike of the consequences in disobeying one of God's chosen representatives. Welcome to the world of the Latter Day Saints as depicted in "September Dawn." This exact storyline in not the main subject of this movie, though the film graphically depicts in one interesting scene such a castration by the early Mormon pioneers of Utah as part of its overall message. That message is that the Mormons started out as little more than a creepy Branch Davidian style blood cult led by psychotics and perverts that has somehow managed to metastasize into a major universal world religion. Interestingly enough, this isn't meant as a comment on religions in general (i.e. they all started out this way, we just have better source material on this one since its only a little over 150 years old), but rather that, no matter how innocent and clean cut those young men in black ties and white shirts riding around on bicycles may seem today, the "family friendly" modern LDS church has a really nasty, violent, and eccentric legacy that it will stop at nothing to cover up.

The major violent legacy the movie focuses on, of course, is the "Mountain Meadows Massacre" of September 11 (ugh), 1857. This tragedy actually occurred, actually on that date, and actually involved Mormons killing "Gentile" pioneers passing through Utah bound for California. The level of involvement of Brigham Young and the Salt Lake Patriarchy in the incident has always been hotly debated, and "September Dawn" is unambiguous in presenting the case for complete premeditated culpability.

Whether or not Mormon founder Joseph Smith was a con-man, delusional, or a sexual deviant, or Brigham Young a Taliban style fanatic are all matters of debate based on evidence, but the melodramatic way this flick presents both sides invites some snickers, and of course, angry attacks from modern Mormons. Most reviewers tend to focus on the way the Mormons are presented, but equally intriguing is the way the female screenwriter of this movie depicted the "Gentile" wagon train. Its denizens are, for mid 19th century Arkansans, the model of broad minded, peaceful tolerance and liberated gender roles. Their minister and his daughter sound more like Unitarians than say, 19th century Southern Baptists, and some of their women slap rawhide and confront the bewildered Saints with as much authority as the menfolk. As a cinematic device, this is a compelling counter mythology to that of Mormon repression, and in a weird way actually makes the film rise above its melodrama.

The real Arkansans likely inspired as much fear among the then persecuted Mormons as they did hatred, and it ain't just because some of the womenfolk might have ridden shotgun and worn pants..

If 19th century Mormons were fanatics, and perhaps driven to even more fanaticism in response to persecution, how do today's Mormons compare to the likes of the Taliban? If you are talking about Warren Jeffs' fundamentalist Mormon cult that still practices polygamy (and has been in the news recently because of the high profile raid on one of its Texas communities), then this movie play like a documentary, at least as to gender roles. As for the "mainstream" variation Mitt Romney belongs too, well, genealogy is partly my profession (having nothing to do with any religious beliefs), and I have frequently availed myself of the rich resources the LDS church maintains in this field, and which they make available to anyone. Never once has anyone of these volunteer librarians ever approached me with any missionary efforts, let alone death threats, and the one time I engaged one of the librarians on duty at a "stake" branch about the religion, he quickly informed me he was a lapsed member and basically regarded the religion as a bunch of nonsense. And they were letting him work in their library.

The castration scene in"September Dawn" is emblematic of the bizarre production values that make this movie, in many ways, an unintentionally hilarious piece of historical camp. It occurs early in the film, during a cinematic collage of images crosscut between topical examples of church "discipline" and crazed sermonizing by Brigham Young about blood atonement. Night riders swoop down on the cabin of an unsuspecting church member who has committed adultery, or some sort of sexual "sin." The riders drag the hapless man from his cabin bed, and in moonlit silhouette they lift up his nightshirt. One of them raises a knife and goes right for the groin. Next scene is a close up of what is supposed to be the unfortunate fellow's severed scrotum and testicles being tacked to his cabin door with the knife that just emasculated him. The organs appear to be of the grade you expect would be marketed by Johnson Smith, Honor House, or similar comic book novelty merchant around Halloween. Basically a piece of obvious rubbery smooth plastic completely without pubic hair. Nineteenth century men cutting each others testicles off for vicarious thrills masked as religious duty I can believe, but not them "manscaping." . The effects person really should have glued a little fuzz to those Play-Doh plumbs.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

Back in the Gray Flannel Days Before Mankind Discovered the Clitoris

[8/10 · 29 January 2009]

After seeing yet another existential evocation of dystopian lives in 1950s suburbia (try the far more campy melodrama, Far From Heaven , or the far more gentle satire, Pleasantville, for a set of comparisons) it is obvious why the next step in American cultural evolution following Frank Lloyd Wright's inspired masculine tract house angularity involved both the "Feminine Mystique" and the "Hite Report." The sex in these 'burbs was just god-awful. Dicaprio's office stud was, at best, a six to seven pump chump fighting to beat a soft boiled egg timer when he played kitchen man to Winslet's unfulfilled housewife. Not surprisingly, she cheated to find better, but the guy next door was a truly pitiful front seat three stroker, if that. Did people of this type during this time period really screw so industrially? I mean I know the proverbial back seat drive-in movie thing was likely a fast, furtive and mostly clothed affair, but if this movie makes any statement about the banality and hopelessness of these characters' predicament, it is in the bump and grind of their everyday lives, or the lack of any to be precise. These well-suited and fedora clad men had won the war, then came home to fight meaningless memo battles within art deco wood and frosted glass foxhole versions of Dilbert's future cubicle hell. They wound up all pea and no cock, and their poor drab hens paid the real price.

I can easily picture Eddie Haskell as a selfish and quick lout bumbling about darkly in the back seat of a Studebaker between double creature features, but. I wonder if this is what it was like in Ward and June Cleaver's bedroom, or in their kitchen when Wally and Beaver were off somewhere being all American boys?

(Curious Note: Actor Dylan Baker, who plays DiCaprio's cubicle inmate at work, strikingly resembles the model for the father subject in the infamous 1930s anti-Depression propaganda billboard, "World's Highest Standard of Living, There is No Way Like the American Way." This billboard was made world famous through Margaret Bourke-White's classic ironic black and white photograph showing poor African-American flood victims lining up for relief in front of one in Louisville, KY in 1937. The billboard artwork, though it depicted an upper middle class white family enjoying "prosperity" as the Depression presumably ebbed in the late 1930s, is nonetheless eerily prescient for, and evocative of post war 1950s material culture.)

The Night Listener (2006)

Robin Williams is Back Home Again Inhabiting a Role Only He Could Play

[8/10 · 29 May 2008]

The Night Listener is a "six monther" for me. That term refers to an elite group of movies I can (and usually do) watch at least every six months. Classics like "Deliverance," "Apocalypse Now," "The Birds," "Sideways," "The Beast Within," "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton," "The Green Berets," among others.

The Night Listener reaches this level of perfection because of Robin Williams. No actor alive imbues the subdued comical world of a stereotypical World Weary Middle Age Gay Man (all rights reserved) like he does. Insert that stock figure into a moody soft boiled film lavender (as opposed to a hard boiled film noir) mystery involving an obligatory May – September thing going south while the older man develops a dangerous (but ostensibly non- pederastic) telephone obsession with a young boy he will never meet, and who may not even exist, and you have the making of something, well, interesting in a FABULOUS offbeat way.

The relationship ending scenes in the beginning and middle of the movie between Williams and his roving junior boyfriend are inadvertently hilarious because the senior Williams' tight-assed daddy character is eventually driven to exasperated excretory profanity. There is nothing quite like Robin Williams putting that ever so slightly prissy bit of hemorrhoidal indignation to the "F" word when he is playing gay.

After rejection, it's great fun watching Williams' unlikely detective work unfold as his character shambles and sighs through all the scripted midlife existentialism and small town intrigues along the way to an ambiguous denouement, and this makes the movie a very satisfying and leisurely paced piece of camp entertainment. Especially wonderful is Williams 'dinner date with a nasty vending machine Kaiser-roll sandwich (san microwave) late one night in a fleabag motel lobby that sets up, predictably, a crucial plot twist. It's all sort of like enjoying one of those badly written, but wonderfully sleazy Gothic novels over a couple of big mugs of hot cocoa while curled up in a clean sheeted bed after a nice long Calgon bath on a blustery or cold rainy night after the cable goes out.

This movie is not Hitchcock, but like Hitchcock's work, it mates its sense of style, especially attention to stylistic details, and its mood so appropriately to its characters that the background is almost itself a form of characterization. Robin Williams' perfectly arranged and cluttered city townhouse where he lives alone since his "young" man left him is an extended evocation of his fey despair, and the shabby Midwestern town he winds up in chasing after the phantom boy looks like a postcard series for edge of the world hopelessness.

What is even more fascinating than the movie itself is the information revealed (perhaps inadvertently) in the DVD special features about gay body/age perceptions and aspirations. The older, more erudite and hirsute Williams and his buffed, shaved "younger man" are an expected pop culture distortion and idealization of the real life Armistead Maupin and his former partner, Terry Anderson, the co-writers of the film's screenplay, and upon whom the events in the movie are supposedly loosely based to some degree. The reality is both are rather average looking, bearish men of similar looking ages.

I guess this means, despite the mythic reputations of Isherwood, Bachardy, Versace, etc., that reality among most mature worldly gay men of means and talent really does involve, more often than not, what they have to settle (or pay) for. That would be enough to make them world weary.

The Flock (2007)

A Ludicrous Romance Between Gere and Danes Would Have Camped It Up Right Nicely

[5/10 · 29 May 2008]

One of my favorite movies is "As Good As It Gets." It took the ludicrous idea of a romance between sixtysomething Jack Nicholson and thirtysomething Helen Hunt and made one of the most hilariously unbelievable concepts workable, and snagged Oscars for both Nicholson and Hunt.

So would a movie about fetish sex killers that involved an even more ludicrous romance between an almost sixtysomething Richard Gere and twentysomething Claire Danes get either of them an Oscar? Are you kidding? But it would be hilarious to watch. Better than the relentlessly heavy handed, pseudo-moralistic slop they wallow in.

I mean, come on. Gere needs to play the character as both intensely driven and vulnerable. That would get Danes to at least think about giving him a pity f*ck. Or maybe arouse her curiosity in this movie that is all about the kinkiest aspects of sex just enough to try and find out if this old parole office who is no gentleman is all grayed out and shriveled up down there, or still packing anything worthwhile.

And Gere, in the end, would snap, and become the geriatric version of his "Breathless" character. Danes, of course, would be the object of his twisted obsession.

Cue Jerry Lee Lewis. And there should have been at least one death by gerbiling in this thing.

Bobby (I) (2006)

Why Didn't A Drunk Demi Moore Seduce The Nerdy College Boy Campaign Worker?

[7/10 · 1 December 2006]

Imagine the "Poseidon Adventure" filmed in a grand old hotel about to be torn down, its glory days long gone. Instead of Stella Stevens, there is Demi Moore, looking her age, playing the loud, drunk, obnoxious bitch part. All the characters egotistically go about their pedestrian "swinging 'sixties' business, ignorant of the looming disaster about to engulf them, their hotel, and their country (if you believe the "liberal" message). There is an All-Star cast, including the director's dad, all playing the needed personality stereotypes, and in this case, historical cultural stereotypes. You have a wonderfully distracting storyline about a miscast acid peddling hippie hanging out in a room at this luxury hotel so he can give a couple of nerdy "squares" working in Kennedy's campaign their first "turn on" (an acid peddling hippie is a must have for any unsubtle movie about the "'sixties"). I haven't decided what was more ludicrous. Demi's Midwestern fratboy husband wearing a bad wig as the hippie, or the horn rimmed nerd's skinny naked ass wiggling after he opens a bathroom door and ponders plunging into the warm hallucinatory napalm bath exploding over defoliated Asian farmland he finds on the other side. Should today's audience not know what's "goin' down" with this, there is a background song with instructive lyrics about, "LBJ, LSD, and CIA." OK.

That nerdy college boy's ass is actually symbolic of one thing very wrong with this movie. If we had to see it, instead of that day trippin' nonsense we should have seen it framed against a shot of a naked and drunk old Demi Moore purring for him to come to Mama. This is 1968 right? What famous movie released just before the nasty events this flick is wrapped around was also filmed at this hotel? Ah…If you are old enough to know, you know. If not, if you were playing attention, you heard the nerd mention it by name.

The stars probably did this gig more out of respect for Martin Sheen's politics, or his son's heartfelt ambitions than for the paycheck, but if I were one of the women, I would be livid. Never has any cinematography shown middle age, and even young women, in such unflattering light. All of them, from Helen Hunt to Ms. Moore looked appallingly old. You could see every wrinkle, line, brown spot. Even Lindsay Lohan's 20 year old skin looked freckled and toneless. What was up with that? A bad makeup department? Some silly symbolism about the decay of American innocence playing out on women's bodies I missed? Sharon Stone was completely unrecognizable. I didn't even know she was in it until I saw the closing credit (unfortunately I arrived at my viewing a tiny bit late, so I didn't see any opening credits).

The movie does have one redeeming technical quality. Whoever made the editing decisions did an interesting and effective job working the archival footage of Bobby Kennedy's doomed campaign into the hotel goings-on. I would go see this movie just to see that footage on the big screen arranged the way it was. Seeing RFK being mobbed like a rock star up close and unscripted by all those unscreened people says more about the loss of innocence in politics and Americana than many hours of forced and scripted symbolism can. Unless the forced and scripted symbolism IS the symbol for what politics has become, then we might have something. One old clip shows Bobby campaigning in some Appalachian coal mining hellhole. When asked about his wealth and their poverty by a reporter as the locals gawk at him in the background his comments are halting and uncomfortably naive. Emilio Estevez doesn't believe Bobby was a fake opportunist. He certainly holds the established view that the "ruthless" Kennedy had by 1968 confronted his own Machiavellian tendencies and evolved into something special. He might be right, and I hope he is. If this guy was a demagogue, his technique was effortlessly transparent compared to that of the one we're saddled with today. The contrast between the two is embarrassing, not just in terms of politics and style, but of competence. If you doubt me, just ask yourself who you would prefer in charge of hammering out the deal that managed to end the Cuban Missile Crisis without a war, RFK or ….that "other" Texan? That's my "liberal" thought for today.

Estevez tried to use the old black & white movie "Grand Hotel," as the structural mechanism around which to build his plot and themes. The effect is, at times, more like the 'eighties TV show "Hotel" than the classic Greta Garbo movie. One could have fun examining Demi's character as a parody of Garbo's, but I want to go elsewhere. Whether or not this young Sheen intended it, his movie is a curious, symbolic inversion of "Grand Hotel." The 1932 Garbo movie, filmed in LA, but set in Berlin, was made during the Weimar Republic's last death throes, yet there is not one word of dialogue about, or one single allusion made to Hitler or the political chaos playing out in the streets just outside the doors of that hotel. "Bobby" uses a day in the life of the Ambassador Hotel to reflect on and foreshadow, not escape from, the political maelstrom swirling outside it that portends an ultimate American tragedy once it gets inside.

This movie is solid entertainment, even if its iconography is forced, and its pop culture references too self indulgent at times. I still rather would have seen that kid's ass jiggle opposite Demi Moore's tits, body double or not.

Devil's Pond (2003)

A Guilty Pleasure

[7/10 · 1 December 2006]

It's more of a lake than a pond, and if you expect quality you'll have a devil of a time trying to convince yourself that its worth the rental price, but for me its just the type of bad movie that's a real guilty pleasure.

Imagine what might happen if a former A&F model playing a redneck psycho stalker manages to get the local hick Britney Spears lookalike, played by an alumnus from "American Pie," to marry him and go on their honeymoon for two weeks to a log cabin on an island out in the middle of a VERY isolated lake within a day's drive of the podunk town they live in. It can be reached only after miles of travel over dusty logging roads. And the cell phone doesn't work out there either. You know there's gonna be trouble.

When Britney, still in her wedding dress, climbs into the truck immediately after the ceremony and tells her new cutie to "get me the f*ck outta here," you also know you're in for some wonderfully bad dialog, hammy overacting, bad direction and writing, and lots of lowbrow by the numbers fun. And this flick does not let you down. After a few days when Britney runs out of birth control pills and A&F starts to get weird about wanting to make babies, she might want to end the marriage as quickly as the real Britney did hers, but boy does she have her work cut out for her to do it.

This movie is something a community college drama student from say, northern Minnesota, who had seen a lot of Hitchcock movies and decided he could make one just like them might turn out. Cary Grant, James Mason, or Paul Newman our leading man ain't, but the disconnect between his obviously angelic mallrat looks and the manly deer hunting, wife beating, obsessive character he is asked to portray is most of the fun. The rest is laughing at how dense the chick is for winding up out there in the first place, and how once her brain cells start sparking a little she manages to get herself "the f*ck" out of the mess she is in. Enjoy. I did. :-)

The Descent (2005)

Well Done "Butch" Female Homage to "Deliverance"

[9/10 · 24 November 2006]

This time the explorers in trouble really do have "purdy mouths." This movie is about what happens when a group of six (not four) thrill seeking (but inexperienced and unprepared) upper middle class professional women (not men) find out rather bluntly what happens when they "git in there" in those Appalachian Mountains, USA, they don't respect properly, and then "cain't git out." As much as I wanted to say this movie is derivative, I "cain't." It's well done despite having its influences show, at times, very deliberately and overtly. Before I "git" to the big cinematic homage this movie makes, a few words about the uncredited literary inspiration for it: the novel "The Descent," by Jeff Long. The screenwriter adapted this book just obliquely enough to avoid any successful copy write or unfair usage lawsuits (assuming Long was not paid anything), but if you have read the novel (I did four years ago), you know this movie likely would not exist in its actual realized form if that nook had not been published. Long's work is more epic in scope and globe-trotting in its setting than this movie, and the book's plot details are different, including a bizarre scene where female cave mutants surface, waylay and sexually ravage a pubescent boy, then rip off the hapless kid's penis during a frenzied effort to "revive" him once he is "exhausted." The reason I mention that little, almost seemly incidental item from Long's thick book is that this movie is completely devoid of anything like that. The movie's horror elements are raw, direct, and not in the least campy. Changing Jeff Long's plot around by making it into a powerful re-imagining of James Dickey's "Deliverance," and then avoiding the most obvious homage it could pay to it (a homage that was a central, not incidental part of Dickey's masculine work, but would destroy "The Descent") is what makes this movie work so well.

There is an opening sequence of the women rafting down a whitewater river somewhere in Britain (right hand driving shown), not in canoes, but in big "tourist guide" style rubber rafts. This establishes an immediate and direct link to its predecessor, without any lengthy exposition to bog down the plot. The women are obviously weekend thrill seekers (whitewater) but not overly skilled at what they do (rubber rafts). Tragedy follows thrills when one woman's family is killed in a nasty car accident after they have picked her up at the river take out point. Flash quickly to the following year when the sextet meet again for their annual adventure, this time somewhere in "Appalachian Mountains, USA." More specifically, according to a highway road sign, in the fictional "Chattooga National Park (hummm)." There is a brief flurry of bad jokes among the women about hoedowns and some nondescript banjo music on the radio in one of the two SUVs (as in "Deliverance" there are two vehicles) while the group wends its way deeper into the mountainous forest. One of the women, the leader, jokes about not having been lost in her life.

Instead of rafting, the danger device here is spelunking. The leader conveniently and deliberately chooses to leave the cave guidebook behind in the glove compartment just as leader Burt refused directions to the river thirty-four years ago. To do anything else would defeat the point of it all, right? There is no need to take the book anyway, because the cave they are going in isn't even in it. Needless to say, once underground, the women do get "lost" in many ways, and encounter serious troubles brought on both by their arrogance and lack of caving experience. One woman has a serious accident that results in a nasty surface leg break, complete with protruding bone (sound familiar?), and they of course encounter rather disgusting "locals" down there. Inbred these cave dwellers no doubt are, but they are more like Jeff Long's more extreme example of parallel hominid evolution than James Dickey's sociopathic rednecks. There is a sequence where one of the women falls down a pit into a pool of water and "embraces" a prone cave dweller, but with a nicely different result than in the similar incident with John Voight and the toothless man at the base of Tallulah Gorge.

"Deliverance" is everywhere in this movie, except refreshingly in the one place where it indeed should not be. You just knew, going in, that at least one of those women would have to be, uh, "violated," by these cave critters right? Nine out of ten Hollywood based American hack screenwriters and directors would have played it that way of course, and the movie would have fallen apart. It doesn't happen here, and that could be due to yet another parallel to "Deliverance." Both movies were made by British directors, John Boorman in the original case, Neil Marshall of "Dog Soldiers" notoriety doing this movie.

"Deliverance" was filmed on location in Appalachia. "The Descent" was not. It was filmed as a UK original release movie in Scotland and England. I am not sure exactly where in Scotland (if anyone knows, email me the specifics) the "Appalachia" sequences were filmed, but for a production company restricted to Britain (I am assuming because of budget) they did very well in picking their shooting locales. They avoided the usual treeless highland moors that wouldn't pass for the Blue Ridge or Cumberland Plateau. The fall landscape that did use (oak and maple leaves on the ground in thickly wooded karsty terrain) sort of does look like the Southeastern Mountains of the USA, yet not exactly (too many evergreens along the roadway). In this lushly wooded part of Scotland substituting for Southern Appalachia, the surreal misty intro is yet even more evocative of its inspiration.

Go see it. If you like adventure movies, or horror movies that build on their inspiration without being a simple rehash of old tricks and clichés, you won't be disappointed.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

"Spider-Boy 2" Aims to Please It's Targeted Audiences (and probably will), but Offers Something for the "Babysitter Viewer" Too.

[6/10 · 24 November 2006]

With his performance in "Spider-Boy 2," Tobey Maguire firmly establishes himself as the "thinking person's" Ralph Macchio. The almost 30-year old Maguire's on screen adolescence is virtually undiminished from episode 1, but the darker themes in episode 2 are an intriguing disconnect for older, more discerning viewers (those dragged to see the movie by younger, less discerning ones). I have no doubt that straight girls under 16, and gay men over 40 will enjoy this one as much as the first one, but there is also a little something here for the indifferent captives in the theater as well. Now that the "Batman" series has been resurrected with Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader, I'm thinking that Maguire should be on a short list for Robin should that character show up again in the future, thus sealing the poor actor's fate as an omnipresent junior action hero (while he laughs all the way to the bank, no doubt). Anyone for a big budget, live action version of "Jonny Quest," or "Speed Racer?" Call Tobey!

Shortbus (2006)

The First Ten Minutes Are Like Nothing You Have Ever Seen, Then It Gradually Loses Its Boner

[7/10 · 24 November 2006]

This movie is, as far as I know, the only movie ever distributed in the USA not considered strict pornography that contains both erections and money shots. Yes they are really in this thing, together with an actual plot and fairly nuanced acting.

I won't reveal what happens during the first ten minutes of this movie (all I'll say is its commonly said if most men could do it, they would never leave the house), but it alone is worth the price of a ticket to see. The problem with "Shortbus," is that after that initial rush of jarring novelty, the whole thing gradually, though pleasantly, starts to fall apart. A movie of this sort should not have used an urban swinger's sex club run by a stereotypical drag queen as its central unifying device. This is a cope out; rather the filmmakers should have used a more complex and organic episodic flow like what the late Robert Altman pioneered, and Linklater used so well in "Slackers" to tie the relevant diverse and alienated characters together.

"Shortbus" also seems to be essentially a "gay" movie with just enough straight sex in it to lure in a broader audience. About 75% of the character driven graphic interactions are homosexual depictions. I have no problem with graphic homo-sex in a movie that is supposed to be about the variations of human sexual experience, but I would have preferred at least a more varied mix of the hardcore stuff.

Since this movie so clearly crossed the Rubicon on sex, I wish it had kept going. More about the dominatrix and her odd relationship with the trust funder would have been nice. The only time I got even a seminal erection watching this movie was when she whipped him into shooting his rich money clear onto the hotel room wallpaper over the bed. The filmmakers had a predictable socioeconomic class bias about these two characters. Her dysfunction was pitiable and sympathetic, and extensively explored, but his was simply pathetic and degrading, too bourgeois, and therefore without need of any development.

The movie also needed some bisexuality besides its socially acceptable limited lesbian exploration. Something like a gay couple, one guy butch, the other like the endearing and naive Ceth. The butch guy gets turned on arranging and watching sex between his passive partner and women who like to seduce "gay" men. The passive guy goes along because the sex with his lover afterward will be enhanced by doing so. Also, why not a "gay" man giving the main female character her first orgasm. With his penis, his mouth, his fingers, a dildo, a vibrating cucumber*, an anguished discourse on the relevance of Gertrude Stein's writings for unrealized lesbians, I don't care. Just something unexpected. The way she finally gets one is too disappointingly artsy for an otherwise quirky, sweaty hardcore sex movie with a real plot.

Maybe the reason male bisexuality, unlike female bisexuality, was off limits in a politically correct art movie like "Shortbus," is that it is likely to offend the movie's core audience. To acknowledge any level of authentic bisexuality in "gay" identified adult men is taboo and heretical in high culture because it undermines and demeans the activist (if not yet exactly scientific) concept that sexual orientation, particularly among men, is wired entirely one way or the other from birth, or earlier. A concept that gay men have worked diligently through political action for over one hundred years to have wider society accept as absolute. Women are given more freedom in this area. Just as they were exempt from most 19th century European "sodomy" laws, they get the benefit of the doubt now when it comes to bisexual "exploration" in both movies and life. For men, it's supposed to be all over by puberty. You are either one way or the other, or you are kidding yourself. Here's to you, Magnus Hirschfeld. The closeted Nazi brown shirts may have burned your books, along with your files about them, but you get the last laugh from the grave.

The best chance the filmmakers had to go for broke with the gay theme they highlighted, and really make a bold statement was their wasted opportunity for angelic Ceth to give wistful, old Ed Koch a pity blow, not just a kiss. Imagine seeing a 23 year old character, representing the sunny and forgiving sincerity of a young gay man for whom being Out and about in NYC is effortlessly transparent go down on an 80 year old actor who could actually get it up and get off (maybe the actor they cast couldn't).

The old mayor, lying blissfully naked except for his socks pulled up tight, and finally exposed for who he really is could ramble on in an increasingly fevered way about his guilt over doing nothing about AIDS when he had the chance, and for wasting his life in the closet while sweet, understanding Ceth earnestly scoffs his aged, withered member to shocking attention. Just before we see the incredible money shot spray all over the ebullient Ceth's cherubic face (even if a stunt double is required for this task), or hear the young man's squeal of innocent glee at a mercy mission accomplished, we see teary rivers of cathartic redemption cascade down the old politician's face. No cash would change hands for this indulgence, just an artistic license granted. For the audience, they would be playing the role of a fly stuck to the soiled wallpaper in countless DC and Northern Virginia hotel rooms, after-hours legislative and executive inner offices, and Middle American pastoral counseling parlors. Where voyeurism would be real participation and bear actual resemblance, if somewhat artistically warped, to our times. It would definitely beat being stuck in a 'Seventies sex club, without hope, and with a drag queen right out of an old Mel Brooks play book.

*They make a perfect wedding/civil union shower gift.

The Green Berets (1968)

It's heresy to say it, but this movie is the most entertaining one yet made about 'Nam

[7/10 · 24 November 2006]

For my money, Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is the best movie about the Vietnam War. It is the ultimate cinematic example of war as art; the ideal balance of historical background distorted by literary allusion for aesthetic purpose, or however you want to say it, and with the fattening and deliberately incoherent method master Marlon Brando cast for perfect symbolic and comic relief.

"The Green Berets," likewise, does not depict reality, but it should not be judged punitively for that. Reality is not the purpose of dramatic film. If you want reality, watch a documentary about the war, or better yet volunteer for the going concern in Iraq if they will have you. Chances are if you can walk and keep your sex life reasonably private like GOP Congressmen and mega church preachers try to, they will have you.

To its benefit, "The Green Berets" is no more or less a distortion of the Vietnam War than most Hollywood efforts at telling the "truth" about that conflict; it's just that its hyped, gung ho and pro-war distortion is politically incorrect. Also, it is not set during the post-Tet drugged-out, fragging period when everything fell apart and when Oliver Stone served, the period that came to define American cultural perception of what the entire ill fated U.S. involvement there was like.

This movie does provide something all, or most, other movies about the Vietnam War haven't, and the war itself of course didn't. It's fun to watch from beginning to end. It never fails to entertain. When not bailing out of burning toy helicopters flying around on a wire in an aerodynamically ludicrous death spiral, or shooting charging waves of U.S. Army extras dressed up in black pajamas and Kung Fu straw hats, John and crew hang out in a surreal Da Nang "cabaret." There they are serenaded by a Doris Day quality Vietnamese creole chansonnier while they make contact with an ARVN bigwig's débutante relative they want to enlist as a Mata Hari type seductress in a "daring" secret sex mission to bed and set up a VC general for capture by John's A-Team. Gawky minor "everyman" actor Jim Hutton plays the ideal amiable rogue and thief who steals resourcefully to advance both his private comfort and the unit's mission (a storyline deliberately satirized at one point in Coppola's masterpiece). The earnest side story about the little Vietnamese orphan boy and camp mascot Hamchuck and his "peter-san" tugs at the ethnocentric heart of every heartland American. A short-lived cult actually grew up around the movie's title song and its writer and singer, an actual ex-Special Forces sergeant named Barry Sadler. This enigmatic, forgotten man who performed the ballad on probably every "flyover country" variety show from Jimmy Dean to Ed Sullivan while the novelty lasted actually merits his own biopic movie.

"The Green Berets" is so riveting as a Vietnam movie, and as cultural history, because it is such a curiously misplaced and relentlessly absorbing mind candy variation of all those upbeat, thrilling, and overblown Frank Sinatra, Trever Howard, Alec Guinness (and John Wayne) World War II adventure movies that preceded it. Aldo Ray is in it just to make sure. That's its allusory purpose, and why John Wayne made it. Produced it through his son, co-directed it, and starred in it.

Don't blame John entirely for hapless production values either, such as the scrubby pine barrens of south Alabama and Georgia military reservations subbing for the defoliated bush of "Country." He wanted to film it in Country, just like Mankiewicz had partially done a decade earlier for "The Quiet American," but the U. S. Military John idolized yet never served in quietly persuaded Saigon not to let him film it there. Instead they let him tour some bases in Vietnam safely away from the action, then gave him carte blanch to film it in another occupied, if more benign hellhole of humid languor with just a distant memory of the ravages of civil war. Perhaps if it actually had been shot on location a little reality might have seeped in by mistake, or maybe things were just too hot in Southeast Asia in '68 even for a John Wayne who finally wanted to do some morale boosting duty in a real war zone.

It doesn't matter. Somehow south Alabama and Fort Benning work, considering everything else. Even the closing scene with the wrong-headed sunset works. For all you liberals angry with this movie, right there is your artistic statement about the war, even if John didn't realize he was giving you one. I own the DVD, and am proud to say so.

I have no idea what he thinks about Iraq, but I hope Braveheart Mel sobers up and considers producing and directing an upbeat epic about the current war. It, like "The Green Berets," would never fail to entertain.

She's the Man (2006)

Channing Tatum and the other men are simply too old for the roles

[8/10 · 21 July 2006]

Look, this movie is funny, like "Porky's" and other movies of its type where men in their mid to late 20s play high school students, but lets face it, runway model Channing Tatum is simply too old and has too much muscle development to be believable as a high school boy. That out of the way, this movie's gender-bending premise is very good at ridiculing American attitudes about soccer. The idea of a girl posing as a teenage boy to play boy's soccer at some elite prep school with buffed up guys in their 20s is a wickedly ironic comment on how Americans view soccer as a sort of upper crust "semi-gay" sport. We all know red blooded and clean cut all American boys with any inclination to play the game wise up and move on to real sports like "football" by the time they reach the age mom doesn't have to drive them to practice in her minivan anymore. This eccentric and unique American fixation (like universal neonatal circumcision??) is contrasted with the rest of the world where soccer is the definitive and uncut male working class sport. Try going into a pub in Manchester UK and whispering soccer is for gay guys and girls and see if you get out alive. Ha Ha. This is especially ironic when you consider that good old Packers and Steelers bratwurst and beer Chevy pickup tailgate party American football is derived from rugby, a sport born on the playing fields of one of England's most elite prep schools. Cricket anyone? Maybe baseball instead.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

IF MM HAD CALLED THIS MOVIE 'THE BUSH CHRONICLES' WOULD RAY HAVE REACTED THE SAME WAY?

[4 July 2004]

Much has been said about the Shakespeare-purloining ('Something Wicked This Way Comes') author Ray Bradbury's less than enthusiastic reaction to this movie's title. While accusing Moore of 'stealing' his 'Fahrenheit 451' title, the prolific Bradbury surely knows he has no legal legs to stand on. Every professional author knows (or should know) you can't copyright a title. And since Mr. Bradbury never registered his title as a trade name (he probably never thought of marketing a line of 'Fahrenheit 451' firemen action anti-hero figures), he is really staggering on wobbly swamp land with his argument. This leaves him only the last refuge the right-wing scoundrel always likes to try and fall back to when cornered: the moral high ground.

Don't misunderestimate me, this doesn't mean Bradbury is a right thinking wingnut just because he doesn't relish a leftie like Michael Moore adapting his novel's name for a political propaganda movie. Even though Ray is on record calling Clinton a 'shithead,' and a pre-911 GW Bush 'wonderful,' I'm still willing to give the guy a break. Anyone who could write such a book as 'Fahrenheit 451' probably has some reservations in the back of his mind somewhere about some aspects of the Patriot Act. At least some.

Another reason I don't think Bradbury is a true right-winger, in the Main Street/Wall Street sense, is that he gave a now infamous Paris interview in 1990 to one of those expatriate American (America-hating?) writers in which he said, unequivocally, that there had never been any real totalitarian strain in U.S. history. Ever. The Klan is bad, yes, and misguided politically correct liberals might want to ban 'Huckleberry Finn,' but none of that is any sort of seed ground for fascism or communism (I guess he meant in the European sense of the terms). Nor, despite a professed dislike for tax increases, did he offer up that old 1930s Chamber of Commerce canard about the New Deal being an uncontrollable vine creeping towards socialism. Hopefully he knows the real kudzu from the counterfeit dandelion version. He even said the homeless needed to be taken care of, and AIDS was a problem we could do something about, so obviously he can't be a bona fide bootstraps reactionary.

With that in mind, fast forward fourteen more planting seasons, and no matter how angry you are about Florida, no matter what you think of roving wiretaps, enemy combatants, or the military-industrial 'no-bid' complex, if you take Ray at his word, there is no way Bush can be any sort of homegrown Hitler, and the Republicans are not exactly Nazis. I think Ray is right. And for that matter, Michael Moore is too.

'Fahrenheit 911' for all its shortcomings as serious PBS style critical documentary, does seem to disabuse such outré 'new' New Left silliness with its own silliness. The Dubya in this movie, and the people surrounding him who do such inexplicable things as sing cheesy original lounge act songs at press conferences, or spit-slick their hair down for quick photo-ops just aren't competent enough to be good Nazis, even if they wanted to be. If they were, Michael Moore would be ash floating out of a chimney by now, or at least bug-eyed senseless from too many concentration camp storm troop sodomy sessions. And the horny 'red state' camp guards would not be making home movies and posting noisy digital pictures of Michael in flagrante delicti on the internet either. No siree, Bob.

'Fahrenheit 911' is a wickedly funny movie in the sloppy overzealous collegiate way that all Michael Moore's movies are. The Bush we see here, mangling the language and goofing off with Poppy deep sea fishing, slicing golf balls between off hand comments about evil terrorists, and joking about his 'base' among upper crust donors is no reincarnated ghost of Adolf stalking the nightmares of the ACLU. He is not even a good Chaplin parody. He is a parallax version of what those French types who offered Moore his Palme d'Or at Cannes see: the ultimate 'Ugly American.'

Assuming Bush's politics are bad, they represent the worst from American political traditions, not European. A dysfunctional home track trifecta of William Jennings Bryan's washed up religious myopia, William McKinley's missionary imperialism, and Warren Harding's amiable mediocrity and fat cat cronyism (there, at last, is a valid American 'ism). This is the Bush that 'Fahrenheit 911' shows us up front, and should more fully explore. Instead it then just settles for more quick laughs by showing the Bushes, father and son, and their Saudi lackeys doing an endless series of hundred million dollar handshakes over the years, followed by hints at the usual fairly well publicized conspiracies.

I'm thinking Ray just didn't like the idea of his philosophical novel turned into that sort of a political burlesque show. The kind of superficial visual agenda marketing device, that God forbid, portends the death of reading itself, just as in the book whose title it debases. If you have ever read 'Fahrenheit 451' you know it's not just about fireman who set fires. It's about a future, written long before Jerry Springer, where the visual and audio media have rendered the printed ones obsolete by dumbing down the populace to the point they no longer care they don't read. A future almost realized. Would you rather watch 'Survivor' or read 'Lord of the Flies?' Would you rather go see 'Fahrenheit 911,' for the shits and giggles, and a rush of adrenaline anger, or sit down and wade through Craig Unger's book, 'House of Bush, House of Saud,' or Kevin Phillips, 'American Dynasty?' A well rounded person might do both, but don't assume most people who go see 'Fahrenheit 911' are that well rounded. Could this be where Ray is coming from? If it is, he may have a bit of a point, though I would not say he's 100% correct. The Bush first half of the movie is really hilarious, and the second half, once it settles into the original footage from Iraq and the home front (and ideas not 'borrowed' from Unger and Phillips) packs some serious thought provoking punch, whether you agree with it or not.

Ray is likely no reactionary (even though he says the internet is a 'scam,' and claims never to have driven a car in his life), and may have slightly inflated ideas about his own good writing, but what I can't understand is where was his displeasure back in 1994? That was the year another controversial and wicked political propaganda burlesque show marketed as 'documentary fact' came sneaking into town to prey on the overly impressionable. Jerry Falwell's, 'The Clinton Chronicles.' Okay, so even if Clinton were a 'shithead,' was he also an international drug smuggling kingpin, and Vince Foster's killer? Bill Clinton, in Falwell and his minions' minds, is everything diabolical that a distorted, imagined agenda-driven caricature can be, except perhaps a colonizing, body snatched space alien. Sadly not a word of protest back then from the author of 'The Martian Chronicles.' Shame on you, Mr. Bradbury.

Cruel Intentions 3 (2004 Video)

'DAWSON'S CREEK' GOES TO A CLUB MED PHOTOSHOP SEMINAR

[18 June 2004]

Yes this is another one of those laughers where a 30something (Smith) tries to play a 20 year old college boy lothario. That is a time tested Hollywood tradition, and not unexpected in a movie of this caliber. What really tests any semblance of credibility is the 'college' itself. Trust me, there isn't a real college anywhere this side of an internet diploma mill that looks like this one. What you really have depicted here is one of those $2500.00 three day weekend seminars where art history majors and trust fund freelance photographers go to get a couple hours instruction in Photoshop tweaks on how to produce fine art prints with inkjets, or something along that line. Lots of time at the pool, plenty of time for sex games among the precocious Botox and Power Peel set, and one or two hangover busting workshops looking at digital slides.

The only sex scene really worth anything is when the Evil Nerd does a quick and nasty 'back seat' style hump on a cute blonde one night on the grass in the resort courtyard. A little bare tit shows up, and the blonde's orgasmic cries are slightly above porno grade.

The real standout, though, is the cinematography. Through careful photographic site selection, grimy and tawdry modern LA is distorted into a rather appealing collection of exotic faux Mediterranean and colonial California Mission locales where the vistas are always bathed in warm late afternoon sunglow or hidden among cool, seductive night shadows. This city hasn't looked this good since Jack and Faye explored it in 'Chinatown.' Or at least since the soap opera, 'Santa Barbara.'

Rent this only if you want to see LA presented the way the California Department of Tourism might want you to see it.

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)

Rent This And Win A Date With Hollywood's Newfound Cultural Correctness

[7/10 · 31 May 2004]

I rented this movie one dateless night along with 'Big Fish.' I had been waiting for 'Big Fish' on DVD ever since I learned Billy Redden was in it. He was the banjo boy in 'Deliverance.' 'Big Fish' and 'Win a Date' make a great combo because each represents a different kind of Hollywood 'flyover country' mythmaking. 'Big Fish,' a sort of 'anti-Forrest Gump,' gives you 1950s Alabama as a velvia-toned 'Pleasantville' where black and white kids play together and go to the same churches. No lynchings, no George Wallace.

This deception is part of a sly joke, part of the mythical life story of the lead character exposed as myth. Grownup Billy Redden was in the movie, for about fifteen seconds, sitting on the porch of a picket-fenced little house facing the village green in an immaculately whitewashed New England looking Brigadoon of a town lost in the Alabama swamps. He was, of course again playing dueling banjos, placed there just to remind you that what you otherwise see is all just a big fish tale.

'Win a Date's' deception is not sly understatement, but glaring overcompensation. The movie is set in Frazier's Bottom, a real town in West Virginia, but don't get out a map and plan a trip. Country roads won't ever take you back to this movie's West Virginia, no matter how many 'wrong turns' you make driving them in vain looking for it.

Not all West Virginians are inbred pot growing cannibals, but these folks are too clean, too sober, too blandly prosperous, and completely devoid of the diphthongally challenged. Not the slightest hint of nasal twang by the actors, not one sodomy joke, everyone wears shoes, no one wears overalls, and nary a 4x4 anywhere. In the local bar hangout, men don't wear cowboy hats, or John Deere caps. There is a dart board like in 'Cheers,' but no pool table. And the music, well it ain't ever country. The biker chick 'bartendress' (the lone local with a semi-authentic, but discreet Appalachian accent) might gladly serve you a latte or a bottle of Samuel Adams, if you ask. This is not moonshine, or meth lab America.

The story, of course, is total cliché. A checker at the overly modern Piggly Wiggly named Rosalee (don't expect total cultural correctness) surfs across an internet contest to 'win a date' with a second-rate bubble gum 'bad boy' matinée idol named Tad Hamilton. After being egged on by fellow checker and gal pal Cathy, she enters, wins, flies to LA, has the date, refuses to compromise her Heartland chastity, and flies back nonetheless satisfied to Red State America. Tad follows her home because he is smitten with her virtue, and of course he wants to seduce her eventually. Standing in his way, if reluctantly, is Pete, Rosalee's not so down home childhood friend and her dorky, precocious boss at the Piggly Wiggly. He of course is also smitten with her interminable chastity, but stereotypically too shy and unsure of himself to make any moves that might threaten it, or their friendship should she (likely) reject him as a lover. In the end, you know who gets the girl, with her 'carnal treasure' still buried for him to dig up off camera when 'X' marks the right time. The dialogue is hopelessly sappy, featuring groaners like the difference between 'big love' and 'great love,' and how to win the heart of your true love by telling her she has six different types of smiles.

Midwesterner Josh Duhamel surprising plays Tad as lonely and confused in his fame and wealth, rather than as a simple predatory Lothario. LA born Kate Bosworth is out of place as a Piggly Wiggly checker, but Tennessean Gennifer Goodwin seems convincing as Cathy, right down to her Pringles enhanced figure, good ole girl hairdos, and bubbly, slightly trashy personae.

The real star is New Yorker Topher Grace, a blend of young James Stewart and Alan Alda: vulnerable, sympathetic, yet obnoxious. He plays insecure Pete as a sort of straight 'gay' guy constantly engaged in witless Wildean banter when around Rosalee. His entire social life, when not sitting home alone reading Flannery O'Connor, is spent as a 'third girl friend' to Rosalee and Cathy, tagging along to see all the new Tad Hamilton movies at the local theater, etc. The classic scene in this movie is when Pete, thoroughly frustrated at his looming loss of Rosalee as gal pal and fantasy lover, confronts Tad in, of all places, the men's restroom at the local bar. "You win," the skinny Pete tells Tad, "but if you break her heart, I'll tear you to pieces with my bare hands, or … (with eyes rolling while reconsidering)… with VICIOUS RHETORIC!" Do West Virginians act and live like the people in 'Win A Date' any more than they do in a movie like 'Wrong Turn?' Certainly not, but seeing Hollywood get it wrong to the other extreme is good. The original ending in the deleted scenes on the DVD, however, hint that the original concept was more condescending.

One of the reasons 'Win A Date' probably didn't end up a 'Sweet Home Alabama' type putdown (something like 'Jessica Lynch, after the nude photos, Wins a Date With Colin Farrell, playing himself') can likely be traced directly to the outcry over CBS's stupid idea to do a 'Real Beverly Hillbillies.' reality show. This idea certainly would have become reality but for Robert Byrd, a certain Senator from….West Virginia, who railed loudly against it right on the Senate floor. His reasoning was that if Hollywood would rightfully shudder at the idea of doing a modern minstrel show (by anyone other than Spike Lee), or a new pidgin English version of Charlie Chan, why were hillbillies still ripe for vicious ridicule? Maybe they aren't so much anymore, given what you see in this movie. As far as this hillbilly is concerned, that's a good thing.