"If you understood everything I said, you'd be me" - Miles Davis
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" - George W. Bush
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
"Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" - Homer Simpson
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we" - George W. Bush
Utility Fog Banner

  I Miss the Sixties

Rat Pfink a Boo Boo!



  Suds Warrior
A post apocalyptic world without gasoline is one thing...
But imagine a world where beer is scarce and only those with most brutal pedal powered machines can attain it...

Road Warrior Remake
Via Laughing Squid

  Cloverfield Clues
Cloverfield Despoiler Wiki

  Actor, Director, Hambone

10 Classic Death Scenes of Su Chen Ping
Via VideoSift

  Cloverfield
J. J. Abram's new movie is due 1-18-08. There have been developments.

  Great Flick
Overlooked Movie: Point Blank
Search Results "Marvin Boorman" (YouTube)
The real thing: Marvin and Point Blank

  Dare I Say "PKDickian"?
Richard Kelly's (Donnie Darko) new film, Southland Tales, will finally be released on November 9, 2007. The trailer looks interesting. And I think it's nice to see Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) doing something that isn't a shoot-em-up or sports-related.
Via Fimoculous

  "Would it Surprise You, Sir..."
Walter Jon Williams considers The Maltese Falcon:
"Spade is described as looking like a "genial Satan." He's sleeping with his partner Archer's wife, he's not terribly put out by Archer's death, he doesn't seem interested in vengeance or justice at all. He treats women badly. He keeps telling people that all he really cares about is the money, and you have no data to indicate otherwise. To all appearances, Spade is a heel.

If you were reading this book fresh in 1930, and hadn't seen the movie and knew nothing other than what the book told you, you wouldn't know that Sam Spade is the good guy--- not until the last scene, when he sends Brigid up the river for murdering Archer. That reversal would have come as a complete surprise, and a revelation. Hammett succeeded in hiding that particular football right up to the book's climax.

Now suppose're in a theater in 1941 to watch the Huston film adaptation. You haven't seen the earlier adaptation with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, and you haven't seen the comic adaptation with Bette Davis, and you haven't read the book. And there you are watching Humphrey Bogart play Sam Spade.

You've seen Bogart before, and you know he isn't a leading man. Up to this point, Bogart has always played the heavy. He's the gangster, the gunman, the crooked lawyer, the criminal kingpin. You have no idea that this is the breakout role that makes him a huge star.

If you're watching the film in 1941 with no prior knowledge of the story, you would have had no idea that Bogart was the good guy. In that final scene, you would have been just as poleaxed as the first readers of the book in 1930."

Thin Man, Thick Plot

  A God Among Men
Peter O'Toole is 75.
"I can't stand light. I hate weather. My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another."

Amen, brother

Via No Smoking in the Skull Cave

  Ooh ooh ooh
From Wikipedia
"Cloverfield is the working title or codename of a science fiction film set for release in 2008 produced by J. J. Abrams, directed by Matt Reeves, and written by Drew Goddard."
More Cloverfield Mysteries
"Untitled J.J. Abrams Project" at IMDB
"Ethan Haas" at YouTube
Ethan Haas Was Right RPG Spoilers

Via Ectoplasmosis

  Was You Ever Stung By a Dead Bee?
Stinking Badges (Wikipedia)
Via Bifurcated Rivets

  Why "Pirates of the Caribbean III" might not suck
chow yun fat in Pirates of the Caribbean 3
It has Chow Yun fat

  Another Time, Another Place
Teleport City serves up a great indepth look at Walter Hill's Streets of Fire

  Wait A Minute
So I rented Underworld: Evolution and found it acceptable, if not exceptional. It's got loads of the old ultra-violence, Derek Jacobi lending an air of dignity, and of course, Kate Beckinsale in very tight rubber pants. But they just about lost me when the villain grabs a cable and pulls a flying helicopter down. If you can't figure out why this won't work, no matter how strong you are, do some chin-ups and think about it.

  You Should Go
serenity banner


  Whatever You Say

dune poster
"In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...) Jessica - nun of the Bene Gesserit -, sent as concubine at the Duke to create a girl which would be the mother of a Messiah, becomes so in love with Leto that she decides to jump a chain link and to create a son, Kwisatz Haderach, the saviour. By using her capacities of Bene Gesserit - once that the Duke, insanely in love with her, entrusts her with his sad secret - Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...
...
In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...

In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes."
Go, Baby, Go! Somebody needs to hook Alejandro up with a renegade Korean anime house and enigmatic swiss venture capital financing. He tried to get Dali to play the Emperor. I don't know who is crazier.
Jodorowsky's Dune
Via mike.whybark.com

  All Hail Broog
"In this instance, however, the storyteller so skillfully enfolds the roots of Wonka?s pleasingly Dahl-esque misery in further and more ludicrous mysteries and greater oddness that there is no sense of the magician revealing his tricks ? rather, the audience is invited to scrutinise his top hat for concealed rabbits and finds instead a four-storey hotel populated entirely by Latvian mango farmers."
Broog, Alien Film Critic


  Hard Boiled

San Francisco locations from "Bullitt," then and now. Via Incoming Signals

  Peter Lorrie
"...what made Peter Lorre such a dynamic actor was the discontinuity between how he said what he said and how he looked when he said it. A Lorre reading inspired levels of interpretation, double-meanings, and dark subtexts codified with a cynic's wit. Untold secrets seemed to lie just behind those obtuse oculars of his."
I need to get "The Maltese Falcon" on DVD.
Link
Via Linkfilter

   Chow Yun-fat Is God
"Bulletproof Monk" is a crappy movie with one saving grace: Chow Yun-fat (OK, 1 1/2-the nazi villian was pretty good). So I note with pleasure that Chow Yun-fat will be in at least one and maybe two of the sequels to "Pirates of the Caribbean".
Link
Via Boing Boing

  It's The Little Things That Bug Me
Today I'll consider "Kill Bill, volumes 1 & 2". While I have nothing but respect for Uma Thurman, and I would surely think twice before pissing her off (with or without a sword), I can't help but notice that her character (The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo, hereafter refered to as Uma for brevity) is, for a professional assassin of skill and experience, pretty damn stupid:

1: Upon waking from a 4-year coma Uma kills the two scumbags who are about to rape her. She then hides out in one of their cars for a long time until she can get her legs working. Don't you think that the police, after finding 2 bloody, murdered bodies in a hospital, are going to check on the victim's car?

2: Uma goes after the first of the people who put her in a coma and murdered her entire wedding party. She is still in the rapist's car-a rather colorful pickup truck with "pussy wagon" painted on it in big letters. I don't suppose there's anyone on the lookout for this murder victim's stolen car? And as far as I could tell she doesn't do any reconnaissance of Vernita's house-she just walks up with a knife. For all she knows the house is actually a heavily-armed suburban meth lab.

3: It turns out that Uma belonged to a group of professional assassins with extremely silly snake-based "code names". She had left the firm, her lover (and group leader), gotten pregnant, and was set to be married-though not necessarily in that order. Now the thing about bands of assassins is-they kill people. And if you screw them over, or try to leave their happy little family I can see where violence will ensue. But that never occurs to Uma. And it would have been so easy to secure the chapel-just a pair of claymores pointed towards the front door.

4: Uma is surprised to find that O-Ren Ishii has a small army of swordsmen at her command. Smart assassins learn these sorts of things about their targets before attempting to kill them.

5: If you cut someone's arm off at the shoulder, I wouldn't count on them being alive later to give you information or carry messages to your enemies.

6: When Uma goes after Budd, she just kicks open his trailer door and runs in. She is greeted by a blast of rock-salt from a shotgun. Once again no preparation or research. I would have lit the trailer on fire and shot him full of arrows, then finished him off with the sword. A bulletproof vest would have been nice too.

P.S. If I were Chia Hui Liu, a cranky martial-arts master ("I kill at will!"), and I had plucked out the eye of my misbehaving student, I wouldn't let her keep cooking my meals. She might take the loss of her eye personally and try to kill me-say by poisoning my dinner of fish heads-a method that neatly makes all my bad-ass kung-fu irrelevent.

  Priorities
Let us consider whether I should go see "The Grudge":
1: Very creepy Japanese-style horror, ala "The Ring"-Good
2: Remade by the original Japanese Director-Better
3: Sarah Michelle Gellar shower scene-BINGO

  Damn
Why the heck isn't "G-Men from Hell" on Cable? William Forsythe is an unsung gem of an actor, thank god the Coen brothers like him. And I gotta see Robert Goulet as the Devil.
Via Boing Boing

  Mini-Review
Rented Underworld
1: Another wierd color-filtered flick-everything is either grey or red/pink/flesh
2: If only they had spent 1/10th of the money used for art direction on a more intelligent script.
3: Gotta love those endless clips of ammo.
4: Kate Beckinsale is one tasty rubber-clad crumpet.

  100 Movies That Deserve More Love
Link
Via Jerry Kindall

  Lord of the Rings/The Two Towers
After watching the Battle at Helms Deep at least a half-dozen times I have to say that that is one piss-poor fortress. It's missing a lot of the basics:
Firing Slots/Ports-beats exposing your whole torso over the wall to fire arrows
Catapults/Arbalasts/aka Artillery
Boiling Oil-very handy
Long Poles to push away those pesky ladders
Drawbridges-It was way too easy for those Orcs to get the battering ram to the gate
Why wasn't there somebody guarding the drain grate? It's an obvious target. I would have put the water into a pool to be used to flood the enemy.
This is just off the top of my head-a study of castle design would undoubtably come up with more examples.

  Feline in the Fedora-the reviews
"This screened too late for us to review, so in the interest of fairness all we can say is that we're pretty sure it's gonna suck." -- Film Shorts, THE STRANGER

"Get out the flatware, mother--the Thanksgiving turkey has arrived!" -- Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION

"Perhaps the worst holiday movie ever made." -- John Anderson, NEWSDAY

"An abomination, impure and simple." -- Joe Morgenstern, WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit." -- Manohla Dargis, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Like being run over by a garbage truck that backs up and dumps its load on top of you." -- David Edelstein, SLATE

"If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more." -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBER

"Crass and vulgar almost beyond belief." -- Charles Taylor, SALON.COM

"A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy." -- A. O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES

"Comes scarily close to being the most unendurable Hollywood creation of the last dozen years." -- Michael Atkinson, VILLAGE VOICE

"Makes the Matrix sequels look like works of genius." -- Michael Sragow, BALTIMORE SUN

And my personal favorite:
"They may as well have skipped the hassle of securing licensing rights and simply called this mess Mike Myers: Asshole in Fur." -- Gregory Weinkauf, DALLAS OBSERVER
Link

  I Got That Going for Me
So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So, I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one -- big hitter, the Lama -- long, into a ten-thousand foot crevice, right at the base of this glacier. And do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga...gunga -- gunga galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consiousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
CarlSpackler.com
Via Bellona Times

  This Would Have Been So Sweet
Orson Welles almost made the first Batman movie.
The Sideshow

  Duderific
I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the title Dude, Where's My Car? can be traced to a line in The Big Lebowski, when Sobchak asks Lebowski: "Where's your car, Dude?" And even though most of Dude, Where's My Car? makes even Bill and Ted seem like a subdued, autumnal work of the subtle Japanese master of cinema, Yasujiro Ozu, Dude has become a cult film, and the title of the movie alone is worth the price of admission. And coming in the year 2000, it clearly signaled that Dude would span the turn of the century. The totally awesome title of the sequel alone--Seriously, Dude, Where's My Car? (planned for release in 2004)--should insure that Dude lasts well into the new millennium.
All you might want (or need) to know about the word "Dude".
Via Kaedrin Weblog

  Harvey Lembeck
He was much more than just "Eric Von Zipper".

  Useless Knowledge
This explains what David Cronenberg is doing in the "Friday the 13th" slasher flick "Jason X".

  Painful it is
Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones makes David Lynch's "Dune" look like the "Maltese Falcon". Or should I say "sound"?. I've heard better dialogue from intrigued terriers.

  Wait a Minute...
I like "Blade II". Guillermo Del Toro is a good director, the movie looks marvelous, the fight scenes kick ass (dude) and I always enjoy watching Kristofferson shoot things. But something occurred to me. Wouldn't driving a hopped up 70's Dodge Charger around Prague be kind of conspicuous, even for a big black vampire hunter with a sword?

  You have dishonored my master, now you must die!
Mmmmmm....Sweet Hong Kong Cheese! - Showtime Extreme is showing Master of the Flying Guillotine, aka "The One Armed Boxer vs. The Flying Guillotine".
From the Village Voice review:
"Never anger a man who ventures forth from his own home by setting it ablaze after leaping through the ceiling."

  I call Bullshit
I like "The Matrix"-Laurence Fishburne could make ice-fishing dramatic and Carrie-Anne Moss in tight black plastic is always a good thing. The greenish tint is annoying, but I can let that slide. But there's one thing that continues to bug me: The whole reason the uber-computer Matrix has kept humanity alive in pods is to harvest our body heat for power. Even if the people are fed soylent green and processed algae this can't be an efficient way to generate heat. A much better rational for humanities continued existence would have been that their brains are used for extra computing power. A little parallel processing/quantum multiple reality mumbo jumbo and I would have been satisfied.

Home assignment: Given that current environmental concerns would be irrelevent and avoiding carbon sources as too short-term, provide the Matrix with power.

  Not Very Observant
So I'm watching "The Phantom" (1996), and villian #1 is rowing into a cave that contains a "abandoned" hidden fortress. He's sure that he has found the location of the maguffin he needs to rule the world, bwaahahaha. Now what I would be doing in his place is wondering "Who lit all those torches?".

  The things I think about whilst driving
Previously I wrote about the "Resident Evil" movie and I've thought of another quibble with the plot's logic. In the movie our heroes are trapped in a hi-tech underground lab. They have disabled the AI that runs the lab with an EMP device and are beseiged by zombies. In order to escape the lab they restart the AI and threaten it with permanent destruction, forcing it to help them. But there is no reason to suppose an AI would possess a survival instinct. And even if it does regard continued existence as a priority, it may have higher ones. An artificial-intelligence's "motives" and "desires" may be totally different from those of an naturally evolved biological sentient. Hey! that's a neat acronym-Look, I'm a NEBS!

  Huh?
Dumbest line from a movie trailer (this week):
"Don't let anything get in the way of your destiny". From my understanding of destiny, nothing can get in the way of destiny, that's why they call it destiny-it's destined.

  Better than "Tenent Badness"
I saw "Resident Evil" on cable the other night. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. While no classic, I was never bored or insulted. And I must say that Germans do know their set design-the movie looks amazing, even on my pawnshop-special tv. Milla Jovovich makes an impressive action heroine-she's as cute as a chinese baby yet she exudes such a sense of intelligence and will that you never wonder what a supermodel is doing fighting zombies. The plot has some nice twists involving temporary amnesia and it blows up real good. The only thing that bugged me was how dense the hot-shot special forces-types were about how to go about killing zombies. If I had a nice shiny automatic weapon and it's clear that my by-the-book center-of-mass body shots are not killing my opponents it wouldn't take another character providing exposition a 1/2 hour later before I tried shooting the damn things in the head.

  Thoughts on "Black Hawk Down"
1: Somalis are using cell phones. Who was running the cellular phone networks?
2: Earlier I wrote about how much I dislike the trend of tinting movies and commercials green or brown. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, this movie is a prime example. Once I noticed this stuff I find myself constantly asking myself "where is all that green light coming from?" and "why is that sunlit beach colored like Kermit?". Maybe now this will bug you like it bugs me-you're welcome.

  It's Kind of Sad
I saw "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" with sister and assorted kids. I read the first Harry Potter and enjoyed it: they're clever and lively kid's books with enough wit to engage an adult. But the movies are limp, sad things. As I left the theatre I realized the only character that I cared about was the doleful computer-generated house elf.

  I love Made-for-cable B movies
"Made Men"-Jim Belushi (always underated in my opinion), Steve Railsback (Best Manson EVER, not to mention "The Stunt Man"), and Timothy Dalton as a southern sheriff. I'm in gunfight and big explosion heaven. I always liked Dalton as Bond-I thought he had the requisite touch of cruelty. Brosnan ain't bad, but he just isn't mean enough. Plus he always seems, how should I put this, too damn short.

  I am not alone
Someone else
likes "Hudson Hawk".

  The Wilhelm Scream
A sound effect scream from 1951 continues it's "career" even today.

  Sunlit Noir
"Kiss Me Deadly" was finally on again Sunday night. This time I managed to tape it and I am a happy boy. Seeing it got me thinking about a genre of movie that probably only exists in my own addled brain-the "70s Sunlit Noir" film. Since I made up this catagory, the defining films would have to be "Point Blank" and "The Outfit." Other good examples would be "Hickey and Boggs", "The Domino Principle", "The Getaway", and "Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia".