Wednesday, March 29, 2000

Lost Souls… a review

I went to see “Lost Souls” last night starring the first draft scripts of Omen and The Exorcist… er I mean Wynona Ryder and Ben Chaplin.

Ben plays Peter Kelson a famous author of serial killer books and a rogering good recipe for apple blossoms. The problem is that he has a really hot girlfriend and we all know that hot blonde women are the devil’s minions.

Hey I didn’t write the rules don’t blame me.

Peter also has a recurring dream in which the letters “XES” keeps appearing.

I know what you’re thinking, but it turns out that not only is it sex spelled backwards but it’s also ancient Greek (speaking of backwards sex) for 666.

Insert your own “missionary” sex jokes here… I’ll wait for you to finish.

la la la …..hmmmmm….. doh de doh….

OK… are you done?

Lets fast track over to Wynona’s character Maya Larkin. Maya is going to be in every Goth boy’s spank bank for the next year. She runs around with dark circles under her eyes and a cigarette stuck to her bottom lip.

Come to think of it…EVERYONE in this movie runs around with a cigarette hanging out of their mouths. It looks like a
freaking bingo game. This isn’t a bad idea when you think about it though. I mean IF Satan is coming back to earth then getting lung cancer is probably a welcome relief. My strategy is that if Satan is up here than he’s probably left Hell unattended. I think it might be a good idea to get a tumour and die. Think of Satan’s fridge!! It’s probably filled with cheesecake and imported beer and he’s not going to be around to keep an eye on it. He probably gets 4000 cable channels too. The liquor cabinet has got to be stocked and don’t even get me started on his DVD collection. I say go out with a bang (a car accident involving hookers and a Porsche for me) and then change the locks on the gate to Hell.

I digress though.

As usual Satan leaves his flight number and airline ticket lying around so that Wynona can discover how he plans to take human form although it’s written in a complex mathematical form that Ms. Ryder cracks halfway through a pack of Rothman Menthols.

I’d get her to do my taxes this year but I’m afraid that she’d report my bogus expenses directly to God.

It turns out that Satan will take his human form in the body of a man born out of incest. If he was a cross dressing chainsaw mechanic who is married to a mule he was on Sally Jesse Raphael Tuesday morning.

Any guesses on who that guy might be?

Tough luck Peter…. its gotta suck pretty big to be the vessel that Satan plans on squeezing his huge red ass into.

Maya spends a good chunk of the movie trying to convince him to listen to her tapes of demons squealing lines from
“Deliverance” but since he’s already so contaminated with evil he can’t hear anything she gives him.

That’s my excuse every time I tune my girlfriend out as well…

“Sorry honey” I can’t hear you because I’m so tainted with evil that I see your lips moving but it just sounds like the football game that’s on the TV behind you. Now could you move your ass please so I can watch this?” (Remind me not to send her this review by the way….)

Peter finally assumes correctly that the huge blood pentagrams that keep cropping up in his neighbourhood and the fact that priests keep trying to snuff him are a little too hard to ignore and so he tries to find a way out of this movie before his career goes to hell.

I’ll leave the rest to the movie and if you still want to spend 24 bucks to see it don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The South Park Movie was scarier than this.

Posted by rtheygood at 05:56:02 | Permalink | No Comments »

Unbreakable… a review

This movie is written, directed, produced (and what ever the hell else you do when you get a hit and your ego runs amok) by Night Shyamalan. Remember The 6th Sense? Pretty cool flick eh? Not standard Hollywood fare.

So how do you follow that up? Well first ya hafta get artsy!! This means that you have to film the entire movie with a single dirty Christmas bulb for lighting. It was like peering through the hair of my brother’s armpit when I was ten and he had me in a headlock. I could kind of make out figures but it was really hard to make out any real definition in the surroundings. Then again at least the theatre didn’t stink like a badger’s arse on a ten mile run so I guess I’m still ahead on this one.

Night brings back Bruce Willis to act out the main character and instead of that creepy “Haley Joel Whassisname” we have Samuel L. Jackson playing (what else) a creepy OTHER guy who knows what’s going on but ain’t gonna tell him just yet. Sammy still talks like he’s packing heat from Pulp Fiction and it’s digging into his thigh. Once again he walks around in a long black coat but this time he has a glass cane. How many freakin’ trench coats can this dude appear in? If he ever stars in a movie about cave men they’ll all be wearing floor length fur capes with purple lining.

I’d like to see him play a guy with a lisp in a pirate shirt JUST ONCE!!

Imagine that you were blessed. I mean money bursts out of the crotch in your underwear every time you adjusted the “boys.” Now imagine being so stupid that you didn’t notice that quarters were flying out of the urinal as you were giving yourself that final shake. Well…. that’s Bruce.

Bruce is an unhappy man. He lives in a dingy house that looks like it was painted with cigar smoke and phlegm. Everything is yellowing and old. All that’s missing is 12 cats, the wafting odour of deep heating rub and Hee Haw playing in the background on a broken black and white TV set. This is old age wrapped up in a house. Pass me my fuzzy slippers.

Bruce’s marriage is on the rocks and he has a strained relationship with a boy that he’s trying to mend. Sort of like that “last” film eh? Something else is missing…. music. You could actually hear the movie next door because of the prolonged periods of silence in the film. This movie is very uncomfortable to watch. It’s like having a meeting with your boss and he stares at you for 10 seconds between each sentence before he breathes in to ask you something.

Bruce survives a flaming wreck and doesn’t really think much about it. Okayyyyyyyyyyyyy…

EVERYONE else does though. His own wife and kid look at him like there are dancing maggots forming a congo line behind him and everyone seems “disturbed” by Bruce’s good fortune. No…. “Congratulations there buddy.” Just creepy silence. You’d think he was painting bloody pentagrams with the train’s engineer head.

Then along comes Sammy L.

The bizarre thing is that Sam is just the opposite of Bruce. He’s had a hard life and he’s risking a body cast every time he breaks wind because of an illness. He gets a wild idea about what’s going on and tries to explain it to Bruce. AND THEN………….

Well…………

What I will say is that this is one of those “Blair Witch” experiences.

You’ll love this or hate this. It’s as simple as that. Night is attempting to push the envelope of Hollywood movies and I applaud him for that, but he’s getting a little over confident.

The movie was interesting and I was sort of intrigued right up until the last moment, but then it just explodes into the crappiest 30 seconds of cinema since that wang shot at the end of Boogie Nights.

I say IF you have to see it, go on a Tuesday night. It’s not bad until the end.

Posted by rtheygood at 05:28:13 | Permalink | No Comments »

Traffic… a review

Wow…

I just went to see this movie about drugs and they said that it was a bad thing.

Well, not in so many words but I got the idea.

So… what’s the difference between Mexicans and Americans?

It’s like a toilet bowl…

You see whenever they are showing the “street life” in America it’s in this washed out blue tint (I guess this represents… uh…. Tidy Bowl? Maybe Toilet Duck. Yes that’s it…. Toilet Duck says that if you do drugs you’re flushing your life away. Actually he’d probably say “Quack Quack” and then fly around in his toilet airplane with that stupid helmet on but I digress.

Whenever the film goes to Mexico it’s filmed in a dirty and washed out sepia tone, brownish film stock. The image here is a burrito platter 5 hours after taking the tour bus to Mr. Colon.

So you get the crap in Mexico and dump it off in America.

If Canada was involved then we’d be filmed in green because the Mexicans would get a nasty head cold up here and come back all congested and phlegmy.

But enough about the artsy stuff.

Catherine Zeta Jones is very pregnant (her ass won’t be squeezing under any laser beams here unless they’re set to warn about stampeding water buffalo in the lobby) and her husband is a drug dealer. This is bad because she’s 30 and already a mother when her husband gets busted by the DEA. She’s rich, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to go back to a crappy life driving a Honda and watching a 20 inch TV (my heart went out to her).

Michael Douglas is the new drug czar for the US Government. He’s the stereotypical work-a-holic who doesn’t notice at first that his preppy daughter is blowing the paperboy for change so that she can score some crack in downtown Washington with her friends.

Look for Trophy Grace (That 70’s Show) as a kid with a drug habit. Thank God he’s distancing himself from his television character eh?

Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán star together again after making Boogie Nights. They’re Californian cops just trying to make sense of this crazy world. I think they just really dig wearing undershirts and getting sweaty while sitting around in a van. Did they even change sets between these two movies?

Benicio Del Toro is my favorite new actor. You might remember him from The Usual Suspects or The Way of the Gun. He plays a Mexican cop who gets mixed up with the army and the drug cartels. He’s just trying to be an honest federally in a cesspool of corruption and he knows that at any moment he can be killed. What will he do? What will he do?

Dennis Quaid is a sleazy lawyer trying to score with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Yeah…. big stretch. I bet that NEVER happens in real life.

The whole movie is about how drugs move from Mexico to the USA and who’s using, selling, getting arrested and dying in the process. It offers no answers but points out the futility of trying to fight it.

At least I THINK that’s what it was about. I was hitting the pipe pretty hard in the parking lot before I bought my ticket.

A great movie…. the spiders that were crawling all over my arms were a really cool special effect, but I don’t know how they got my popcorn to talk to me in Yiddish.

My 2 cents (man)…. heheheheh…. cool….. hehehehe

Posted by rtheygood at 05:26:51 | Permalink | No Comments »

Wednesday, March 22, 2000

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon… a review

Crouching tiger hidden dragon?!!

How about crouching pothead hidden stash?

Man… you have to be able to suspend your disbelief for this one.

Imagine chasing a chick down an alley and all of a sudden she runs up the wall and over the rooftops and gets into a slap fight with another chick in the treetops!!!

Yeah, well somehow it seems plausible if you put them in blue tights slap and on a red cape, but have them running around in silk pajamas and they just look silly.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that it’s a beautiful movie and the fight scenes were incredible but they looked awkward as they jumped from rooftop to rooftop. I think it was the legs flailing around in the air that looked bad. Imagine dangling a rat over a cat’s head with some fishing line. I could see it if they planted a foot on the roof and “leapt” to another ledge (a la Matrix) but the running in air bit was weak.

The story is as follows:

This guy (forget me using names… I’m sure that in Chinese it’s Bob, Carol, and Cleetus but I can’t remember what they were calling each other now) is a warrior. He carries a cool sword named uh… green cheese (whatever). It’s magical. Well…. it can’t break even though it’s as floppy a porn star in a cold lake. This is metaphoric for something in nature. You know, bend like the reed in the wind and you will not break. The Chinese are always more poetic than us. If Sylvester Stalone had written this movie the motto would be “Bend in the wind and shoot him in the knees.”

At any rate he’s tired of killing people and he gives his sword to his girlfriend for safe keeping. She goes to another guy’s house and puts it on a mantle. I’m pretty sure that she hands out flyers to tell people that it’s there as well and even points out that it’s unguarded. Never give a chick your sword to hold onto.

Well not your REAL sword if you know what I mean.

It gets stolen (duh) and the girlfriend chases the thief over some rooftops until she sees it go into this rich dude’s castle.

Our warrior comes back and finds out that his sword is gone (film this in 2001 and what you’re really saying is that she wrecked his car). He doesn’t care because he really came to tell her that he loves her which is something that he couldn’t do before because his master had been killed by the Jade Fox and he needs to avenge the death which he can do without his sword but then again he needs to make sure that the thief who stole it deserves the honour of carrying it.

Um… I think so anyway.

There’s this girl who lives next door and is about to be married off. She doesn’t want to be an aristocrat and wants to be a warrior. This is handy because she can kick just about anybody’s ass.

The story tends to jump around these major points:

Dude wants to kill the Jade Fox who has stolen the secrets of his poker playing warrior buddies and killed his master.

Dude wants to train the thief who has his magical green sword how to be a true master. That or kill her (whatever).

Dude wants to admit to his girlfriend that he loves her because he’s tired of masturbating on mountain tops.

Then there’s the “girlfriend”…

She wants dude to crap or get off the pot. She’s great with a sword too (if you know what I mean) but could use a warm body to rub her feet after a long night of flying over the city. She makes friends with the kid getting married next door.

The kid is a spoiled little bitch. She does whatever she wants but since she’s a martial arts expert who’s going to say anything? She wants to be a warrior and also loves some thief who lives in the desert.

The Jade Fox is some cranky old bitch who I’m pretty sure is a lesbian. She wants the kid to travel around with her and be a thief. She has no honour but does have a 12 inch tongue so you can see the kid’s dilemma.

Other than that we’re talking about a lot of flying and fighting. It looks great and the fighting is spectacular. If you can get past the fact that people land in Japan after they’ve been kicked in China then I say go and see it.

It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before (well…. sober anyway).

Posted by rtheygood at 17:22:53 | Permalink | No Comments »