News of the Right

My friend Drew was involved with the Alamo Drafthouse’s “Bloodshots” 48 hour horror movie challenge a few weekends ago and WON first place with the entry “Meet the Maydays“. Yay, Drew!

Seattle’s The Stranger has one of the best movie reviews I’ve read in my life, ostensibly written by Diane Keaton. I have no idea if this is her work or not, but I can totally see her saying this (she’s a wild woman!):

What’s up, bitches? Diane Keaton here. I just got back from seeing The Women and, um, I couldn’t help but notice something: I AM NOT IN THIS MOVIE. Where the fuck am I? I am the queen bee of this shit. The hive mother. Annette Bening wishes she could smile through her tears like Diane Keaton! You know the Meg Ryan character? The one who spent her whole life trying to be everything to everybody but somehow somebody is always disappointed? That’s like if my entire oeuvre mated with itself and gave birth to a mega-me. I’m sure you remember when Meg Ryan says, “Wouldn’t it be great if when you were born, they gave you a rule book?” I am, like, ALWAYS saying that! I should have mailed that shit to myself. Then there’s the Jada Pinkett Smith lesbian (”If we’re lost, we both ask for directions”). I could SO play that character. I invented lesbians. Look it up. And the little girl who makes a tiny bonfire of tampons because she’s just not ready to become a woman? Did you even THINK of casting Diane Keaton in that role? No? Big. Fucking. Mistake. I can play young. Hey, Hollywood. Write this down. Next time you make a two-hour vaginal suppository that hasn’t met a feminine cliché it didn’t dip in chocolate and shove down America’s gullet (smoking, shopping, cheating, faked orgasms, diets, supermodels, bubble baths, hunger, water breaking, Botox), maybe you should do your job and fucking call Diane Keaton. Bitches.

–via JoeMyGod

Helen Killer #3: What could be more damaging to the reputation of the sainted Helen Killer than to portray her as a whore? And while one is at it, why not put the image on the front cover of a comic book? Oh, the joy of iconoclasm! In the most over-the-top issue so far in a series that was halfway to the moon to begin with, Helen goes under-the-covers to scare up anarchist Elisha Grey in this penultimate chapter of the series. A+

1985 #3: Like Secret Invasion, 1985 is halfway done and there’s not a shred of evidence that the plot is going anywhere. Like Toby and his Dad’s encounter with Modok, there’s no urgency in the tale (really, that was the slowest getaway scene since Tuistas‘ interpretation of Esther Williams in a Richard Donner film). The surreal “now you see ‘em, now you don’t” of heroes and villains adds to mystery of the tale (the Big Questions being “Why are only villains popping into this world? (yeah yeah, there was the Hulk, but in 1985 he had been a full-fledged hero for, what, 20 minutes?)” and “What’s their Evil Agenda?”), but doesn’t take time to clue the reader in. I like how the Hulk and Juggernaut disappeared from Toby’s life because that seems to be the way real life would work: a chance encounter with a hero, before normal life takes over again (contrasted with the narcissistic “Rick Jones’ Method of Injecting Oneself into a Hero’s Life. Forever.”). However, I don’t like how they disappeared from the story (known as “Falling into a Claremont Hole”). I’ll glance at the next issue, but I’m thinking this is the one where I get off. D

Five things you need to know about The Dark Knight:

1. Christian Bale is an excellent Bruce Wayne, but his Batman needs a lozenge.
2. I’ve never seen the Joker as a violent sociopath, but more as an annoyance. Then Heath Ledger came along.
3. This is the first time ever that a villain team-up made sense in a movie.
4. Listen for the words “need”, “want” and “deserve”. They will tell you everything you need to know about the plot.
5. The secondary cast members give performances just as demanding as the lead actors. Blink and you’ll miss Anthony Michael Hall.

Of course, the word on every comic geek’s lips this weekend is “Watchmen”, since the full-length trailer debuted in front of The Dark Knight. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read the graphic novel, and will probably be fined for saying so. I’ll have to pick up a copy and finish is before the poseurs do. I hate being in the middle of a phenomena.

Mattel crossed a line for some people by releasing the Black Canary Barbie, a tartier version of an already loose doll. The odd thing is, I really can’t find any original complaints online, just an article in The Sun that says people are upset.

OMG EEEEEEE Joss Whedon’s superhero musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Filion is online for this week only before going for sale on iTunes. I’ve always had a crush on Nathan Filion, but I fear that he’s been ousted from my heart by NPH. Of course, he’ll have to share space with Rick Schroeder, and ya know, should… anything… happen there while they’re… ya know, waiting for me… like a pillow fight in their underwear, then, uhm…. yeah, I’d be cool with that.





Best line: “The hammer is my penis.”

…there was Mr. Midnight!!

Thank the gods Christopher Lee had the chance to redeem himself after The Return of Captain Invincible, unlike Orson Welles whose swan song was The Transformers: The Movie. Poor guy.

Click on Ghost Rider (a steaming turd of a movie, to be sure) for the list.

I was really disappointed to see Supergirl on this list. I LOVE Supergirl!!! Same thing with Barbarella and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. God help me, I enjoyed Daredevil, too.

But some moves seem to be missing. What about Dr. Strange? God awful!! And Captain America? The Salinger talent must have skipped a generation. Or the unreleased Fantastic Four? Two words: Roger Corman.

The best friend and I had our usual Saturday night tonight - dinner (pot roast and mashed potatoes) and a movie (two, actually: Boy’s Life 6 and Ocean’s 13). We saw Boy’s Life 1 during our time in grad school and still remark about how sweet it was (I especially like Friend of Dorothy), and while BL6 is nowhere near as uniformly sweet, one short, Davy and Stu, momentarily split the crusty shells around both our hearts and made us go “Awh!”

I’ve posted it here for you. Enjoy and go “Awh!”

Davy and Stu
Uploaded by kollioster

Ambigrams are clever pictures that are the same backwards and forwards, or right-side up or upside down, or angle-to-angle (soon to be made wildly popular with the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, no doubt). And the 20th Anniversary DVD of a favorite movie of mine, The Princess Bride, features an ambigram:

Pretty neat, eh? I saw this movie for the first time on Thanksgiving Day, 1987. It was my freshman year at Mercyhurst College and I had just worked a 13 hour shift at Rebecca’s Restaurant where I was a bus slave. Really, my job at Rebecca’s was a great one; obviously so, I had been there for three years by the time I started college. The whole staff was amazingly cool - the bartender let us drink after-shift sometimes, the head waiter was a condescending prick with a wicked sense of humor (ah, Fred!) whom we all loved, the eponymous co-owner was a terrific woman with a thing for gay men, the wait staff was a trip and us bus kids… well, we thought we owned the place. On the Thanksgiving in question, I was to work the early shift, then go home to have dinner with my folks. However, just before I was supposed to leave, Fred told me that several of the bus kids who were supposed to be there, weren’t coming. They were “sick” or some such BS. Fred gave me the option to leave, but said they really needed the help that afternoon.

What could I do? I called my mom and told her to go ahead and eat without me. A work ethic is a terrible thing sometimes, right? Thank God Mom understood.

One other busser stayed for a second shift - Amy. By the time we were done it was way late and we were exhausted, but we couldn’t relax. Rebecca fed us and tipped us extra (from her own pocket, I think), so, feeling rich, Amy and I called our parents and said we were going to see a movie to unwind. The Princess Bride.

To say I howled and stomped and cried my way through the movie is a gross injustice to the embarrassment that Amy suffered that night. But The Princess Bride is still one of the best movies ever, and I say that with twenty years’ (!!!) worth of perspective and repeated viewings, not just through the lens of punchiness.

Jesus. Twenty years.

Is there anyone cuter on the planet than Keri Russell? Her pixie-ish face, her bouncy hair, her perfect skin (and no Aveda endorsement yet! How odd!) OK, one could argue that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is cute, but one would be wrong - he’s HAWT!!! He sings! He cuddles!! He makes love to you with his eyes!!! Lord, what is it about men with pouty lips? Put the two of them together with a kid who can actually pull attention away from the insanely over-the-top Robin Williams, a kick-ass soundtrack and an uneven script, and you have August Rush.

It’s not that it’s the greatest movie in the world, and certainly not the destined-to-be holiday classic that Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is, but it’s loaded with schmaltz and is clumsy in it’s attempts to manipulate the audience.

And I was so willing to be manipulated by this movie.

The story isn’t new - upper class girl meets and gets pregnant by a blue collar guy before they are torn cruelly apart - but having their kid be the force that draws them all back together is pretty novel. August is prepossessed by music - he hears it everywhere and runs away to where it seems to be coming from - New York, the city of his conception. Then Robin Williams appears and the movie goes into a strange Hook-like tailspin for 40 minutes or so. I mean, orphaned kids who busk for their Faginesque guardian and make their home in an abandoned theatre complete with trapdoors and a slide. It stinks of Trevor Nunn. I hate that Robin Williams’ humor has taken a masochistic bent of late, even if it disguises itself as “physical comedy”. Ever since One Hour Photo, he’s become disturbing and unfunny. His character in August Rush, “Wizard”, just seems to bring the creepiness to the surface and give it a face.

But back to the good stuff.

Maybe it’s because we’re in the holiday season and I’m excited to go to PA and see my family, but little thing that even hint at separation are setting me off on long crying jags lately: commercials for the Human Society, The Lion King, Brothers & Sisters (best damn show on TV!!), and now August Rush. Maybe I’m having my gay male period. Whatever it may be, I found a real earnestness in August’s whole-hearted belief that he was loved and that someone would come for him. As August, Freddie Highmore is never coy or precocious or ironic. He’s a serious little boy who has a talent for music and a belief in parents who love him. Kid’s going places. Watch for him.

A final thing I liked about the movie was actually a long preview for the upcoming The Golden Compass. Loving the books so much and knowing that all references to Dust and God have been removed, there really hasn’t been any pull for me to see the movie. Until this trailer. Yeah, the atheistic heart of the movie has been removed (and, honestly, I’m about one papal encyclical away from being an atheist out of spite), but there were moments that seemed to have the book down pat. Who am I kidding? I’m going to see it no matter what, but my eagerness to see it may change between now and then.

About four weeks ago, my friend Michelle started asking me if I wanted to go see Beowulf on November 16th. While unusual for her (Michelle, much as I love her, is no great fan of the classics. Moreover, she asked me three times about going. After the second time, I was going to call her husband and warn him about her having a pod with his name on it waiting at home.), being a Brit Lit geek and Neil Gaiman fan, I was hardly going to say no.

Yeah. Then I started to see the trailers.

And not the trailers I had been seeing. Beowulf was sold high and low at Comic-Con this past July, much like Stardust was in 2006. And let’s talk about that particular piece of effluvia for a moment. I loved the Stardust comic books (if they can be called that). Together, they were a beautiful piece of work that was not embarrassed to reveal the cruel nature of fairy tales perfectly exemplified when the incarnate star evaluates her Earth-bound situation in a single word: “fuck.” Gorgeous drawings. Lyrical prose. Well-rounded characters. And a pat, but satisfying, ending.

Throw all that away and you have the movie Stardust; truly, no relation to the book. Complaint #1: Claire Danes as Yvaine?!? This is the girl who smiled her way through Brokedown Palace and Princess Mononoke. All the appeal and interest of white rice. Take this as you will, but in the IMBD entry for Stardust, she’s listed below Ditchwater Sal (then again, Robert Deniro is listed below Claire Danes for his… let’s call it a “role”, just for the sake of argument. The only thing I liked about that was the role-reversal of his faux gay pirate being beaten up by real-life poofter Rupert Everett). Complaint #2: the Hollywood ending. There just had to be a fight, didn’t there? And not jut swords clashing but headless capering corpses, witch guts, a tearless reunion and a “let me shimmer” moment the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Mac and Me. Gag.

But back to the Beowulf trailers.

Different trailers. Newer trailers. Trailers that made me think, “I can’t believe XBox has jumped on Beowulf for video game fodder. I wonder if this will make kids read the poem. Nah.” but then turned out to be actual trailers. This trend in using digitally enhanced live action hopefully will not last long.. well, let me qualify that. If this is a related process to what was done in Sin City and A Scanner Darkly, why did Beowulf have to look like Final Fantasy XII? Real people are made to look like video games? Why not just use real people? Does wiping out texture and color tones equal artistic film-making? Did that work out well for Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings (a movie I love, actually).

The long and the short - Neil Gaiman needs to get out of Hollywood, just like Stephen King does. They may be great in their writings, but so far, no one has gotten a handle on how to make them into decent cinema.