The Infinite Napkin

There’s a terrible plot afoot. There’s not much time to explain, my friend. Time is running out. Oh, where to begin?

This plot, it may go way way up the food chain, to a mysterious and shadowy figure who wants to do harm, fatal harm. How?

He cut the trailer for MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND. Whoever did that is out to kill this cute little movie. You can’t let them succeed.

But what I found was that MSE-G is just a movie that needed a little more work. It’s actually pretty fun. The relationship stuff is good, and the somewhat off-putting thought of portraying a female super-hero as basically insane is actually done really well in the course of things. There are just some jokes that were left in this film that die a horrible death right in front of you. Even in the best movie, when there’s a wrong note or two like that, you can start thinking that someone’s asleep at the wheel.

Let me put it this way. Until I saw him on the screen, I had no idea Eddie Izzard was in this thing. Did you know? I love Eddie Izzard and I didn’t know. But here’s the thing. Eddie Izzard isn’t all that funny in this movie. Eddie Izzard is only unfunny when he is flat prevented from being funny. It either happened in editing or shooting or maybe Ivan Reitman made him stick to the mostly pretty good script. Like a lot of super-hero comics, your main character is well-delineated, and the remaining characters tend to be cardboard cutouts of people. Rainn Wilson manages to squeeze laughs out of the jerk best friend, but it’s a hell of a fight; lesser men would have died trying.

All this movie needed was one more trip to the script doctor and it would have been great. As is, I enjoyed it a lot and puzzled at the missteps. It’s a tow-headed, rambunctious stepchild of a super-hero movie (better than THE (new) PUNISHER, worse than, oh, say, BATMAN RETURNS.

But let’s face it: you know the pitch went “Uma Thurman as a super-hero”. Boom! Green Light Express! But here’s something else that may surprise you–the super-hero stuff is actually pretty well done. G-Girl has cool costumes (talk about action figures!) that are more VOGUE than RUBBER COUCH QUARTERLY, and she’s not fetishized. Super-hero movies nowadays are fetish pieces, slaves to an ideal image. Superman has a pretty simple costume, but when you look at SUPERMAN RETURNS, you realize that not one visual detail has gone unnoticed or untouched. G-Girl gets messy, and it’s cool.

Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson do great jobs, as well as Anna Faris and the members of the cardboard brigade filling time when the principals are offscreen. You really should see this movie if you like super-heroes. Even solely as a romantic comedy it works pretty well. I know, you don’t believe me. But at least don’t let the trailer put you off it.

Saw a trailer for SNAKES ON A PLANE in front of this, and I want to know if this same conspiracy is determined to ruin Rachel Blanchard’s career as well.

–John

It goes without saying with me that Zooey Deschanel is an easy screen presence to fall for. So when she makes sad movies, I cringe a bit. I want to see them, but watching her suffer sucks.

I was struck by how many 70′s cinematography elements were in this. I personally really dig bright horizons and shaky handheld shots in the right movies, and this one feels right. The only thing they didn’t do here was the shifting shaft of light polygons trick (last seen by me in Amber Waves’ paean to Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights). That trick still feels overused.

Reese (Deschanel) is depressed, man. She’s trying to make it as an actress in NYC while trying to duck hungry book editors looking to use her as an in to her famous novelist dad (played by Ed Harris) who lives a Salinger-like existence in Michigan. Her tummy tells her to take the latest offer, which involves her going back home to pick up the love letters between her dad and her recently deceased mom. Turns out she got them in the will and never picked them up. 100 Gs for the stack.

Reese is depressed, did I mention that? She slams her hand in drawers to feel anything at all; it primes her tear ducts it seems. So how bad could Michigan be, right?

She finds her dad is not alone. He has a stern simple gatekeeper in Corbett (of all people, Will Ferrell) and a kindly helper in an English girl who is a former student of the legendary novelist. Ferrell saves the movie from becoming way too maudlin just by being Will Ferrell. He says some funny things, but this is in no way a Will Ferrell role, and he doesn’t try to run away with it. This is Will Ferrell playing part of an ensemble, and he can damn well do it.

If you’re a fan of Ferrell or not, the one thing you do know is that when he shows up, anything can happen; that quality plays well here, because when the script tries a little too hard to create an interesting misfit, it comes out of Ferrell’s mouth and you think “well that’s not so outrageous. He was in a Christian rock band called Punching Pilate? Okay.” Ferrell is the lone sympathetic character here. Everyone else is eyeball deep in pain.

Ultimately, this is a fine movie about how the winter between father and daughter begins to thaw. That’s the Winter Passing of the title. Not much is resolved so much as it simply evolves. Nothing merely stays the same forever; even bad situations have to change somehow.

Oh and Rachel Dratch is in this for about a minute. Love her too.

–John

Shane Black writes and directs a new flick and I missed it? I must be slipping.

This is pure joy to watch: Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer mixing it up with Michelle Monaghan (thank god MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 wasn’t it for her) . Black loaded the movie with references, so many I’ll leave it to the kind of people who like explaining jokes to catalog. I will mention two.

KISS KISS BANG BANG, after all, is the Japanese translation of James Bond, actually Mister Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. A song by that name was commissioned and used in THUNDERBALL, a movie in which a NATO pilot is murdered and replaced with a double that came from a convalescent home. I call that one intentional. So it is a Bond thing in that sense.

The second one is simple but joyful to me. In a quick take we see Harmony brandish a baseball bat when she sees the ersatz Robocop in the apartment and we see she’s carved “Wonder Girl” on it, echoing Robert Redford’s “Wonder Boy” bat from THE NATURAL.

This is a metamovie, and it didn’t piss me off. So many movies about the movie industry and LA, and especially ones that are self-consciously movies are usually tedious exercises in navel-gazing. I blame 8 1/2, which itself is excused because it’s genius. But this movie keeps a light touch and succeeds. I’ve been reading bits about how this movie was criminally overlooked in theaters. Sadly, I don’t think there was any way for this gem to do better; it rewards careful watching and has its fun in little ways.

How many movies have you seen where the characters are having fun with each other, and no I don’t mean where they gang up on someone (see all “American” movies — pie, wedding, band camp). Black didn’t so much direct this movie as write the screenplay directly on the screen. I can’t see a different director having this level of touch control, no matter how good they are. Black knows his script and does the job. Yeah, and you know what? I still like THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT.

No, not that one. This is the one with Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo.

Some history: Back in Perryton, Texas, where I spent the last two years of high school, I worked at the Video Vender, one of two video stores in town. It was a great job. My boss was just into his twenties–his sister owned the “chain”. They also had a store up in Liberal, Kansas 60 miles north. Part of my job was to watch as many movies as possible, particularly backlist stuff that wasn’t moving.

In a town as conservative as Perryton, you had to learn who was looking for family fare and who was looking for a little spice. In the war with Blackstar Video, every customer mattered. It was where my movie watching really spread out, where I really started thinking about movies and what they meant to other people. Right or wrong, any given customer had an aesthetic, and our job was to match their aesthetic up with something that made the acres of video racks manageable.

I wasn’t there for the people who knew what they wanted; I was there for the people who wandered the aisles without a clue, who might just give up and take off, especially if the hot new releases were already gone. Saturday 7pm on was the hardest. Ten people could wipe out your new release shelf and then you had to read these people. And you couldn’t hand them just anything.

They came back for a piece of your ass if it wasn’t as good as the last one, or perish forbid, exceeded their propriety. You could give them all the finger and hand them PIECES when they’re looking for SOPHIE’S CHOICE, but rebel’s pay sucks in West Texas. It became a fun game, really. This being the mid 80′s, there were rules even larger than mere aesthetics. We had to keep movies like THE RIVER away from any bank employee; for a while there were several movies out that had bankers as the villains against poor farmers, and the bankers in our town were sad enough about dropping the ax on the local farmers. The banks didn’t want to own farms nohow. Actually, it wasn’t a good idea to give em to the farmers, either.

So any given night my boss would hand me three movies to watch at home. We all know the box lies like a dog, especially on movies that don’t sell themselves. I’d want to watch WITNESS and my boss would hand me TRUTH OR DARE (the horror one), BREWSTER’S MILLIONS (some folks weren’t so sure, what with a black man in the lead), and THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND. If I had a blog then (or the desire to keep a journal), I’d have a fatter book than Videohound. Soon I was hunting all over the store, taking home anything with a little dust on it.

When I left to go to college, my boss offered me his job, so he could go run the Liberal store. A little part of me thought about it. Then this really huge part of me drowned the little part in alcohol and dragged the stupid thing off to college, where it discovered the joys of Tu-Wed 2 for 1 rentals and eleven local rental outlets.

Anyways, DEAD HEAT was one of these neglected movies. It’s a perfectly good sci-fi/horror/cop/buddy movie about resurrection. And it’s pretty funny. Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo make a good team, and the script is nimble and fun. Pacing lags often, but I smell budget there. Two zombies in a gunfight with full-auto weapons is funnier than it sounds. I used to tell people about this since my Video Vender years and they’d just look at me. Never heard of it. Plenty of people in Perryton saw it, I can tell you.

Anchor Bay recently rescued this film from total obscurity and re-released it into near-obscurity. Go get it. Better yet, rent it; live like the 80s, baby.

I almost finished this.

It’s better than Spawn, worse than Tom Jane’s PUNISHER. Chart this in the continuum of super-hero movies accordingly. Brian Yuzna directed this, and he knows from directing, so he doesn’t get too bogged down in this story.

An artist is offered the chance to become vengeance itself (altho vengeance itself’s resemblance to Wolverine is close enough to make me wonder why Marvel didn’t annihilate this) after his girlfriend is murdered and he says yes because this ain’t no short-subject. He gets his revenge then goes catatonic when Jeffrey Combs shows up in a toupee weird enough to stop anything. Seriously. I think the guy locks up trying to understand that thing.

For reasons only known to the writer, the sanitarium allows a pretty psychiatrist who uses music therapy to talk to him. She pertly defends her theories with big words, but she’s carrying a tray of cds and a boombox around, so she loses.

The devil figure who grants these powers on our hero in the first place is kinda human and has this statuesque woman with him who will have sex with anything. In a scene designed to remind you that Yuzna’s at the helm, M (the devil) makes his sidekick’s breasts and buttocks expand to the size of armchairs, until she kinda looks like a big fleshy jack. No computer here, kids–Yuzna’s all about the latex effects (courtesy Screaming Mad George–as ever, well-done).

So anyway, it’s the old sell your soul to the devil but resist plot in action. Our hero is caught by M and buried alive. He pops out of the grave just fine, thanks, and able to turn into the caped Wolverine clone Faust. There’s lots of facial prosthetics and bad attempts to be “fun crazy”, and Mark Frost tries to rubberface his way through as best he can. But ugh. The movie actually drags when the admittedly-just fine action scene come along.

Faust decides that the music therapist must be protected, and that he should have sex with her. But the two are completely unrelated. So anyway, they’re having sex and we find that the doc has a problem with sex. She sees this fleshy headed “Comfortably Numb” guy and screams a lot when she tries to have sex. She explains to Faust that she was raped when she was 11. He’s okay with that; he’s a sensitive modern guy, as well as a demonic tool of vengeance who’s gone off the reservation.

I made it about 70 minutes in before I faded out. Hokey dialogue is fine, violence is fine. But frankly the whole woman doctor who would be Faust’s girlfriend if only she weren’t horribly scarred (often a subtext for repression or male anger at sexual inaccessibility) just put me out of my misery.

Bonus points for taking the super-hero different places, just ’cause you can. From what I’ve seen, it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of Quinn and Vigil (heck, Quinn wrote the screenplay), for what it’s worth. But as faithful comics adaptations on the cheap go, I was happier with ROD STEELE: YOU ONLY LIVE UNTIL YOU DIE.

Plus, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I bet Uwe Boll has seen this movie. I refuse to explain why.

I will read or watch anything that Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman have written or adapted. I watched ZACHARIAH, for god’s sake. I mean what I say. Pair this with my affection for Harvey Korman and there’s really no reason for me to put this off any longer.

AMERICATHON posits an alien fantasy crazy-place never-gonna-happen-right America where dependence on oil has ruined the country. (I know, some people had trouble with the giant floating pyramids in Enki Bilal’s IMMORTAL too, but stick with me, here) Cars are the new trailer houses, with fake grass lawns and little picket fences. Everyone now walks/bikes/skateboards/unicycles their way around. There are a few great sequences of California freeways filled with joggers.

Now you may wonder how come it is that you can’t find this gem on DVD. Well, here’s a theory. The NIKE name and logo are ruthlessly used in this film, recast slightly as National Indian Knitting Enterprises, the richest company in America. Its owner, played by Chief Dan George, has loaned 400 billion dollars to keep America afloat, but it’s time to pay him back. “I gotta eat, too,” he keeps muttering. See, since everybody’s walking and jogging, all the classy outerwear, right up to tuxedos, are modified jogging suits with NIKE (swoosh) on them. When this movie was made (1979), Nike wasn’t quite so mind-bogglingly huge and powerful. It could be that the DVD release hasn’t happened because they haven’t got to it yet, but I like my theory better because 1) it’s mine and 2) it has at least a one percent chance of being true (which according to our current government is enough suspicion to act on anything).

The president is a graduate of Scientology and EST named Chet Roosevelt (John Ritter), elected because 1) he has a presidential name and 2) he ran on the “I’m not a schmuck” platform. But Chet is kind of a schmuck. He’s clearly meant to be Jerry Brown, mellowing the country further into the hole. An idea is struck to have a national telethon to raise the 400 billion before the clock runs out and the new Hebrew/Arab union of states slips in and buys our note and our country out from under us. The half ha-ha/half heh-oh-boy comic future presented here resonates with Proctor and Bergman’s usual cleverness and prophetic power. It’s a vision of America as it becomes a second tier nation, a middling player next to the emergent Vietnam (now a tourist paradise exceeding the French Riviera) and what’s called the Hebrabs.

Zane Busby, always adept at scary weird characters, is Vietnamese popstar Mou Ling Jackson, and nearly runs away with the show a couple times, especially with her dance number. Meat Loaf is a daredevil who fights the last car on earth to the death, Harvey Korman is the host (I’ll eat one of my dirty socks if Phil Proctor didn’t play that role in the stage version), Elvis Costello performs, and Fred Willard is one of the bad guys.

Sure the movie wanders a bit; satire like this isn’t so much plot driven. Movies like this had their heyday in the late 70s to early 80s and were killed off when they started passing off exploded sitcom ideas as features (see POLICE ACADEMY 1 thru please kill me). For all their flaws, their goofy charm wins out. I located my copy of AMERICATHON at superhappyfun.com — go getchaself one, hah?

I was having a pretty scary day today when this black gem arrived in my mailbox. Pierce Brosnan has done a magnificent job of turning his Bond persona into world-weary shitbags in movies like this and THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (if you haven’t seen it, don’t make me come get you!).

I like Greg Kinnear so much that he’s enough to make me watch darn near anything; I’ll probably watch him play Dick Vermeil in that damn Disney flick, even. Here he is playing the nice guy to the hilt, but not in a fake way. Hope Davis plays the Hope Davis role (and that’s cool). The visuals and script are great; they continually present you with plot options and aggressively take the character route at every turn. You think you’re so smart watching this thing, and the director/writer holds those tired plot devices in front of your nose and gives you a smack when you think you’ve got it all worked out.

It’s snappy, it captures Julian’s (Brosnan) detachment and neediness perfectly. If there weren’t three excellent actors in this thing, it would have stunk, because we’re here to meet these people, not to watch the inevitable descend upon them.

Watch this with your favorite movie cynic and watch their predictions crash to earth like a pig-stuck bull. The matador avoids death, but keeps it close all the time. Julian lives this life until he wakes up to find he has no friends, no home, not a soul he can talk to. All it takes is a sympathetic ear to change two lives forever.

Yep, watched the whole thing. You should too. Bonus points for playing “Heat of the Moment” during an assassination with a straight face; extra bonus points for playing the Plimsouls for any reason at all.

I took two passes at this one and failed. It seems to be actively working to put me to sleep. DEAD BIRDS is the tale of some thieves in the Civil War (or thereabouts) who steal a Confederate payroll (or something) from a bank while the soldiers are there delivering it. Why not wait until they leave and strike? Then there won’t be a gunfight, silly!

And what a gunfight it is! Instead of squibs we get cans of tomato soup blasting out of people’s backs, painting the walls. Okay, it’s stylized; that’s fine with me. Then there’s a close-up of someone taking a shotgun to the face and it takes everything off above the jawline, leaving a weaving sfx construct that looks like Sam Raimi should count his EVIL DEAD props. This effect always looks cheap and never shocks. It is a comedic excess in a glum movie. Johnny Reb after Johnny Reb paint the walls with their mortal juice and in the escape, one of the bandits takes a hit and there’s not a drop out of him. Later we find he was only hit in the shoulder, as opposed to the giant cyst of blood positioned in the middle of the chest, or wherever.

Violence does not have to be believable, or even consistent. But when it’s all you’ve got, think it through.

This movie gets praised as “atmospheric”, which is a quality three steps down from “good”. Much effort is put into the lighting and the color, to the detriment of story, script, pretty much everything else. When one facet of your movie looks professional and solid, the flaws practically glow in the dark. Many great scary moments in horror movies come from the waiting, the anticipation; but waiting in and of itself isn’t scary. Too many horror movies think using the Godzilla movie timeline is the way to maximize the scare later–see, in Godzilla movies, there’s always a bunch of foofaraw before you see the big G. It’s ALWAYS TOO LONG. But Godzilla movies are practically kabuki in their rules and traditions, and you can’t just go a-changin’ Godzilla, I guess. But newer horror movies are like horny teenagers, with the idea that if you hit people with a big explicit scare early and keep hitting them, that that’s just awesome. Bleh.

I have nothing at all against Henry Thomas and Patrick Fugit, but they are terrible bandits/cowboys. It is small wonder their compatriots immediately start planning how to get rid of them as soon as they escape with the cash. As far as I can tell, the only reason that Henry’s in charge is that he has the hot girlfriend/fellow bandit Nikki Aycox. Maybe it’s me, but the very last thing I would do to an armed group of bandits in my sway is make them hole up somewhere with nothing to do but worry about capture and then take my hot girlfriend by the hand, walk right past them and have lots of audible sex upstairs. That’s just poor management skills.

Thomas and Fugit’s simple flaw as these characters–they still look like kids. They stand next to these much older character actors and look like they’re tourists in WESTWORLD. Fugit’s character is the one who gets shot in the robbery. The wound is right below the collarbone near the shoulder joint (a shirtless scene makes this clear). So what is Patrick doing? Playing cards, using both hands, not worried. This is not toughness. This is just dumb.

Then there’s a lot of card-playing. A storm’s coming. Did I mention they’re hiding out in a conveniently abandoned plantation house? Well, they are. There are dead birds all over the place. A well-photographed sky looms. There’s talk of betraying the ex-child actors and making more loot. One of the character actors takes the horses into the barn. He likes those horses.

…and I fell asleep. Even if you promise Godzilla appears, I don’t think I’ll try again.

Those sidewalks look an awful lot like…I dunno, but other than some very tourist-y footage (people even wave at the camera), this movie is about as close to Bangkok as I am.

I managed to randomly pick another Jean Rollin flick that wasn’t about vampires. This one’s about spies, how they mostly shoot each other and take stuff. The movie starts with “Rick” getting blasted with what looks to me like a perfectly good movie camera (not the spy kind–this is as big as a football.) in his hands. He was taking secret footage with it, see. He was supposed to have “a vial” on him that “could kill a city”, but he gave it to a high-kicking Thai sex-worker to keep.

The spy outfits competing for this prize really only have one difference, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised–it’s boys vs girls! The guy leader has this awesomely well-trained dog that ends up saving the day Lassie-Kicks-Ass style. The girl leader likes to bite pearls and touch herself while watching women get horsewhipped. So who’s the bigger misogynist, I ask you. French movies are crazy.

So there’s lots of shooting, a load of the worst judo ever, and an old French guy dressed up like Fu Manchu with the robe and the hunch and the looooong facial hair. He’ll sell you a girl for a hundred bucks in 1984 dollars, and kill a guy for the same price.

Yes, I watched the whole thing. The expected twist at the end happened, and then all my sleep endorphins flooded my brain, so I couldn’t tell you how the credits went. There was a lot of voice-over narration, probably because when they cut it together, the movie made less sense than your average cheap spy flick. People will tolerate characters doing lots of inexplicable stuff in between gunfights, but when the confusion goes down to “Well, who’s THAT guy?”, you have a fundamental breakdown.

Jean Rollin obviously knows enough to cover mistakes; he’s not a bad film-maker, but he’s made a bad bad movie here. The 80s are littered with movies like this…indy actioners that sure looked exciting while they filmed it, but just sits there like a load of crap on the screen. That sound you hear is a lot of francs or bahts pouring out of the producer’s pocket to no good end.

Rollin really must fight his urges making these non-vampire flicks. After 3/4s of the movie, where the only sex scene is a weird one on a boat where the Thai woman gives in to the lecherous captain stares at a picture of her beloved Rick on the wall like it was Gabriel with a flaming sword the whole time, (*breath*) the Thai woman escapes the female spies and is running around a French farm looking for a way out and she sees one of the female spies on top of some fellow in a field. The guy sees her and says to his paramour “Do you want to stop?” She says no, one of the other girls will catch her. Then she stands up to give the audience a good look and stares at the Thai woman. Maybe the subtitle should have read “No, but I have a plan. I will get up and stare at her in a worldly fashion. That should impress this professional sex worker from Thailand.”

Finished another one! I may have to start calling myself the Movie Insomniac.

This was a Scorsese film that I’d been putting off, mostly because word was it was a lesser gem. I can remember seeing hundreds of ads for it when it hit HBO originally but I never got down to it.

Like AMERICAN PSYCHO, I suppose, this is a movie that says something that we all know to be very true nowadays, and so one could be easily fooled into thinking the movie’s shallow and obvious. THE KING OF COMEDY must have gotten people scratching their heads because the movie’s message about the cult of celebrity either was too far-fetched (I can picture people looking at DeNiro in this film, just after RAGING BULL, and wondering what the hell is going on) or too obvious (this country’s going to hell in a handbasket!). It was great seeing Sandra Bernhard in a real movie and giving us all the hairy eyeball.

Jerry Lewis is, well, Jerry Lewis as the Johnny-Carsonesque (in the film he’s described as Jack Paar’s replacement–I wonder if they tried to get Johnny for this. Even his stalwart producer Fred deCordova is in this.) talk show host. He just plays himself and it’s perfect. We all know now that Robert DeNiro is funny, but that may not have been so obvious when TKOC was new. It’s just proof #87 (#86 is RONIN) of DeNiro’s genius as an actor; Rupert Pupkin is kinda funny, occasionally okay in his act. As a human being he’s the nerd from high school with all the big plans, still chasing the girl (who looks startlingly to me like Tessa Thompson from VERONICA MARS, but a quick look at her bio reveals that Robert DeNiro would have to be her dad, so no dice).

THE KING OF COMEDY plays like the nice-guy version of TAXI DRIVER. Rupert certainly comes out better in the end than Travis.