The Movie Hooligan Blog

Auteur Watch - Charlton and Fraser C. Heston

2012-01-30T01:10:00.000-08:00

"It is NOT a world of men, 'Machine'!" The usual suspects? The closing of the American frontier, computers, and... let's say refrigerators. Why, without refrigerators, men would have to go out with bowie knives and chase down a buffalo to get their meat fix! But thanks to American Exceptionalism, all we have to do is drive to the store and buy it... even though a real man would probably steal his steak. As for me, I've got guys driving up in vans trying to shove meat down my throat. I don't even need to drive to the store! On the other hand, they only show up every two months or so. So persistent are they. And they never have Tofurky Italian sausage that I used to eat way too much of.
Where was I? Oh, right, the Hestons. Well, after profiling the Scheinmans last week, I just KNEW my list of auteur siblings/parents was incomplete. Charlton probably directed something... there you go. Mother Lode. Long before the Coen brothers change the directing dynamic forever, the Hestons did it first. Now every two bit internet millionaire with a brother thinks he can get behind the Canon HD video camera and play God with cast and crew's lives. Then it was the 90s, and young Fraser had to go to Scheinman and beg for work. Well, how about a Stephen King adaptation? Those are still hot, right? Tell you what. We've got Frank Darabont doing the classy Stephen King stuff, so why don't you do one of his dreck books? Here's 20 million dollars and the full resources of Castle Rock at your disposal; go make us a damn hit movie! He didn't completely a-hole his way out of the biz on that one, but Alaska finished off both Hestons for good, at least in terms of the silver screen. Of course, Charlton himself did appear in that Michael Moore documentary! And that cameo in the 2001 Planet of the Apes reboot. But like Michael Schroeder before him, relatively young Fraser decided to take a break anyway. Well, he was overdue, and frankly he just doesn't fit in with all these young punks running Hollywood nowadays. Off to the ranch in Montana. Unfortunately, Schroeder beat him to the punch, coming out of the retirement coma first with Man in the Chair, but ol' Fraser's got an ace up his sleeve! Something called The Search for Michael Rockefeller is currently in production, and I see that Fraze is proving himself a double threat on this one: director AND narrator! Well, the Rockefeller name is almost as iconic as the Heston name, but I guess it'll have to do. A toast to Fraser C. Heston! You've done your dad proud.

Liam & the Wolves

2012-01-30T00:47:00.000-08:00

As expected, The Grey takes the top slice of cake this week at the box office. It scarfed up $20 million at the ticket counter, but it cost $25 mill in TV ads to get that 20 mill! I have it on the highest authority that it's director Joe Carnahan's masterpiece, but I don't know... his The A Team was pretty masterpiece-y, too! Debuting at #3 this week is Two For the Money... I mean, One for the Money, the latest Katherine Heigl juggernaut. Apparently, leaving Grey's Anatomy was the best thing to happen to her. It at least got her away from the unseemly advances of now grown-up Patrick Dempsey. She's such a big star now that she won't return Soderbergh's calls! Go figure. The last debut this week is... no, not Phone Booth... no, not this thing... it's the latest Sam Worthington juggernaut, called Man on a Ledge. Almost sounds like the title of a Magritte painting! He's got Mel Gibson's long Lethal Weapon hair, and he's got attitude, but hopefully Sam won't start spouting right wing gibberish any time soon. Gotta be a billionaire for that.

Money never sleeps, but 'Wall Street' slips into coma

2012-01-29T00:36:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened over the course of 23 years since the original, and it starts out promising enough, blatant ode to the Blues Brothers aside; I guess Frank Oz was unavailable to reprise his role. It's a good thing I saw the original first; otherwise, I might not have appreciated what ... sorry, SPOILER ALERT... what Charlie Sheen says to Gordon Gekko at the big function they both attend. Unfortunately, Charlie seems to be less reprising his role as Bud Fox as he is appearing as Charlie Sheen, the hotshot actor with a babe under each arm. Oliver Stone gives himself a juicier cameo than last go-round.
Then of course, we get to Shia LaBeouf. I guess this might explain his motorcycle accident he had. We'll try to leave that alone for now. I'm probably not giving away a whole lot by revealing that Shia's just a guy who happens to be sleeping with Gekko's daughter. Good plot construct. It also worked in The Paper Chase, but it seemed a little more genuine. Shia is a Wall Street hustler trying to raise capital for a nuclear fusion plant. For God's sake, the guy's name is Masters! What more do you bastards want? Since Shia plays a Wall Street guy who's trying to be a green energy crusader AND make a little money, let me just take a second here to defend solar power. Actually, I don't really need to, as the deal that transpires in the movie is more reflective of a big oil man's interest in solar, pun intended. I've been through worse on my thesis: "Sun sets on solar power", "Solar industry in eclipse," etc. Literally tens of them! So even though Solyndra may represent the industry as a whole for lots of Americans, I've studied the industry enough to know their big breakthrough is at hand: Nanosolar, hot carrier cells, salt-thermal storage, don't get me started.
Gekko this time around is a little bit shorter on aphorisms, but I did like the exchange he had with Shia about money in the subway. Marrying money, sleeping with money... ah, to be rich and paranoid. Otherwise, the movie seems to be less of an oracle and more of a reveler in the trappings; some might call it "possesso-porn," but I won't go that far.
Now, there's an episode that happens that threatens to tear Shia and Gekko's daughter apart forever and ever, but by that point I lost interest and started thinking about how I would have written the scene. For some reason, I wanted Shia to say "Okay, fine. You know what? The whole Gekko family is NUTS!" and storm off. But as always, that says more about me than anything, as I haven't been a father yet. As we all know, men don't leave. Of course, not even a man as hardened as Gordon Gekko is immune to the prospect of being a grandfather. His heart is softened, and he offers to stake the kid with a very large sum of money. If only Mary Matalin or Grover Norquist were on hand to scream "Redistributionist!"
Frank Langella does what he can in a role meant for Jackie Mason. I was also reminded of his turn as the editor of The Daily Planet in Superman 5. But once again, the names of the phony firms here are a tad clunky. Churchill? Please. Rodrigo Prieto ASC does what he can to hide the digital video, but it's not enough, damn it. Like Angry Smurf, I HATE the blurry pictures! In the music department, Stewart Copeland is out, and David Byrne and Brian Eno are in! They do what they can.
So, to summarize, maybe I'm just a jaded sophisticate, but the sequel doesn't seem as good or as predictive as the original. Maybe, given some time, it'll be up there with Inside Job or even Too Big to Fail, but it can at least boast a theatrical release. The screenwriters seem to have done some of their homework, but not enough. At least Gekko seems to have paid more dues than Jack Abramoff... or, at least, saved a hell of a lot for that rainy day.

**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

VH1 - Behind the Broadcast

2012-01-28T10:38:00.001-08:00

That's about as snarky I can get, but what can I say? Movies like The King's Speech bring out the latent Brit in me, as I'm sure it does for the Weinsteins. Everyone's good in it, of course. Tim Burton loaned out Helena Bonham Carter for a few weeks, Colin Firth's speech impediment was convincing, and well... who doesn't love Geoffrey Rush? Seeing as how I just saw Karate Kid for film buffs, Rush makes a fine Miyagi to Firth's Daniel-san. He lost the Oscar to Christian Bale, but came a close second, I'm sure. Director Tom Hooper, hot off the John Adams HBO series, brings similar sensibilities to this tale. There's a bit of a student film feel to the stationary shots, but I guess it's to accentuate the regality of it all. Guy Pearce was just in a film with Adam Sandler, so I couldn't help but think of that when he taunts his brother Colin, and the whole speech impediment thing. I dare say they're trying to get me to feel the Royals' pain!

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch: Cameron Kincaid

2012-01-27T01:06:00.000-08:00

Well, ultimately, I think The Village Voice nailed Man in the Chair about as well as anybody, but to be fair, the film did get better when it focused more on the old people involved. I thought I knew a thing or two about Hollywood, but I didn't attend high school in Hollywood. That's sort of the perspective we get here in the place holder of our hero, baby-fat-ridden high school student Cameron Kincaid, a director's name if ever there was one. James Cameron, Cameron Crowe, Cameron Kincaid - the big three, if you will. Also, I hate to say it, but hanging around film geeks must be pretty painful for the average person. I'm a film geek and even I grew tired of Cameron and his best friend. Or maybe I'm just not hip to the film geek youth anymore.
The film establishes early that our hero is a troubled youth. Cameron is on his bicycle, and he gets taunted by a gang of white punks in their late 20s in a nice car. Cameron starts to flee, but then doubles back, riding over the car with his bike. Why? Because it's awesome! Duh! Next scene: Cameron's in class, and the punks in the car are in the back of the classroom. Some might say that if you're in the same class with the bully, you're probably not going to do that to his car, but what do I know? The chief bully's also an aspiring director named Brett Ratner... I mean, Brett Raven. The inevitable pounding in the hallway is pretty tame, but Brett knows how to hurt Cameron: by telling him he has no chance of winning that film festival contest. I want to grab the first third of this film by the neck, shake it and say "GET A LIFE." There's more to life than the making of a film. The rest of the film eases up on it a little, and there's a nice twist to the ending. For some reason I hate to spoil it, I guess because I want you to suffer as I have suffered.
There's a good friend of mine who just hates it when the title of the movie is used in the movie's dialogue. Barton Fink is the exception to the rule, of course... not Charlie Bartlett. Plucky old geezer Christopher Plummer tells the kid, "Ah! You want to be the man in the chair," meaning the director of a film. The man in the chair of Man in the Chair is Michael Schroeder. He was the first assistant director on a movie called Jocks, a film they showed on USA Up All Night hosted by Gilbert Gottfried. I remember this because Gilbert played a mime, with narration provided by some wicked French dude. The other film was Off the Mark... I assume the link is correct. I don't think Schroeder was involved with that one, but it seems like the kind of thing he might have. He was also an A.D. on Million Dollar Mystery, which apparently has been permanently banned from ever being shown on TV, and rightly so, frankly.
The late 80s-early 90s were a step up for Michael Schroeder, as he himself finally became the man in the chair, if only on such video store shelf mainstays as Cyborg 2 and Cyborg 3: The Recycler. It took him ten years to get Man in the Chair made... why do I get the feeling that the Robert Wagner character in the movie is an isomorph of Angelina Jolie?
Kudos to M. Emmet Walsh on a gritty performance, but when he quotes Hunter Thompson near the end, it's more of what we expect from him. Somebody give him a role in a Funny or Die video as Newt Gingrich. He's the only guy who can do it! And of course, one last tribute to the script. At one point, Mulder's boss on The X Files takes sympathy on the Plummer character by saying "My ass bleeds for you." As does mine for this film.

**
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Stooge Fright

2012-01-24T11:45:00.001-08:00

Well, after the summit of Dutiful but Dumb, it's only natural to expect the next Stooge film to be at least not as good, and at most a downright letdown. All the World's a Stooge is a lot closer to the latter category, but I might just be having a bad day. Reminds me of a bad Francis Veber comedy, if he ever were to get his busy French hands on the Stooges. To be fair, there's no casual wine drinking in this one, combined with the eating of decadent French pastry... mmmmm. French pastry.

ACT ONE

A swipe from the past at the Angelina Jolies of the world? Ouch! Well, the Mia Farrows, too. We start at the top of the American social structure, free from the wild influence of the likes of the Stooges... or so they thought! We meet a fast-talking society dame holding a cat who's about to receive a refugee from "the war torn battlefields of... somewhere." The butler prepares to alert the media. However, all is not well on the homefront: the husband, a rather working-class looking lad, or at least a lower-rung managerial type, comes barging in with a bad toothache... Did anyone notice that there's a dog sitting at the table? Must be a leftover from one of those all-dog pictures that got made back then for some reason. I think I know the reason: they were CUTE, damn it. And some people probably thought, oh my! Hollywood's got the technology to read dog's thoughts, translate them to sound waves and transfer these waves directly to celluloid? Jules Verne be damned! Mostly Southern types. The actor playing the husband is apparently a fellow named Emory Parnell. What Preston Sturges saw in him I'll never know. But the Stooges usually get saddled with rather crappy supporting players. Showbiz, baby! Emory does get to some Stooge shtick, as he ladles a bunch of alfredo sauce onto what I'm assuming is an omelette. In the next scene, it becomes a water-soaked sponge. He puts his fork in it, and water spurts all over his nice brown suit. The missus insists he goes get that bum tooth pulled, so he'll be in a good mood when the refugee arrives. Good screenwriting, baby! Before leaving, he runs afoul of a hot pancake. More Stooge shtick. Anybody can do this.
New scene: dentist office. As usual, the old, musty, rusty, moldy comedy formula of a person's name: their first initial is I (Isadore for boys, Iris for girls), and the person's last name is a verb related as roughly as possible to their profession, with "um" on the end. Jewish? In this case, the dentist's name is "I. Yankum." Precious. Probably how Isaac Asimov got his "I, Robot" title. We hear Curly grunting, as though his tooth's getting pulled. As with the beginning of Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World, the scene's not quite what we think. I dare not spoil it any further. Needles to say, Moe's in a bad mood and he gives Larry a swift kick in the ass for good measure. They play window washers, yet manage to get the dentist soaking wet instead. Exit the doctor. I should also mention that Moe tells Curly to stop falling off the scaffold. We'll leave that aside for now. So, the dentist is gone, and the Stooges are cleaning up the water they "spilled." Enter Ajax Bullion, holding his hand to his face from the pain of his tooth... We'll leave that alone for now as well, but I suppose we can safely assume that the Stooges probably did something to the secretary, and that she's now incapacitated to some capacity. Nevertheless, the guy's tooth is a humdinger, and so necessity becomes the mother of comic havoc, hopefully just this once. Since the guy insisted, whatever the Stooges do to him is nice and legal. And so, they begin to pull the bad tooth, the only way they know how... Now, here's a great screenwriting tip: watch how they do this scene. Curly finds a giant pair of oversize novelty dentures, and starts pretending they're canastas. Moe takes it and throws it onto the chair... need I tell you the second half? I think so, because it's probably the lamest example of Moe pretending he's got something stuck on/in his ass, and then yanking it out, but apparently the director didn't want to cut away that day. They do cut away when Moe sticks it on Curly's nose. Good exchange between Moe and Curly at 4:37.

ACT TWO

Well, we're past the 5:20 mark, and we're still in the dentist office, and we're getting past the point of ridiculousness, which for the Stooges is saying a lot. Ajax now has a mouth full of dentist cement, and they've probably pulled the wrong tooth. Larry tells Curly, "You stripped his gears!" Did the guy have dentures? I still don't get that one. Anyway, cement in the mouth, but it's dried too fast! They can't put his teeth back! They try drilling with a power drill. Curly gets an idea: "We'll have to blast." They go with Curly's idea. Long story short, the Stooges' brief flirtation with dentistry ends, they dive out the window onto the scaffold, and down the side of the building they go. Meanwhile, there's an explosion, and Mr. Bullion is totally okay. Now, I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but there was one time the Stooges took an engine out of a car, but the guy was able to get in and drive off. However, he drove only a short ways, leaving engine parts trailing behind him. As for Mr. Bullion's brush with Stooge dentistry, he manages to keep going. All a little too neat, but the biggest hole in the plot is yet to come, my friends.
Scene: outside Jerome's Inc. Department Store... an investment of Curly's, perhaps? The boys drop a bucket on Officer Bud Jamison's head, then their scaffolding lands on his back. They take off running, hiding in some guy's car. The guy shows up: Ajax Bullion. Small worlds make for big laughs, apparently. As fate would have it, Moe must've read his thesaurus that day and he declares that the three of them are... yup! You guessed it. Refugees. Ajax, proving himself to be the fourth Stooge, indeed, offers to take the Stooges to his house. That'll show the missus!... I guess.
And so, halfway into Act Two, we have the big test of our suspension of disbelief. The Stooges are dressed up as children, Larry in a giant girl's dress. Moe and Curly have some nice choreography at 8:16. Take that, Fosse! Larry gets slapped for saying "Leave him alone!", and rightly so, I'm afraid. Anyway, the moment arrives when the missus meets the Stooges, introduced as three "refugees." No buyer's remorse here, no questioning that they're adults rather than children. Curly gets caught up in the moment, saying "Mammy" several times, in a performance that no one's allowed to like in this day and age. We grow so weary of flop sweat in this age of post-internet ennui. The triumph of Steven Wright. James Gunn's Super obviously borrowed from where Curly ends up knocking over the chair the missus is sitting in, WITH THE MISSUS STILL IN IT. He falls as well; otherwise it wouldn't be funny. The butler says "Luncheon is served." Butlers never learn to not say that when the Stooges are in a room. This butler somehow doesn't get knocked over when the boys run past him... you know what? This one's not one of my favorites, and it is past my bedtime, so I'm going to cut this short. A Stooge film can't be good when the big pie fight only has one pie thrown in it. One pie thrown by the Stooges, one ax thrown AT the Stooges in response. I'm never watching this one again.

**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Adam and Andrew Scheinman

2012-01-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

You might not know it from his IMDb entry, but Andrew Scheinman's a big deal. Or perhaps you would. Check out his top four right now. Stand By Me? A Few Good Men? Princess Bride? Harry Met Sally? Oh but he's not just the king of the late 80s-early 90s... watch an episode of Seinfeld, and you're bound to see his name. Oh, THAT's gotta be worth something! Let's just say he doesn't have to struggle to get work.
They say it about every decade now. If you remember the early 80s, you weren't really there, man! Of course, if it's the 80s, it's because most people in L.A. at the time were all coked up, their hearts all a-twitter, running around to get things done. Andrew did two movies back to back with the Hestons: titan Charlton and son Fraser C. I guess this might partly explain Castle Rock's future involvement with Needful Things. And then, after working with Albert Brooks on Modern Romance, it was time to regroup, and take a short break. But, not for long, apparently, because Rob Reiner was about to go places, baby. Three movies in three years? Even ol' Meathead was gonna need some help with pulling that one off. Andrew isn't credited with Spinal Tap, so we'll leave that one aside. While you're at it, Andrew, take this Jeffrey Stott kid under your wing. Teach him a thing or two. Hands off Little Big League, though, Jeff. That one's all mine!!!!
Yes, the Scheinmans have separately had careers a little more equitable than, say, Lawrence and Mark Kasdan. Andrew appears to have been the mother log that fell first, and upon which brother Adam and Jeffrey Stott have taken nutrients from. But Andrew's making a big comeback with Rob Reiner's 2012 picture... MEATHEAD!!!! Wow! It's not even based on a Stephen King book or anything! Unless Guy Thomas is yet another pseudonym...

Marriage Power!

2012-01-22T18:24:00.000-08:00

I should probably include these two in my Auteur Watch series... nah, never mind. Hunky auteur Len Wiseman and his wife, superstar Kate Beckinsale, once again storm the winter box office with the latest installment of the Underworld saga. Another chance for people to discharge guns, and look totally awesome while doing it. The totally awesome part is what separates the movies from your average NRA meeting. Meanwhile, Red Tails, the George Lucas tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen, comes in at #2... a sad weekend indeed. But it was only $6 million behind first place, if that's any consolation! In even worse news, BOTH of Spielberg's pics fall off the top 10. There is no joy in Marin County, the mighty Whiz Kids have struck out. Marky Mark's latest falls to #3, Soderbergh debuts at #5, and the critically maligned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close debuts at #4. I came to that conclusion because Ebert gave it ... gave it 2.5 stars (out of 4), and The Onion gave it an F. The harder screenwriter Eric Roth works these days, the worse grades he gets! How's THAT work?

Wall Street 1... Ballistic: Fox vs. Gekko

2012-01-21T23:06:00.000-08:00

Welp, you gotta hand it to Oliver Stone... okay, maybe not, but a film nut like me has got to. Think of him as the Tyler Perry of the late 80s: one film a year for eight years in a row! Okay, not as impressive or as lucrative as Tyler, but you get the idea. Ollie turned away from Vietnam for a second to address the financial crisis of his time. Kinda sad how very, very current it is in the wake of all that's transpired.
Now, if you had a good economics professor like I did, you know that it all started with Reagan. I prefer to think of it as a cookie jar. Let's say that in 1980 we had a relatively full cookie jar. Now it's empty. The rich people needed all the money more, so they slowly trickled it back to themselves. And a show like Breaking Bad is now all the rage: America is now the proverbial frat boy sitting on the couch as the rest of the world surpasses us, so we go for the low hanging ingenuity fruit like making the Cadillac of crystal meth. What I want to know is: when's Mike coming back to get his revenge? Far as I know, near as I can tell, he's not quite dead. Anyway, there's gotta be a way to blame Obama for all of this...
As for the film itself, well, I'll try not to spoil it too much if you haven't seen it. Young Bud Fox... good name! Bud works at your local mom 'n pop brokerage firm named Steinem-Paglia... I mean, ... damn. Gotta work to remember what it was. But that's me all over: I mean, Steinem's not exactly a name synonymous with high finance, right? In this hyperlink age we live in? Charlie works alongside future Scrubs star John McGinley, and I couldn't help but think that Oliver 'n Weiser modeled this a bit on some old 40s screwball comedy, just slightly. Or maybe Stone sees himself as fully contemporary, with nary an homage to the Hollywood of old his parents weren't a part of. Oscar winner Michael Douglas plays the sleazy Bain Capital-esque vulture capitalist named Gordon Gekko... what is that, Dutch? Think a combination of Trump and Leona Helmsley, but who knows a thing or two about business.
For some reason, Bud Fox has a hard time getting to meet Gekko, but that was the era. Back then, if a guy like Gekko saw a kid who merely looked like his future heir apparent, he had to jump through hoops to prove it. Bud finds he's ill prepared to leap into the deep end of the pool, and he quickly exhausts the few good ideas he has: in this case, winning stock tips. He finally squanders his last bargaining chip: his dad, the union steward at Bluestar Airlines, gave him the inside scoop on a favorable court ruling about to be handed down. Gekko, however, plays both sides: he throws Bud some business his way, then later on scolds Bud for not having enough insider info.: "Unless your dad works at another company,..." Drat. The IMDb doesn't have that line, but it does have a similar line, so post me about SOMETHING ELSE PLEASE!! David Mamet couldn't have written Gekko's dialogue better... and he probably would've made Gekko say "Things change," for starters.
I won't ruin the plot any further, but I will protest on Daryl Hannah's behalf. Wrong for the part? For shame. Why, I can't think of a part she was wrong for! Well, maybe Legal Eagles... There's one other Gekko speech that's quite telling, indeed: it's the one about how "The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth..." How things have changed. Guess I better see the sequel at some point, based on that line alone. There's also a similar speech that the Steve Martin character gives in Grand Canyon... hey! Stop throwing stuff at me.
There's some experimental lighting in Wall Street, courtesy of multiple Oscar winner Robert Richardson. This was just a couple years before he went through his phase of very bright lights dangling over tables, washing everything out. Forget Daryl Hannah; John Cusack would've been perfect for Bud Fox... but he wasn't in Platoon, was he? Plus, it wouldn't have had the same resonance with Martin Sheen as the father, so you gotta like that. People had a problem with Daryl Hannah, but not Charlie Sheen's eyebrows. When he's happy, furrowed brows. When he's mad, furrowed brows. My viewing companion thought... SPOILER ALERT... when he was being escorted from the office, the guy in real life probably wouldn't cry. But I came to Charlie's defense on that one: just a little something for the Oscar voting block, because THEY don't know how hard it is to cry on cue... right?

Great triple bill with: Inside Job, Other People's Money

***1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Oyster: 9, Curly: 2.

2012-01-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

SPOILERS ALERTS!!! Once again, maybe I'm wrong, but somewhere along the way I came to the conclusion that Dutiful but Dumb is probably the best Curly short of them all. Oh sure, others have their high points, and sure, DBD is no Micro-Phonies, the greatest Curly short of them all, but if you had to pick one... and that's what film critics always have to do, pick one... if you had to go to that proverbial, apocryphal desert island you always see in one-panel cartoons, Dutiful But Dumb is the Three Stooges short I would be compelled to take. It's got everything: democracy vs. fascism, joie de nouriture, giant novelty cigars, harmonica music, and of course Curly getting strangled by the neck and having his face shoved into the vat of chemicals in which a picture is getting developed. Well, one can't help but appreciate the extra effort the boys put in on those all-too-rare occasions.

ACT ONE

Mel Gibson apparently loves the Stooges, even though they had Jewish sympathies. But surely Mel is conflicted over the plot of this one, as they play paparazzi... and I think we all know how he feels about the paparazzi. Clearly the opposite of how Lady Gaga feels about them. In this case, the camera-wielding psychos are chasing after a poor, blameless job creator named Percival de Puyster... better check the Wikipedia entry to see who his real life equivalent is. And even though Percy seems a bit effete at times, he does have strength enough to keep a big handful of the Kodak stormtroopers out of his honeymoon suite, who clearly have wooden mallets in their hands and Priapus on their minds. Percy and his bride have an exchange worthy of S.J. Perelman: she says "Have you forgotten all your other wives?" Percy says "Completely... except on Alimony Day." But just as the woodpecker and the pine cone keep evolving to stay one step ahead of the other, the paparazzi are suddenly getting taller! Oh wait... it's just Moe sitting on Larry's shoulders. So even though it might look like Moe's grabbing his crotch to make a right turn, it's actually Larry's head. Ultimately, this new-fangled height is not enough to get the picture, and their failure is resounding.... Boy, Moe's EXTRA mad in this one!
I believe it was David Steinberg who first offered up a Stooge philosophy, strikingly similar to Orwell's theory of the three classes. Moe is the upper class, Larry is the middle class looking to trade places with the upper class, and Curly longs for equality amongst all peoples... in other words, bat$#it crazy. But Curly's not immune to the occasional risk if there's reward to be had, and... SPOILER ALERT... he becomes the Trojan paparazzi, and gets a perfect picture of the happy couple, worthy of an informal prom photo. (Curly 2:19) Curly gives a "n'yuk n'yuk" the likes of which I've never heard before. Actually, this whole film is pretty chock full of n'yuks, which is probably why it's one of my favourites.
Meanwhile, back at the lab... seriously! Okay, the darkroom, where the photo is busy developing. While we wait, Curly tells us the parable of the three watches. Moe's obviously not in the mood for it, and he waits a good long while with both fingers outstretched for the first eye poke of the proceedings. I guess he wanted to make sure to hit Curly in the forehead, but had trouble negotiating Curly's miner cap. Larry keeps the hits coming. He runs in from Stage Left and says "I can't find the negative!" Moe asks Curly "How about the positive?" Hard to say how extensive photography was among the masses at the time, but why waste a good opposite joke? As usual, Moe doesn't like Curly's answer to the question, but Curly's punishment is rather harsh, I felt, especially when I first saw this one as a tween, but I'll try to leave that out of it for now. Let's just say that Alex's beating and near-drowning in the farmyard trough in A Clockwork Orange was child's play in comparison.
Needless to say, the simple act of developing one photograph cannot be handled by the Stooges. And even the much simpler act of exiting the darkroom ends up having disastrous consequences when done by the Stooges. Of course, surely some of the other Whack Magazine employees are culpable, as they left a bunch of dry timber around for the Stooges' flint to set ablaze: there's a domino-esque line of six prints leading to the editor's desk. The assistant editor acts as the seventh domino as the Stooges violently emerge from the darkroom. Sadly, the picture that Curly took ends up looking like a picture of Curly with his face in the developer. The boys get fired on the spot and start to pack their things, when opportunity arises. The initial scenario that sets the scene has finally ended, which paves the way for the scenario that will consume the rest of the film. In a plot structure similar to We Want Our Mummy, there's a suicide mission that gets rebranded as a good job opportunity. The Stooges, of course, triumphantly accept. They leave in a hurry, and Curly knocks the dominoes... er, the prints, over again. This time, however, there's eight instead of six.

ACT TWO

Scene: the fictional country of Freedonia... I mean, Vulgaria. There seems to be only one law in Vulgaria: no cameras. Of course, if the Stooges are able to get cameras into your country when they're illegal, well... you might as well hire them to work at Customs. As fate or the plot would have it, the Vulgarian stormtroopers, led by Lou Dobbs' great grandfather Bud Jamison, have captured another photographer, and are marching him past the Stooges at just the right moment. Moe's still in a bad mood and breaks his flash bulb over Curly's behelmeted bald head, but the Stooges put their differences aside when opportunity presents itself. An execution? What a photo op! Curly tells the intended victim to put a gun to the head of the senior arresting official. The Stooges eventually figure out what's going on and take off running. Sensing bigger game, the cops go after the Stooges and the original arrestee takes off... snapping a picture first, of course. The Stooges run quickly, but without the proper compass, and end up running into a giant Vulgarian jail cell.
The boys are now in casual Vulgarian prison garb. Now, when I and my mates watched this when we were young, my mates noticed these three holes in the wall the Stooges are standing in front of. They're a little bit lighter than the rest of the wall, and they turn black when we hear the sound of bullets. Ah, showbiz. For some reason, I'm suddenly reminded of the ending of The In-Laws... the 1979 version. The Vulgarians honor the boys' request for one last request: just one last smoke. The cigarette companies should be all over this part, if only the boys didn't go for a cigar. According to Wikipedia, Curly pulls out a cigar "the length of a hero sandwich." Now, a hero ain't nothin' but a sandwich, but Curly indeed buys them some time, and it may be the only time Moe doesn't smash Curly's cigar.
Next scene: both executioners and victims have fallen asleep, and Curly's sleeping with a tiny piece of the cigar left in his mouth. The executioners wake up first and spot their big chance. The Stooges wake up just in time. Unfortunately, they used their last match, and Curly tries to light the cigar by inhaling on it. This backfires on Curly, some might say literally! To cut to the chase... I know, it's too late for that at this point... the executioners take their shot again, but the Stooges have a few tricks up their sleeves, and their heads tucked into the necks of their shirts. They're able to make a getaway this way, and a better one at that.

And now, we see the thing that the editors of Whack Magazine were talking about: a whiz-bang new technology that can make a gun fire by itself. The editors called it a "ray machine." The Vulgarian upper echelons refer to it as a "poofer." They've even turned it into a verb: "Proceed with the poofing!" The upper echelons, however, get wind of three picture-taking spies, so they have to leave the room. Little do they know how close these spies are, and pretty soon the Stooges end up using the "poofer" with hilarious consequences. How and why do they ever let Curly be in charge? The echelons rush back to the office, and the boys hide. As you can see from the jpeg I chose, Moe hides in the lamp, Curly the radio. Larry's the odd man out this time, but he must've found a great hiding spot not worth caring about. But let's take a brief time out for all the would-be screenwriters out there. In clearly what is an homage to the conceit of The Front Page, and the many many remakes it spawned, Curly alone has to keep the bigwigs from looking inside that radio. Cue what has to be the greatest Stooge music interlude ever, including a not-so-subtle jab at Harpo Marx. (Curly 1:29) If they don't have that minute of celluloid in Heaven, I ain't going. That's all there is to it.

ACT THREE

Oh, before I continue, I would be amiss if I didn't mention the little laugh Curly gives at 2:48. A true craftsman. Anyway, the Stooges get the best of the bigwigs and head out into the Vulgarian air in disguise. Curly gets freaked out by a bayonet and the boys run away, following Curly's lead. And all this time I thought Moe was the alpha Stooge! A cook rings a dinner bell, and the four of them run to eat. The cook ultimately can't keep up with the Stooges, and he falls, making a noise similar to the noise made a little earlier in the pic, at about 1:48 to be more precise. Someday I've got to hire someone to make these connections a little clearer, or at least YouTube can figure out how to position the films automatically with links. That'll be someone's next billion. Anyway, the scene now is a café, just your typical Vulgarian café. For me, personally, the thing that separates this Stooge short from the typical Stooge short is that it's very good about hiding its gratuitous scene stretchers. Some might complain about them spending the rest of the pic in some nondescript café, but Curly manages to make it work. First, he runs afoul of a bottle of dry ice... I mean, strong Vulgarian liquor. So strong, in fact, it makes his whole body violently dizzy, not just his head. It's classy, however; there's no vomiting. My description doesn't do it justice, of course. And then... the oyster soup arrives. Kashrut aside, it's a fun scene, and the Stooges would try it again in the later Income Tax Sappy, but with a resourceful lobster claw. To go back in history, there was a similar scene in the Hal Roach Taxi Boys short, Thundering Taxis. But the Taxi Boys aren't on DVD yet, are they? Damn straight. I hate to have that attitude, but clearly the Taxi Boys have neither the number of shorts under their belt... I mean, films to their credit, nor do they have the consistency of character that Laurel & Hardy or the Stooges has, Billy Gilbert aside. Anyway, the point being, it's hard to enjoy a bowl of milk... bowl of soup unless you got some crackers. Everybody knows that. But even oysters like crackers, too, and the war in the café is on. Curly loses several crackers to the lone live oyster in his soup, but he manages to get the better of that damn oyster a couple times. Note his gales of laughter! Some might call it prejudice, but clearly this is not your average oyster. The oyster eventually gets the better of Curly, just after Curly got the better of the oyster with the pepper-covered cracker, so Curly takes out his gun and fires just over the oyster's head several times. A sad reminder that no one wins when there's gun violence.

EPILOGUE

The three bigwigs come to, find the Stooges, and the Stooges are carried away by riflemen. The riflemen have bayonets on their rifles, and the Stooges are hanging by their belt loops from the bayonets. I probably didn't describe that quite right, but needless to say the wire technicians must've been busy that day. One of the finest Stooge shorts ever made.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - John Requa and Glenn Ficarra

2012-01-18T18:32:00.000-08:00

Despite the worldwide internet blackout, we're still open! Reason enough to stop PIPA/SOPA... whatever it is. This is one party that shouldn't be shut down.
Well, I haven't been able to prove it yet, but I did recently see a VH1 documentary about "Weird Al" Yankovic, and one of the people talking about Al was named John Ficarra... oh, right. The blackout. I'm going to assume that, as hard as it is to get into showbiz as it is, there's a relation. The son does better than the father. Only the son of the showbiz father would be crazy enough to actually TRY to make it in showbiz. Somewhere along the way, he found a Requa to cling to. The guy must be talented... or at least, make Ficarra look good in comparison.
It all started at the tail end of the 90s, with Clinton's popularity at an all time high. We didn't even need to listen to his speeches, because we knew he was on the job, making the world at least seem like a better place. Klasky Csupo clones were everywhere thanks to the Simpsons, so why not try to write for one? The Wild Thornberries just might do. Paul Simon might even do a song for it! How cool/slightly tinged with sadness is that?
But these high profile gigs don't last forever, and something called computer animation was finally grown up and ready to really ruin the natural world. Jumanji was a mere warm-up act. How about talking dogs and screaming cats? With this surprise hit raising the boats of all the people involved in it, it was time for the next generation to take over Hollywood. Cats & Dogs director Lawrence Guterman quickly slit his throat with Son of the Mask, while Requarra cozied up to the Weinsteins, and somehow ended up with the Coens as well... they are the catalyst that cools ancient Hollywood feuds. Their project? Turning a Coen short story into the infamous anti-Christmas movie, Bad Santa. Drunk off this second surprise success, they fell into the Hollywood trap and worked on another movie with "Bad" in the title, and Billy Bob Thornton starring in the movie. The Bad News Bears reboot was birthed, and it was decidedly time to step back and take a short break. They would not be called back to do the reboots of Bad News Bears in Breaking Training or The Bad News Bears Go to Japan... come to think of it, nobody would. It was at this point when Ficarrequa said to itself, "Well, Hell! We're just as smart as the idiots who direct these pieces of sh...oe leather, why don't we?" And that they did. Big time. I Love You, Philip Morris and Crazy, Stupid, Love are but a taste. The best days are ahead for all of us with FicarRequa making our movies. A toast to the continued reign of Requa-carra! May it last a thousand years, sir!

Entourage, Season 17

2012-01-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

Women love him. Men want to be him. Yes, Marky Mark's latest brainless actioner takes the cake at #1 this week. Meanwhile, we get a glimpse into the near future of nostalgia, as 1991's Beauty and the Beast comes in strong at #2. Could Aladdin be next? Somehow, I seriously doubt it; maybe they'll release the second one with Homer as the genie. Tee hee hee! In a surprise to me, 65-year old Dolly Parton hurling rolls at Queen Latifah comes in at #4. Can a sequel to 9 to 5 be far behind? Surely there's a script for it bouncing around Hollywood! Did Colin Higgins leave nothing behind? Last, but not least, Gary Oldman leaves the top 10 all too quickly, but Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher debuts at #10. Will it last only a week? We can only hope. She seems to be taking cues from the The King's Speech playbook. She's running out of Oscar options, or maybe the sky's the limit, who knows? Not enough colorful characters anymore.

Red vs. The Mechanic: Which Kicks More Ass?

2012-01-14T18:30:00.000-08:00

Kind of unfair to compare these two titans of the action genre, but they are similar in some ways: both are about those special, specialized types of people that you hopefully only find in the movies, both feature lots of explosions and flying bullets, and both kinda move so fast that it's hard for anything to really resonate and take hold, even a couple hours after watching. So while both are quite similar, they do part ways in terms of tone: Red being a PG-13 comedy, and The Mechanic with dramatic pretensions and an R rating that it doesn't shy away from.

BURN AFTER READING 2: THE RE-ENLISTENING

Somehow, these kind of movies are showing their new cookie cutter molds. You can only stay ahead of them for so long, unfortunately. But as with The Last Boy Scout, Bruce Willis gets to play a hero with a deep, proud history. This time, he's a retired CIA operative... now, what are the odds that he was the best at what he did? And, to a lesser extent, still does?
As with all movies like this, it's a little bit of everything. Sensory plot overload! It's part Midnight Run, part Blues Brothers... one character actually quips "We're getting the band back together!" SPOILER ALERT: There's a coverup that's connected to one of the highest government offices in the land. Well, we can't help but expect a slight continuation of Dubya-era movie politics. There's a very rich history indeed of films between 2001 and 2009 advocating the overthrow of a bad government! So I guess you could say this is part Eagle Eye as well. The postcards were cute, though, denoting each stop on the road trip.
The filmmakers matter less and less these days, the more things get done with CGI, but I would like to point out one name I recognized: cameraman Florian Ballhaus, progeny of Scorsese collaborator cameraman Michael Ballhaus... I'm assuming. There's a lot more shot set-ups these days for a two hour movie, aren't there? As for the cast, my viewing companions wanted to see it more for Malkovich than anybody, but I must confess that Helen Mirren looked rather fetching at the big party at the end. Peter Greenaway had a good eye, no? All in all, not a bad way to spend the evening, even though it wasn't terribly memorable, either. As a serious film critic, I can't rate this too highly, of course.

***

TRANSPORTER 4: THE TRANSPORTERING... AND THE MENTORING

What are the odds that Jason Statham is the best at what he does? I went in a clean slate on this, just after Red, and after the ladies went to bed. This is almost perfect Cinemax fare, featuring a couple gratuitous sex scenes, but alas, it has too much plot and too many actual actors in it. Ben Foster, for example, does okay as the troubled kid, and the kind of drinking he does in this movie is not what you normally see... at least, not in the booze commercials on TV. As for drinking in other movies, my viewing experience is not that extensive. Seems like people are either alcoholics or they're not; Ben's character lives sort of in between, which seemed novel to me.
I didn't know this was a remake, but the name Carlino at the end did ring a slight bell. Then, of course, the IMDb reveals all. The mastermind behind such hits as Class and The Great Santini penned the original script some 40 odd years ago, and I have it on the highest authority that the ending was a tad different. Statham doesn't trust his audiences yet; I'll leave it at that.
The action scenes border on the ridiculous, but they seem reasonable enough compared to other Besson-produced fare... I STILL say there's a connection. He got that Besson name somehow! In striking back at the system that gave him life, then promptly screwed him, Statham doesn't go as high as the Vice President of the United States, but the corporate equivalent, perhaps. And even though Tony Goldwyn is now best known as a celebrated actor's director, he can still play the smarmy bad guy with the best of 'em. So ultimately, I guess this is not something you'd necessarily want to watch with your drinking buddies, but I still don't feel I was manly enough to watch it. As with most things in life, it's a tightrope act.

***

-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

The Stooges go to prison...

2012-01-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

I almost remembered the title of the film I was thinking of that sort of parallels this week's Stooge film, So Long, Mr. Chumps. It's a film from 2006 called Let's Go To Prison. At the time, the airwaves were carpet-bombed with TV trailers for the movie, and I couldn't help but think to myself that... well, it just didn't look good. Even the normally ultra-reliable Dylan Baker couldn't rise above the lines he was given, and Chi McBride was given a thankless role. Then I actually saw part of the film: the premise involves a guy who CHOOSES to go to prison in order to see a guy that he had framed, and to watch him suffer some more. That was the main part that I had a problem with, the rest of the film aside. As it turns out, it's a premise as old as prisons themselves...

ACT ONE

We start out innocently enough with the Stooges in an unusual occupation: cleaning up messes they didn't even make. The three of them work over the same littered stretch of wide studio lot street. Each has a giant pushbroom, and... SPOILER ALERT, the three of them collide, letting out the loud "woodblock" sound. Curly says "Swing it!", so Moe kicks Curly in the ass. And rightfully so, frankly. It's about this point that the three split up to cause more damage. Curly tussles with a large truck, and Larry ends up accidentally spearing Moe in the ass with one of those pointy stick things that garbagemen sometimes use to pick up garbage. No reprisal for Larry; not on-screen, anyway.
It escalates from there. Curly runs afoul of a particularly clingy piece of flypaper. Moe looks on angrily as Curly struggles with it... guess what happens next? Let me put it this way: usually, Larry ends up getting his hair stuck and torn. They decided to switch it up this time. From there, we find the story strand that will carry us through the rest of the pic: Curly looks down and finds an envelope full of oil bonds amongst the street rubbish. Screenwriter Clyde Bruckman couldn't help but pay homage to Sherlock Jr., in which close to the same thing happens to Buster. Just money back in Buster's day, not your fancy modern oil bonds. Curly ends up in a heavily over-watered patch of grass and tries to take a bath. Larry takes considerable exception to this. Curly ends up slapping Moe in the face, runs away, and runs back toward the camera, using the grass as a slip and slide, but doesn't end up paralyzing himself, thankfully.
This is probably where Act Two should be, but I'm going to wait until the 5:40 mark or so. Fortunately for the Stooges, the envelope of oil bonds is marked with a name and address. The Stooges return the oil bonds to their rightful owner. The rightful owner, one Mr. B.O. Davis, gives the Stooges a reward and tasks them with finding "an honest man." You'd think that what the Stooges did would qualify them, but this possibility is ultimately not considered. There's no film otherwise... oh, right, an honest man with "executive ability." In other words, do what your local oligarchs tell you to do. How hard is that? I guess the Republicans don't want to hold up So Long, Mr. Chumps as an example of how well our current system works. It's far too common. For example, Moe asks "Can we have some money on account?" Curly's proviso: "Yeah, on account of we're broke." Of course, Curly also just tried to eat a banana peel, throwing away the soft, icky inner part.

ACT TWO

Might as well break it here. We start Act Two with the Stooges having put their new money immediately to work: each is wearing a nice fur coat and a tall top hat. But this is most certainly not the time for a pie fight. Not with actual nice clothes. They're busy trying to find an honest man with executive ability by leaving a wallet on the sidewalk. Sounds better than any employment agency to me. Professor Moe explains: "An honest man will return the wallet. A dishonest man will keep it." The first customer's kinda funny: a blind man with a cane spies the wallet, and grabs the money, running away before the Stooges can grab him. They get the second guy by putting gun powder in the wallet, and activating the gun powder with a battery. Eat your shirt, MacGruber! They've got the wallet attached to a wire and not a string, by the way. I always leave out the important details like that. The man manages to escape, but leaves behind him a smoldering pair of pants. "This is disgusting!", quips Moe. Time is stretched out as Moe and Curly fight over Curly's wanting to smoke a cigar.
Fortunately, fate steps in to help the boys on their quest to find an honest man. It's kind of a shaggy dog story... in that it involves an actual shaggy dog. A dog picks up their wallet and hands it to the boys. The dog signals with his tail (on a wire, perhaps?) for the Stooges to follow. The dog leads them to a distraught woman. The woman tells the Stooges that her sweetheart, Percy Pomeroy, is an honest man, but he's currently languishing in jail, wrongfully accused. Executive ability is left out of the equation at this point. The Stooges decide to get themselves arrested in order to get Pomeroy out of jail. This is where I part company with the Stooges, but I slog on nevertheless, the loyal Stooge short reviewer that I am... oops! Daily Show time!

Act 2.5. The hunt for unlawful activity begins. The Stooges' plan to get thrown into the big house: assaulting a cop. They find a cop, and kick him in the ass. An on-looker passing by at the same time starts to laugh. The laughter being the worse of the two offenses, the laugher happily gets carted off to the big house himself. Curly decides to stick up someone, and Moe and Larry go to find a cop. They get back to Curly to find that... SPOILER ALERT! The guy's got the gun on Curly now! There's a mighty struggle as the cop tries to subdue the man. The gun ends up getting pointed at the Stooges; they rightfully n'yaah-n'yaah in response and duck. Now, this part you might find a little troubling: the cop wrestles the gun out of the bad guy's hand and gives it to Curly. Anyone? Anyone at all? Well, it does come in handy for the next scene, so that makes it okay. We'll just let that alone for now. Larry hits Curly in the tummy, but Curly doesn't bend forward. Moe then hits Curly in the belly, and he bends forward. Then, Moe hits Curly in the head to righten him back up. Curly, the class act he is, doesn't unload the gun into Moe, even though he clearly could have, and probably should have. If I'm not mistaken, that's the second time in this pic that Curly gets the ol' double whammy like that! ...damn. Now I gotta go back and catalog THAT too? I'm just not that good. Fortunately, this all happens in front of the police station, so the three scofflaw-heads don't have far to go to cause some real damage.
They go to police chief Vernon Dent, and Curly tells Vernon that they just held up the First National Bank and shot two guards. Vernon is rightly skeptical, and more than a little sarcastic, frankly. Not that I can hardly blame him. But this is still a comedy, so a call comes in a few seconds later... guess what happened? The First National Bank was just robbed! Two guards shot! Off the cops go. Vernon slams the doors behind him, causing the light fixture to drop and dangle, but not quite hit the ground. Here's where the true writing genius comes into play, all you would-be Joe Eszterhaseses out there... A lone cop walks under this dangling light fixture, and the Stooges push him out of the way. They all land on the ground in a heap, and Curly gets hit with said fixture. It's the act of slight heroism that gets them the jail time they wanted...

ACT THREE

Setting: Hoose Gow rockpile. The Stooges are busy smashing rocks... but they manage to sneak in a round of bowling while the guards are away. The guards aren't away very long, so it's back to the pile of rocks. Either they aren't working very hard to break the rocks, or the rocks are made of balsa wood or something; probably very expensive prop rocks that need to be treated as carefully as Curly's head. This is Depression Era Cannery Row we're talking about, after all!
Suddenly, a large bee on a string starts getting dangled in front of Curly's face. Moe helps out his dear friend and brother the only way he knows how, and swats at the bee with his sledgehammer. Fortunately for Curly, his head's harder than the hammer and it gets mashed all out of shape... as though it were made of some sort of soft modeling clay!
Good visual joke: to match the convicts' striped uniforms, they've got a striped horse pulling a wagon. Not-so-good choreography: the lame excuse Moe gives himself for falling headlong into the path of Curly's sledgehammer. Payback's a b... a headache, let's call it.
Seeing as how this one's kinda lame, I'm going to cut to the chase. They eventually find Pomeroy, as they recognize his number: "41144". It's kinda rare for what's his face to have the kind of initial reaction to the Stooges that he has, but you gotta stretch your acting chops sometime! Given that the boys never stray too far from whatever tools they have at hand, the last job they were given, fortunately, was to do some painting. Curly used this to his advantage by stealing a guard's lunch meat and replacing it with a coat of black paint. This time, the Stooges and the honest man paint themselves guard uniforms so they can escape. Did they remember to paint both sides of their bodies? I'd hate to spoil that one, despite everything. But I will spoil the last "surprise": B.O. Davis was actually a crooked crook, and just as the foursome try to make their escape, B.O.'s being brought to prison. The boys give him the Stooge treatment and Curly says "See you out at the rockpile!"

EPILOGUE

Moe and Larry are breaking rocks on Curly's head. At least, until they get to the third rock. Curly says "Wait a minute! That's a real one! I'm no fool... n'yuk, n'yuk, n'yuk..." Nice try, Curly, but I'm afraid you three are still consigned to a lifetime of being accosted by joyous fans on the street and getting ACTUALLY poked in the eyes by them. Don't forget to do that special block!

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Frank and Mark Ridley

2012-01-12T19:31:00.000-08:00

Close enough. Frank's got a part in the upcoming Inside Llewyn Davis... incidentally, get in touch with Kati Batchelder, as there's still time to play an extra in Inside Llewyn Davis! Kewl! Brother Mark is apparently a big-shot stand-up comedian... maybe not Jeff Dunham big, but still quite big and respected in the industry in general, so that's nothing to sneeze at. Okay, technically, the Ridleys aren't auteurs, but they're good enough to be in a Coen brothers movie, so they must have at least a Master's degree in something. That seems to be how it works. It's like working with Stanley Kubrick, but clearly the Coens can get stuff done a little bit faster. Frank was also in I'm Paige Wilson, but he played Oscar Tuscon in that one.

Devil inside, devil inside, every single movie's the Devil inside

2012-01-09T01:11:00.001-08:00

Gotta give the Devil his due, and at least capitalize his name! Yes, people are ready to be scared again and The Devil Inside scares up more B.O. than Tom Cruise's latest flick. Once again, I missed all the P.R. for D.I., so I don't know if it's another one of these low-budget things filmed on a cellphone or what. And why's that girl afraid of that tattoo on the inside of her lip? She's going to be in the Neo-Dolce Vita inner circle in no time! Just like Casey Anthony used to be... Meanwhile, back at the film lab, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy debuts at #9... is that based on a poem or what? The Internet will do my thinking and remembering for me from now on! Because I gotta go!!

Three Stooges: Non-sexual 'Boobs in Arms'

2012-01-07T13:58:00.000-08:00

Come to think of it, that's not entirely true, as there is a subplot involving making a husband jealous... a slight nod to Laurel and Hardy's The Fixer Uppers, but never mind. A classic Stooge is still a classic Stooge, and this is one of the great ones, IMHO. The elements are just right, the setpiece that stretches out the length of the film is well hidden, and... I dunno, it ultimately just works, like Micro-Phonies! I'm not a big fan of Micro-Phonies, however, but we'll get to that one soon enough, perhaps by the Presidential election. Someone else do the sums on that one for me.
Well, I'm under increasing pressure these days now that I don't have any more homework, so I can't devote the usual time I do to my Stooge reviews, but I'll do what I can here. It's kind of a shame, really, because the Three Act structure is very sharply defined here. Something about war brings out the best in the Stooges, and they finally draw a direct correlation between war and greeting cards, a connection that's rarely talked about in the lame-stream media. The boys start out peddling greeting cards, and run afoul of a particularly disgruntled customer. They end up head-butting him into a laundry ... you know, when they've got two panels in the sidewalk that's used for laundry? The Stooges have relied on those many a time before. SPOILER ALERT: So, they end up running into the guy's wife, they end up counseling her on how to win her husband back, who she feels no longer loves her. Curly ends up pitching some woo with the lady; she ends up fainting in response. It's a delicate balancing act of making the husband just jealous enough so that he doesn't end up killing Curly. They don't pull it off. So that's two run-ins with the same guy. The third run in: the boys end up enlisting in the Army, and the guy's their Sergeant! Gotta love that. More high-jinks.
Soon the boys end up at war with a country that's not quite into the Fascism game as good as Germany or Japan or Italy. Why, even the guy who turns and looks turns up as an enemy soldier! There's also a guy who screams rather loudly after sitting on his own spiky helmet... and rightfully so. The boys get one last chance to stick it to that Sergeant fellow, but they were high on laughing gas so they weren't totally aware of it. Sadly, actor Richard Fiske actually was killed in action in World War II, and died in LeCroix, France; everything indeed did happen to him. Still, a fine Stooge short, and it belongs squarely on that short list of the ones I tend to watch over and over again when it comes time to select a DVD for a bunch of us to watch on the telly... so old fashioned, no?

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

I want my money back!

2012-01-06T00:55:00.000-08:00

Welp, it's close to my bedtime, so no time to make a visual to go along with the review. As a loyal reader of this thing will know by now, any film worthy of Oscar gold usually deals with prejudice. My own personal prejudice, when it comes to the making of a movie, is about who is making the movie. Take Michael Bay, for example. Another example is the makers of the movie 'Kick-Ass.' Now, I liked Kick-Ass as much as the next fanboy pushing 40, but for some reason I don't trust those people to make a serious movie about the Mossad hunting a Nazi in hiding. To be fair, given the script and the actors involved, they did pretty good, and dare I say it, even half-ass nomination worthy. However, the story threads come untied as they attempt to hold two seemingly separate movies together into one cohesive whole.
Take the casting, for starters. Look at the actors involved here, one by one. We've got Sam Worthington, Tom Wilkinson, Marton Csokas and Ciaran Hinds. Two actors assigned to the same parts, separated by about 30 years or so. Now, you'd think the natural pairing would be Sam and Tom, and Marton and Ciaran, right? I mean... LOOK @ THEIR FACES!!! As it turns out, the parts are switched. Sam grows up to become Ciaran, mostly I think because he's the good guy in the story. Sorry, SPOILER ALERT. I mean, let's face it. Sam can't play a bad guy. He's come too far in too short a time; we'll leave Terminator 4 aside for the moment.
Okay, so that's the first major complaint out of the way, but I'm perfectly willing to grant that Oscar-nominated director John Madden does what he can to keep the film in Oscar territory, especially the first half of the story. I guess I might as well outline the story at this point. Basically, three Mossad agents go into Cold War-era East Germany to track down a notorious Nazi war criminal... I forget already; his nickname was the "Butcher of Birkenau" or something. In a film of this magnitude, you only go after the most notorious criminal, of course. And as much as I'd like to believe that the Mossad can be incompetent at times, even the first half of the story unravels a little bit in its own way.
I wouldn't dream of ruining the big twist in the story any more than I already have, mostly by pointing out that there is a twist... can I say that there's a... nah, I can't say that. Helen Mirren plays one of the three Mossad agents involved in this little Cold War caper. She's retired in the modern half of the story, and her daughter has just written a novel about her Cold War exploits, when suddenly... she has to come out of retirement for one last heist! Let's put it that way. Now, Dame Mirren is 66 years old at the time of this writing, but that's the affliction of this modern era. Just judging from our celebrities, the average age is indeed higher and it would appear that Social Security is indeed in jeopardy of running out due to the overpopulation of the aging Baby Boomers. People just can't afford to retire any more. Indiana Jones will be 70 in 2012! Newt Gingrich admitted openly to being a 68 year-old grandfather! Ron Paul's a 74 year old grandfather! ... I assume he's a grandfather; Rand's certainly not going to stop the family name from perpetuating! Joe Biden will be 74 when HE runs for president in 2016. But back to actors: Al Pacino's just over 70, DeNiro's almost at 70. Our greatest action hero movie stars are getting on in years: Liam Neeson's pushing 60, Nicolas Cage's almost 50, Tom Cruise is almost 50... I only mention this because I couldn't help but reflect on all of this when the culmination of The Debt is a bloody knife fight between a 65 year old woman and a ... 90-something year old man? It's not something you see every day, I'll give you that!
And so, in summation, I think a single star rating can hardly describe my viewing experience of The Debt. Let's just say it was a fully-inflated 4-star balloon when I started, then the air slowly started leaking out during the first half, then much faster for the second half, until it was a very nearly totally empty balloon by the end. I'll split the difference and call it 2.5 stars, what the hell. Gotta run!

**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Short Reviews - December 2011

2012-01-03T02:03:00.001-08:00

Whew! Big image. Well, I'm attempting to compensate for another anemic monthly list of films. As everyone knows by now, a person will always cherish the pop culture they're exposed to as a teenager. For me, as with most people my age, having grown up with MTV, we can't help but think that Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is the greatest music video ever made. Aside from The Eurhythmics' Missionary Man, it represents the most effort a pop star has put in to one video. I have the feeling that after the first hour, Annie Lennox probably screamed "GET THIS CRAP OFF MY FACE!!! NOW!!!!" Peter himself had a similar moment when they turned his face blue and put clouds on it. And of course, I couldn't just limit myself to that one video. I tried to keep everything in chronological order, but I just want to let the purists out there know up front that I failed. I prefer to think half miserably, but I'll ultimately leave it for you to decide. And keep the Geffen copyright lawyers busy, even though I'm not as bad as YouTube. If there's an artist out there who's advanced the music video arts farther than Peter Gabriel, well... frankly, I don't want to know about it. A toast to my man, P.G.!

Nuts - PONICSAN!!!!!!!!!!!!

RV - Barry Sonnenfeld... CALL YOUR MOTHER!!!!

Young Adult - What can be said? It's not easy being Diablo Cody. I mean, YOU try being Diablo Cody! Even for one day! Egg-zactly. You can't handle it. WTF. Move on dot org. OMGerz.

The Artist - Best movie Gene Kelly never made

Room in Rome - ... HELLO!?? What's that?

Rock of Ages - Tom Cruise rocks the rock opera...
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Tyler Perry's Good Deeds - Remake of Seven Pounds, but without the ickiness?

Tyler Perry's The Marriage Counselor - With Kim Kardashian? Now you've REALLY crossed the line, buddy.

Outland - Malcolm in the Middleton

Lego movie? Anyone?

Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers - That's it? Paul Michael Glazer? Sheesh...

...then again, there is Creed's "With Arms Wide Open", and that OK Go video. Okay, I stand corrected. Sorry.

Auteur Watch - Anthony and Joe Russo

2012-01-03T01:53:00.000-08:00

Lucky bastids. As with Rod Daniel, the Russo's careers really took off once they dove headlong into TV. Unlike Rod Daniel, they're doing it at a time when TV quality is about on the same par with movie quality, which I think bodes less well for the cinema. The one Russo looks like if Joe Pesci and Robert Smigel mated, IMHO... actually, I guess you can't really use IMHO with an observation like that.
Anyway, they do seem to be two peas in a pod when it comes to working together. The 90s were their slowest period yet, but they stumbled into the silver screen racket in the 2000s with Welcome to Collinwood. What can one say? George Clooney in a wheelchair is better than no George Clooney at all. They forgot that rule with Batman & Robin, of course. TV work soon followed, but it was a return to the cinema with 2006's You, Me and Dupree. If you're anything at all like me, you will no doubt remember the accompanying USA Today article that asked "Are you a 'You', a 'Me' or a 'Dupree'?" It was soon after that Owen Wilson attempted suicide, but I like to think it was because of Cars. Or maybe just having to have lunch with a Disney executive, who knows.
And, of course, the 2010s look like they're going to be even more fruitful for the Russos. They should stave off another stab at the silver screen for as long as possible. They've already missed their 2009 gestation date. Be more like Terrence Malick, boys!

New year, same old box office...

2012-01-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

Why do I get the feeling that Tom Cruise is buying a whole bunch of tickets himself? Still, god bless him and Brad Bird for the rising of M:I-4 like a phoenix to the top of the box office. Best Christmas movie ever, second only to the director's cut of Bad Santa. Meanwhile, War Horse rises, Tinin sinks a little... I thought Tintin was about a secret unicorn or something. They unwisely clipped the title, in my humble opinion. Gotta have that section after the colon these days if you're doing a sequel, and there are at least two other Tintin films planned, aren't there?! Chipwrecked, A Game of Shadows, Ghost Protocol... just those three.
No new debuts this week, as one would expect. People are still celebrating New Year's with New Year's Eve, and why not. Garry Marshall's still got it, but thematically he's come a long way down from Pretty Woman; again, my humble opinion. The testicular cancer drama The Descendants re-emerges at #10, which I'm pretty sure means Oscar buzz at this point. Another golden statuette for Payne? Why not. Why wait 'til he's so much older? The Darkest Hour is another drama about the time young stars spend in between their big money-making films: a lesson Robert Pattison has learned all too well. Where's the frickin' loyalty? Why do they stay away in droves from your art-house projects? I gotta go... Happy New Year, for those of you who celebrate such things!

Wait, wait... what was the title of the film?

2012-01-01T01:34:00.000-08:00

Ah, when director Danny Boyle and actor Cillian Murphy get together... MAGIC! When Cillian and Christopher Nolan get together... Batman. Or, film in between Batmans! Will the Scarecrow be back for the final installment? ...apparently not. As long as it doesn't jump the shark the way Spider Man 3 did. Man, that was SO bad, they had to go and remake Spider Man 1! Erase Tobey Maguire from the Book of Spidey!
But, I digress again. On to the sci-fi genre. Tis a tricky business to get right, this whole sci-fi racket. You need a good plot and great special effects to get in the Blade Runner league. Movies don't proliferate as quickly as books do. The last time I was in a bookstore, a used bookstore, I couldn't help but marvel at the literally thousands and thousands of sci-fi books out there. Almost as numerous as the Harlequin novels! How does one distinguish itself from the pack? How does one make the cut to become a movie? Obviously, better minds than mine are hard at work on these various philosophical dilemmas.
Well, depending on how you feel about the movie, you're either going to go easy or go hard on the very plot of the whole enterprise. SPOILER ALERT. Here's the deal: the sun is dying, and a crackerjack crew of eight is flying a spaceship to the sun with a bomb in it... We'll leave that alone for a second. Needless to say, things don't go smoothly. Same reason the door of the "ark" in 2012 doesn't just close up and everything's okay. Why, you'd have to shave about 30 minutes off the running time of the movie! Sometimes you gotta just go with the 2.5 hour pseudo-epic. Sunshine's a little more streamlined than that... but it's still not free from the gravity of, let's call it "homage" to its sci-fi brethren, upon whose mighty shoulders it stands. One of my viewing companions compared it to 2001, only without all those smelly apes. And I suppose one could say that the crew looks like a Calvin Klein ad. Thankfully, Michelle Yeoh throws off the average age of the crew, and I guess Cillian does as well, to a lesser extent. I couldn't help but think of 2000's much-maligned Supernova, but clearly the stakes aren't as high here. And, of course, Solaris, but I fear that Sunshine's not in the same league. Also Silent Running with the plants. Lots of sci-fi movies beginning with S!
I hate to spoil any more details of the film, as I want the rest of you to suffer as I have suffered, but I did appreciate the cinematography of old, and by old I mean like Outland: big Panavision with lots of lens flares 'n stuff. As it turns out, there's only one cinematographer in the biz better than Stephen Goldblatt, and that's Peter "Spota" Hyams himself. Go figure. Or maybe it just saves on the budget. The one moment in Sunshine that I unequivocally liked, of course: when the girl says "We've got an outbreak of excessive manliness on the ship." And, being a Danny Boyle film, there's the occasional flash of deep, philosophical dialogue, mostly courtesy of the villain at the end. So, remember, kids: the more philosophical you are, the more crazy you are, too!
But I'm afraid I can't let go the plot holes of the basic science of this sci-fi film. According to the DVD jacket, the sun is dying in the year 2057, about 45 years from now. Apparently, the catastrophic environmental crises we face here on Earth are SO powerful, they've radiated back to the sun and caused the sun to start dying. Well, this was made during the Dubya administration, so all of Hollywood's products were a little more dour than, say, under the Clinton administration. But I still believe that the sun will last a bit longer than 2057. I've heard about 4.5 billion years longer. But I'm in favor of any expensive suicide mission into space. Superman IV happens to be on the table here next to me, and who knows? Maybe all the world's nuclear weapons in a giant net would cause the sun to fail, making the expedition of Sunshine necessary. Maybe we can all learn from the mistakes made by the crew in this film. GOTTA RUN!!

Good double bill with: Solaris, Supernova

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Ernest Hemingway punches Woody in the mouth...

2011-12-31T18:53:00.000-08:00

...but ol' Woody's not taking it lying down, I tell you what! Well, for one, he cast daughter Mariel in Manhattan, then, didn't he? Naughty boy. Besides, he's busy planning his 2013 pic as we speak. No time to savour the small victory at the box office that was Midnight in Paris, his 2011 pic with Owen Wilson's nose. But I give credit where credit's due: the rest of Owen Wilson must've studied his Woody Allen pics in advance, as his subliminal Woody impression seemed to have a lot of the nuances down, especially the 'not believing what he's hearing' stuff that Woody seems to do an awful lot. But when you're surrounded by idiots and lesser brains like Woody, you gotta fight back somehow.
I gotta keep this short, but I think I can hit all the main points. Kudos to Michael Sheen who's in a brunette disguise; from Twilight to this, he covers the waterfront, man. The opening sequence of Midnight in Paris is awfully reminiscent of the opening of Manhattan, but in and around Paris, I'm assuming. All the big Paris landmarks are here: the Arc de Triomph, the Dior store, and of course the omnipresent Eiffel Tower, even tackily lit up at night like some kind of giant ... Paris monument. You get the idea. The picture quality of the Blu-Ray we were watching was so good, that the opening credits themselves reminded me of imitation Woody Allen credits that pop up every now and again. What is it with him and that one font? Certain directors have their own fonts: John Landis and Carpenter come to mind... I guess they're the only ones.
As for the film itself, well, as a fellow liberal damned to an eternity in hell, or Arizona, whichever comes first, I always appreciate any dig at the Republicans I can get, and Woody goes after the Tea Partiers, no less! Oh, Kurt Fuller, I hope you don't hang out with Bruce Willis and Fred Thompson too much. Now, there's always a great debate that rages in any Woody Allen film. Here, it's about nostalgia. The main character is ... wait for it... a writer! Woody HAS been reading The Onion lately! Owen Wilson plays a hacky Hollywood screenwriter, perhaps modeled after one of the Wibberleys or Henry Bean/Leora Barish... maybe Tim Herlihy, someone like that: a Hollywood creature who's about to be married and condemned to a life in Malibu with his hot young wife. His current work is about a guy who runs a nostalgia shop. Owen Allen himself longs for Paris in the 1920s. You know, baguettes, rubbing elbows with the icons of tomorrow, all that post-Great War crap. Will his dream magically come true? Or will the anti-nostalgia argument triumph? Well, sadly, this isn't Melinda and Melinda, and we're only going down one road in this pic.
But I ramble on too long, I'm afraid. One of my viewing companions summed it up nicely: "Does this mean that Woody's officially lost his mind?" I'm paraphrasing, of course. But Woody did once say that he couldn't have directed Dr. Strangelove better than Kubrick did, but why not try a spin on The Shining for a change? A portal to the 1920s is discovered, of course, and is used several times by Owen Wilson. Woody also saw and liked Inception, and made a portal inside a portal, with Inception actress Marion Cotillard, no less. There's even a portal punchline, which somehow feels like salt in the wound. I gotta run. Don't give up your day job, Woody.

**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Galadriel?

2011-12-30T01:14:00.000-08:00

All snarkiness aside, director Sam Raimi seems to have finally achieved his goal with The Gift and A Simple Plan... For Love of The Game, not so much. From all the interviews he gave in the early 90s when documentary filmmakers were fawning over indie directors, Sam kept saying something like that he wanted to inspire people... something like that. In other words, reach beyond his Evil Dead movies and all the stuff he did for TV like Hercules and Xena. Mission accomplished. Twice.
I wouldn't dream of spoiling the plot at all, but it does involve a woman who possesses psychic-type gifts; as usual, she hates to label it or profit from it. I guess you end up like James van Praagh ended up once profit enters the picture. As with all good movies like this, we get an opening scenario to establish her routine, and then we get swept up into the episode that will consume the rest of the movie. Raimi can't help but throw in some old-fashioned horror movie scare tactics, of course, but he also has some nice cutting-edge (circa 2000) CGI Vista-glide effects, slightly similar to What Lies Beneath, but probably costing much less. Raimi uses some of the cast here that would go on to his Spider Man trilogy: J.K. Simmons and Rosemary Harris mostly. My viewing companions wondered openly why screenwriter Billy Bob didn't either star in or direct this thing? Well, he was a busy boy at the time, perhaps working on The Man Who Wasn't There or Waking Up In Reno... sheesh.
That's all I can recall at the moment. Fine movie, top notch acting all around, good location shots where the trees get all the water they can stand, and plenty that they can't. Giovanni Ribisi's one scene of course is a visceral favorite... a dramatic ode to Lebowski, perhaps?

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Tyler Perry's The Great White Book

2011-12-26T01:22:00.000-08:00

Welp, while I'm sitting here, waiting for a DVD to "format"... in this day and age! The very idea. Now it says there's five seconds left! That's the longest five seconds I've ever seen, and the progress bar's still only at half way. Computers are just dumb that way; they have no conception of time. As usual, I'm forced to multi-task, so why not take this time to write about the latest and greatest last movie I saw recently? In this case, it was the biggest feel-good historical hit of 2011, The Help. As usual, I couldn't decide which image to go with. Do I go with the lightning strike at about 30:18? Or do I go with the fallout of the movie's big secret at about 1:47:21? As usual, I pick both... but I couldn't help but notice that that landscape in which the lightning bolt hit looks a little bit like English countryside with their carefully sculpted lines of trees demarcating properties. GOLDBLATT!!!!! No wonder the movie's budget is so small. They're using bloody stock footage!

Well, where to begin? Well, since the movie's about prejudice, I'll reveal MY personal prejudices. When I see certain names, like, say, the NEW Participant Media... they've frankly become a little too cozy with the Rick Warrens and the Mel Gibsons of the world for my taste. And now with Chris Columbus and his 1492 Pictures production company, and while he's busy thinking about his legacy, the rest of us hardcore cinema buffs are thinking about his crimes against cinema. Home Alone and Bicentennial Man come to mind. I'll let I Love You, Beth Cooper slide; well, he was rebounding from Rent, so why not pine for the lost 80s of your 30-somethings? Not to mention the film's director. A director's got to have a rough name, in my meek, humble opinion. Quentin Tarantino. Francis Ford Coppola. Joel and Ethan Coen. Alfonso Cuaron. Guillermo del Toro. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Pedro Almodovar. Andrew Niccol. Krzysztof Kieslowski.... Tate Taylor? TATE TAYLOR? No, no... this is a Disney sit-com star's name. A pop star under 20 years old's name. The name of someone starring in the Twilight movies. Not the name of an Oscar-nominated director. But I guess his previous work, Pretty Ugly People, is as close as we're going to get to a gritty Marc Rocco-esque '90s pic.

HOWEVER... THAT BEING SAID... I did appreciate many facets of the picture. The lush cinematography, provided by Lethal Weapon 2 and Batman & Robin cameraman Stephen Goldblatt. Old school camerawork: real film, good dolly and crane movements of the camera, and a relatively still camera when it comes to emotional moments... apparently, the trick of having a shaky camera during scenes of emotional turmoil is FINALLY falling out of favour. And the production design: the ratty interiors of the rooms that the black men and women live in look like the real deal. And the acting: very good acting, and I'm assuming the Southern tics in the actors' speech were spot on. Either spot on or too textbook. Sounded pretty good to me. I'm sure they got the best 1st A.D.s in the biz to work on this pic and keep things moving on time. The story's simple enough to understand, but the thing it gets right is the little details of everyday life in the South in the early '60s..... Really? You're scared of black people's germs? They serve your food, they clean your house, they nurse your children all day... but they can't use the white bathrooms in the house. That makes a lot of sense. Sorry, there I go into standup comedian mode again. So, the film works on about 9 of 10 of its facets up to a point.

But then... the spell the film casts is slowly lost, piece by piece. I started to wonder: is Bryce Dallas Howard playing two parts by any chance? Hilly AND the ditzy Celia? Apparently not, but I suppose both girls are just as busty. Bryce didn't show off as much. I guess this Jessica Chastain's taking off; I just saw her in The Debt! Very different vibe in that one. And Emma Stone is fine as the young white female lead of the pic, although I did keep thinking of Lindsay Lohan for some reason. Of course, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer kinda steal the show, Octavia a little more so. On the other hand... Serenity Johnson from Halfway Home? No, there's something wrong with that. She's not allowed to be this good in this movie after being in that show. And she does a fine job selling the concept of comfort food, but I learned that lesson a few years ago for myself, thank you very much. I'm paying the price for it now by going to the gym as often as I can. And to nitpick the sound editing, doorbells probably didn't make the stock doorbell sound back in the 60s that they do now, but what do I know, right?

And then, as all these strands start to unravel the film completely, there's the matter of the book that's being written. The girl's given deadlines that don't seem to be reachable with '60s typewriter technology. And while the toilets on Hilly's front lawn was a nice visual gag, would that kind of thing really happen? Really? And wouldn't there be a harsher punishment for "Skeeter" for that typo? Dontcha think? And of course, the little girl using one of the lawn commodes, well... I thought Dave did it better in Jackass 1, don't you folks? Kinda turned The Help into an Adam Sandler pic for me... Say! Wasn't he named Skeeter in one of his films? A lot of people going potty in The Help, come to think of it. Dramatic at first, comedic later on in the 2nd and 3rd acts.

And now, we come to the film's big reveal... I wouldn't dare spill the beans on the film's big "awful horrible" big secret... is that what she called it? Let me check the IMDb... nope, nothing there. Anyway, in dancing around what the big secret of the movie is, it reminds me of a similar culinary secret in Fried Green Tomatoes, and I can't help but think that this kind of thing happened to all you Southern honkies probably more often than you think. All of you probably weren't saints! Unfortunately, the secret doesn't stay secret too long, and pretty soon it ends up in the young white girl's book, and it becomes the highlight for the dozens of readers we see reading the book. This is sadly where I had to part company with the film. Even the most progressive New York publishing house of the 60s probably wouldn't print such a thing in a book. You'd have to wait for Philip Roth's work in the 70s, am I right? Something like that? Don't you think it would be a bit more memorable as a publishing event? This is the reason why Indiana Jones only set Hitler temporarily back and didn't kill Hitler himself in the Indy films: historical consistency! The Wild Wild West effect is more pervasive than I thought: our explosion-happy, attention-span-shortened present is creeping into our depictions of the past.
So, to summarize. I'll rate it this way: the First Act of the film gets four stars, the Second Act three and the Third Act one and a half. What's that average out to? I'll say two and a half. A three star movie is a slick Hollywood vehicle I'll probably only see once, like The Client or The Talented Mr. Ripley. A three star movie is slick and unmemorable, but at least it's logically consistent. The Help plays too much hooky with history at the end. In closing, let me just ruminate on what Aibileen would tell the special chilluns in her life: "You is kind. You is smart. You is important." I can't help but think of another Movie Philosophy Guru who used to say "I feel good. I feel great. I feel wonderful." Oh, you know who I'm talking about! But in case you don't, here's the hyperlink anyway. You let me down, Onion and Village Voice, so I gotta do your dirty work for you. Good luck at the Oscars, The Help! You probably won't need it since you were #1 for three weeks, I'm thinking.

**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Stooged in a Hole, or The Fashion of the Christ

2011-12-25T00:23:00.001-08:00

Well, it was either that, or go with "Cookoo NOT on a Choo-Choo." Personally, I think I made the right choice. I'm not as proud of myself as The Donald Trump is proud of himself, but ultimately I think the Stooges owe a little bit of a debt to Laurel and Hardy in general, and in particular to the premise of their mean-spirited romp Towed in a Hole. Yes, it's time for our next entry in the March of the Stooges, Cookoo Cavaliers. It's not one I see on an at-all regular basis... although I do think I watched it a while ago. I think we TiVo'd it off of IFC or AMC or TCM... one of those channels. So let's get started in earnest.

ACT ONE

Always good to open with a great comedy sign on the side of a truck. We see the boys trying to peddle some fish. Larry's driving, and Moe and Curly are on top, sitting in a boat tied to the truck. Moe and Curly are yelling through horns, and Moe's blowing through his... hmm! Sounds vaguely like how they play the shofar! Moe tells Larry to stop the truck. Fortunately for them, Moe and Curly don't fall off the truck. Let me get that right: Moe tells Larry to "stop the boat." We'll leave that for now. And then, we get to the more blatant Towed in a Hole reference. The Stooges end with the premise where L 'n H began with it. As some of you may remember, Laurel proposes the idea at the beginning of the film of cutting out the middleman and fishing for their own fish. The Stooges have been at it for at least a month... oh, right. SPOILER ALERT. Literally! Anyway, all three have their feet on the ground and get ready to pound the pavement some more trying to sell fish. Larry proves himself incompetent with customers as he grabs a basket of fish, sees a pretty classy lady approaching, and GETS SCARED! He gets scared, drops the basket, and retreats to Moe's side. A sad day for Larry fans everywhere. (Larry 1:20)
The blowing of the first sale begins. Curly steals the "haddock" joke from Horse Feathers, a Marx brothers feature film. The lady is unimpressed, and even fires off a joke of her own! Moe tells her that the fish in the picnic basket is a "weak" fish. She smells it from a distance and says "Smells strong to me!" She makes this comedy racket look too easy... you know, I kinda thought that looked like One-Take Anita Garvin. The Stooges are now stealing Laurel and Hardy's cast, for God's sake!!
A dog then smells the fish and rolls over on the ground, then gets up and runs away. Director Jules White's specialty: directing Stooges and dogs. Undeterred, the boys get back to blowing their horns. Can you even doubt that Larry and Curly will end up blowing their horns into Moe's ears? Why not? Not enough kitchen sink gags to go around.
A customer up high asks what kind of fish the boys have. Moe, just like he did in that one with the kidnapped baby... one of them, rattles off a long list of fish instead of food you shouldn't feed a toddler. The lady asks for a mackerel. The boys run to the back of the truck, open it, and smoke emerges from the back of the truck. Apparently, the fish smell so bad, it's visible in the air. Curly pulls open a drawer on the back of the truck, takes out a gas mask, reaches in to the back of the truck, and gets a fish. Curly then throws the fish at the lady, and the fish rightly hits the lady right in the face. The fish falls into her flower pots on her ledge and the flowers quickly wilt. The woman comes to and throws the fish back down, hitting Moe in the kisser. At this point, Moe says "We've been trying to sell these fish for 30 days... and haven't got rid of one!" Now, in a nice twist... okay, just nice to me... they quickly decide to change their business plan. Larry's off-the-cuff remark is how they decide this time. A rare occurrence indeed.
It's not quite Act Two time yet, folks. First, the boys go to the local real estate business shop, where Jerry from two films ago comes out and sells the boys some real estate. They want to open a saloon, and this dude says "Oh, I have the best beauty saloon in all Mexico!" Lynton Brent, a painfully white white guy, is talking in a bad Mexican accent and appears to be more tan than Snooki is orange. Well, it is indeed all related, and most of the cast of Jersey Shore is in that new Stooges feature length movie, so why not? It's one of those acting jobs that actual Mexican actors would rightly not take. To cut to the chase, Jerry the Mexican entrepreneur, tells the Stooges "You give me $300, and I'll give you the business!" Let the stereotyping begin!

ACT TWO

Scene: Cucaracha, the "busiest spot on the map." Well, the Stooges visit a lot of fictional places... better check Wikipedia just in case. Ooh! How about Google Earth?... (later) nope. Nothing on Wikipedia, and Cucaracha took me to a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota! Made-up place called "Cockroach." Go figure. We see a "Mexican" taking a siesta on a spot near the sidewalk, and the Stooges blaze into town in their truck at 12 fps. The dude doesn't wake up. See, according to the stereotype of the time, Mexicans are apparently lazy. And yet, they work hard for very little money and even less legitimacy. Go figure. Daffy Duck was also guilty of this with his racially-tinged cartoon Mexican Joyride. Well, it was a different time. Still, not as bad as that one Stooge flick with the earthquakes, right? ..now who's lazy? I don't feel like looking it up. I must continue to march ahead.
The boys pull up to their business, which looks in a little bit better shape than the house on the defunct orange ranch of It's a Gift. Curly, getting ahead of himself as usual, introduces us to the first, or second or third, sequence that will help to pad this film out to two reels, or about 16 minutes. He does a pantomime sequence where he pretends to be a bartender, with the aid of some strategically placed sound effects: clinking glasses, falling ice cubes, that kind of crap. They eventually make their way to the locked door of the business. No key. Moe tells Curly to use his head. It works on the first knock!
It's around this time that the boys eventually realize it's a SALON and not a SALOON. You'd think the sign on the front of the biz that says "Beauty Salon" would've tipped them off, but apparently they're all illiterate. Lousy FDR and his corrupt Department of Education! Usually Professor Moe takes over at a time like this, but in a rare bid for alpha male supremacy, Professor Larry says that there's a lot of money to be had in making dames pretty. Curly offers his own advice with a hair bleaching formula that includes gasoline. We'll try it in another film, I'm hoping. Moe gets blocked from poking Curly in the eyes with the ol' hand block, but he's always able to get around it later on. Time to clean up the joint, an act that you'd think would be boring, but not with the Stooges! Moe gets a face full of powder, and Larry laughs at his misfortune. That's twice now in this film he's done that! He's getting a little cocky, dontcha think? Moe and Larry eventually both gang up on Curly. Larry gives Curly a couple good socks on the back of the head that, frankly, I don't think he deserved. Larry's getting VERY cocky and disrespectful in this one! That faceful of perfume wasn't enough justice.

I'm going to attempt two pics here. See what I mean about illiterate?... never mind. I guess it's at the top. Yes, you've seen it here first, folks. I'm doing more than one pic from now on! Anyway, perhaps this is the proper start of Act Two. We'll call it two and a half. The boys are busy painting misspelled words on their newfangled store front, when their first customer arrives: a slick Mexican cowboy and his four girls... burlesque? Brothel? Bordello? Something beginning with 'b' comes to mind, but never mind. This is a clean family pic, all you filth-ites out there. Okay, they're chorus girls. Close enough. The dude wants his four brunette chorus girls to become blonds. Is it safe to say that you don't usually see naturally blond Mexicans? There was a dude I knew in high school who started out life with gorgeous blond hair, only to see it turn brunette in his tweens or teens. Poor fella. Then there was the black dude in college who started out as a redhead but became a brunette when he grew up. Me myself, I'm getting all this awful grey in my hair lately. Too much sugar. I don't wanna grow up! Waaaah. Anyway, enough of the follicle eugenics. Back to the damn Stooges.
The girls are introduced, and Curly gets to do some flirting. He seems to be the best one at that. All the girls are cute enough, which is the problem. I guess the fourth one, Rosita, is supposed to be the ugly one, but did you see her wave? She's got 'tude, dude! She's not wearing glasses, so she's not ugly, as these films go. Damn! Larry really is a naughty boy in this one: he's hitting on TWO of the dames at once! (Larry 8:52) I guess the moral of this Stooge fable is: never leave your girl or girls at a Stooges' beauty parlor. And yet, in they go. The blind leading the blind. Curly takes a chance at some more flirting, and he goes in for a kiss. Why does Moe always try to intercept these kisses, either directly or indirectly? Explicitly or implicitly? Doesn't he know he's going to scream that he's been poisoned and slap Curly? Moe kicks Larry in the ass and wastes a perfectly good punchline opportunity. Larry said to the chick whose looks they're about to destroy first, "Did anyone ever tell you you have beautiful black eyes?" Kick from Moe, and all Moe says is "Get back there and get to work." Sheesh! Why not something like "Your ass is going to be black and blue in a minute!" Oh, right... family friendly again. Just family friendly stuff like eye pokes and throwing fish at ladies.
The first lady sits down, gets a cloth thrown over her like at the barber, and she says "I'm going to take a nap." Uh huh. Well, the Stooges had good screenwriters working for them, one can't help but admit.
The fun begins. Curly cracks two eggs over the lady's hair and uses an egg beater on the top of her head. The lady has to sit there with egg yolk over her left eye. Whatever they were paying her, it clearly wasn't enough. Curly runs afoul of a clothespin that won't stay put. I can safely assume he's using a clothespin on her hair, can't I? This is a Stooge beauty salon, now. Gotta keep that squarely in mind. Meanwhile, Larry goes out to look for some mud. Finding some in a wet hole in a sidewalk, he cheerfully fills up his bucket and heads back in. The three of them proceed to cover the woman's face with the mud, as we hear her muffled ... shrieking? I hate to overemphasize it, but that's just the chauvinist in me. The mud looks more like chocolate frosting at this point. Moe goes to work on the girl's fingernails with a big-ass pair of scissors. What a nightmare... and I'm not even a girl over here!
One cross-fade later, and Moe's indeed spraying the girl's hand with a paint sprayer as discussed earlier in the film. The girl now has a thing over her face that looks sort of like an onion, or maybe a small sink with some of the pipe sticking up. It has to be seen to be believed. Why don't we call this Act Three?

ACT THREE

The torture continues, but at least the Stooges are messing themselves up too. Curly ends up with a veritable paint beard from Moe's sprayer. They still haven't gotten the big thing of concrete off her face yet. I'm assuming it's concrete; good comedy facial material, for one. Curly begins pulling big tufts of hair off the woman's head. You think one would do the trick, but the woman stays in the chair all the same. Larry starts delicately hitting the woman's concrete-covered face with a hammer and chisel. He hits himself with the hammer, then he hits Curly AND himself in rapid succession. Moe joins in on the fun after he gets hit in the face with a dislodged chunk of the concrete. At no point do the other three women beat the sh... stop the Stooges from whatever the hell they think they're doing. Moe takes up the hammer and chisel and proceeds to hit Larry and Curly. Moe, in an unusual moment, asks Larry for the thing the workman left behind... and Larry gets a big-ass drill! Moe goes to work. Is the woman dead yet? If she's not after 4:51, she'll never be. Well, it was obviously a dummy, but still... Jesus! The woman, groggy, gets up with some concrete dust left on her face, and a nice Larry-sized bald spot on the back of her head. She walks out of the salon and Moe tells Larry and Curly to get the other girls. All too convenient. Time to ruin three girls at once.
Moe, after a failed "See that?", throws a glass bottle of hair remover at Curly. It hits the wall in a magnificent explosion, and then... time for another proxy. A dog gets soaked in some of the hair remover... gee, I wonder what's going to happen? Will Curly put A and B together, just like with the alum? Will we? The boys end up spritzing each other with the toxic hair goo they've made. Moe and Larry get big facefuls of it, but their eyes don't burn out so it must be okay. Larry makes his girl look like Ed Grimley at 6:33. Things go from bad to worse when Moe calls for hot towels. Oh, great. They'd probably use them, too! They're just Mexican girls, who's going to care?
And then... FINALLY! The dude comes back with the first girl, and even though they appear to have dubbed his lines in later, he's in a mind to shoot the boys so full of holes that they'll look like some kind of bloody Sierpinski Sponge... I mean, Swiss cheese. (Menger sponge? I like Sierpinski better.) Unfortunately, he waits to see what his other three girls look like. Normally, I'd hate to spoil the surprise, but I'm so down on this particular short that I'll tell you what happens: two of the girls look like Larry, and the one on the right looks like Curly! Their fashion crucifixion wasn't as long and drawn out as the first woman, to be sure. The boys make their escape, but end up running down the street being shot at by the girls. A fitting ending to an unfortunately awful Stooge short. It's fine when the Stooges are hurting each other, but in this case they've crossed the wrong line. I'm going to do like the Maltin book and give this a one-star rating, or a BOMB.

BOMB

-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans

2011-12-25T00:22:00.001-08:00

Wasn't Stand By Me great? Wasn't it? I guess it was about as good as it got for these two. No, you want to be more like Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, I'm afraid.

Spielberg vs. Spielberg

2011-12-25T00:21:00.000-08:00

Boo, IMDb. Yay beer! Well, the official IMDb top 10 is still on last week, so I have to go to my backup plan, Variety.com, which says that Tom Cruise's movie tops the box office this week. The rebound story of the year! Just last week it was at a mere #3 or something or other. So, they started running the pictures of Tom Cruise wearing a hoodie... and he's 18 again! Lucky bastid. Dragon Tattoo came in third, something else second... Sherlock Holmes 2, that's it. So the top three is all sequels... if you consider that Dragon Tattoo is based on a trilogy. Close enough. But for me and people like me, the real story is Spielberg's two films going head to head. Why, I haven't seen anything like it since John McTiernan went up against himself in 1999. That's right, THE John McTiernan! Die Hard? Predator 1? The list goes on and on... actually, those are the only two anyone remembers. But it appears that Spielberg couldn't crack the top 3. For shame. He hasn't had as rough a time of it since The Terminal came out in '04, but at least he's never had as rough a go of it as with Pluto Nash. Sheesh! I gotta run. Pic later.

In case I forget again...

2011-12-21T01:08:00.001-08:00

Sheesh. Good thing I ran across Abel Ferrara's name. Of course, as a globe connected to the internet, we all labour under a certain amount of short attention span and short term memory. Because I don't get to these reviews as quickly as I should, I put them off. But a friend of mine did TiVo Abel Ferrara's 1995 vampire pic The Addiction. How bad could it be? For me, rather bad. I know Ferrara's one of those directors that film critics kinda have to like. I'm no longer living by myself in a mancave of an apartment, so I missed my chance to see Bad Lieutenant 1 with Harvey Keitel. That's the one he'll be remembered for, of course. For me, probably Driller Killer; gotta love that title. I'm not even gonna post a pic of The Addiction. Phooey.
But I will give it some storyline props. It was ahead of Twilight by 13 years. Here's the story. SPOILER ALERT. A young, naive Lili Taylor gets bitten by vampire chick Annabella Sciorra, and you know what happens? She becomes COOL, that's what happens! She rocks the academic world, that's what happens! She wears sunglasses at night, talks like Kerouac on speed, and is COOL COOL COOL. That's basically what happens. Lili converts her close friends, Lili runs afoul of a vampire alpha male, stages a vampire coup of sorts of the literati at her Ph.D. ceremony, and generally climbs the vampire and scholar social ladder, spouting pseudo-Ayn Rand philosophy along the way. Or maybe I'm not giving it the credit it deserves. Maybe if Ed Wood wrote slightly hipper scripts, like Diablo Cody does. But, don't worry, folks. Good triumphs in the end, if you consider the Catholic Church good. Close enough for this movie. Christopher Walken has a short scene as the alpha male that Lili runs afoul of. Walken was a busy boy in 1995, what with The Prophecy and all, but he owed Ferrara a favor, I guess. Ferrara owes all of us, I think. Especially for Dangerous Game. Hmm! Is screenwriter Nicholas St. John some sort of pseudonym for Ferrara himself? He seems to get work ONLY WITH Ferrara... kinda like John Brownjohn only seems to work with Roman Polanski. Another mystery for the ages.
One last thought. Most modern movies are in black and white in order to make a bold statement about cinema, or for the unique visual opportunities it offers. I think Ferrara chose black and white because it's cheaper, and because you can use Hershey's chocolate sauce for blood.

**
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

The tools we use every 10 years

2011-12-19T22:12:00.000-08:00

All right, let's get this one over with. This was one that famously, or infamously, got a new-fangled colorization treatment so that it looks like Barton Fink or something. It also features some great violent Stooge moments, like Moe doing the rumba on the side of Curly's face with a cheese grater, and Moe getting hit over the head with a rather thick broom handle. And if I remember correctly, Larry gets grabbed by his curly locks and slapped in the head. Timeless.

ACT ONE

We start innocently enough with a second hand store front. The front of a second hand store, if you will. I won't spoil the Stooges' stunt doubles' grand entrance for you. That's the least I can do. I'll spoil just about everything else, though. For example, the standard play in these kind of deals is that the boys start hitting each other until they end up breaking something. They run into an office building or an apartment building, and before you know it, they've got a new job. In this case, as you can guess from the title, No Census, No Feeling (... is that a play on something?), they end up as Census takers. Moe tells Curly, "We're working for the Census!" Curly asks, "You mean Will Hays?" Follow this link to read more about the infamous Hays Code. Ah, good ol' Wikipedia, Charlie Brown. Will college papers ever be the same? The boys ultimately decide to split up. They can do more damage that way.
Moe gets hit by a flying pitcher... never mind. Larry, ever the lead idiot, ends up back at the original store they trashed. Note to any future Census takers: DON'T be like Larry. Curly finds himself in a classy joint and proceeds to destroy it when no one's around. Ah, a Stooge in love. More destructive than any terrorist.
Addendum: Curly finds himself in the KITCHEN of a classy joint. He's questioning the sexy French maid... Census questions, of course. The maid goes to get permission from the head of the household. Blatant plot device. Census takers are THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY in these sorts of matters. Yes, it's federal overreach, but even Republicans would agree that it's justified when it comes to Census takers... they used to be, anyway. Hard to know where they stand on anything these days.

Anyway, I think it's time for a funny case of mistaken identity! Moe enters the same kitchen that Curly is in. Because Curly has his back turned and is wearing an official chef's hat, Moe doesn't know who he's talking to. Curly, of course, is all too willing to play the part of the working chef. "Well, you've caught me at a busy time," he tells Moe as he gets ready to grate some cheese into the punch... or maybe an onion or some garlic. It's the Stooges, folks. What do you expect? Cordon bleu?
Curly gives a jolly laugh at 4:01 in the proceedings. (Curly 4:01) I should probably point out that the seeds of a recurring joke get planted at this point. Place of birth? That famous comedy lake of note, Lake Winnipesaukee. Life saved again by Wikipedia! And look! A reference to the very film being reviewed! ...oh, What About Bob. That was something I didn't chttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifare to know...

ACT TWO

Might as well call it an act break. And now... perhaps my favorite Stooge moment of ALL Stooge films is at this point... nah, there's still Dutiful but Dumb to get to, but this would have to be a close second. The sequence where Moe and Larry are but two couches apart, and another case of mistaken identity sets in, as he confuses Larry with a guy with a newspaper over his face. There's the Lake Winnipesaukee question, then the litter of three question and then... Moe's rage takes over. (Moe 4:56) If that film clip isn't in Heaven then I ain't going. That's all there is to it.

Okay, back to the humdrum. Moe gets hit over the head with a rather thick cane that mercifully breaks into two. Larry finally realizes what's going on and asks his soon-to-be trademark question, "Hey, what's the idea?" There's more: "I saw him first! Gimme my four cents!" Moe asks, "Will you take five?" And, of course, like an idiot blessed with a dominant short-term memory, Larry agrees to five. Why Curly and Larry don't wince at the mere mention of the numbers two and five, I have no idea. Apparently it's funny every time.
Cut to the snooty party, overseen by classy dame Symona Boniface. Some would call her the Margaret Dumont of the Stooges, but she can be as nasty as the boys any day of the week... damn! You can find just about anything on the web. And yet, they hang that Manning dude out to dry... Peyton Manning, I think it was. Personally, for me, Symona's finest Stooge moment comes in Half-Wits Holiday, but... hell with it. We'll get into that one soon enough. Moe gets interrupted while trying to break Larry's neck by Symona Boniface. The two newly minted Census takers get to work. Some hilarious number-play ensues, no doubt inspired by the likes of S.J. Perelman or Ben Hecht or George S. Kaufman, one of those jerks. Here's how it starts: Moe asks Symona "How old are you?" Larry asks "What address is this?" Get it? GET IT? I should at least point out that at one point Symona asks Moe, "Well, how do I look?" Moe says, "Oh, lady, you look like a million!" Larry says, "Ah, she can't be that old." The three of them wait for the laughter to subside. Let's see Margaret Dumont pull THAT one off! (On second thought, leave it on. This is a family blog! Drumroll, please...) Moe and Larry eventually get into a bidding war between 43 and 50 over Symona's age. Hmph! 29, my ass. She was 46 when she made this pic! Curly seals the deal with an auctioneer joke, gets hit in the face with one Census notebook. He turns around in anger, then shrugs his shoulders! What is it with him and shrugging his shoulders! He then proceeds to get hit in the back of the head with the other Census notebook. Back to the punch we go... the fruit punch. Curly mistakes alum for powdered sugar and dumps the whole box into the punch. That's right, folks... the alum gag isn't just for Looney Tunes cartoons. The punch is served en masse to the guests. Let the Alum Games begin!
We're not even on Part Two yet? Good Lourdes. Curly, like the low-class lout he is, tries to drink punch from the ladle. Moe whistles at him, and he stops. Now, here's a tip for all you screenwriters out there. Curly uses the ladleful of the toxic alum home brew and waters a flower that he is fortunately standing close to. We see the flower pucker up and close, to the stock sound effect of a squeaky door closing. Good screenwriting tip for all. The only other example that comes to mind is the skeleton in Clifford... someone has dipped my CPU in pancake batter again! There we go. In Clifford, there's a skeleton wearing a baseball cap in the dinosaur ride at the end. Sorry, forgot... SPOILER ALERT. Now, this may seem out of place, but it serves as a plot point later on. The skeleton ends up in the cart with Clifford and eventually ends up getting eaten by the giant animatronic T-Rex, so it serves as a proxy in lieu of Clifford himself getting eaten. Why, Charles Grodin even says at one point "Maybe I should just let the giant T-Rex eat you! Who KNOWS what sorts of horrors you'll unleash! 'I just made the bestest nuclear bomb in the whole wide world!'" Yes, like Clifford himself, I too am a very special boy. But back to the plot at hand. The flower, in this case, serves more as the canary in a coalmine rather than a proxy. It only foretells the comedy horrors about to be wreaked on the innocent job creators present at the snooty party... ah, what am I saying. Screw those one percenters. Of course, Moe and Larry are also seated at the bridge tables, so they're not free from the wreckage either. At one point, Moe tries to spit out his drink at stage right, then at stage left. For some reason, I seem to recall Jerry Lewis doing that move. Get on that, will you, Robert Osborne?
Eventually, Symona herself begins to see why her drink isn't going over as swimmingly amongst her table guests. Ellinor Vanderveer is seated next to Larry at another table. She appeared briefly in the Marx brothers' classic A Night at the Opera. What a mug!

And finally, we get to part two on YouTube. Symona has a funny moment exactly at 0:08; she appears to have forgotten her line! Let's see Dumont do THAT!

ACT THREE

Okay, I think I've written quite enough about this little alum party. It seems to be the part of the film that gets stretched out so the film's 16 minutes long. Moe eventually puts two and two together, and realizes that Curly's the "start of all this." The party gets completely ruined, and we make a rather abrupt transition to the boys resuming their Census chores. In probably the best case of mistaken noise ever for a Stooge, we hear the sound of a roaring crowd. Moe of course turns to Larry and, even though he can see that Larry's mouth is clearly closed, asks "Why don't you quit yelling?" They hear, then see, stock footage of a crowd at a football game. Yup, that's right... a chance to make money taking the Census at a football game. And it's all for the taking, just for the Stooges. "There must be 100,000 people there! We'll make a fortune!" Time for Curly the Calculator to go to work, which also helps stretch the running time of the film. He has to pull the receipt tape out of his jacket pocket instead of his mouth this time. I just hope the Farrellys do the proper digital CGI homage to this, instead of just championing the cause of giving Jersey Shore's cleavage more exposure. To the football game we go.
The boys arrive at the stadium, and apparently they're not taking their own advice. Rather than try to take the Census of the crowd in attendance, they try to get the Census of the FOOTBALL PLAYERS PLAYING THE GAME. They even dress up as football players to get past the guards. Must be another good screenwriting tip. If they just go into the crowd... well, first of all, they'd have to pay a million extras to make the film! That ain't gonna happen, especially not at Cannery Row... I mean, Columbia. Well, they weren't owned by Sony and Coca Cola at the time. There'd probably be a very different run-in with the authorities if they went into the crowd, but never mind. It is what it is, and interviewing the football players we go. It proves to be difficult, to say the least, especially since THEY'RE PLAYING FOOTBALL! Did I mention that THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE THE CENSUS OF FOOTBALL PLAYERS WHILE A FOOTBALL GAME IS IN PROGRESS? Just thought I'd mention it.
Okay, I'll spare you the play by play, but here's how it ends up. At some point, the boys abandon their careers as Census takers, and instead sabotage the football game. Curly's running down the field with the ball, with Larry and Moe far behind, dragging an ice cream cart. Larry's pulling the cart, while Moe is chucking ice creams at the players and referees who are all chasing them. We see player after player after referee get hit in the face with a substance that's supposed to look like vanilla ice cream, but it looks more like shaving cream. Curly makes like Forrest Gump, and keeps running after crossing the goal line. He keeps running down the street, and the football players and referees chase them! A sad ending, indeed. But that seems to be how it happens with these Stooge films. For the most part, you can only hope to get a few four-star moments in a two-and-a-half star Stooge flick. Let's split the difference and call it 3.5, then. 'night!

***1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Michael and Shawn Rasmussen

2011-12-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

Well, up until recently, the Rasmussens have been the picture of obscurity. They have yet to become epic game-changing icons if the 2010s are their favorite decade, that's for sure. Still, they've been working the studio system, rocking the film festivals, and learning from the screenplay workshops. They only worked on the script of 2005's Long Distance, but did everything on their 2011/2012 directorial debut Dark Feed. They obviously have taken a step backward in terms of casting. Where's the one big name that every film like this needs to stay afloat? Take their work on John Carpenter's The Ward. See? Gotta have one big name... even if it is a faded 70s/80s director icon. Carpenter saw Drag Me to Hell and thought, hey! I got an idea for a movie. A toast to the endless future of future horror mavens the Rasmussen boys!

Cheeky Basterd

2011-12-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

Welp, it is official... Brad Bird stumbles! That's what you get for doing a non-Pixar pic. The Guy Ritchie juggernaut jugs on with his latest & greatest: Sherlock Holmes 2. Or is it a reboot? I don't know. The Wild Wild West formula rises again like a phoenix. The explosion-ridden present creeps into the past, never content to stay put. And clearly the trend is away from sequel numbers. Look at all the sequels in the top 10 this week that DON'T have Roman numberals! Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows... Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked... Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol... The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1... Young Adult: Juno 2. No, the Twilight saga is as close as they're going to get. The Roman numeral is a dirty word in Hollywood now. Take Rambo III, for example... the good one!
Still, I can't help but get a little misty-eyed at the loss of rebellion. Jason Lee has finally grown up and done a G picture. Maybe it's a hard G, who knows; a little something for all his fans who grew up watching him in Stealing Harvard, Almost Famous, A Guy Thing... you know, the fun stuff. Meanwhile, the box office is still celebrating Arthur Christmas, while the real Christmas is still a week away. That'll probably get a bump next week, huh? I gotta go.

Triple Indumbnity

2011-12-17T17:24:00.001-08:00

This begs the deep, philosophical question: can one make a double pun out of "Double Indemnity"? Or are we restricted to just one pun at a time, like "Triple Indemnity" or just "Double Indumbnity"? And should I have put hyphens around the dumb or quotation marks in order to highlight it? Or in ALL-CAPS? Sorry about yelling, but these are the kinds of detalis that separate the men from the boys... I'm sorry, I forgot. In this day and age, men don't worry about details, especially when it comes to effeminate pursuits like correct spelling and grammar. Anyway, the deadline looms, so it's time to look at the next Stooge film, From Nurse to Worse. Long story short: still not my favourite.

ACT ONE

As with the far superior, post-stroke Curly masterpiece, A Bird in the Head, the boys press the start button and find themselves as paper hangers. They don't know who they're working for, but they soon find out: their friend Jerry. Their friendship with Jerry will be put to the ultimate friendship test. Will their friendship sour when Jerry's profession becomes an issue, and he sells the boys on some insurance? You might recognize Jerry, as he's typically played the heavy in the last couple Stooge films. Here he plays the worst kind of heavy: a friend that tries to use his friends as clients. In this case, it's for some sort of insanity insurance. Apparently someone could get paid $500 a month if they're declared insane by a doctor, but enough about Congress. (tee hee hee!) Curly confuses "banana" with "bonanza". Moe looks like he wants to hit Curly, but for some reason decides not to. Is Moe getting soft in his upper middle age? Could be. Anyway, all the boys have to do is fork over $50 to Jerry, and the gateway to the con is opened.
Now comes the part that stretches the film out to 16 minutes. Curly has a dollar, but it's hidden in a ... sorry, SPOILER ALERT. It's hidden in a purse around his neck. Moe starts to undress Curly to get at the dollar, but Curly thankfully takes over. He's wearing several vests, and it's quite funny when he removes them. So much so, in fact, that he'll do it later on in another film... the one where they invented a flycatcher, and Christine McIntyre mistakes him for a contest winner... ah, skip it. One Stooge film at a time, please. Dang! Curly's arms are kinda buff! When did he have time to work out? Everything but the gut, apparently. The purse is opened, and moths on strings fly out. The dollar's been pretty worked over by the moths, but I guess it'll still do. This was the Depression, after all.
Now it's Larry's turn to fork over some money. The dialogue that Moe and Larry have is probably based on a popular song of the time. Someone else look into that, will ya? Now, I'm no expert, but it seems to me that, after all the time they spent getting one dollar out of Curly, it sure would be funny if it turned out that Larry had fifty dollars on him that were easier to get to. They go the "comedy hair" route instead, as Moe ends up tearing out some of Larry's hair, trying to get money to fall out of it. If I recall correctly, this is the first time they've done that: torn out tufts of Larry's hair. To be honest, I haven't been paying close enough attention so far.
Jerry returns with the insurance paperwork, and the real fun begins. In the Stooge-ocracy, it's decided that Curly will be the one to play insane. He refuses at first. There's a Catch 22 there someplace...

ACT TWO

We end up at the offices of a "Colossal Insurance Examiner." Gee, I wonder if he's got a good comedy name? He's played by Vernon Dent, so we're of course in for a treat. We start in the waiting room of the doctor's office. Curly's pretending to be a dog, but he falls for an elegant, stand-offish lady who's waiting in the waiting area. She appears to be visibly repulsed by Curly. Good casting for the part! Curly goes so far as to dance with the comely lass, when Moe brings him back to the task at hand. The doctor appears and asks "Well, which one is the crazy one?" I told you! Good ol' Vernon never lets you down. Oops! Dinner time... gotta run.

6:04pm - Back! Okay, so the boys head into the examination room. Following specific directions in the script, Larry gives Curly a kick in the ass for good measure. The exam begins. The doc says "Now, let me see... the heart." Curly helpfully says "Two spades!" Now I'm no Freud, but sharp comic timing would seem to imply non-craziness, but never mind. Interesting audio note for you audiophiles out there: Curly sounds like he's underwater at one point! (Curly 5:44) It's the straw that breaks the doc's back and he immediately decides he has to operate on Curly. Damn doctors!! So, needless to say, the plan that Jerry outlined doesn't happen as they thought. The doctor tells Curly that he's going to have to operate on Curly's brain. Curly regains his sanity and the boys flee the office. We hear some vintage Curly noises as they flee. Vernon Dent ends up doing some of his own stunt work out on the street. Whatever they were paying him, it wasn't enough. In another bit of miscasting, the guy who turns and looks, who USUALLY plays a bad guy, shows up here as a cop! Dr. Dent (D. Lerious), now resolute in his determination to crack open Curly's skull, follows the Stooges with a scary fervor. Fortunately, the Stooges make a clean getaway in a strange van. Unfortunately for us, they wind up in a dog catcher's van. To aid in their getaway, the dog catcher and his assistant put a fresh load of dogs into the van WITHOUT LOOKING IN THE VAN AND SEEING THE STOOGES.
And now, for another sequence that stretches out the running time of the film. The three Stooges meet their intellectual match, facing off two dogs in the back of the truck. The boys, catching the dog's fleas, obviously lose. Meanwhile, the dog catchers are listening to the tune they played two Stooge films ago, in Nutty but Nice, but it's cut short by an announcer that sounds an awful lot like Moe! Announcer Moe makes an announcement about the three lunatics on the run from the law AND from their brain surgery appointment. The dog catchers listen in absolute, abject horror. Who wouldn't, frankly?
And so, we come to a fitting end for Act Two. The dog catchers' truck drives into what looks like a garage, but is actually a dog fumigation building. They park the truck inside it, leaving the dogs inside the truck, and proceed to fill the fumigation building with some sort of parasite-killing gas... Wouldn't it be more effective to open the truck in order to more efficiently "gas" the dogs? You might be asking yourself a question like that, but once again, you're not thinking in terms of movies. You're just supposed to think to yourself, holy dog crap! Curly and the boys better get the hell out of that truck! Meanwhile, the Stooges and the dogs have formed some sort of human-dog centipede, each scratching the others' backs in a line. For all you film buffs out there, there's a film that Stooge veteran Jules White directed with just dogs... that must've come in handy for this film. Oh, I don't even know if Jules White directed this one. Someone else look up all that junk for me, okay? Robert Osborne, get on it.

ACT THREE

The boys break out of the truck, and proceed to run around it like idiots. Curly stops and says "This is the longest room ever! C'mon!" They eventually break out, just narrowly missing the dog catchers' nets. They thwart a second attempt by the dog catchers to get them in a taxi. MAGIC! They're unable to outsmart the doctor, Dr. Lerious, however, who rather conveniently happens by in a car of his own. The way he whisks the boys back to the hospital ought to get him banned from his profession for life... then again, it is the Stooges. I should also probably point out that even the simple act of thumbing a ride can set Moe off into one of his trademark rages... but not this time. The plot sprints ahead.
Back at the doctor's office, it looks like the doc's plan to "cerebrally decapitate" Curly is about to come to fruition... but not before Curly manages a little more comic mayhem of his own! He manages to tastefully rip off a nurse's dress, who just as tastefully grabs it back from him. Never content to let a sitting joke lie flat, Moe and Larry resurrect the "MY FRIEND CHARLIE WHO WALKS LIKE THIS" gag. Only in a Stooge film could that work. I sure hope the Farrellys do their rude, tasteless take on it, for all our sakes. The boys are off and running, with the cop on their tail. Time for another Third Act recurring gag. Moe and Larry and the cop keep running into this effete stunt man trying to carry a nice delicate tray of tea and biscuits somewhere. No wonder health care costs are so high. Larry says "No cop can ever catch us!" We'll leave that alone for now. The Stooges worked on shoestring budgets, so they maximized one set of plates and dishes by running into the guy twice with the same first set of broken dishes. The second time this happens, the cop, of all people, says "Oh, what's the use?" You'd think the guy carrying the damn dishes would say that, but he's got dignity and sticks to his guns. Oh, and the boys and the cop get distracted by cute babies, and attempt to fool him by dressing up as a doctor and patient. Meanwhile, back to Curly, who's being dragged to surgery un-anesthetized. In a positively Kafka-esque moment, he manages to slip out of the room, unnoticed. He runs down the hall to another door, goes through it, and... yup! Finds himself back in the room with everyone staring at him as if to say, God, what a jerk! He gives a "N'yaah-aah-aah!" and, accepting his fate just as quickly, shrugs his shoulders and gets back onto the operating table. Moe and Larry enter the room dressed as doctors' assistants. A dude approaches Curly with an ether-soaked rag, and Curly freaks out yet again. A big struggle breaks out, and it turns into a football-field pile-up. And then, more magic happens. I know I wouldn't be able to pull off something like this myself, but they manage to do a li'l ol' swait-and-bitch... I mean, bait-and-switch with Curly and Dr. Lerious... or is it the ol' switcheroo? I tells you, it made me think of Mission: Impossible for some reason. (Opening either this weekend or the next... just Tom Cruise's little way of telling Spielberg to further go f... himself) The boys escape once again. Oh, I should probably point out that one of the other doctors screams "IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?... Oh, I'm a doctor!" Great stuff. See also that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he goes up against the hairy orange monster for another smart "doctor in the house" joke.

Now, even the Stooges liked to reach for plot grandeur every once in a while. And so, as the end of the film approaches, the boys run their way into the "Morgue" room. Enter the bug-eyed Dudley Dickerson and some other white dude that appears in a lot of these damn Stooge films. The boys pile onto a table in a completely butch manner and cover themselves up with a giant sheet. Enter the two. Dudley Dickerson ends up bugging out his eyes and jumping out the window. Something the Lord Made this is not. Time for more running. And we come to the resolution of the smashed dishes recurring joke... much like the beleaguered glass door replacer of Men in Black... the Stooge film, not the Barry Sonnenfeld blockbuster series.
The boys themselves get tired of all this running around that crazy hospital, so they make their final getaway on a special gurney with a sail. Cut to the footage from a previous Stooge short, but with a special added on ending. They run into Jerry from the beginning of the pic, and manage to knock him into an open vat of either plaster, white paint, or oatmeal... whichever looks better on film. A couple Stooge shorts end this way, but we'll get to those soon enough.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Stephen and Timothy Quay

2011-12-17T02:05:00.000-08:00

Man! Bad week to get some blogging done. Sorry, gotta keep it short. Well, we're up to the third pair of identical twin filmmakers. Good Lord! If you've taken an experimental animation class like I have, you've probably heard of the Quays. According to their IMDb bio, they're "best known" for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer music video... but I'll bet they don't like to think so! Apparently they did the wood and metal sequence, judging from their body of work. Using magnets and metal filings for animation, that's how they made their stamp on the world. Alas, I'm not terribly familiar with their work otherwise, but I think what The Onion said about their Piano Tuner of Earth-Quay-kes probably sums it up best... it wasn't good, basically. But it's still better than total obscurity, right? Like THIS BLOG!!!

Okay, let's try the smile again, only a little more girl-next-door and a little less slutty...

2011-12-12T13:57:00.001-08:00

Goodness, shame on me! I must be in some sort of a bad mood... or maybe I'm just trying to get into the next Garry Marshall ensemble cast. Behold the awesome purifying power of the holidays... I'm just not that into it myself. But don't kid yourself, Literati: this screenwriter Katherine Fugate is the real deal. Check out that résumé! And check out this part of the résumé! Art, baby. Hubba bubba, dubba trubba. In yo face, Cezanne. Good lesson for the kids: don't waste water. Anyway, once again the Greatest Generation has to step up and show all us young snots how to Git 'R Done, as Garry Marshall's latest imitation of Short Cuts snags the #1 spot away from the latest Twilight movie. Some have pointed out that it's #1, but a rather anemic #1, which just means that they're just jealous that they didn't get to work with the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer and Hector Elizondo, so they can just go sit in the corner with the rest of the Lame-Stream Media, eating a hearty mixture of worms and boogers.
Meanwhile, the seemingly endless 80s flashback apparently continues with #2's entry, The Sitter, about the worst babysitter in the world. It's supposed to be an homage to all those terrible 80s movies about babysitting... the only one I know of is Adventures in Babysitting, and sure, it's no classic, but it's the best Chris Columbus can do, for God's sake! Why not give him some credit? Chris himself of course pines for the lost 80s; hence his film I Love You, Beth Cooper. Also not his fault: I blame Larry Doyle for that one, and really, how can you disagree with that? Personally, I can't handle this new, thin-faced Jonah Hill. I get confused by The Sitter's poster, featuring a wide-faced Jonah Hill. Does he want to be Chris Penn's heir apparent or not? Why does he want to be like the new, thin Seth Rogen? Clearly not as fun. As for director David Gordon Green, well, I guess he's retained his poet soul that apparently characterized his early 2000 work, at least until Danny McBride started showing up in his movies, and Jody Hill probably couldn't have directed The Sitter any better.
Well, that's all the debuts this week. The 80s flashback continues with The Muppets movie hanging on at #4. The Descendants hangs on to the #7 spot. Immortals is almost gone at #10; I'm surprised it's hung on this long! But ain't that always the Devil's bargain: he gives you immortality but sticks you with Mickey Rourke's 2011 face. Can't hang on to Rourke's 1989 Johnny Handsome face forever, apparently. And, of course, with only 70 million in the bank, there is no joy in Happy Madisonville, mighty Sandler has once again struck out. That won't even cover the catering bill!

Stoogy's Day Out

2011-12-11T01:06:00.000-08:00

Welp, I just saw a trailer for the new Three Stooges movie, so I better start with my thoughts about that. The thing that some might find disappointing about the original Stooge shorts is that no Stooge ever gets hit in the nuts, not even by a lobster. This is an oversight that the Farrellys finally rectify in the movie, as well as the fact that the ladies usually wear too many clothes in the original shorts, with the exception of Disorder in the Court, of course; and while this may make me seem prudish, I gotta say that the gal "testifying" about her sexy dance was pretty sexy! I still can't get past Snooki's face, personally, but I'm sure my mind will be changed about that, one way or another. I wasn't terribly impressed with Sean Hayes as Larry, and I didn't get the sense that he was particularly enjoying himself. Curly was pretty good... but the guy doing Moe! He was pretty excellent, if I do say so myself. Oh, he'll have a lot to say on the DVD, I'm sure. He must've been channeling the ol' sugar-bowl top himself, I dare say... FIND THE TRAILERS YOURSELF!

And so, on we go to the next Stooge flick. Let's get it over with. It's called How High is Up? Not to be confused with the Cheech and Chong flick of the same name.

ACT ONE

SPOILER ALERT. What better way to start a Stooge flick than with the boys asleep? Curly runs afoul of a particularly pesky pest while sleeping. We are looking down on the boys from above, and a lamp is hanging over them. We pull back and see that... they are actually asleep under their car! Well, it was the Depression, even though the Stooges in no way represent the angst of said Depression. Things go from bad to worse as a street-washing truck douses the boys with water. They pull down a shade that says "Men at Work" on it. Things go from worse to even more worse as a freak accident lets loose a flood of water from a hydrant. The water ends up washing the boys completely out from under their car, and the three of them float down the street on the back of this strong new urban river. Pedestrians look on in horror and disbelief. They finally come to a stop at an intersection, and fortunately for them, a truck bearing down on them ALSO comes to a stop, even though the street the truck was on looked pretty slick from water. What almost could've been... well, I guess it was just the stunt doubles, and they die in high enough numbers as it is. Moe confuses the honking of the truck's horn for the alarm clock, so he hits Curly in the stomach, and then in the head, ordering him to turn off the alarm clock. Curly doesn't have the normal reaction to getting hit, as he's still plenty tired himself. They eventually realize a cop's watching them, and quickly grab their mattress out of the road and head back to their car. The cop gives them some motivation with his nightstick to move quickly.
Back at their car, Curly makes the usual stupid move: Curly shows Moe an anchor. Now, what do you think Moe's going to do with that anchor? But they try to keep the shtick sort of fresh: Larry ends up being collateral damage. Curly ends up trying to fix their flat tire. A piece of salami from Moe's sandwich ends up serving as the patch for the tire. Needless to say, there are no wasted setups. Moe tells Larry to get the tools that they've been using for the last ten years... just like in that other one... the name of which escapes me at the moment. Pardon My Scotch, that's it! The boys leave to find some work. I probably should've mentioned that in this one they play three self-employed fix-it men. And when you see how they drum up business, you might agree with me that they should be flogged in the town square. After they leave their car, a stray dog goes up to the tire and immediately makes food out of the salami patch on the tire.
The boys return. Moe grabs Curly and says "I thought I told you to fix that puncture." Curly bellows, "I DID!" Good line reading. (Curly 4:08) Larry tries to act like Moe at this point, and quickly gets put in his place by Moe with just a dirty look! Behold the power of Moe.
Now, as I've noted before, in these Stooge shorts that aren't as good as some of the others, there's typically an episode that's used to pad out the length of the film to two reels, or about 16 minutes. In How High is Up?, this episode happens at this point: Curly tries taking off his sweater, and has some trouble doing so. Moe and Larry "help" Curly take off his sweater... and it's probably the saddest thing you'll ever see. I won't describe the whole ordeal, but this will give you an idea of how bad it gets: at one point Moe asks Curly, "Were you wearing a pink tie? No? Well, here's your ear back." At 5:50 and 6:04 in particular, Curly seems especially pissed. I'm going to use this episode as the Act break.

ACT TWO

The boys finally stop grappling with Curly's sweater after destroying it completely and proceed to drum up some "business." They spy a group of lunch boxes and get to work. Now, this is where I part company with the Stooges in this instance. Here's how they drum up business: they put holes in the lunch boxes with their handy board with a nail in it. And even though they rather immediately get caught because of their own stupidity, I still don't like it. Somehow, the filmmakers must've felt the same way, as we move quickly onto the next situation. The boys cut in a job line and get more than they bargained for, finding themselves working as riveters on the 97th floor of a new skyscraper. As with most things, it's about the journey with the Stooges, not the destination. As the boys climb to the 97th floor, Curly has the opportunity to tell Moe, "You laugh when you say that!" And Moe does! It's an unusual moment in Stoogedom... at least, for me. (Moe 1:10).

ACT THREE

Well, for some reason, I hate to spoil the details of what happens on the 97th floor, but it should probably come as no surprise that the parachute Curly's wearing on the way up ends up getting used. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the rest of humanity, the parachute opens, they land in their car, and drive off with the parachute blocking their vision. The final shot of the film is epic.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Liam Neeson's "Frantic"

2011-12-09T02:28:00.001-08:00

Well, we're perilously close to the end of Act Two of Liam Neeson's long, illustrious career. His Schindler's List days are long behind him, but his A-Team-esque days appear to still be ahead. Check out that poster! Can't airbrush the years away forever, man! To be fair, Unknown's a little more serious than The A-Team, but I've probably given away too much of the plot already. SPOILER ALERT. For me, anyway, this is one of those movies that needs to be seen at least twice; partly because of the headache-inducing quick edits, and partly because of the onion-like plot. Also, partly because of the unseamless digital effects, particularly the aftermath of one explosion. Sometimes it pays to either do the real thing, or construct some sort of analog model, but Joel Silver's still tightening belts on budgets these days, his Road House days far behind him, but perhaps not far enough behind for his taste.
And so, let's dance around the plot enough to qualify this as a movie review. We start off much like Frantic started off, except in Germany in this one. Somehow France's sightseeing is more full of promise, but perhaps that's just bigoted ol' me. Seems ordinary enough: a couple checks in to a fancy-shmancy hotel, guy forgets his suitcase, goes back to the airport alone to get it. Then, something happens along the way... and, long story short, Liam suffers a concussion, slips into a four-day coma, and finds his life totally upside down. This film would be totally different in America, of course... he's able to get out of the German hospital to find he's gone from the frying pan to the fire. He seems to have been replaced by Michael Collins co-star Aidan Quinn (younger and even more blue-eyed!!), and his wife no longer recognizes him. But God bless him, Liam's convinced he's not crazy, and by God, we, the audience, feel his pain.
I will confess that trailers in general no longer do it for me, and the trailer for Unknown didn't impress me all that much. But the movie proper had a certain charm for me. The plot probably went off the rails more than I cared to notice, but there was a certain restraint of tone that I appreciated, even if I can't recall too specifically how it manifested itself. And it looked like it was filmed on genuine FILM, damn it. Not that modern, streaky digital video crap that I hate. But I will confess that the film probably thought it was in the same league as The Day of The Jackal. It's not, but it's probably got a better story than Taken.
And, of course, I should probably give a shout out to those scrumptious leading ladies in the film. I should've remembered Diane Kruger from Inglorious Basterds as Gina, the street-wise cabbie/waitress. If it were Mélanie Laurent, I would've made the connection. I think Diane just might have a fine future as Demi Moore's heir apparent... but I would ultimately advise against that. Several reasons, but mostly that you'd have to go through Demi Moore to get there. Demi's not about to give up just yet! As for January Jones, well, you gotta love the name for starters. I think any girl named after a month already has a leg up in my book. She's already got Mad Men to her credit, and she'll probably do well career-wise anyway, but somehow I see a role in her future playing Michelle Bachmann in an HBO movie. Is that too crazy?

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Mark and Michael Polish

2011-12-09T01:46:00.000-08:00

Crikey! How many of these identical twins are there in the movie game? The Pates, the Hughes, these guys... Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, who else? Hennessy sisters, Meg and Jennifer Tilly... too many to count on one hand. They burst onto the proverbial scene in 1999 with Twin Falls Idaho. A critical favourite and... well, modestly budgeted enough to warrant a future career, the Polish boys brought about their own personal millennial doom and jumped feet first onto that one-film-every-two-years treadmill that most filmmakers eventually find themselves upon. First came Jackpot, the inevitable sophomore slump feature. But it did give Uncle Rico a chance to prepare for the Second Act of his career. And they got to work with 80s icon Daryl Hannah. Then there was Northfork, another chance to work with an 80s icon: James Woods.
Then came The Astronaut Farmer in 2006... and it was time for a three year break. 2009 was a busy year for the boys, and Michael ended up using aliases on Stay Cool and The Smell of Success, but not for the same reason that Stephen King writes under his Bachman alias. The 2010s will find the boys busy once again, and this time they're abandoning their own material for the sake of being at play in the field of icons. Their 2012 feature is called Big Sur, and if you're like me, you might at first think, oh great! Another Henry Miller biopic. Just what we don't need. No, it's based on the work of Jack Kerouac. Unfortunately, they're going to be competing with On the Road, also coming out in 2012 or so. Worse yet, On the Road's got none other than Bella Swan herself in it! That's right, Kristen Stewart has just GOT to show the world that she's more than just this role that's made her an international star. Harry Potter Syndrome all over again. Of course, they didn't exactly flock to The Runaways, did they? Maybe the Polishes will come out all right on this one. But get back to the quirkfest as soon as possible! Us film geeks need more quirk in our lives. We're getting no love from the multiplexes these days.

No debuts this week!

2011-12-06T01:35:00.000-08:00

Well, Abel Ferrara's new pic probably debuted in 10 New York theaters, but I'm focusing on the Top 10, baby. Gotta keep current somehow. I forget what pic I was going to use, so why not go with something from Crimes and Misdemeanors? Too many choices. Anyway, the holiday slump benefits Hugo and The Descendants, which rise from 5 to 3 and 10 to 7, respectively. Tower Heist and Puss in Boots are almost gone. Arthur Christmas holds constant at #4; personally, a Merry Christmas is enough for me, folks. I gotta go; people are trying to sleep in the computer room. Stay warm, my friends! If you're thirsty, drink something.

Moe in a giant girl's dress: $16. Moe in a giant girl's dress beating Curly with a balloon: priceless.

2011-12-04T01:22:00.001-08:00

Sorry, folks, but I let you down, what can I say? Late for another Stooge deadline, but I can't think of a better one to cut short than Nutty but Nice. Well, maybe a Joe Besser short or two. Sure, there are plenty of good Stooge moments in this one, but I've got a serious problem with the plot structure. And yes, it should matter to you, too. The Stooges play their ACTUAL selves in this one: showbiz entertainer types who get sucked into a kidnapping plot. Rather, they impose themselves upon it. They start off as waiters in a theme restaurant. No offense; I mean, I love Larry as much as the next guy, but I'm hesitant to drink a cup of water that's been in any man's pocket.
Okay, I'm starting to ramble, so I better cut this short like I said I was going to. Something about the kidnapping plot I couldn't stomach in this one. If they play detectives, fine. If they're entertainers that feel a sense of obligation to a little girl they didn't entertain, not so much. And maybe it was something about Moe in drag I found off-putting. But hey! At least he didn't have nail polish on his fingers! A little bonus for my loyal readers: that's my Kryptonite. If I see a man with nail polish on his fingernails, I stop and stare. Well, I stop and stare at most things anyway, but that especially. Oh, and, let me give a brief shout out to one of the future Stooge players: the bad guy whose big move is turning and staring in fear... I'll look up his name later; we'll be seeing a lot more of him as the weeks progress, anyway. Ultimate verdict: not hunting this one down on DVD.

One last note I meant to add but forgot: the Stooges, never one to miss an opportunity to lift a joke from elsewhere, seem to, in my humble opinion, pay a tribute to the whole reincarnation angle of Laurel and Hardy's The Flying Deuces. In their desperate manhunt, Curly stops to examine a horse. "Don't you believe in reincarnation?" he says. Busted!

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Short Reviews - November 2011

2011-12-03T18:01:00.000-08:00

Welp, we've got less than a month left in 2011 to go, but I think I can already declare that the Essential Collection of Laurel and Hardy that was recently released is already the DVD collection of the year, if not the decade... well, that's the film reviewer's job, right? To make grand, sweeping declarations like that! Strange; meanwhile, TCM's showing a bunch of silent Laurel and Hardy shorts that I ain't never seen before! Too bad they're not on this collection. Well, I'm not as rabid a L&H fan as the official ones, probably, but even I know what a big deal this is. Stunningly great picture quality. Foreign language versions. Guest appearances in other shorts that no one would care about otherwise. We'll never see the likes of Laurel and Hardy again, that's for sure... okay, maybe not. (Side note: Oliver "Fattius" Hardy? Oh, that's not nice. Norville, damn it! Norville.)

Big Trouble - Perhaps Heavy D's greatest role... it's the only one I've seen, so I don't know for sure. Godspeed, Heavy D... Godspeed.

Wild Wild West - Barry Sonnenfeld, call your mother...

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon - Bill O'Reilly plays himself in it. It's not kosher.

The Last Detail - PONICSAN!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nero Fiddled - I guess Decameron skedaddled... see, it was originally called The Bop Decameron, whatever that means.

Vanilla Sky - Decameron Crowe!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - Experimenting with new nose technology, I see...

Flight - Zemeckis! You've come back to reality!

The Notebook - The role that got away from Jessica Biel

The A-Team - The role she regrets getting...

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - Ditto...

Next - ...well, it was a fun shoot, anyway. She and Tamahori kept having fashion wars in between takes!

The Chocolate War - Oh, Obie...

Be Your Age - Exactly. I guess most people these days only watch the first half, though.

The Freckled Fish - Solomon Soopmeat? Good comedy name...

Galaxy Quest - ... is it one word or two? Anyway, someone give Enrio Colantoni an Emmy for his performance on Person of Interest, even though it's really for Mathesar... ah, screw it. He's overexposed as it is, as I'm just now seeing from his IMDb C.V.

Homeland Security - Exactly. Enrico the Chef... oh, puh-leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze... Your best work, Gallo!

Cold Souls - Good double bill with American Splendor

Crossroads - Hah, hah, ha-hah hah!!! Anson Mount's a dork!!

College Road Trip - Martin Lawrence in a G-rated movie? No. Not possible. Not Cee. Not Hurbie. Not Boog. Not Marcus Burnett. Not Miles Logan. See what I mean?

Cider House Rules - Really? Heavy D was in that?

Jack and Jill - Another Yahoo! movie list... Drag Gone Bad.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - Not even out yet!!! (11/12)

Madea Goes to Jail - My question about the list, Yahoo!... only one Madea movie?

Hairspray - The remake, not the original. I guess the original's okay... must be the only PG-rated John Waters movie

Norbit - Fake boob technology's come a long way since Back to the Future Part II.

White Chicks - Hey look! It's the Hiltons!

Ed Wood - Movie maker gone bad, not "Drag Gone Bad"

Mrs. Doubtfire - No doubt

Pink Flamingos - Only one out of many X-rated John Waters pics

Tootsie - I think it was supposed to be bad... or at least, convincing enough for a soap opera. But it's on the list because Larry Gelbart wasn't happy with it

The World According to Garp - Ah HAH! Robin Williams makes the list twice!

Dressed to Kill - Damn! Spoiled the surprise. Well, he still looks better than Angie Dickinson... oh snap!

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar - It's FOO, not FU!!

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - What can you say? They were ahead of their time with the whole "cougar" craze. And they look better, too!

The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Again, I think it was supposed to be bad. What would the Drag Gone Good list look like? Would there be anything on it?

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life - Honorable mention, I suppose, as their whole series was simply RIDDLED with guys in drag. TV's chopped liver, apparently

Some Like It Hot - Again, to me, this doesn't belong on the list. Or are people tired of this movie yet? It topped the AFI comedy list!

Girlfriend Experience - CHANGE THE TITLE! CHANGE THE TITLE!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Girlfriend Experience - Once again, the porn world and the public education world cross... would've been a bigger deal a few decades ago.

Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself - Yes you can, Tyler... yes you can. Incidentally, this can be said about all his movies.

Clash of the Titans - Rated B for breast feeding... Titans is right!

The Seven-Ups - What a ripoff! No 7-Up in it at all! No Mr. Pibb, no Coca-Cola, no Shasta... I feel cheated. Someone get me an Adam Sandler DVD. I need my product placement fix...

Kazaam - Ahhh... that's better.

Dodsworth - There's gotta be some way that either Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston can remake this picture and make Fran the hero.

Midnight in Paris - Finally! Woody Allen punches Ernest Hemingway right back!

Manhattan - In other words, what Harlene Rosen or Louise Lasser has to say is irrelevant

And finally, to put my obsession with Madonna's Material Girl music video to rest. God bless you, YouTube and Wikipedia! Keith Carradine? What was he thinking?!! Well, Madonna was kind of a big deal at the time. Her star has turned into a white dwarf since, needles to say.

Wikipedia's got too much... this is getting out of hand.

Auteur Watch - Jesse and Evgenia Peretz

2011-12-03T17:41:00.000-08:00

Lemme tell ya something... it's getting cutthroat out there in the world of showbiz! Well, probably the world, in general. But showbiz in particular, even a child of semi-privilege is having a hard go of it these days! You know, the kind that Noah Baumbach makes films about, mostly The Squid and the Whale, where life is very long and there's time ONLY for fussing and fighting, my friends. Take Jesse Peretz, for example. His resumé's not exactly full to bursting, like David Gordon Green's or Morgan J. Freeman's was in the late 90s, which of course means he's living life to the fullest, like Terry Gilliam hopefully is. But still, as he, along with the rest of the world, emerged into the post 9-11 world, it was hard to make an impression in the full-to-bursting filmmaking community. I mean, if you can't get noticed with Zach Braff in your movie, well... guess who's taking the fall for that?
And so, Jesse needed a partner. Enter Sister Evgenia of the Virginal Movie Career... Hey, don't laugh! Can't argue with resluts! Results, rather. Just as the Farrelly brothers got on the Jim Carrey train at the right time, so to did the Peretz siblings ride the Paul Rudd Concorde to glory with 2011's Our Idiot Brother: a smarter, not-as-edgy Judd Apatow-esque production. At least, Apatow's name isn't in the full credits list on IMDb. Not even under a "Special thanks" category! There's nothing new yet on the Peretz slate, but don't worry. They'll be busier than Jody Hill in no time flat. They'll have to subcontract their work, they'll be so busy! So keep an eye on these two, as they'll be household names around this time next year. In fact, you won't have to keep an eye on them at all! You'll be sick of them by then. But they'll win you back, no question about it.

Happy Vampsgiving!

2011-11-30T01:40:00.000-08:00

Oh, right! The picture... Anyway, big surprise. The latest and greatest Twilight entry is #1 again. On the other hand, George Clooney's latest non-crowd-pleaser is #10 again! Not going to make my one-week wonder list! Yay! But back to Twilight. See, they COULD have released it near Halloween, but wisely chose close to Thanksgiving instead. Maybe next year they'll pick Christmas. Vampires aren't just for Halloween anymore, you see... nah, still the week before Xsgiving, according to the notoriously unreliable IMDb, my go-to source for movie information. Oh, is Jacob going to do like Puss in Boots and get his own spinoff series? Might as well! But really, who wants to read about wolfmen's mid-life crises? Totally not sexy.
In second-place news, The Muppets reboot takes 2nd place, if not Manhattan. Yes, despite the hip critics protestations, Disney still knows how to make the box office its b'eatch when it wants to, as long as they spend more on advertising than they expect to earn on opening weekend. Meanwhile, the latest lamprey attaches itself to Christmas: this time, a non-tipsy Arthur. Lousy Brits. And a PG movie, no less! The war on Christmas begins, with the adults taking Christmas joy away from our tiny tots. A Silent Night, Deadly Night reboot is surely next. If he played his cards right, what's-his-face could've had that plum role. Arthur, son of Santa... time for the next generation to tentatively take the reindeer reins of power... JESSE EISENBERG! That's it. Sorry, Jesse, but I guess you're not a crucial part of my personal neural net. Let's face it: James McAvoy's no spring chicken anymore! Jesse would've been the perfect post-modern hipster wise-cracking son of Santa. Try again next year when the sequel gets released.
And finally, Martin Scorsese, the patron saint of violent, R-rated movies, finally felt the need to make a film his young relatives could watch. Universally loved by the critics, all-but-shunned by the movie-attending public, Hugo comes in fifth with only 11 million dollars. Well, that's half way there! Only 159 million more to go, and you've covered the film's budget... as for advertising, distribution costs, etc., well... I'm sure the studio thinks of it as a long-term investment. After all, this is not Transformers we're talking about! Might as well see what Michael Bay's up to. Nothing new on the director part yet, but... The Hauntrepreneur? I gotta go.

Movie Review: The Maiden Heist

2011-11-25T23:53:00.000-08:00

Whatever The Onion says about it, that's what I say.

Good double bill with: what else? The Cooler!

**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

N'yuks and bolts

2011-11-23T02:31:00.001-08:00

Once again, we stumble across a Stooge short that needs no introduction. Without a doubt A Plumbing We Will Go is one of the (Stooge) greats, and deserves its place amongst the top 10 or 20 Stooge shorts ever made... then again, there is that whole Dudley Dickerson subplot, which I find to be unnecessary. Oh, so you're saying you prefer NO black people to a bug-eyed black person? No, I'm not saying that. Not too many dignified black roles in these Stooge shorts... then again, not too many dignified roles of ANY ethnic stripe in a Stooge film. Sure, the rich types start out dignified but live to see their stations quickly eroded, usually right out from under their feet. Still, there's the whole plumbing sub-plot. Let's focus on that, shall we?

ACT ONE

It seems to have been a while, but once again the Stooges find themselves in the loving arms of the wrong side of the law where they squarely belong. Of course, as an amateur lawyer, even I have to object to the prosecution's argument. "Evasive attitude?" Where is that in the Constitution, exactly? If we started locking people up for "evasive" attitudes, there'd be no one left in the world! Then again... well, for brevity's sake, let's leave aside the fact that the three of them are on the witness stand together as one unit, with Curly and Larry sitting in Moe's lap. Kinda gay? Or very, very gay? Personally, I think Brett Ratner should apologize to GLAAD not for his comments, but for Rush Hours 2 and 3 at the very least. Probably Red Dragon, too. Anyway, back to the trial. The Stooges are on trial for looting a chicken coop that belonged to a woman with a good comedy name. The judge throws the case out, leaving aside the fact that Curly's hat is apparently full of chicken down. Curly lets out a ripe n'yuk n'yuk, then a nyaah-nyaah as he attempts to pluck all the feathers out of the air. Gossip, indeed. Bud Jamison gives Curly a good, swift kick in the ass, and they're off to get locked up a second time. Bud immediately spys the boys trying to fish a fish out of a display bowl in front of a pet store called "The Doggy Pet Shop." Moe gives Curly the ol' Oliver Hardy treatment. You know how Oliver Hardy's always slapping Stan Laurel's hand for one offence or another? Anyway, Curly runs afoul of a mannequin dressed as a cop, and he goes to town on it. Let the slippery slope begin! Guess what happens next... no, go ahead! Guess! That's right, Bud Jamison steps in front of the mannequin, but he manages to hit Curly first. Let the chase begin. Meanwhile, that dirty ol' bastard Monte Collins is performing a magic show that the Stooges get tangled up in. The cop sees them in a magic box and storms the stage. The Stooges eventually get away in a plumber's truck. Trucks were easier to steal back then, apparently. And car accidents were more common. The cop grabs on to ... you know, a thing with wheels on it that gets towed behind the truck? Larry tells Curly to cut it loose, and Bud Jamison ends up in a vat of watered-down plaster, or something. As good a place for an act break as any.

ACT TWO

The boys stop in front of a house. Larry and Curly fall out of the back of the truck. "Why don't ya call your stops?" asks Curly. A butler comes out and admonishes the Stooges for being late. (He thinks they're plumbers, you see... well, he's about to go to the School of Hard N'Yuks!) The way I figure it, it's time to apply my "Jerk Mandate" rule. Because the butler acted like a jerk, it's okay if the boys trash the house. Another good example of the "Jerk Mandate:" the demise of Abigail Craven in the first Addams Family movie. Because she acted like a jerk to Fester, she clearly deserves what happens to her... I forget what happened to her. Anyway, back to the Stooges. They see Police Officer Bud Jamison riding after them on a bicycle, grab a bunch of plumbing equipment, and storm the house. They perhaps should've taken one turn in the road while making their escape.
The butler informs them that there's a leak in the basement. Betraying their extreme ignorance, Larry asks "Where's the basement?" Curly compounds the ignorance, and exclaims "Upstairs!" Oscar for Larry, anyone? Nah, his Oscar moment comes a little later on. They eventually end up DOWNSTAIRS in the basement. Moe takes a rather nasty tumble in the excitement but gets right back up again. (Moe 5:08) Professor Moe, at 5:17, for once, has questions of his own: "What do you know about plumbing?" So much to learn. Larry's Oscar moment happens at 5:24 when he says "How can you fix it while it's leaking?" Curly and Moe get sidetracked in a competition to see who can nod their head the most, after which Curly is off to wreak his own havoc. Moe and Larry proceed to destroy the basement, but they do it in small steps. Another Oscar moment for Larry at 6:46. (Larry 6:46) Curly has a moment where he f... messes with the censors at the Hays Commission as he interrupts the shower of some snooty dude. Maybe he's the token Brit, who knows. After the guy wrapped in a towel leaves, Curly proceeds to destroy the upstairs bathroom. They seem to have dubbed in Curly's voice at 7:42. God stops the water once to get a laugh, but after that, Lord here comes the flood. Curly is powerless to stop the water coming from the knob, and the hole's a little bigger than one finger, and the water's more powerful than Curly's hat.
Back to Moe and Larry. Larry suddenly gets inspired to wander off and cause his own damage. But before he goes, he manages to hurt Moe in the process. Moe gets hit twice, then Larry, in a fit of panic, gets hit twice, but I think Moe got the worse end of the deal. Maybe Larry's Oscar moment is at 8:38, who knows. I'm obviously not the one to make the final decision about something this important. (Larry 8:38) Meanwhile, Curly continues on his plumber's journey. It pays off later on, trust me.
And now... enter Dudley Dickerson, the token bug-eyed black dude. He earns his stuntman credentials on this one, as he ends up falling on his ass about twenty times too many for my taste. Oh, I just hope I didn't laugh too much at it when I was a kid. If so, I can never run for president.

ACT THREE

I don't know where to break between acts two and three, but perhaps Curly's final plumbing job is a good place to start. Curly managed to get ahead of the water for a few seconds, but alas, his labyrinthine piping could only slow down the water so much. Curly's Oscar moment surely happens at 0:27. (Curly 0:27) Followed immediately by Larry's Oscar moment, when he puts that snooty butler in his place: first in words, and then, with a FACE FULL OF DIRT!! Heh heh heh... actually, it looked more like a square piece of foam... hopefully, it was. Meanwhile, Curly finds his way back to Moe... the hard way. Curly ruins Moe's plumbing work, and Curly has another Oscar moment at 1:28 by screaming "I resent that!" Good line reading. One for the books. They dub his voice again at 1:39, I'm afraid. Curly goes to get another piece of pipe, like he said, and then proceeds to destroy the house's electrical system. Fortunately, he's dried out quickly, after being soaked to the bone, so he'll stave off electrical shock for a while. More capering with Dudley Dickerson. Needles to say, the science of comedy is stretched to its limits in this one, but how can you not be won over by the genial nature of this film? It just wants to entertain! Something like that. Oh yeah, and Larry emerges from the ground like some kind of bald-headed mole. I think they used that clip again in a Shemp film. Most expensive shot of the whole movie right there.

Maybe this is where Act Three begins, even though there's not much left. The Stooges take an early swipe at television, a medium they would eventually conquer. But for now, it provides a good laugh. This is where the comedy dividends pay off with the initial investments made. Oh, the indignities that Bess Flowers has to suffer. It only gets worse, especially after Curly emerges from the basement. Curly patches up the hole he made in the upstairs bathroom with a throw rug. And, of course, as often happens in films like this, we find out that everything's connected. Guess who's house they trashed? Well, I just hate to spoil it, but needles to say, the Stooges never give up hope. The three of them are all in the basement now. Larry tunneled his way back, apparently. Moe tells Curly to "go up and collect for the job." Is he serious? Apparently, deadly serious. When the owner of the house ends up in the basement the same way Curly did a few scenes ago, Moe is rightly enraged. Why, look at the damage they caused by falling into the basement! The magic act also makes a return appearance, and the hole that Larry dug comes in handy, but it also suffers from a plot device: I thought he dug only one hole! Also, the special effect of the final shot: I wonder how it played on the big screen back in the day? Probably not as well as it should have, but sometimes you have to take those visual risks for the sake of the big picture.

And so, is A Plumbing We Will Go better than the sum of its parts? Arguably, not all of the parts, but you gotta admire the effort of the good parts. I understand James Cameron used this film as inspiration for Titanic!... okay, maybe not.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Josh and Jonas Pate

2011-11-20T01:43:00.001-08:00

Apparently they're twins, which makes sense from the picture... sort of. They've still got their whole professional lives ahead of them, but there's probably enough to apply my handy decade theory. If pressed, the brothers would probably say that the 90s were their favourite decade. Just starting out, lean and hungry, rubbing elbows with the greats, and getting the best cast of 1992 together for their debut feature, The Grave. I'm sure Maxim magazine would say that it's Gabrielle Anwar's greatest role of all time, and they'd wonder aloud why she can't get more roles like that. Then came 1997's Deceiver. What is it about having Ellen Burstyn in your movie? Or Faye Dunaway? It's just not the 70s anymore, guys. But it'd be the last time a decade was so clearly defined by the tacky, tacky clothes.
And so, the Pates survived their cinematic adolescence, trying in vain to be the next Coen brothers, deciding against it, and going full bore into TV production in the 2000s and beyond. But they're not going to make the same mistakes that, say, Rod Daniel made. No, their superhero/supernatural projects will be a cut above the average dreck. And judging from their respective resumés, it appears that Jonas is the alpha brother. Harder working, more stuff on the plate. Why, Josh doesn't even get credit on Shrink! For shame. Hate to see that. I dunno; maybe I'm naive, but what I saw of Shrink I liked. I know the Onion didn't care for it, but frankly, they're just too damn picky. If Tina Fey's not in it, it doesn't get an A. Another complaint was that the germophobe guy in Shrink wasn't consistent. The germophobe guy would wash his hands all the time, sure, and yet he slept with a germ-friendly prostitute, if I remember correctly. Well, that's the thing about love. When the little head does the thinking, all bets and rules are off. The most primordial biological impulses will not be denied. Ever. Case in point: The Grave!
As always, the 2010s are looking to be the bestest decade ever, because in the midst of all the dreck they're producing for TV, I smell a pet project! Something called Way Down South. Way Down South, resting in my arms, I've been waiting all night long just to talk to you. Way down South, do you have to leave so soon... sorry, got sidetracked again. These blank.gifs are rearing their ugly heads again. The Pates were born in North Carolina, which I guess is technically part of the South. Same reason Brad Pitt's character in Inglorious Basturds was from Quentin Tarantino's home town or state. There's just something about that damn South. Must be a yin yang thing. Us snooty Yankees are either the yin or the yang to the South's deliberately unsnooty yang or yin. Emmy Rossum, gotta like her! Fuhgettaboutit...

Hey, get a room, guys!

2011-11-20T01:42:00.001-08:00

Oh, right... I shoulda figured that the latest installment of Twilight would make the box office its bitch. Typical. Well, it's for the kids. The kids are all right, when it comes to the movies. I guess George Clooney's just not the draw he once was, as with the Ocean's Eleven movies. No one wants to see him in About Schmidt, except maybe me, but I can't get to the theatre these days. Gotta work on that. The other debut this week is Happy Feet 2, another sequel. Lotta sequels on the chart this week! Harold & Kumar 3, Puss in Boots (Shrek 4.5?), Jack and Jill... I think of it as a sequel. I think of it as Billy Madison XII... something like that. Close enough.

Rock, Paper, ... Avalanche?

2011-11-18T00:22:00.000-08:00

Time for this week's Stooge film: Rockin' Thru the Rockies. It's a rather nondescript one, if I do say so myself. Not in my regular Stooge short regimen, or pantheon. The problem could be the presence of too many Stooge staples: the swinging branch, the running to dinner, the running afoul of a wild beast during sleep... let's take an in-depth look, shall we?

ACT ONE

You do have to give them credit. At least the setting seems unique. It's a period piece, such as they are. The Stooges were on a tight budget as it was, but fortunately the props they work with are pretty ancient as it is. The Stooges play guides taking a troupe of three lovely ladies and their battle ax manager across the country to an engagement in San Francisco. It's apparently the post-Civil War period and they've got a covered wagon, so it's basically the blind leading the blind. Now, like any seasoned film star, the Stooges believe in a good segué as much as the next guy. Here's the segué we get to introduce the Stooges: the battle ax says "Where are those three SUN BAKED HAMS?" Cue the swinging branch gag! The third one always does the trick. To further set the setting, Moe says "Quiet! You want the Indians to hear us?" As always, Curly provides the counter-intuitive genius: "Yeah! I'm sick and tired of looking for Indians! Let them look for us for a change!" Ever the parrot, Larry repeats this line, which Moe finds to be the bigger insult, apparently. Thank God the battle ax rings the dinner triangle. She's strong enough to knock their three heads together, and she does, further threatening to shoot them if they don't get them to San Francisco in time. Tough crowd! Moe does the lousiest job of sweet-talking ever, and spares their miserable lives for 13 more minutes, long enough to indulge their love of food. To the corn beef we go! Right after Curly almost kisses Moe on the mouth.
The boys... well, Curly, runs afoul of a stubborn can of corn beef. Curly tries opening the can with an axe... gee, I wonder what's going to happen. Moe and Larry go double-team on Curly's ass: Moe with a fist to the stomach, which causes Curly to bow forward, and Larry with a fist to the head, which causes Curly to stand up straight again. Oh, dude! So harsh. You may never see this move again! But circumstances were dire, and you'd think Curly would get the message. No such luck, and he ends up causing further damage. Long story short, Curly ends up shooting Moe in the foot and scaring the horses. After the ruckus dies down, one of the goils says to Curly, "Well, if there ARE any Indians they certainly know where to find us!" Curly doesn't quite espouse his logic on that particular topic, but he does make another desperate attempt at an actual joke. Larry gets a big line at this point: "Indians, Indians. Hah hah! Why, there isn't any of 'em for miles around!" I understand that this part was submitted to the Oscar committee. Alas, they didn't think Larry was Oscar-worthy that year; Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story would just have to do. Politics. But this might as well be the unsubtle transition between Acts One and Two. Judgment call on my part, I know.

ACT TWO
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We meet the Indians. Since they're movie Indians, we don't have to feel as bad... something like that. Well, they are comedy Indians, of the "Escrow" tribe... get it? New Stooge character actor Dick Curtis will just have to do as the chief Indian. He says "How," of course. Curly says "How do you do," giving us a glimpse into future post-stroke Curly line readings. The eviction notice is given: the Stooges and company have two sundowns to get going. Far too lenient. The Indians leave, but the seeds of future plot developments are planted: one of the Indians fancies the white chicks. Dick Curtis makes an interesting grunting noise , and says "You keep-um mind on business. Make-um whoopee later... not bad!" They're only human!
The "Indians" leave and the boys return to the business at hand: going from the frying pan to the fire. Curly ends up firing the rifle again, and the horses get so scared, they loose themselves from their connection to the wagon and run off. Curly ends up killing three ducks. Everyone else exclaims "Look at the horses!" Curly, the lone voice of insanity, says "Look at the ducks!" Moe and Larry say "Never mind the ducks." Frankly, it's sloppy direction. They should've had Curly say it three times, and on the third time, have EVERYONE say in unison "NEVER MIND THE DUCKS!!!" Hopefully, the Farrellys won't make the same mistake with their crappy reboot.
The battle ax tells the boys that the only thing keeping her from shooting them is that she's out of bullets. Curly helpfully says "Oh, I've got plenty of bullets! I'll be glad to lend you some!" Curly eventually comes to his senses and takes his bullets back.
Using a blatant plot device, the Stooges manage to build half-decent shelter for the night using scenery from the girls' show. Curly also manages to ruin two guitars, using them as "snow shoes." We don't see him actually wrecking the guitars, though. I guess technically the Act Two break should've been when night fell and the boys were asleep. As we find out, Curly also barks in his sleep! What would Freud say about that?
Anyway, how to get a wild animal into the plot? Genius, that's how. Curly is given a bear hyde as a blanket, but he needs a mattress as well, so he goes out into the snowy night to get one out of the wagon. He leaves the door to the temporary shelter open. Cue the REAL bear. Long story short, this leads to a variation on ANOTHER classic Stooge theme where the boys think their fellow Stooges can make animal noises. Curly reaches for the real bear, thinking it's the bear hyde. The bear growls like the MGM lion. Curly yells "Hey! Quit snoring so loud!" Long, long story short: Curly scares off the bear by barking. Brother bear scared off by evil, insane white man, in other words. Finally! I'm putting my Native American college courses to work. Curly's stunt double leaps in between Moe's stunt double and Larry's stunt double and promptly goes to bed. Fade to black.
Now, this should probably be the act break between Acts Two and Three here, but I'm going to wait until the ice fishing gag for that.
The next morning. Moe and Larry find that Curly has hogged all the blankets sometime in the middle of the night. Retribution is swift and in the stomach. Curly notices the ceiling is pregnant with many snow babies. Moe tells Curly to brace it up with a pole, but what good would it be if we didn't have the Stooges covered in snow? I'm assuming it's fake snow made out of asbestos. Well, it was lighter and looked better on film. Also, real snow might be too heavy. Curly makes a good Woo-Woo noise here. (Curly 1:31) Whew! Haven't gotten a blank.gif message yet. Curly bad-libs again, saying "I'm sorry, Moe! A lizard! I mean, a blizzard!" Long story short, the Stooges rudely wake up the girls, and shock them with the threat of changing clothes. Such gutter behaviour, indeed. Darwin must be spinning in his grave. The Stooge love affair must be at an end, or at least at its first seven year itch. Case in point: Curly beans Moe with the non-blade end of an axe, and when he comes to, he ends up telling Curly "I hate you!" Sounds like the proper Act break to me.

ACT THREE

Here's another good screenwriting tip... maybe not. Still, the Stooges found it necessary to justify a close-up shot. Larry's pumping water into a bucket, but because it's cold, pumps ice cubes instead. Moe sees this in the wide shot, and looks rightfully shocked and disgusted. We then get a close-up of the pump coughing up a whole bunch of ice cubes. Oh, but it doesn't end there, my friends. Moe tells Larry, "Look! Gold!" And of course, like an idiot, Larry bends over and looks for gold, and Moe proceeds to dump all the ice cubes into Larry's pants. The battle ax is not amused by any of this, of course, and orders the boys to get breakfast for everyone. The Stooges love food more than gold and proceed to break into the canned corned beef once again... gone! All the food's gone! Larry says, "Bears! They've eaten it up! Nothing left!" Maybe that was the Oscar part, I don't know. In his delirium, Curly gets the idea to rig a sail to the wagon, in the hopes that it will act like a boat on land. The battle ax, weary from battle, agrees to try it. I almost hate to hear that level of resignation. Moe starts barking orders and generally gets caught up in the moment. For once, Curly brings HIM back to earth! (Curly 4:09) I dare say the whole film's worth it for just that moment. Sorry, but I don't know how to make a hyperlink to a YouTube video go to the spot I want it to. Work on that, Google nerds!
Next scene: the sail's built, and people keep saying "Well, all right!" Finally, we get that unison we should've had earlier. Now, some might mistake Moe's line at this point for love of country, but I think of it more as just the latest in a lifetime of Curly rebuttals. Here's the scenario: Curly says "Hey! Maybe we'll be like Columbus and discover a new country!" Moe says, "This country's good enough for us." Well, you gotta feel national pride some of the time. Larry keeps the madness going by saying he'd like to "discover" something to eat. Time for the big fishing scene. Now, you probably know what's going to happen, but there's at least one surprise on the way. Oh yeah, and at 4:50, Moe says "A blue... who's talkin' to you?" Gotta like that. But the surprise is at 5:34 here. The not-so-surprising part, well... let me put it this way: Curly ends up saying "Hey! This fish looks like Moe." You'll see a play on this theme later on in "A Bird in the Head," and it's done a little better there, in my humble opinion. Or maybe I'm just saying that because that's the second Stooge short I ever saw.
Now, since they squandered so much time already, there's 90 seconds left in this picture. You can do the math on this one: is that enough time to squeeze in a kidnapping subplot? I didn't think so either. But the Indians were decent enough to leave a note... in English no less! Apparently they refer to the battle ax as "Hatchet Face." They kidnapped the three girls, and apparently didn't do a very good job of it, because we hear screams as soon as the note's read. All in all, it's handled far too efficiently, but there's just enough time for Moe to suffer another massive head injury as the wind picks up, and carries the besailed wagon away to God knows where.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Charles and James Parrott

2011-11-13T22:57:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who cares about these two? Maybe, except for those Sons of the Desert types. They might know who these two are. They worked with Hal Roach a lot, probably with Laurel and Hardy a lot. I tell ya, those non-Laurel and Hardy assignments were just the pits. Absolute pits. Working with animals, and sub-par Laurel and Hardy humans. Long time between prestige gigs. Oh, but that's, like, old! At least three generations ago! Get with the living, dude! I can't, I just can't. That's why I'm a film fan! That's all the life I can handle!

Tarred, feathered, and singed by the box office

2011-11-13T20:25:00.000-08:00

Slight pun on the director of Immortals. But for me that's not the real story of the box office this week. The latest manly Lord of the Rings clone isn't news. That's what people don't like about Lord of the Rings: both chicks and dudes can find characters to relate to when watching it. That's no good. 300, Thor, Watchmen, Immortals... all for the dudes. As it probably should be. And probably how the new Superman movie will be. No, the real story this week is guys in drag. There was a Yahoo! list last week called "Drag Gone Bad" which probably should've just been called "Movies with guys in drag in them." See, because the "Drag Gone Bad" list included Norbit and Some Like It Hot: two movies that could only be together on a general list like this. I personally don't consider Some Like It Hot to be Billy Wilder's best work, but it's probably up there for most, if only because of Marilyn Monroe. If the list wasn't just for films, they'd include these Miller Beer commercials with these guys dressed up as ladies to take advantage of Ladies Night at their local bar. And how about Sorority Boys? Why didn't THAT make the list? I guess it wasn't bad enough to make the list, or funny enough. One of the two. Anyway, in the picture I have there, there's J. Edgar under the Adam Sandler pic... ANYONE ELSE SEE THE IRONY OF THAT? Or is J. Edgar Hoover's personal public file now been purged of any and all eccentricity? Simpsons time, gotta go......................

.....oh, that was not a good Simpsons. Marge, Bart and Lisa blogging... I guess it was inevitable. They're changing Homer too much. He can make stuff now! There's stuff he doesn't eat now! Then again, I think it's the principle of it. Homer will eat anything, but it has to be his idea. Anyway, I think I covered all the debuts: Immorals, J. Edgar and Jack and Jill. Let me just say that Clint Eastwood got DiCaprio away from Scorsese somehow. Would Scorsese have made a better J. Edgar biopic? Hard to say. The Onion wasn't crazy about it, but Ebert was. Oh, those two are always disagreeing. I gotta go. Tax time!... no, wait, health care recertification time. I just don't know what's worse.

As Nazty as they wanna be

2011-11-13T19:53:00.001-08:00

You know, there's a whole other version of Wikipedia out there for right-wingers. I'm not going to give the name of it, but I did browse it a little bit. It certainly lived up to its name, if nothing else. I browsed about three different topics, and then the following question came up: "Should the United States have entered World War II?" They've expanded since then to include World War I, and probably the Civil War, for all I know. Now, I already know I'm not smart enough to debate, or even ponder, such deep, philosophical questions, but from a movie standpoint I can answer that easily: How about Raiders of the Lost Ark? And the third one? Schindler's List? Saving Private Ryan? Hope and Glory? Those are my reasons we needed to enter World War II.
Of course, this was before Obama was elected president when I saw that web page. I'm sure the argument now is that, well, Hawaii's not really a state anymore. The continental U.S. wasn't attacked, Pearl Harbor was! Besides, if Germany did win the war, Fatherland would be a biography and not just perverse historical fiction TRYING to be a legitimate biography!
And, of course, all the great comedians of the time had this terrible anti-German bias, making fun of Hitler and what not. Jack Benny with his To Be or Not to Be, Chaplin with The Great Dictator, and the Stooges with this week's entry, You Nazty Spy! (Damn... I've fallen behind just a smidge)

ACT ONE

Even the Stooges knew that Hitler had help. A Hitler cannot exist in a vacuum, and the Catholic church and some industrialists were champions of the chancellor's cause. And so, we begin with some bored job creators sitting around (in the fictional country of Moronica) deciding to oust the king and replace him with a dictator. The Stooges are "paperhangers" doing some work in the house of the industrialists. There's no time for them to destroy the place, as the gears of the plot turn quickly in this one. A lot to cram into 16 minutes this time. Moe (Moe Hailstone here) transforms himself into Hitler before our very eyes, also with the help of a prop moustache and messed-up hair. It's not long before Moe's giving a speech before a crowd, with Curly decked out as Mussolini, I'm assuming, and Larry as... Goebbels? I forget his comedy name already.

ACT TWO

Sorry, folks, but I gotta keep this one short. But I promise I'll spend more time on I'll Never Heil Again. All seems to be going well for Hailstone until his secretary turns out to be a double agent. I'm functionally culturally illiterate and don't know who her historical counterpart is, but she has a magic eight ball and uses it to tell Moe Hailstone's fortune. Moe grabs the ball and hits Curly on the head with it. The ball breaks into three large chunks, and turns out to have an incriminating note inside it. The secretary's plot is foiled and she makes her escape. Wacky comedy stormtroopers are called in, and they march off, kicking each other in the ass. The guy on the end always has it easy.

ACT THREE

There's a big meeting of delegates. The new secretary, a ballerina, comes dancing in. Moe and Curly start dancing. Curly laughs in his regular voice at one point, and says "I'll bet you tell that to all the boys." Oh, and of course, we dwell on the comedy map shown in the picture for a little while, a Stooge comedy motif to be seen later on as well. Why, the Simpsons even had one once! Can't remember when. And so the delegates come in. The three dictators say "Peace! Peace! We want peace!" The delegates are wise to the Orwellian nature of this statement... or maybe they're just jealous worm-eaters taking a break to do some self-loathing out in the open for a change. The boys give 'em the works. Curly gets out the golf clubs and hits them on the head. Finding this not sporting enough, he gets golf balls out, puts them on the rug and hits them at the delegates. Some of the delegates get hit, but Larry gets a golf ball in his mouth. After the four delegates are defeated, the knuckleheads' fortunes go from bad to worse. The townsfolk of Moronica (about 99% of them, if you will...) riot and start to storm the Hailstone headquarters. The three decide to release the lions. And so, down they go to release the lions. They should've gotten someone else to do it, because, well... I hate to spoil it for you, but there ends up being some very full lions in dictators' clothing emerging from the corner they went behind. Something like that. Too bad this kind of thing doesn't happen in real life to real-life dictators.

***1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Charles and Vlas Parlapanides

2011-11-06T02:49:00.000-08:00

Somebody get those boys a Chocofreta! Sorry, folks, gotta keep it short this week, which won't be hard in the case of the Parlapanideses. Charley's clearly got the leg up of the two brothers: he's younger, he knows Demetri Martin, and hell! Look @ that smile! Sky's the limit, but alas, they're not astronauts. Charley cut his teeth under Scott Rudin on The Royal Tenenbaums, among other things, but clearly the 2010's will be their most awesome decade ever. They've got Immortals under their belt! How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? There's no turning back now. Careful, though... better keep fetching coffee for the rest of the demigods if you don't want to get banished again!

Puss does the booting

2011-11-06T02:48:00.000-08:00

That's where I've seen that face before! Sorry, had to go for it. Well, Tower Heist's probably #1... it's a couple hours yet before the polls open... I mean, before the box office tallies come out. Maybe I should try to get some sleep. Wait, wait, gotta do my Farmville chores first...
(next day) Shoulda known! Guess if you're a professional critic, you must be baffled! The realistic drama about the Iranian family trying to get by in rural Kansas should have been #1 this weekend! It's going to win several Oscars, right? No, if you're a professional critic these days, you know the dumb Adam Sandler pic's going to clean up on a certain weekend, or the latest Pixar-ish film. Don't kid yourselves: the technicians behind these movies are putting everything they got into making a smart, technically accomplished film you've never seen before. If it's a remake, there'll be a twist on it. Or in the case of the new Footloose, no twist at all! A complete, faithful remake with a fresh young cast! THAT'S the twist! Same old, moldy screenwriter, but still! No, Tower Heist will just have to settle with #2. Poor wealthy Brett Ratner. That's the price of Hollywood success: the more money you make, the more you're hated. Just ask Michael Bay! You gotta strike back however you can. The other debut this week is Harold & Kumar 3D. How they get smoke to be three dimensional I'll never know. Someone's going to get a technical Oscar for it, I'm sure. Must be computerized then.
Well, that's all the debuts, so my job is done. Johnny English 2 looks like it'll be joining the short list of one-week films. I'll explain at the end of the year...

Short Reviews - October 2011

2011-10-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

You often hear about the great unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood. Bill O'Reilly's "Those who Trespass" is SO the opposite... Meanwhile, here's something you'll never see in the short list on Yahoo!: "Peter's Friends remake" or "Peter's Friends sequel." People these days would be like "What is that? A porno?" Maybe it was! Who knows? I never got around to seeing it...

"In Living Color" - Not to be outdone by the return of "Beavis and Butthead", In Living Color's coming back to TV... How many more have to die?

The Three Stooges - Featuring "Snooki," a bunch of homeless guys that the Farrellys stepped past on the first day of principal photography and the cast of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Larry David has a part in the film. He once asked Martin Scorsese if he knew what he was doing. Sure, it was just on his HBO show. Still, I can't help but wonder: if he says that to Scorsese, what's he going to say to those Farrelly boys?

Get Him to The Greek - KRUGMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cinderella Liberty - PONICSAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We Bought a Zoo - NOT based on Terry Thompson

Anonymous - From the director of 2012, The Day After Tomorrow and Stargate... Similar thematically to Stargate, actually! Remember? James Spader had some new-fangled theory that rocked the Egyptology world. Emmerich should take on the seven plagues next with help from the Naked Archaeologist... oh, right, James Cameron already did. Maybe Cameron will give his blessing.

The Rum Diary - Looks pretty good! But how did Johnny Depp steal Michael Rispoli away from Edward Norton?

J. Edgar - The best Scorsese picture ever made... by Clint Eastwood?!!

Gray Matters - Creepy premise, isn't it? A brother and sister that people assume are a married couple? Just saying... Maybe it's more common than I think, I don't know...

Suspect - You're next, Clarence Thomas!

For Love or Money - Barry Sonnenfeld, call your mother...

Harve Karbo - FINALLY! Some Coen news! Sounds like it's based on that Joe Carmody story from Ethan's Gates of Eden, but what the hell...

Solitary Man - What? No Kathleen Turner? Used to be that a Douglas-Turner-DeVito movie would get some damn PRESS COVERAGE!!! Speaking of which...

The War of the Roses - DTD Overdrive

Johnny English Reborn - With Gillian Anderson in the role that John Malkovich played in the first one: the American actor whom the rest of us ask "What the hell are they doing in THAT?" In Gillian's case, she needs the work.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - My God! Christopher Lee's approaching 90! Better call Michael Gambon...

Drive - "I threw the hot dog toward Tiger Woods because I was inspired by the movie 'Drive,'" 31-year-old Brandon Kelly told The Press Democrat. "As soon as the movie ended, I thought to myself, 'I have to do something courageous and epic. I have to throw a hot dog on the green in front of Tiger.'" Meanwhile, Sarah Deming of Keego Harbor, Michigan, has just filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict and the Michigan theater chain Emagine for “promot[ing] the film Drive as very similar to Fast and Furious, or similar, series of movies.” Good luck to both of you nutbags! We're dangerously close to entering Helter Skelter territory...

The Best Man(1964) - Lemme guess... Cliff Robertson's Nixon and Henry Fonda's Kennedy... Lee Tracy as Eisenhower... (http://www.epinions.com/review/Best_Man_Franklin_J_Schaffner/content_79235354244) I'm sorry, Fonda as Adlai Stevenson. That's what I get for not doing my homework.

Die Hard 5 - Sheesh. As long as Kevin Smith's not in it.

"Person of Interest" - With Kevin Chapman as Peter MacNicol

Inside Llewyn Davis - Whoever cloned Steven Soderbergh must've done the same with the Coens

Carl(a) - Seems familiar...

Connie and Carla - Close enough

Victor/Victoria - Finally! Found the month's theme...

Glen or Glenda - Now we've gone too far... Holy crap! I think we watched this because of Ed Wood! You talk about subliminigable!...

The Work and The Glory - Gov. Rick Perry would do well to watch the trilogy and get right with God. Does he want to lose Utah? All of Utah?

Trespass (2011) - First of all, there's only one Trespass (1992). The two Ices, the two Bills. Period. Second, since it's a Joel Schumacher film, I guess that means that the phone conversations will have two clear voices. Usually the person on the other end of the phone sounds a little crackly. Schumacher provides audio equity with his phone calls. Third, doesn't Nicolas Cage kinda look like Gary Cole from Office Space?

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - Sorry, Bobby, but it's going to take more than your plea to salvage the train wreck that is Mel Gibson. For one, he's still worth more than you, right?

Air America - Mel's petitioning to have the title changed to "Fox News Airline"

Suburban Commando - Well, there you have it. Hulk Hogan doesn't support Obama anymore. Dare we bother to find out why?... oh, Hulk wants to be President himself. Sounds about right. I'm voting for Ventura if he runs. He's actually got some governing experience, and Hannity doesn't like him. Reasons enough.

The Fighter - Mark Wahlberg and David O. Russell are finally calling it quits. My question: why now? Why 11 years after George Clooney?

Gingerdead Man 2: The Passion of the Crust - Greatest title ever... I guess Gary Busey has standards after all.

Immortals - It figures that Mickey Rourke would want to be a part of this... now if we can just get him another face transplant (Johnny Handsome?)

Sledgehammer O'Possum in Out and About - I hate to dredge it from obscurity, but I did see it on Cartoon Newtork lo those many years ago, but it's still perhaps the most obnoxious, annoying cartoon I've ever seen on TV. And I've been to Sick and Twisted festivals! I watched it again with the sound off, and it still held true to its awful, awful ideals.

A Little Bit of Soul - With Geoffrey Rush as Godfrey Usher

Desperado - With Steve Buscemi as Buscemi

The Book of Mormon (2014) - Never say never, right? And they thought they were done after Team America: World Police... for shame, South Park boys!

Jack and Jill - Ah yes... Adam Sandler finally dips his toes into the Eddie Murphy "Nutty Professor" waters, playing two roles on-screen at the same time. Seems like he did that in Zohan somehow, or maybe he just spent most of the film on a MoCap stage. I'm assuming cinematographer Dean Cundey, cameraman on such classic movies as the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Jurassic Park, got sufficiently drunk on the set.

Rocky Balboa - Oh, Wikipedia... sweet, naive Wikipedia... the sixth and final film in the Rocky franchise? You really believe that, don't you?

And They're Off - Best movie of 1986...

Rapturepalooza - Craig Robinson as the Anti-Christ? All this time I thought it was Anthony Anderson!

Three Sappy People by Dawn's Early Light..........

2011-10-31T20:22:00.000-07:00

If I recall correctly, the first Stooges videotape we got back in the day featured Dizzy Pilots, A Bird in the Head, and this one: Three Sappy People. And in it, the Stooges may be up against the greatest challenge they've ever faced: they're up against someone as loony as they are! The sad saga of Lorna Gray / Adrian Booth's career is an interesting one if you've got the time to read it. Not me, I gotta keep moving. How she failed to get a cameo in Crimewave I'll never know. Do your research, Raimi! Incidentally, it's apparently not too late... Here, she's the engine that drives this one forward. Let's have a look-see, shall we?

ACT ONE

Here's the scene, folks: we start with a glimpse into the life of privilege, where this so-called "Great Depression" hasn't inflicted Sherry Rumsford hard enough. She's late to her own party but makes a grand entrance... in her car! We'll leave behind the logistics of that for now and focus on the dilemma of her poor, upper-middle-class husband who's at his wit's end. It's a good thing he loves her, otherwise... And yet, there's a kernel of universal truth there someplace. Boy, I guess it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor: this life's going to be hard for you either way if you're socially inept! A friend suggests these three psychiatrists... The Stooges must've lost the coin flip this time, because they play three guys that get mistaken for the psychiatrists, in lieu of the elegant simplicity of playing the psychiatrists themselves. Scene: the office of Dr. Z. Ziller, Dr. X. Zeller, and Dr. Y. Zoller. I guess they're German. Technical note: as the camera dollies back towards the center of the office, the camera's rolling at 12 frames per second, and the painter and phone operator are working a little more feverishly than normal. Fate sweeps them out of the office. The phone operator exits through one door, the painter through another. Things were more uptight back then. As the painter leaves, the Stooges enter at precisely the same moment. Just go with it. Larry's big moment: he says "Looks like there's nobody here!" Curly easily steals his thunder, though. The man is a comedic genius with a ladder. Apparently they couldn't get a balsa wood prop ladder because Moe ever so gently gets hit in the head with the ladder in a separate shot. The phone operator comes back in and asks "Say! What war is this?" More timely than ever. When it's the Three Stooges, it's obviously World War Three! Duh! Finally, their profession is revealed: they're from the phone company, and they're here to help. The ten scariest words in the English language, especially in this context. The boys, having already begun the hard work of destroying half of the psychiatrists' office, change focus and get down to the hard work of destroying the other half of the office. Moe and Curly engage in a brutal game of tug of war. Curly loses. There's a mid-scene edit so they can carefully set up Curly with paint cans on his hands and a board on his head; Larry, of course, doesn't pull off the illusion as well as Moe.
Fate intervenes again. The Stooges are presented with an economic incentive to pose as the three psychiatrists. I still probably didn't get it right, but apparently in this film Curly's about to be a father, but he could use a little cash, of course... I'm not over-using the word 'apparently,' am I? Boy, I'd hate to see THAT word cloud! Still, the significance of this scene is not to be underestimated: for once, Curly's called to task by his fellow Stooges for "acting slug-nutty all day." Usually their erratic behaviour is a given, is it not?

ACT TWO
There's no fade to black to separate acts one from two, but we gotta trudge on all the same. We're at the Rumsford home, where Sherry's about to leave. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the Stooges arrive on a three-seater tandem. Sherry finds the threesome hilarious, and decides to stay and entertain her party guests after all. The chauffeur looks on in abject horror; hence the picture! Once again, the Stooges show their liberal bias: Sherry invites the boys in by saying "Last one in is a Republican!" The Stooges immediately crash into butler Bud Jamison, who almost as immediately crash-lands into the lap of a party guest. The Stooges only make matters worse with the most obvious jokes. The long-suffering husband says "Now, let me tell you a little bit about Sherry..." ...yup! Can't go wrong with names with two meanings. All this talk about alcohol sends the boys scurrying over to the punch table. What is it with the Stooges and food? Larry gets another chance to strut his acting chops by pointing out that the punch is weak. Ever the experimental chemists, the boys dump more liquor into the punch bowl until it's steaming, as though from dry ice. Man, is my typing getting atrocious of late! I thought I was going to get better at typing as I get older... Oh, right, Moe adds Worcestershire, and Larry adds Tabasco to the mix. More acting for Larry. The husband comes over and says "Gentlemen, would you be good enough to look my wife over, now?" Easy...
Next comes the recurring gag that holds practically the rest of the film hostage: that old reflex test where you tap just below a person's kneecap. The Stooges of course can't even handle that. Fortunately, Curly doesn't totally lose it on Sherry's knee. Curly ends up kicking Moe in the face... or close enough to it. Curly also runs afoul of a comedy statue, quite similar to Harpo in Animal Crackers. How much did THAT cost?

ACT THREE
As often happens when the Stooges visit the job creators, dinner gets served. They're first in the race to the dinner table, of course, but we start Act Three with a level playing field. You know, so everyone has an equal chance. Moe reigns in Larry by his curly hair. Curly's seated next to a classy dame, the Countess played by Ann Doran. She's a cut above the usual Stooge actor. She played James Dean's mom in Rebel Without a Cause! God bless the IMDb. Of course, she looks like she's going to laugh when Curly touches her cheek with an electric razor. Such sloppy work. The Countess is working her face over with a ... you know, one of those makeup pads. Geez, am I devolving or what? Is there any doubt that it's going to get eaten? The Countess has moved on to lipstick, so she doesn't suspect anything, except that Curly's still a nut. Thank God the tamales arrive. Curly's confused by his, while Moe and Larry look downright horrified. Technical note: I should probably point out that the same background audio loop is used, as we hear the same chuckle over and over and over and over and over.... but back to the tamales, the food that leads to the big food fight that all these high-class banquets seem to end with. What is it about the upper-class people during the Great Depression wasting food? Such decadence. These tamales seem to be filled with black ink. Larry squirts Curly in the eye, and Curly throws his tamale at Moe, despite Larry's protestations. I only point this out because the tamale gives Moe the appearance of a Devil's beard which he's unable to shake. The food fight quickly turns to cream puffs, given the lack of pies. Ann Doran gets used as a shield by Curly, which leads to her great line: "The King shall hear of this!" Curly, of course, does his move where he winds up to throw a cream puff, gets hit in the face, winds up again, gets hit again... that's his shtick! That's his shtick that he does! Several times in different films. Poor Bud Jamison gets some cream puff residue on the back of his neck, and raises his shoulders in response. The Stooges receive some pay, and the long-suffering husband finally gets some payback. Assault by chocolate cake, if you will. Am I the only one who thought of Joe Pesci's demise in GoodFellas? Similar setup, anyway. Should serve as a nice prolegomena to any future rich eccentrics.

EPILOGUE

Earlier in the film, Curly said he suffered from T.S. As do we all, Curly... as do we all...

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Penny and Garry Marshall

2011-10-30T00:19:00.002-07:00

I cannot believe I forgot this powerhouse sibling pair! I have to temporarily suspend the alphabetical order of things... oh, it's just that important. Sorry, Parlapanides, but you're just a'gonna hafta wait'a. Well, I guess Garry's doing all the powering these days, frankly. He's made a movie called "Valentine's Day". Up next? "New Year's Day" or "New Year's Eve." If he's really bold, he'll do "Pesach" or "The Bestest Yom Kippur Ever."
As with the Scotts, Ridley and Tony, one's got the brains and sensitivity, and one's got the box office savvy. Penny caught on for a while during the 90s when the Cold War ended and we were ready to get in touch with our feelings. Garry had a couple tricks up his sleeve, though! Cheeky bastard. If I had to guess, I'd say the 80s were Penny's favorite decade. Well, she's kinda mid-decades. If I had to guess, I'd say 1985-1995 were her favourite years. After The Preacher's Wife, it was a slow decline into... shudder! Directing TV. According to Jim? Puh-leeeeeze. Jim's not a good director's actor. 1999's Made Men? That's Jim's kind of thing.
As for Garry, well, it appears that, after Pretty Woman, he was pretty much free to bomb as he pleased. Tis a long way between blockbusters after all. But God bless him, Hector Elizondo won't do a film without Garry... motel pictures, huh? A toast to the practically guaranteed success of New Year's Eve. Take a chance on the trilogy, Gar. Make a romantic Boxing Day blockbuster with Don McKellar in the lead. Take a chance!

Shrek 4.5?

2011-10-30T00:19:00.001-07:00

Where's Keith Braithwaite when I need him? Why, even Albert Pyun doesn't stop by anymore... even when I flash the Pyun Signal in the sky.......... WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... time to eat my cans of frosting some more. Well, this should come as little to no surprise. Of course, it's no Cars 2, but few can be. Larry the Cable Guy might stick out like a sore paw in this one. Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas team up for at least the third time for Puss in Boots. The other debuts this week include In Time, The Rum Diary and... Anonymous? That's this week, right? Oh dear. According to Variety, it's in limited release stateside. Still, I can't help but think that the Bard is smiling down on the film's failure. But let's get back to the other films. No one's raving about The Rum Diary, but I look on the bright side: Ebert gave it more stars than 1998's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Then again, FLLV had a #1 opening weekend. Always a trade-off. Meanwhile, more Coen news keeps pouring in. Apparently Justin Timberlake has signed on to Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens' next flic. Never underestimate the casting power of the director of photography: longtime Coen collaborator Roger Deakins was the camera guy on In Time. My other favourite example is Thomas Rosales Jr. who had semi-prominent roles in Heat and L.A. Confidential, both filmed by... the same Italian dude. Our guest has returned; I better go...

The Friends of Benny Affleck

2011-10-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure if I should go with that headline (an awful pun based on 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle') or with "Ben Affleck's 'Heat'", but both surely apply, and there are homages to both in Affleck's Boston-based crime caper "The Town." The only thing he forgot is repeated trips to the confession booth, or to a wake, or wherever one goes to get wine and communion wafers. The religion of the characters is left out of it for time's sake.
Welp, seeing as how I am such a movie geek to the point of remembering the freakin' TRAILERS for these things, I might as well make it part of my critique, because the trailer did sell the film pretty well for me. On the other hand, I did have a problem with the whole love story angle... if I remember correctly, they pointed out in the trailer that this was a thriller with a twist: the robber falls in love with the sexy young girl who works at the bank. Victor Garber, not so much. Loved him in Titanic, though! I had problems with that plot device in the trailer, and I had more problems with it in the movie. Aren't I a genius? Love me, cherish me. But Ben does what he can with it. It does become a problem later on, and the plot gets complicated as a result.
But let's get back to the meat and potatoes of the film. We got ourselves a fine heist film here with all the modern conveniences that a modern take on the cops 'n robbers genre needs. Jon Hamm plays the proverbial Al Pacino "Heat" role here as the FBI guy hot on the bad guys' trail. Ben Affleck is the proverbial De Niro "Heat" arch-criminal but with a thick Boston brogue. The meeting of Ben and Hamm clearly isn't as epic, iconic, game-changing, what-have-you, as the Heat counterpart, but not many can be. Besides, with Righteous Kill, De Niro and Pacino are an ocean cruise away from being the new post Buddy Buddy Lemmon/Matthau comedy team! Let's face it! And let's hope that it comes to fruition.
So the robbery that opens films like these pretty much goes off without a hitch, but they decide to take bank employee Rebecca Hall along with them during the getaway. Apparently this wasn't Affleck's idea, but he takes a shine to her all the same. Well, Woody Allen did as well, so can you blame a guy? They drop her off and leave her blindfolded and barefoot, much like what was done in Coyle under similar circumstances. She provides the moral dilemma of the movie: is she just another witness to eliminate? Or do she and Affleck live happily ever after?
The courtship begins, right after Ben has a quickie with future Ellen Barkin-in-training, Blake Lively. Usually the woman wants the man to spend the night, but anything REALLY goes these days, as Cole Porter will attest from his heavenly post as he looks down on the modern world in constant, perpetual disbelief. But you see, Krista and Claire represent two 'paths' that Doug MacRay can take with his life. Krista is the same-old-same-old blue collar life, and Claire is the upgrade to the nice part of town. "Dig Dug" clearly has a lot of brushing up to do if he wants to fit in with Claire. Their first meeting was a bit underwhelming as a psychological gotcha game; Claire should've been a little more suspicious, frankly. The communal garden becomes Dougie and Claire's "home base," so to speak. We'll go back there a couple more times.
But now, it's back to the guy stuff. Next robbery, please! This one gets a little messy, but they manage to escape, Ronin-style. Sorry, Spoiler Alert. More plot developments, then the one final score. Enter that venerable character actor, Pete Postlethwaite. Who does he remind me of... James Finlayson, ever so slightly? Guess we'll have to wait for that biopic a little longer. Oh well. SPOILER ALERT: Something for all bad guys everywhere to remember: if you want to get killed, tell someone about how you killed their parents. You just might get your own self killed soon after. Another biopic casting suggestion: Titus Welliver as the lead in the Anthony Bourdain biopic, directed by Steven Soderbergh.
The plotting in Heat was a little more fluid, not so by-the-numbers as you might notice. The Town, sadly, suffers a bit as the end approaches. And I'm being kind: there are plot holes you could drive an armored car through... but I did appreciate the bit where the cops start shooting at the wrong armored car. How do you signal to the cops in an armored car that you're not the bad guy? The dude in this instance does what he can, probably getting very hurt in the process. The crooks that we're rooting for here aren't as prepared as the crooks in Heat, and very much less prepared as the ones in Bandits in their big final escape. Still, the main ones manage to escape: Coughlin and MacRay. Philosophical discussion time: are they not two sides of the same coin? I'll leave that for others to hash out, except to say, yes. Yes they are. And one side of the coin has to die, or at least get re-smelted. More spoilers: Dougie escapes, but manages to leave enough money behind for Claire to donate ice to the local rink in Dougie's mom's name. There's even a nice plaque and everything. On behalf of my cranky friend who watched the movie with me: wouldn't that get Claire into even more trouble than she was already in with the FBI? Wouldn't they ask where the money came from for her to make such a charitable donation? Wouldn't that happen? Or did Dougie set that up before he left? So many questions. And yet, I was entertained nonetheless. Probably won't watch it again, but who's got time to rewatch everything anyway, right? Unless someone wants to get it for me on Blu-Ray, hint hint..... sigh. That never works!

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

The state of the American blockbuster: Thar be the cast of "Blow"!

2011-10-25T01:49:00.001-07:00

Tis a rare occasion indeed for me when I get to travel to a friend's house to watch a movie. But every once in a while the stars align just right, and that very thing did just happen, as this friend of mine happened to buy the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. An expensive 2-pack, no less! They got the Blu-Ray AND the DVD. Can you believe they're already predicting the obsolescence of the DVD? Apparently the internet's going to conquer our TVs or something, and provide streaming movies to our TVs wherever and whenever, blah blah blah. Personally, I think they might as well try to get DVD commentaries coming into our cable boxes. That's the state of the American cinema at this point: why watch the sick and twisted Death Wish II when you can listen to the even sicker and more twisted minds behind the making of it?
Unfortunately, this friend of mine didn't have a 3D television yet, so I didn't fully appreciate the various gratuitous 3D moments that are apparently going to become commonplace. Personally, I'm not as against them as Roger Ebert is. Most of the great movies have some kind of 3D gimmick in them already. Anyone remember that Buster Keaton film where he's sitting on the front of a train that emerges from the horizon and stops just short of hitting the camera? That would probably be his vanity logo if he were alive and filming today... or maybe the thing where the front of the house falls on top of him. Yeah, probably that one.
This film cost 250 million dollars. Let that sink in for a while. I guess that's small potatoes these days, actually. Quantum of Solace cost around 225 million. Spider Man 3 also sported a 250 million price tag. Lord knows what the next Batman film's going to cost. I'm thinking probably 210: they should stick with the 30 million step increases just to be safe; of course, they're feverishly changing Catwoman's costume digitally, so there's another 20 million or so. But Pirates of the Caribbean 4 cost 250 million, 55 of which went to Johnny Depp. I'm assuming he didn't have points; otherwise, he would've gotten screwed. Disney's the real pirate, am I right? Whatever Geoffrey Rush got, it obviously didn't go towards makeup. He's looking a bit pale these days. Well, some people are a rougher 60 than others, but he's still got that true pirate spirit, and a hearty laugh to boot.
Unfortunately, there isn't a digital marvel here quite like the squid-faced Davy Jones. But make no mistake about it, we're not short on alpha male pirates here, and Ian McShane as Blackbeard will do rather nicely. Unfortunately, he's not allowed to run free at the mouth like his Deadwood character. This is PG-13, for God's sake! Speaking of which, his ... I'm sorry, the demise of one of the characters seemed to push the PG-13 rating pretty good. The 250 million is nothing if not up on the screen, I give 'em that.
As for the plot, well, I think it was sufficiently complicated enough. That's the way plots are these days: they try to insure repeat viewings through complicated plots, but I think I got the gist of it the first go-round. They wisely trimmed the Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom characters from the fat, and broadened the pic's scope a bit. Pintel and Ragetti are gone too; I guess they wanted too much money. I haven't read the novel that this installment's based on. I just hope it's not like the Twilight series at all. I'm probably giving it away, but I'll make the comparison nonetheless: probably the most direct comparison I can make is that this smacks ever so slightly of Indiana Jones 3. This time, however, there's two chalices instead of one... and the retrieval of a mermaid tear to boot. The mermaids this time seem to have arrived more or less out of the FHM/Maxim/Michael Bay casting vortex, with a vampire twist, if I may be so bold. The mermaids are rather bereft of cleavage, which is where Penelope Cruz comes in. Gotta love that hat. Why, is that a tattoo? I don't know much about tattoo etiquette, but a breast tattoo probably shouldn't be much larger than hers. I'm old fashioned that way, what can I say. Barry Sonnenfeld adopted a similar strategy with Wild Wild West and beyond: production values. Well, what do you expect from the director of such hits as Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha and Nine?... that WAS Judi Dench! Lucky girl... I missed it, but Keith Richards returns as Jack Sparrow's dad, and he's got a classic line: "Does this face look like it's been to the Fountain of Youth?" I guess not, but does he still goes to Switzerland to get his blood changed?
Well, I guess I hate to admit it, but I was entertained. What can I say? The way movies are made today, there seems to be a lot of science poured into their making. Computer graphics, probably computer-enhanced screenwriting. Do they use word clouds to double check everything? Something's going on, I swear. Of course, I couldn't help but think that computer-enhanced screenwriting was at work in Terminator 3 when Ah-nold appears nude in the world once again, but ends up going into a Chippendale's themed strip club. Maybe it's focus group-based screenwriting, who knows. But no matter how fancy things get (in the Pirates movies), there always seems to be a moment when Jack ends up at one solitary island. It happened in the first one, and he was out of rum. No time to stop and smell the rum in this one. Also, he doesn't get decked in the face, only to turn and stick his big mug right in the camera's lens. See? 3D before it was 3D. Why, one might go so far as to say that the entrance to the fountain of youth was a teeny bit of an homage to Depp's big death scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street, both more or less involving fluids defying gravity. They even manage to work in an homage to ships in a bottle. Even better than that, because of Penelope Cruz, they throw in a quick nod to the tempestuous nature of Spanish/Mexican women: they apparently love and hate you in equal measure. So much feminine mystique summed up in one 10 second exchange... A toast to the new science of movies; may they never have to reveal it to us.

***1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

"Hey, don't look now, but I think we're about to be killed!"

2011-10-23T01:43:00.000-07:00

FINALLY! One I don't have to watch... but what the hell, I don't have a whole lot on my plate right now

ACT ONE

We start off with the bad guys this time, a gang of three crooks who don't even use a gun. They're slick slicksters who talk old widows into handing over the deeds to their houses. If I remember correctly, Nixon used to do something similar before he became president. But the high and low tend to cross paths in California, and the three white collar criminals drive past our three blue-collar heroes. Larry jumps out of the way into Moe's arms; Moe promptly throws Larry onto the ground. Well, not too promptly, but you get the idea. The first recurring acorn is planted in the brain when Curly says he craves roast chicken and dumplings. Over the course of the next 16 minutes or so, it will become a mighty oak. A mighty oak indeed. Moe slaps Curly, telling him it was for not dreaming enough for the both of them. A smart sentiment. Doesn't bode well for Larry. Yes, Curly is indeed in full bloom here, chewing up the scenery like nobody's business. But before Moe can really tear into Curly, Larry spots the farm across the street. The boys enter. Curly finds an egg. Some capering ensues. The farmer comes in. Seeing as how this was the Great Depression and all, and the farmer apparently had no Mexicans working for him, the farmer offers to feed the boys after they saw up some wood... hoh boy. Here we go.
Curly ends up getting the back of his head sawed by this giant saw. Cheese and crackers. Ah, I remember the good old days when we would rewind the VCR tape and watch that part a couple of times, wondering how the hell they did that. Even now I can't help but squeam at it. Incidentally, when Curly wrecks a tool like that, there are no follow-ups... until now. Moe and Larry have to keep using this saw, but can't because of the teeth ravaged by Curly's corundum head! Moe loses it and starts chasing Curly round the wood. Moe gets hit in the stomach with the saw... it's too hard to explain. Curly gets hit with the saw next. Now, finer movie critics than I also cut their teeth on this movie, and noticed differences in Curly's line readings. In Movie Maniacs and the instant case, Curly ends up saying "My mother knows my name." I think the general consensus is that his line reading in Movie Maniacs was better than it is in Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise. But I can see the wisdom in both approaches: it's hard to keep things fresh.
It's not quite Act Two yet... The farmer comes back in, sees the mess the boys made, and gives them an easier task to do: loading a wagon. It's either that or jail, and the boys are still eager to impress. Of course, even a task as simple as loading a wagon can get totally f... messed up by the Stooges. This is the stark contrast between Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges. The modern world's conveniences never fail to foul up L&H's plans. The Stooges seem a little more deliberate in comparison. Anyway, the final score: Curly - 0, Faulty Wagon Bottom - 4. Curly ends up in close to genuine tears. So painful to watch.

ACT TWOhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif... these blank.gifs are breeding like rabbits!

We see the deednappers at work, but their luck's about to change... or, at least, cross paths with the Stooges. Worse than any voodoo. One of the bad guys steps in mud, almost as bad as the mud that Principal Ed Rooney runs afoul of at the Bueller residence... geez! I must be stuck in 1985. God, I hate that song. Anyway, the muddy foot guy uses the wrong sign to wipe off his foot with, and off he goes to join his buddies. Meanwhile, the Stooges are on foot. How they ended up with the irate farmer is wisely left alone. We'll see him again as an army sergeant that the boys REALLY run afoul of. Good comedic foil. The boys are so tired from walking that Curly can't even bark like a dog at his usual full throttle. And then... let the wishing begin! Fear itself is the only thing after all! The Stooges become proverbial Cinderellas when they stumble across the "free auto." Once again, finer eyes detected that the boys run towards the car early. (Curly 7:13) Sloppy, sloppy editing, but that's Cannery Row for ya!
Is it just me, or would Barry Sonnenfeld make a good Curly? Well, maybe 10 years ago. Alas, Awesomest Maximus will just have to do. He works cheap. Curly's wish streak continues, as the boys stumble upon a house with a nice old lady cooking up a batch of roast chicken, dumplings, and hot apple pie. An early example of dubbing: Curly whispers to Moe, "Gee, I wish she had some roast chicken and dumplings!" Is Hollywood always this magical? Moe does an impression of Shemp at about 9:44. Again, maybe it's just me, but it's indeed rare to see Moe not angry, and not on the verge of a spate of violence. The boys eat their fill, then offer to do some work for this nice lady. Curly's next wish: to meet three beautiful girls. The wish comes true when the nice lady's three daughters come home from a bathing beauty contest. The boys immediately stop what they're doing and introduce themselves. The nice old lady wisely gets them back on track. Back they go to fix the pump. Their penchant for chaos serves all well as they discover a very giving oil reserve on the nice old lady's land. Welp, that's one thing to be said about solar panels! You can't just dig 'em up. The oil well's erupting from the ground, and the boys, ever the idea men, get the idea to stop the gusher with Curly's ass. It works for a while, but Curly eventually isn't enough to hold back the oil stream, and he ends up in the air. At about 4:17, Curly sounds a bit like John Candy when he says "Get me down," I dare say! Maybe I'm up too late. Moe and Larry eventually lasso Curly, and yank him down off the oil stream, and he falls, breaks his neck, and dies instantly. No, not really, but still... damn, you know SOMEBODY got hurt doing all this stuff! The nice old lady... let's call her the widow Jenkins at this point, what the hell. The boys tell the widow Jenkins that she's rich. The widow Jenkins informs the boys that she just handed over her deed. Now who's acting like a Stooge? Anyway, the Stooges change out of their oil-soaked clothes into some dry clothes. They storm off looking like three widow Jenkinses, and act even more butch than usual to compensate for their new duds. They drive around in search of the crooks and fortunately happen upon them rather quickly.

ACT THREE

I just realized! I didn't break for Act 3 yet. Might as well do it here. Anyway, they find the bad guys, defeat the bad guys, sit back and let the car drive itself like three idiots, regain control of the car, and defeat the widow Jenkins' picket fence with the bad guys' car. Curly's last wish for a Justice of the Peace comes true. I didn't recognize him because he didn't have a face full of mashed potatoes. Curly makes a Dionne quintuplets reference, kisses Moe on the face, and it ends. And so ends an unusually action-packed Stooge film. One of the actual classics. Again, maybe I'm just biased because it's a childhood favourite. You could warp your kids with worse these days.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Oxide and Danny Pang

2011-10-23T01:09:00.000-07:00

How about some real chemical brothers? It's right there in the name, for Gawd's zake! And on top of that, like the Hughes, they're twins. This phenom seems to be more common than not. But at least these twins were born on the same day... same year, anyway. Somewhere on the web it says that Marc and Lori Singer are twins, but check this out... Marc "Beastmaster" Singer, born 1948. Lori Singer, born 1957. Sigh. She's almost at the grandmother stage of her career, for Gawd's zake! I was going to say that you never see Marc Singer and Kevin Bacon together, but these days it's more like Marc Singer and Ellen Degeneres. Could somebody else play the Kevin Bacon game for me? Why don't they have that on IMDb yet? Start with Eagle Eye. That'll save you a lot of heartache trying to connect the dots. But let's try and get back to the Pangs here. For Gawd's sake. They began their cinematic odyssey in 1999 in earnest with a li'l independent feature called Who Is Running? From this plot description, it seems we can tell where their whole career's basically headed, into quasi-Ringu territory. Sorry, but I must confess I'm not a Pang brother expert. Next came Bangkok Dangerous, which they would of course later remake with Nic Cage. Well, they must be making money, because they keep working. Their output is pretty impressive, you must admit! Almost as prolific as Tyler Perry! Well, Tyler's probably the gold standard now: two movies a year. He's the gold standard now. The Pangs tried to keep up during the 2000s. And despite what you might think, Bangkok Haunted's not a sequel to Bangkok Dangerous. Also, they skipped The Eye 3-9 and jumped right to The Eye 10. They did so well in fact that in 2003 they went British Hollywood with The Tesseract starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Soon after they went Hollywood with 2007's The Messengers starring Dylan McDermott. On the other hand, they didn't write one. It's a film about the ghosts that haunt Penelope Ann Miller's career. Then came their Bangkok Dangerous reboot with Nicolas Cage. I remember it well because it opened at #1 in its first week, then dropped to #8 its second week, and then completely out of the top 10 the third week... is that a good thing? Well, it doesn't seem to have slowed them down a whole lot. Their latest is Sleepwalker... which is where I have to draw the line. There's only one Sleepwalker, and that's 1992's Sleepwalkers, based on a Richard Bachman story... or Stephen King, one of those two. Check out this photo: this should tell you all you need to know... about something.

Hey! Remember 1988?

2011-10-23T01:06:00.001-07:00

What a year. The Talking Heads began their long slide into breaking up after the over-produced "Little Creatures" and "Naked." John Hughes was growing up, so to speak, moving into family territory with "She's Having a Baby." Bruce Hornsby and his soft-rock minions taking MTV away from the children. "Rain Man" sweeping the Oscars. Me, I was just starting high school and trying to keep my head above water. The point being, 1988 is when "Paranormal Activity 3" takes place. I hope they got the production design right! They must be doing something right, as each film in the trilogy's been raking in the dough. Bet the Saw films wish they could do that well. Less is more, guys. Someday, all hit movies will be filmed on cellphones from a web diary point of view. Won't our eyes be thanking us in advance for that?
Meanwhile, the Brits are taking a sacking at the box office. The other two debuts this week clearly aren't faring as well. The Three Musketeers at #4? Did Dick Lester direct this one as well? Are they not trying hard enough? On the other end of the spectrum, there's Johnny English 2: The Sequel No One Wanted. Lemme tell you something: if even Richard Curtis didn't want anything to do with it, you're in trouble. Someone's in trouble. Probably all of us. But he's working for Spielberg! Everything is below his level now. He'll choose his projects a lot more carefully for now on... if he's smart. Just saying. Better run.

The Pink Panther cartoons shine on!

2011-10-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

Boy, just when you think YouTube's got everything... I just happened to be watching Scorsese's latest documentary about George Harrison the old fashioned way, TiVo'd off of HBO. George was at some happening, and on a screen in the background they were showing Pink Posies! Awesome. Or maybe it was one of the remakes that spliced old footage into new cartoons with not so much new footage... apparently just Pinkologist. Nah, that can't be right, because that was the late 70s when George was a bit of a train wreck in his Gallagher-esque outfit and his raspy voice. Nah, must've been just after 1967 when A Serious Man came out... I mean, when Pink Posies came out.
...oh, right. The cartoon itself. Well, it's kinda standard stuff, but as timeless as ever. There's a couple of these Pink Panther cartoons that aren't so good... this one where he spends six minutes on out-of-control rollerskates comes to mind, but here we've got a good old fashioned freaking out of The Man. It's a flower-based arms race between the yellow establishment and the pink grassroots. Who will win? I hate to spoil it for you, but I will say that the dude getting shot with the Insta-Grow flower seeds was a little extreme... but that's how things are these days. A normal person has to wince at cartoon violence. Any deviation from the normal reactions and you can't run for President.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Going over and over in my mind, I relive it one Stooge film at a time...

2011-10-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

All right, let's get this over with now as well. What the hell... Hey, Farrelly brothers! Whaddaya think? Tobey Maguire as Curly...

As Wikipedia points out, usually the Stooges are stuck in blue collar jobs, or start the picture running from the police. Here they are successful veterinarians with three young lady assistants, working on a rich person's dog. Will the operation go without a hitch?

ACT ONE

Curly's hitting his stride as a Stooge. Full-bodied n'yuk-n'yuks, punchlines nailed perfectly, good choreography... seems like only yesterday. But perhaps he gets a little too big for his britches. Fer instance, Curly takes a rare opportunity to play Moe to Larry, asking Larry what he's doing. Typically, Moe will ask Curly what he's doing, just before the fireworks fly. Larry's washing his socks, and Curly takes those socks and slaps Larry across the face! Dude, this is a game changer. A total game changer. Fortunately, equilibrium is soon restored when Curly runs afoul of a comical soap dispenser. Long story short, Curly turns into a frozen soap bubble dispenser.
The operation begins. As always, Moe asks for an "Ana-cana-pana"... something like that. In a rare twist, Curly doesn't hit Moe in the face with his elbow... gosh, this all seems very familiar. Oh, right, for some reason I started to watch this one a couple weeks ago. It's a good thing the old bag didn't figure out she could've performed the "operation" herself and spared herself a lot of heartbreak. But, that's how it is when you're a job creator!

ACT TWO
The Stooges take two members of the liberal media on a tour of the animal hospital. Comedy abounds. Only a Stooge would do the old "I got my eyes closed" routine, only to have their retinas shattered anew. As for me, I tend to learn one new thing a day. Today's thing: G.C.M. stands for "Garbage Can Moocher." May I never use that acronym ever again. As it turns out, the two members of the liberal media aren't actually reporters, but dognappers who intend to hold the rich bag's poodle for ransom. In other words, business as usual for the liberal media. Thank God Rupert Murdoch is out there, fighting back... actually, I guess he doesn't have to fight back! Will he go to bat for his underlings who did all the really dirty work? Let's hope not for the sake of his white gloves. Anyway, plot devices conspire to leave Garcon, the rich poodle, unguarded, and the two thugs go to work. We just saw the one guy in A Ducking They Did Go. He's on a Stooge short rampage, apparently. The dog gets kidnapped, but we must switch to other pressing comedy manners, like Curly plucking out Moe's eyebrow hairs... never mind, it'd take too long to explain. Time to bring on the food! The Stooges and a bunch of dogs have lunch together at a giant table. The Stooges are so into their jobs, they also dine on dog biscuits with the rest of the mutts. It's up to one of the nurses to inform the Stooges that Garcon is missing... I mean, Garçon. Gotta get those characters right. (Alt+0231) The dognappers left a ransom note on the patient clipboard, and as Moe reads the note, the camera dollies in closer. Academy Award nomination, anyone?

ACT THREE
The boys think of a plan to get Garçon back. Unfortunately, none of the boys gets a thought in the back of their head... That's Shemp's bit. Hands off! But then, tragedy strikes... the boys disguise one of their OTHER dogs as Garçon. This was in the old days when mattresses were stuffed with black stuff. Leaded cotton, maybe. They take their bastard creation back to the rich old bag's house, where the wacky black maid answers the door. Can the ASPCA do retroactive actions? The wacky black maid ends up vacuuming two parts of the dog's disguise off, then exiting stage left in a caricatured manner, as was the style at the time. Thank God Herman Cain will take us back to those days. Anyway, the Stooges eagerly help themselves to the rich old bag's liquor, with Moe helping to spill as much of it on the floor as possible. They also end up doing the old... what to call it? Larry gets ice cubes down his back, and starts squirming about in a desperate attempt to dislodge them. Moe and Curly start doing the old Russian Dance. Whatever you call that bit, they got it here. The rich old bag enters the picture. Who is that, anyway? It's not Symona Boniface... it's Beatrice Curtis, on loan from Frank Capra, along with Dick Curtis... related? Apparently not. She sees the dog, realizes she's been hoodwinked, and orders the boys to get Garcon back, or it's back to the hoose gow where they should've stayed. Like the true class acts they are, they don't tell her about the kidnapping plot that Garcon is wrapped up in. Lesser mortals like you and I would've told her, but what's the point of a ruling class if you can't have a little fun with them, right? Curly uses the dog to haul off the liquor cart for later, in some kind of Alcoholics Iditarod. The lady rightly faints a second time... oh, is there any doubt this is going to have a happy ending? They also throw in the "Two men in the same coat" fight strategy. You'll see it in Crash Goes the Hash as well. Never gets old.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Jonathan and Christopher Nolan

2011-10-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

Well, things couldn't be going better for these two, that's for sure. Then again, success comes with its own problems. Whether it's kidnapping threats or failing kidneys, everybody wants a piece of ya. The big flap right now is over the new Catwoman's outfit, and people are being downright catty about it! Will the studio make last minute digital changes? You can do a lot more with digital these days. Maybe they can Gump in Ellen Page instead. Do they still call it Gump? Or is it Photoshop now?
Older by six years, Chris is clearly the alpha brother of the two. Both worked on Chris' short films before striking it big with Memento. They even got to enter next year's Oscars! That's how good it was. Then came Insomnia. How anyone survives working with Robin Williams these days is a mystery to me, but Chris did it, and got to reboot the Batman franchise, and as anyone who owns TimeWarner stock will tell you, it was an epic, iconic game-changer. Especially that second one! But, never one to stand still, Chris is able to pull off the "indie" film in-between blockbusters: The Prestige, and Inception. One of which features Christian Bale. Chris wanted to use Bale in Inception, but I guess the guy was busy doing something... Anyway, Nolan's developing his own little stock company, putting many of the Inception cast in the next Batman pic. It's being called the last Batman pic, but I'm sure he'll find something for his stock company to do next. Meanwhile, Jonathan's got Person of Interest to contend with and, while Robert Downey Jr.'s trying to resurrect Mel Gibson's reputation, Jim Caviezel's reputation just might come first. Or maybe it's already back. Michael Emerson's okay and all, and thank God he got out of the Saw series while the getting was good, but I hope they bring in Alan Cumming at some point. Harold Finch as a younger man? Finch's long lost brother? Writers can do anything these days, and it's not like Alan's so busy these days, is it?
So I'm going out on a limb here, but I dare say these Nolan boys have done quite well in these here 2000s. If the 2000s aren't their favorite decade, none of them will be! The rise of the Nolans, the fall of George W. Bush's America 2.0. By the time the next Batman movie hits, they'll be able to buy America with all the money they'll make. A toast to our future overlords! May they not bring about universal toll roads.

Hey! Remember the 80s?

2011-10-15T23:31:00.001-07:00

I'll have to keep asking that for about 10 more years at least... As you may have read on Yahoo! News, Real Steel and Footloose duke it out for the #1 spot. Another great week for corporate-funded underdogs. But personally, I think they blew valuable casting opportunities on the Footloose remake! Why not Kevin Bacon as the new Pastor Moore? Why not Lori Singer as Vi? Why not have it be some kind of allegory? Why not have Ren M(a)cCormack all grown up and turned into a stodgy old man like Pastor Moore was? You can't be footloose forever! The next generation takes over! It's the natural order of things. Which doesn't bode well for me, as I'm getting on in years myself. Also debuting this week is a reboot of The Thing, and I can only assume it's a reboot of John Carpenter's '80s reboot of the original '50s horror flick. May the 80s be rebooted forever. Isn't Tim Burton doing a Frankenweenie remake?... he still is? Good Lord. But that's the bad half of the 80s, probably. I don't know how these decade things work. And last but not least amongst the debuts, it's the latest Steve Martin vehicle, The Big Year. Well, considering that it's bombing, let's call it David Frankel's The Big Year. He's had a good run lately: The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me ... good in terms of box office. Let's hope his next one gets him back on track. Hasn't the whole Fly Away Home thing run its course already?

A Fine Time for Earthquakes

2011-10-13T01:10:00.001-07:00

You know, you might not know it from reading this damn blog, but I'm a college boy. And at the college we went to, there was sort of an implied emphasis on patriarchy. Especially America, of course. We're the paternalistic frat boy of the planet, and we've been sleeping on the world couch for about 30 years now. Something like that. In this week's Stooge short, Saved by the Belle... and good luck finding it on YouTube, because Tiffani Amber Thiessen's not in it... the three knuckleheads play old-fashioned American salesmen stranded in a fictional tropical paradise. I like to think that the heads of Columbia at the time were SO racist, they didn't want to risk giving a role for a Mexican to an actual Mexican, so what we have are slow-moving, yawning white guys playing native... Valeskans of the magical kingdom of Valeska. Don't worry, it won't be the last fictional country the stooges visit. What makes this fictional kingdom unique is the regular earthquakes that plague it. And what natural destructive phenomenon is more patriarchical than an earthquake. Excepting maybe the average meteor strike, nothing. Anyway, it's been a while since I sat down and watched the whole thing, but I dare say the earthquakes denote act breaks... I'll go with the theory anyway, what the hell. I'm feeling lucky.

EARTHQUAKE ONE
The introductory earthquake... and I thought they put more effort into it. The camera moves, the drums roll, and a couple things fall over. These Stooges shoestring budgets give me a headache. Once again, there's buried treasure and bad guys who buried it. They're all set to go, but the Stooges are in the way, stuck with a hotel bill they can't shake... I'm sorry, ammunition is safely stored in the hills. The one guy, Joe, kinda sounds like this other actor that's always in Stooge films... Eddie Laughton. A Brit! Go fig... Anyway, the boys make their escape and wind up with a bunch of pillows. Curly is the idea man again and he gets the idea to use pillows as earthquake shock absorbers. Here's how it works: there's an earthquake, you fall on your ass, and the pillow absorbs the shock. Curly goes so far as to demonstrate it himself! Ouch. But government bureaucrats... I mean, policemen, sabotage the working man again. Also, it doesn't help matters much that Moe grabs one of the policemen's gun and points it at a wise-ass parrot with intent to kill. The boys get whisked rudely away to see General ... Casino? Good comedy name. This was made before Castro, so it's not a play on his name... I think.

Scene: the General's office. Moe and Curly openly flirt with a sexy senorita dressed in noir business attire. It's a different kind of flirting, admittedly. The boys are accused of being spies. We'll see the General later on a couple times, more famously in An Ache in Every Stake and Micro-Phonies. The boys are free to go. Flirting saves the day! Then, the talking parrot provides a nice plot twist. The boys get searched before they go. The letter they got is a bit misread and, rather instantly, the boys are whisked off to a jail cell and are to be shot at sunrise... has this happened to them before? One thing that hasn't happened before is: this time, they get stuck getting pulled out the door. God bless you, Charley Chase! Curly ad-libs "This is all your fault. Have you got a shoehorn?"

EARTHQUAKE TWO
... hasn't happened yet, but it's coming. I saw this already, and am feverishly blogging to catch up. The boys are in one of the strangest jail cells I've ever seen. Larry's big line: "This is the hardest bread I ever saw." ...something like that. The sexy senorita, Rita, hands them food through the jail window bars, of course. The boys get the idea to give soup to the guard. Moe opens the door to another chamber where the guard is sitting. Very unusual. He offers the guard the soup. The guard says "No, I don't like soap." Moe says, "Not soap... Soup! Soup!" The guard finally gets it and accepts the soup. Moe calls the guard an ignoramus, and goes back into the jail cell proper to continue eating Rita's food. The food contains... you guessed it! Tools for escaping. More Charley Chase ingenuity: they saw on the iron bars while the guard is loudly slurping soup. The boys keep working. Cue the next earthquake. This one's a little more impressive, except that you can see where the wall's going to break. It's kinda like in the old Warner Brothers cartoons where you can tell the difference between the cartoon's background and an object in the foreground that's about to be used for something. The only example that comes to mind at the moment is a cat tail used by Daffy Duck in "Daffy Duck and Egghead." Anyway, the boys keep working on the bars despite this hole in the wall. Their new-fangled loyalty to Rita is so strong that, even though she's standing at the hole telling them to come on, they keep sawing at the bars. The things a guy will do to impress a dame.
They end up back in General Casino's office to steal a map. And then... ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE!! The map falls behind a couch. More plot devices. This is too good to spoil. Rita tells the boys to "Harry! Harry! Harry, boys!"

EARTHQUAKE THREE (or four)

The boys make their escape on a comedy horse, and find themselves in the middle of a bunch of tents. As it happens... the hotel owner they ran out on just happens to be the leader of the resistance! Fortunately, Rita saves their bacon yet again. Boy, she sure seems sweet on Curly for some reason! Maybe she's got a thing for fat guys. But I'm afraid their romance is doomed to fail, as she's freaked out by the strange Stooge customs of random acts of violence. And her valiant attempt to save the boys' lives are sneakily undermined at every turn. And who's this Elaine that Curly mentions? Must be this one on his IMDb page. Cue the Act Three earthquake, and the boys end up driving off in a big truck full of explosives. Curly's still got that parrot with him. The boys' slow wit fails them spectacularly here, but they ever so slowly realize they're driving a truck full of explosives. The first two exploding grenades doesn't quite set off the alarm bells, but the lit dynamite stick eventually does. Credit where credit's due: Curly lights a cigar, and Moe tells Curly not to throw the match into the street as it might start a fire. Smokey the Bear, eat your heart out. The boys drive past their horse with the comedy back, the dynamite eventually goes off, and the boys land on the horse's back. I hope they were stunt dummies. I tend to think at this point that the boys died and try to ride to Heaven on the back of a comedy horse, but they of course don't quite make it. Fortunately, the horse has one of Curly's earthquake shock absorber pillows on, in case you were wondering why the horse's ass looked a little strange. Kinda hard to tell on YouTube.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Great Scotts! No pity for the fool?

2011-10-10T01:37:00.000-07:00

Sorry, guess I should've said SPOILER ALERT. Maybe I nodded off for a couple seconds, but I'm pretty sure the new B.A. Baracus did NOT say "I pity the fool." Probably out of reverence for the role that Mr. T made his own. But he's older now and doesn't fill out his frame quite like he did when he was young, and they didn't even bring Mr. Tureaud back in a time-travel-style subplot to warn the young Baracus about the dangers ahead... Tureaud; isn't that French! Traitor! Go back to the Eiffel Tower, this is America! And take your ketchup fortune with you! Oh, wait, wrong Administration...
But perhaps it's an apt comment after all, because this A-Team movie does take place against an Iraqi backdrop. It's an expensive looking $110 million movie version of this 80s TV show that managed to last five seasons. I didn't get to see the end credits to see if they used that old Cannell vanity logo with the man sitting at a typewriter furiously typing and ripping the page from it, making the page his bitch. But I did notice that it was a Scott Free production! Both Ridley and Tony were on duty, so for those expecting a straightforward Expendables-style mangasm will probably be disappointed. This film features Tony Scott stylistics, with a Ridley Scott script: better-than-average, or at least, featuring some length of bells and whistles. And of course, director Joe Carnahan gives himself a nice cameo where he gets to play a cool guy. The days of directors sitting in the back seats of cabs are long gone. Too much at stake. No, the closest you'll get these days is You Can Count On Me. But I digress.
The plot is sufficiently labyrinthine, but I think I got it the first go-round. Plots have to be that way these days, they just have to. Somehow, they tried to jam too many movie references together for my taste. Part Munich, part The Hurt Locker, I'm assuming part Body of Lies, part of the ending of Lethal Weapon 2, there's too many ingredients in the soup. You know, they say that the Coen brothers write parts for specific actors. That sort of dynamic seemed to be at work here in the plot with the presence of District 9 actor Sharlto Copley. Unfortunately, the result is not as prestigious. The fact that his American cowboy accent slipped so much didn't exactly help me, either. No disrespect, though. He was pretty great in District 9 and probably the best thing here. Although Brian Bloom was pretty good, too, as the Blackwater-style bad guy. Still, I can't help but wonder what Ray Liotta would've done with the role. More spoilers: Why they had to give such a juicy role to Gerald McRaney, I'll never know. I guess he was ready for it, but I fear that, unlike Hal Holbrook, there's not going to be an Oscar nomination any time soon.
As for Jessica Biel, well, she's a sweetie pie. She almost pulled off the role for me, but perhaps it wasn't worth pulling off anyway. Debra Messing seemed to play a similar thankless role in the McHale's Navy movie, but she's too old for this sort of thing now, isn't she? It's on to the mother roles now! Sorry, I guess that was a little mean, so I'll balance it out by trashing Liam Neeson. Actually, Liam was pretty good in this role. Well, he's doing this kind of role now. Taken, Unknown to a lesser extent... Still, you're pushing 60, dude! How can you kick as much ass as the rest of the A-Team? Kicking ass is a young man's game, my friend. He even says at one point that he's still as fast as he ever was. Somehow, I think that was his contribution to the script. He even gets to wear his hair brunette at one point. Boy, all those right-wingers who complain that Social Security's failing because people are living longer... maybe they've got a good point after all! Let's just move to a Logan's Run system, just for the sake of keeping people's dignity... Of course, Logan did try to fight the system, didn't he? I guess that doesn't matter... not to mention the fact that none of these guys ages a whole lot after 10 years. Why didn't they make it five? Kind of a wink to fans of the original show. Pretend that this starts off where the original series ended.
Why do I feel a need to spend an extra paragraph on the black dude? I just do. He did okay here! Let's hope he can keep doing movies, and may he never have to go against Emelianenko, for God's sake. But like most of these token black guy roles, he's the heart of the film. He does call people "fool" a lot, but he provides a rare action movie philosophical moment. When he's in prison, he doesn't convert to Islam, but he does find a kindred spirit in the teachings of Gandhi, and when he gets out, he tells the rest of the A-Team that he can't kill any more. And thus, a cloud hangs over the proceedings, so much so that Hannibal Smith finds ANOTHER Gandhi quote, a more pro-violence quote... I forget what it is, but I'm sure we'll all be repeating it soon enough. Then Einstein, Martin Luther King, David Hume, and all the other great philosophical 'icons' will fall, and we'll all just do whatever the hell we want, and not have to justify anything ever again using philosophical arguments. ESPECIALLY not Ayn Rand... Hmm! Maybe it won't be so bad after all!

***

-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - David and Rafe Newhouse

2011-10-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

Nope! Still out of the biz.

It never gets old

2011-10-09T14:20:00.000-07:00

Greetings, my ten followers! That can be taken a couple different ways, of course: the never gets old part. One could say that the formula of the underdog triumphing in the ring never gets old. One could also say that a robot never gets old... but they do tend to get a little rusty. In any event, the box office market has spoken: Karate Kid trumps Primary Colors today. Perhaps any day, but today particularly. And PG-13 trumps R today as well. Which makes me want to focus in a bit on Shawn Levy, director of Real Steel, because every once in a while a director like Jay Roach comes along with that magic touch, the ability to get #1 hits on a fairly consistent basis. 2003's Just Married was a #1 hit; for one week, anyway. 2006's Pink Panther remake was a #1 hit. Night at the Museum 1 and 2 were SO #1 hits... and on and on. When's this guy going to take a break to start his own studio? Not that successful yet, I guess. A film director's job is starting to look less and less glamorous to me as the years drag on. Especially for TV, even though they're working on that quality gap between movies and TV. It may already be equal for all I know; Joe Dante seems to think so.

Still with plenty of bricks 72 years on...

2011-10-04T01:14:00.000-07:00

Finally! Another one I'm sorta familiar with. But time does march on, and when Dick Curtis tells the gang that their musical number was awful, I'm more inclined to agree with him these days.

ACT ONE

Scene: Maxey's Place in the New West. Curly's got a fancy bicycle, a precursor to those damn tiny scooters that seemed to be everywhere about ten years ago... damn, has it been that long? Anyway, Moe and Larry and three chicks are singing "Red River Valley." Ah, comedians. They always work with the prettiest chicks of average talent, don't they? Curly arrives late, and has an appropriate reaction to his boss. Curly gets kicked in the ass and proceeds to join the rest on stage. Curly drastically changes the dynamic when the sextet sings "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain," and Moe gives Curly such a slap, it literally makes Curly's hat spin off of his head! That's worth the price of admission right there, folks. (Curly 2:44)
Meanwhile, back to work. Curly dispenses beers like nobody's business... and they'll be out of business if Larry keeps spilling 'em! And then... the plot pudding thickens before bubbling. The bad guy from the last film shows up here as Dick Curtis' henchman. He pays for a drink with a $20 gold piece by mistake. From there, the Stooges get the idea that they can pan for gold and make a lot of money.
Now, here's a part not for modern audiences. Curly dreams of the future, and says the following: "Oh boy! I can see it now: Me coming home from a hard day's work, I whistle for the dog, and my wife comes out..." To lessen the impact of that offence, Curly elaborates: "Me, with my own wife and children! Dozens of 'em!" (children, that is.) Moe holds up two fingers and asks, "How many is that?" Well, let's face it, folks: when you've made an institutional investment in comedy as the Stooges did, ad-libbing's just that much easier. By the time this scene ends, however, they've clearly come to the end of their ad-libbing, and Moe seems genuinely upset!

ACT TWO
We see the bad guys burying a bunch of money they just robbed from a bank. The arch bad guy... Maxey? But he's a dude! Anyway, "Maxey" bites into something way too hard and loses a gold filling. The other guy, a plot genius, says, "We ain't got time to look for it now..." Is there any doubt that this gold filling will get found later on? Seems like Larry David's been studying Stooge films for plot-development inspiration! No wonder he's got a part in the upcoming Three Stooges movie. Lucky for him he doesn't have to wait for the Farrellys to make a movie for future employment. Meanwhile, the Stooges are heading right for the spot where the illicit loot was recently buried. They do the ol' six legs routine, but don't quite pull it off this time. (It's Curly and a horse in the water, not the three of them...) For some reason, certain lines stick in the craw of memory forever. One of them is when Curly says that the eggs are "nice and fresh in the sun." Larry must've complained that he's more than just his haircut, so he's got an interfilm recurring gag involving the simple act of chopping wood for a fire. Every time Larry chops wood, one piece flies very, very high up into the air. This time it falls and hits him on the head. I don't think that part happens every time, but I could be wrong... and I probably am about that. Curly ends up falling over the burro, taking all the provisions with him. I'm pretty sure it was a stunt double, however, and I'm pretty sure that the stunt double tried yelling like Curly as he went over.

Act 2.5: Some pretty ambitious plotting ahead. Seems a shame to waste the cut of beef that they do. As it turns out, their burro is named Yorick, so here's how they set up the Hamlet reference. Larry bends his ax on a rock, picks up the rock and throws it over his shoulder. The rock hits Curly and thinks Moe threw it. Curly throws the very light rock at Moe's head. Moe doesn't have a rock handy, so he throws a lit stick of dynamite instead. Makes sense somehow. This lit stick of dynamite lands in front of Yorick the burro. Moe realizes the consequences of what he's done and gets whipped into a frenzy. Curly catches second-hand frenzy. The two of them search for a bucket of water, and they don't see that the dog has moved the dynamite to a safer location. They arrive to douse the dynamite, find it missing, and think the burro swallowed it. Eventually, there's an explosion, and the three knuckleheads are pelted with a fairly large amount of stuff. The cut of beef lands in front of them, and they of course think it's Yorick. Moe gets to utter the line, of course.

ACT THREE
The act break's a little uncertain here. This seems to be more like a two-act thing, or maybe I didn't take enough drama classes in college. I guess Act Three begins in earnest when Curly discovers gold... arguably, it's not as legendary as some, but more watchable, at least. JMHO. The gold fever hits the boys hard. Curly and Moe start digging the movie dirt so fast and furious, it freaks out their dog. In one bravura, uncut sequence, Larry brings a bunch of tools and drops them on Moe's feet. The scene continues. Moe gets hit in the ass with one of the picks, and Moe hits Curly on the head with his pick. They had to edit there to switch Moe's pick with a comedy pick. As any Stooge fan will tell you, Curly's head is made of tool-ravaging corundum. But does he not still feel pain? Moe uses an actual pick this time and drives it into the ground. When it gets pulled out, it's got a big wad of bills stuck to it! They eventually uncover all the buried loot and proceed to go back to town to start their new life. I know, I know, but it's part of the Stooge persona to never look a gift horse in the mouth. But it works against them later on when they go back to the very crooks who buried the dough in the first place. The shooting begins.
Curly really f... screws up this time. Moe sits Curly in a chair in front of the door so the bad guys won't get in. Moe says, "Put your weight on that." It doesn't work. Curly's got the bag of money. Maxey says, "GIMME THAT!" Curly throws it at him and makes his way out the window after Moe and Larry.
Anyway, I better cut it short now. There's a big car chase, and the bad guys end up driving into the sheriff's office. Moe tells the sheriff, Vernon Dent, that the bad guys stole the Stooges' dough. Vernon Dent looks at the dough and tells them that it was stolen from the First National Bank. Moe looks rightly disappointed and says "And all the time I thought we had a bonanza." Curly says, "Yes, we have no bonanza!" and starts n'yuk-n'yuk-ing. He turns and looks at Larry, and Larry makes like he's going to slap Curly. Now, I've heard a story that this is where the film was SUPPOSED to end. Fortunately, cooler or hotter heads prevailed. Moe finds himself a nice-looking brick and hits Curly over the head with it. Hopefully it was a prop brick, but it had a lot of prop dust on it! The scene goes on a little longer after that, apparently all ad-libbed, as only the Stooges could, of course. This one's probably not a 4-star Stooge short, but I've seen it so many times already that I can't help but be impartial.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Darin and Glen Morgan

2011-10-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

Moving swiftly on to the next set of auteurs, it's time to look at Glen and Darin Morgan. Glen Morgan's the kind of guy who has an admirable Hollywood career. Not exemplary, like Spielberg, Scorsese, Zemeckis, Troy Duffy, what have you. Just admirable. He gets work and he does it. Maybe not quite the kind of guy who works on The Incredible Hulk, wears a gold chain and tells people "I gotta eat, don't I?" Just seemingly stuck in the Hollywood middle class of the DGA. He's formed a Coen brothers-style bond with James Wong, apparently, but they're probably not going to share the Oscar for best direction any time soon. Glen's worked on many TV shows, and cut his teeth on The X-Files for a while, as did a lot of other people. Now, Darin, on the other hand... when one saw "Written by Darin Morgan" in the credits of an X-Files episode, hold on to your hats! Carnival freaks, psychics, Charles Nelson Reilly... definitely a cut above in quality. Arguably, this new-found prestige clearly went to his head with the episode of Millennium called "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me." But he appears to have paid a long-enough penance and is now back in the good graces of Steady Employment In Showbiz. Unfortunately, Darin's no longer appearing on the radar of Good TV writing, but really, with this whole damn internet craze, who can these days? It's all about personality now! The Situation! Tina Fey! Larry David! Lawrence O'Donnell! Rage... taking over... I better just go on to the next Stooge film.

Short Reviews - September 2011

2011-10-03T02:24:00.001-07:00

Better get this over with now. Having it out of order will seem fresh and new! Right?

Fire Down Below - Best movie ever about irritable bowel syndrome... second best ever

The Ladykillers - Am I the only one who thinks John Boehner resembles Garth Pancake?

Thank You for Smoking - Did Garth Pancake just go right from the Ladykillers set to this one? I think he did

Airplane II: The Sequel - Welp, it's still maintained a certain sense of dignity ... by not being available for free on Hulu... or is that actually worse?

Men in Black III - How did I get from Airplane 2 to M3B? Two words: Rip Torn.

The Debt - Aw, can't a girl pretend to be young? Incidentally, good double bill with Hanna

The Gospel According to Vic - The cinema's never been quite the same since the word "According" has been banned from the marquee

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - What does it say about our culture that the bad and the ugly get two separate categories? Well, I guess I should be thankful, actually... When they remake it, it'll be either "The Good and The Fugly" or "The Good and The Bugly."

The Hottie and The Nottie - Sounds about right, but what about the hottie and the naughty?

Eddie - No Homer?

Homer and Eddie - Whew! Thank the heavens...

The Driver - No character names, just the role they play

Two-Lane Blacktop - No character names, just the role they play

Drive - Ryan Gosling's the new Transporter!

Up the Creek - Deservedly obscure "sequel" to Animal House

Evolution - This movie doesn't exist

Freddy Got Fingered - Tom Green reportedly wanted to make the grossest, most obnoxious movie ever made. This cinematic goal wasn't hard to achieve, as Tom Green himself is arguably the grossest, most obnoxious thing in it.

Atlas Shrugged - Charlize Theron mingled with deceased actresses in Dior ad, but appearing in Atlas Shrugged, written by a deceased novelist, might've been much worse!

Real Steel - The Transformer Kid

"Up All Night" - Arnett's and Poehler's marriage is in trouble...

The Human Centipede Part Two - Ladies and gentlemen, behold the new Saw series!

Hook - Glenn Close is going to play a 19th Century cross-dressing waiter in an upcoming film. Will this win her an Oscar, some are asking? Well, her role in Hook certainly helped her prepare... for both, frankly.

City of Joy - Nobody puts Bethel in a corner.

Creature - It still made more money than Zzyzyx Road!

Anonymous - From the director who brought you Universal Soldier, The Patriot, Independence Day... now he's blowing up Shakespeare!

Lincoln - Now that Liam Neeson's not playing the iconic 16th president, I've got a great role idea for him, should he choose to come back out of retirement... Liam Neeson IS Fidel Castro!!!!

"Whitney" - Seems familiar... "Flying Blind" with Tea Leoni...

The Ides of March - Clooney's The Ghost Writer?

Another Bull$#!t Night in Suck City - That's how they'll have to put it on the marquee, anyway... Why can't they just call it something not as harsh, like Another Lame Night in Lametown?

"Revenge" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1837642/fullcredits#cast
Careful, Madeleine... you're gonna get typecast!

Radioland Murders - Good double bill w/Hudsucker?

Cujo - Good, but still not as scary as the Beethoven movies

"Persons of Interest" - Is that Arye Gross and the Jesus guy, James Caviezel?... damn! One of two. The Arye Gross guy is... Michael Emerson... FINCH!!!!!!

Big Trouble - We will never forget... that the original release date of this movie was moved up because of September 11th.

"2 Broke Girls" - Must be another reality show, the opposite of The Simple Life

Real Steel 2 - They're going to make a sequel already? How's that? What if Real Steel 1 totally bombs?

John Dies at the End - Great title! ...is that Woody Harrelson as a zombie? Is that Paul Giamatti? The stars go slumming; must've been a fun shoot...

50/50 vision...

2011-10-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

Please! A little respect. I mean, JoGoLev plays a CANCER victim, for God's sake! There's four debuts this week, and NONE of them cracked the top three! Just as long as The Help's gone... whew! Thank goodness. Now it's Dolphin Tale... get it? Actually, dolphins have a dorsal fin... Oh, it's an exciting time for animal-centered family friendly fare. Except for Mr. Popper's Penguins; that didn't make as much. Audiences couldn't get past Mr. Popper, apparently. Moneyball's hanging in there as well. The debuts are: 50/50, Courageous, Dream House, James Bond's tenth film THIS YEAR, and What's Your Number? I'm very behind the times, I'm sure, but it seems to me that twenty ex's is a lot for anybody. I hope that's at least two standard deviations above the mean.

Like a duck on Moe's back

2011-10-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

Pushing the big deadline again! Just like a Stooge, for God's sake. In the instant case, A Ducking They Did Go, we find the Stooges down on their luck again, all too ready to be on the run from the cops, even though their dogs are barking. The perfect opportunity presents itself: a bunch of watermelons await stealing on the back of a truck. The boys make like it's all a big football game. Moe grabs a papier maché melon and passes it to Larry, who hikes it to Curly. Even the truck driver, whose melon is being stolen, gets caught up in the spirit of the football moment. Curly fails to catch the melon, but a cop's head manages to catch it! Ain't that always the way? The chase begins and, as usually happens, the boys run into an employment opportunity that will typically consume the rest of the pic. In this case, as salesmen for something called the "Canvas Back Duck Club." Like canvas off a duck's back... that's gotta be a pun of some sort; probably more of its day.

ACT ONE
The boys proceed to impress the two heads of the Canvas Back Duck Club. The big time waster comes early as Curly finally solves the mystery of the name "Canvas Back." Fortunately, Moe puts a quick stop to all that by saying his two magic words: "See that?" The two heads of the Canvas Back Duck Club put a stop to the Stooges' primitive behaviour and tell the Stooges to appeal to the primitive in office jockeys everywhere with a membership in the Canvas Back Duck Club. The Stooges get ten percent of fifty dollars! A lot of money back then. The two heads show their hand early... is this whole thing just a giant scam? During the Great Depression, no less? Well, even the Stooges should be suspicious of any business that would hire them as salesmen. Unless, of course, it gives them an opportunity to break a whole hell of a lot of bottles standing on a table... which one was that? The Bright-O one... Maybe it's this one. I dunno... that guy wasn't too happy about Curly giving him an egg hand! (3:23 here...)

ACT TWO
It seems to start here as the boys leave the office in full salesman regalia. As usual, Vernon Dent runs afoul of the Stooges. Later on, he don't want a coat. He could use a good wardrobe here! He decides it's best to just get on the elevator without using the opportunity to vow that if he ever sees them again... well, you'll get used to the routine eventually. The Stooges pad out the scene in the hallway for as long as they can and head outside to begin their typical sales approach, behaving like a swarm of angry wasps. They try selling to the watermelon-headed cop, and the chase begins anew. The cop shoots into the air, hits a lamp light, causing it to fall on his head. You don't usually see that move these days in real life. The boys go from the frying pan to the fire, and find temporary safety in the police station. Well, we're not talking about a butterfly giving its grub to a bunch of ants here, and the cops aren't wise to the Stooges yet. And even though Moe's got a hunting gun with him, alarms aren't raised. They stumble into the office of the Chief of Police, played by the ever-reliable Bud Jamison. Authority figure, thug, any and all bad accents, the guy does it all. The Stooges give the sales pitch of a lifetime, and the Chief buys it!
The Stooges sell all the memberships and head back to the head office. The Stooges have a hard time getting their commission; they probably should've helped themselves to it in advance, but frankly, that's not fitting behavior for a Stooge. They would apparently have similar royalty troubles with Columbia to no end.

ACT 2.5?
The Stooges find themselves at some fancy club, singing that song they always sing: "You'll never know just what tears are 'til you made me cry the way..." ...something like that. An old timer swings by and tells the club goers that 1) the club ain't been used in years and 2) there ain't been no ducks in years. Dramatic tension mounted! The Stooges will go and find ducks by hook or by crook. Why, the Police would expect no less! Moe and Larry get by as best they can, but their supply of fake ducks runs out. And then, Curly saves the day... well, Moe's and Larry's day, anyway. Guess this is Act Three after all. Curly's ducks head out to be slaughtered. The shooting begins in earnest; the earlier deception apparently forgiven. The Stooges get caught up in this new frenzy and end up destroying their boat in the process. And then... Curly runs afoul of a comedy duck. Don't worry, you'll see this routine many times later on. Later on, Moe will try killing a comedy duck with an oar.

EPILOGUE
Karma is re-aligned in the end. As it turns out, Curly's ducks were the earlier yokel's prize ducks. The Stooges run away with asses full of buckshot, which would be enough in a normal film. For a Stooge-caliber film, what better ending than to re-enact the ending of A Pain in the Pullman, where the boys land on three bulls and bronco their way towards the sunset? Frankly, all the Pixar/Lucas magic in the world couldn't improve the gag; just make it better looking.

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Robert, Thomas and Charles McKimson

2011-09-25T01:48:00.001-07:00

Let's face it, folks. This damn internet's just bottlenecking the way we think about things. Example: ... When I say the word "Example" by itself, chances are you're probably going to think about the opening sequence in Pulp Fiction with Jules and Vincent where they're discussing world fast food cuisine. Another example: when one thinks of the great Looney Tunes directors, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones are currently neck and neck for first place. Everyone else is a distant second... Damn! Forgot Tex Avery! See what I mean? Okay... personally, I put Clampett and Avery in first place, with Jones a close second. I prefer my cartoons wacky and elastic, what can I say? Jones is far too intellectual for my taste, but he of course has his moments, and his share of the golden eternal Looney Tunes greats. As for all the rest, well, they're a distant third. Take the McKimsons, for example. They've done their share of great works... haven't they?? Of the three, Thomas is clearly the omega brother in terms of industry work. He started out early in the biz, but gave up after Mexican Joyride... and after working for Art Davis, who can blame him? The attitude I've copped about Arthur Davis is still with me, I'm afraid, at least in terms of Warner Bros. cartoons. Catch as Cats Can, for example, gives cartoon violence a bad name. Charles started in the biz a little later than Thomas, but stuck around a bit longer to make a name for himself. Robert was apparently the lone director of the triad and, judging from the dates each threw off this mortal coil, animation directing takes a harder toll than the actual animation itself. And this was the early days of the craft! All those lead-based paints used in unventilated rooms... I can only assume, anyway. Daffy Doodles, a McKimson joint, is still one of my favorite Daffy cartoons. Great ending. But I will confess that Easter Yeggs also gives a black eye to cartoon violence. When Elmer Fudd, with his bald head painted to look like a giant easter egg, gets his head repeatedly hit with a hammer... well, at my age I can't help but cringe. The McKimsons, if they didn't create Foghorn Leghorn, seemed to prefer doing Leghorn shorts. And they also did Rabbit's Kin, a rare cartoon that was actually recommended to ME. I'm usually the one who does the recommending and the re-enacting of these damn cartoons. Another classic, but it took the Tiny Toons to give Pete Puma another job.
Sadly, Bob hung on as long as he could through the '60s, when the Looney Tunes began their slow decline and eventual disappearance from theaters, and he finally buckled and switched over to do some Pink Panther cartoons. I guess he got on pretty well with ol' Friz, another name not held in as high of an esteem as Clampett and Jones. Hmm! I wonder if my blog's been hacked yet. I seem to be getting an unusually high number of 'blank.gif' messages into my text. Damn hyperlinks. And with that, I guess I'm done! Hang in there, McKimsons, and you'll eventually get the credit you deserve. A toast to the greatest trio of brothers to work in the Looney Tunes, damn it!

The Lion is King again!!!

2011-09-25T01:46:00.001-07:00

Might as well use the same image. Ooh! Let's see if the code works... Code beautiful, as the Hulk might say, and as the computer nerd's magazine should be named. Or maybe they should go the other way, and change the name of Dr. Dobb's Journal to 0000001 Magazine. Something like that. Anyway, once again the hottest new movie of the week is 90s nostalgia. And the Cable Ace Award for Best New Series goes to... old Starsky and Hutches. (Accepting this award is the son of the guy who played Huggy Bear!) A DOUBLE dose of Simpsons and 90s nostalgia for ya. Of course, as much as I love the Simpsons, even I had to take exception to Homer inventing grunge. And I don't even care for grunge all that much! I know, it's not cool to call it grunge. Unfair to garage bands everywhere. I wanna keep it short this week, even though we've got four debuts again. The latest Brad Pitt vehicle debuts behind Lion King, the sequel to Shark Tale opens at #3, and at #4 is the not-soon-enough sequel to Taken called Abduction. Let's face it: Team Jacob's a bunch of cheapskates. Finally, we have Statham's Fall 2011 remake of The Mechanic called Killer Elite. Now De Niro's the... lemme see if I can find it. Got it! Now De Niro's the Jean-Pierre, mentoring the young generation that all the old fogies so desperately want to rejoin. Take Kirk Douglas at the Oscars, fer instance...

Jay O. Sanders: Alpha Male

2011-09-24T01:25:00.001-07:00

Of course, there are alpha males to spare in director Martin Campbell's Edge of Darkness, based on a miniseries he apparently directed 25 years earlier. Well, nuclear was more of a rage back then, as it seemed we'd never be rid of it. Now it seems it will never stop diversifying. I will say off the top that this shortened, theatrical remake is surprisingly restrained compared to, say, Campbell's Bond pics and Zorro pics. But there does seem to be a nod to Bond when the main guy finds himself handcuffed to a gurney, and there does seem to be a nod to the ending of Braveheart before Braveheart gets killed on the chopping block. But I'll try not to give too much away, in plot terms.
While Mel Gibson's public persona is still in the crapper, his on-screen persona's doing pretty good, and here he plays a good guy with a strong moral compass, but he doesn't get to do his trademark Lethal Weapon running. It kinda got old after Ransom, but maybe that's just me. Maybe for his next movie he can do a road pic with Lindsay Lohan and call it a day. Two wrongs make a right?
Mel at least surrounds himself with top-notch actor types, with Danny Huston as the smarmy CEO of a shady company, and Ray Winstone as the token British guy with a high-ranking low-profile job in the American NSA... how'd that happen, egg-zactly? Don't think about it too much. Come to think of it, there's a lot here not to think about too much. For one, Mel plays a single dad with a twenty-something daughter. Where's her momma at? I told you this film was full of alpha males. Also, there's this girl that Mel talks to about the evil Halliburton-type corporation in the movie, and she ends up getting hurt when she steps out of his car... Was I the only one that thought the timing on that was a little too neat? Probably. I will say that I was surprised by Ray Winstone's end in the film. Doesn't happen often enough as far as I'm concerned, but I guess we don't have a lot of senators involved in the real shady stuff. But every film now is apparently going to be obsessed with death, and the need for a short list of rules to live your life by. I go with Monty Python's list at the end of "The Meaning of Life:" Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book now and then, get some walking in, and try and live in peace and harmony with all peoples and nations... something like that. Of course, no matter how old the likes of Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford get, they can still kick any young person's ass. Must be all that yoga they're doing.

Good double bill with: State of Play, another film based on a British mini-series, and starring a hunky Aussie leading man

***
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

America Needs RootinTootin

2011-09-18T22:40:00.001-07:00

Finally! One I'm sorta familiar with, even though I ain't seen it in years. The Stooges appeal to the kids generally, but their plots don't usually reflect it. This one does more so than others. Gotta keep it short this week, so I'll try to stick with the fundamentals... let's see how well I do.

ACT ONE
The Egyptian Room of ye local Museum of Ancient History is missing the body of King RootinTootin. Well, gotta get the kids interested in Egyptology somehow. Comedy names are as good a place to start as any. Enter those two titans of the Stooge rolling stock company: grand elocutor James C. Morton and Lou Dobbs-lookalike Bud C. Jamison. Anyway, these two knuckleheads have gone and lost an important professor, so they send for three more knuckleheads to find him. You almost have the Raiders of the Lost Ark plot, but somehow not the production values. There's a card game joke, and Moe makes sure the joke is terribly over-explained. (i.e., 3:03 here) Bud and Morton decide to put the Stooges to work on their mission of great danger. "If the curse gets them, it'll be a blessing to humanity." Good thing the Stooges have bad hearing and couldn't hear the whispers. But of course, economic incentives trump all, and $5,000 was a hella lot of money back then. Today it's a nice down payment on a gallon of gas.

ACT TWO
Act Two comes early! The boys hitch a cab ride to Egypt. If your child isn't thunderstruck by this, well... kids are a hella lot more cynical these days. Moe comes on over the cab radio. Curly gets in some good Egypt-related puns, but what's his reward? The usual physical abuse, of course. The part to pad out the film: Curly goes "swimming" in some "water." This leads to an extremely blatant plot device, but never mind. At least they got out of paying the cab fare. The boys find themselves in RootinTootin's tomb. At least, that's what the helpful sinister voice says. They do some cardio, then slow it down a bit when Moe elects Curly the new leader. The blind leading the blind. The boys end up separated, Curly runs afoul of his own echo, then stumbles into a secret mummy room. Henry Silva plays the mummy that gets poked in the eyes by Curly.

ACT THREE
The act dividing lines get a little fuzzy between acts two and three, but the Stooges stumble headlong into another secret mummy room. Moe sees a mummy on a big table in the middle of the room, and declares they've found RootinTootin. Curly notes that the "place" is full of RootinTootins. We see the sinister eyes behind the wall again. Curly is put in charge of taking care of the RootinTootin on the table. Well, he does about as well as Bill Paxton with the safe in Titanic, I would say. And then, we get the subplot. The boys overhear the kidnapped professor, and the second claim on the reward money. Just go with it. Somehow, this wasn't enough to end the film, so an "Egyptian" crocodile enters the picture. It gets a hold of Curly, and Curly makes as loud an anguish noise as I've ever heard. All in all, a fine Stooge pic. One of the greats. Why I don't have it on DVD I'll never know. Well, it is a tight economy these days. I've got plenty of copies of Disorder in the Court, that's for sure. God bless YouTube!

Wikipedia entry for We Want Our Mummy

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Mary and Kevin McCarthy

2011-09-18T22:24:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm just blatantly padding this out now. Neither one of these two were directors... but I did just find out that Kevin worked on many an occasion with director Joe Dante, and Mary got one of her books turned into a movie by Sidney Lumet, so you know they were hanging with the right people. They went from being the toast of the West Coast (Seattle) to being the toast of the East Coast! Kevin died in Massachusetts, so I guess he'd had enough of the Emerald City for one lifetime. What does it say about a man who's been in 100 films, and yet has his résumé shrunk down to four, one of which was his dynamic performance in UHF? Funny how that works. Kevin appeared in many a Dante pic, but never quite like Innerspace. That must've been a fun time. God rest both your souls, and now that you're both in Heaven, try and work on a project together, for all our sakes!!!

Hey! Remember the 90s?

2011-09-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

No, my increasingly fatigued eyes aren't deceiving me, but I did have to double check Variety, just in case. It's not often I need a second box office opinion, but IMDb's been getting kinda flaky lately with all these movies that have the same title bombarding the Top 10. Good strategy, incidentally! Yes, one of the tewnty biggest box office hits of 1994 is just as potent today. The Lion King. Somehow, this has got to be Obama's fault. At #3, Drive debuts strong. Somehow, I can't help but think that Breaking Bad's got something to do with it. I heard they have a teaser clip of the 5th season. I CAN'T WAIT THAT LONG!!! To continue the car theme, Breaking Bad's kinda doing donuts right now... but tonight's episode was pretty exciting. Nyaah, nyaah, gotta see it for yourself. A remake of Straw Dogs debuts higher than I thought at #5. Well, who among us doesn't want to see Kate Bosworth get raped on screen? ... they kept that part in, right? The location was switched from somewhere across the pond to the (American) South, without much loss of continuity. The Dustin Hoffman character is now a screenwriter, so this must've been based on a not-as-bad experience that director Rod Lurie had... I'm thinking it happened in the checkout line at Whole Foods. Close enough. But get back to the movies and TV shows about American presidents, okay, Rod? You're not going to re-remake Walking Tall next, I hope and trust? The final debut this week is Sarah Jessica Parker's latest movie called Tyler Perry's I Don't Know How She Does It... I may be wrong about Madea's involvement, I'm not sure. All I know is that they'll need to find a new title for Sex and the City 3. I'm outta here.

Time for Curly to get a spring on his ass again...

2011-09-16T01:37:00.000-07:00

Republic of Televania... the very idea. Welp, Three Little Sew and Sews finds the boys as tailors, employed by the Navy this time, apparently. And once again, they must play second fiddle to the main story. But having to play second fiddle to the likes of James C. Morton, the third greatest thing to come out of Montana and find its way to Hollywood... the other two being Dana Carvey and David Lynch, of course... there's probably others I'm forgetting, of course. Sure are plenty going the other way, even now, no? Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, all sorts of Hollywood phonies getting their slice of the Montana pie. Gotta love them huckleberries! Anyway, this Admiral fella gets an invitation to a fancy luncheon. The Admiral's name is... wait for it........ Taylor! Coincidence? I hope so.

ACT ONE
We find the boys in a terribly disgruntled state. I've never seen Moe do an impression of Curly! Or have I? Must've happened at least once. The boys are trying to leave early for the weekend, when the big assignment comes down: press the Admiral's suit so he can get to that damn luncheon. Meanwhile, Curly becomes a blatant opportunist after finding the invitation letter in the jacket pocket. He puts on the uniform, gets Moe and Larry thrown in the brig for striking an "officer," then rubs it in... until he gets caught, by Admiral Taylor no less! Curly manages to get away from Taylor's clutches, get Moe and Larry released, and off to the party they go.

ACT TWO
Scene: Count Gehrol's party. Curly works fast and sits on a couch with a lady spy whose attempts to massage info out of Curly have to be intensified due to the film's short running time. Moe and Larry try to impress a couple chicks the only way they know how: showing off their tattoos, of course! Some interesting dubbing from 7:10 to 7:15 in the aforementioned YouTube link. Curly also uses his normal voice throughout the proceedings, most notably in the brig where Moe and Larry were locked up.
Dude! Curly's pitching some SERIOUS woo! So much so that Vernon Dent gets rubbed the wrong way by it. Offended, even! Well, he was a Christian Scientist, apparently... then again, maybe not. Curly's attempts to plead ignorant, and the dame's attempts to squeeze information... where does it all end? Anyway, one thing leads to another, and Curly's attempts to score backfire. Cue the spring. Cue the struggle to escape the gravity of the couch. Vernon Dent cracks up. Curly tells him "You're getting in my hair!", which he'll tell Vernon in a similar situation in An Ache in Every Stake, if I remember correctly. Enter the REAL Admiral Taylor... SPOILER ALERT. Watch it yourself now! Okay, you asked for it! Bud Jamison as the cop guarding the Count's party, is all too eager to eject James C. Morton from the party, save for one last test: the real Admiral Taylor will ask the Stooges if they will admit that they're impostors and that the real Admiral Taylor is the real Admiral Taylor. The charade continues. James C. Morton is ejected, the Stooges plan thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifir escape from the Navy, and the Count, a spy, proceeds to work his magic vis-a-vis that dame again. The Stooges take her to a submarine... something like that. They leave the party, but not before Larry and Curly engage in some petty larceny of some bakery goods. Larry's not usually one to steal cake, but desperate times call for desperate desserts!.... something like that.

ACT THREE
Oh, it turns into a big action climax! I simply can't give you the blow-by-blow for fear of ruining it. They at least don't resort to the old two-guys-in-one-coat fight scene strategy which you'll see several times if you're a Stooge film addict like me. But we do see the depth gauge, apparently designed by the Moore Shipbuilding Company, showing that the sub hits the ocean floor. Curly practices for when they run out of air. Well, a man's got to know his limitations, and seeing as how the Stooges probably don't know how to drive a sub... and then the dramatic tension is cranked up another couple notches. The orders are now to destroy the sub at all costs. "That is all," says the voice. Says Moe, "That is all? Ain't that enough?" The boys get busy turning wheels, spinning dials, anything to end this damn movie!!! And then, through a miracle, the sub rises back into the water and starts moving. Curly starts n'yuk n'yuk-ing out of sheer joie de vivre, closes his eyes, turns a certain knob, them BLAM!!! A blast of water right in the face. I don't think he was quite prepared for the sheer magnitude of the blast. Good lord. He would've been better off getting poked in the eyes. It happens at 5:26 here. Okay, I gotta try and wrap this up now. Three more minutes to go!!! ...you know what? Why should I suffer alone? A classic. Four stars.

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - David and Jennifer Chambers Lynch

2011-09-16T01:21:00.000-07:00

Where to begin, where to begin... I forget where I saw the quote now; isn't the Cloud wonderful? The World Wide series of tubes? It's out there, though, and perhaps none better than Jennifer Chambers Lynch expresses the ennui of the nepotist working class in Hollywood, saying that she's happy to be getting back to work again. Oh, the Proles, how funny they are.
But let's get back to that conclave of icons, the late 70s, early 80s, when David Lynch paved the way for the tearing down of the American edifice upon which our preconceived notions once hung. It all started with Eraserhead, Lynch's take on parenting. The deformed, cackling child becomes father of the tallhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-haired man. Then, on to bigger, more prestigious black and white projects with The Elephant Man... did you know that Demme wanted Hannibal Lecter to be the evil version of the doctor in The Elephant Man? Kewl! But just when Hollywood opened its doors to David Lynch, giving him the chance to direct Return of the Jedi, he said no thanks. What, is he crazy? Short answer: yes. Case in point: Wild at Heart, or the film shown to Alex during his eyedrop treatment. The stage was now set for Pulp Fiction to win the Palme D'Or. Crazy French!!
And of course it was about this time that Boxing Helena came out, amid much anti-fanfare. Well, a chick like Helena you apparently don't cut up all at once. And with that, the daughter is relegated once again to the shadows as the father reaches critical acclaim with such projects as Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. Well, one does have to hand it to Twin Peaks: at least they knew when to quit. Breaking Bad, not so much. All I'm saying is: something big better happen soon, if only because the entire cast is now getting too much movie work! And so, after almost 20 years, the next generation of Lynches is ready to be the new generation of iconoclast. I haven't been able to figure how good Surveillance did amongst the critics, but judging from the projects on her plate, it musta did something. She must've come in under budget and not been too much of a bitch on set. Bronwen Hughes could learn a thing or two from Lynch's sterling example!

We will never forget

2011-09-12T22:24:00.001-07:00

It's a tragic week for all Americans, and really, for all peoples all over the world... I'm referring of course to the poor box office performance of Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star. All that lost money. Truly, the terrorists have won anew. Doesn't anyone understand? They hate us for our freedoms! The freedom to go to the cinema and contemplate the comic space that Nick Swardson's genitalia occupy! The space close to it, the space a slightly farther distance away. What part of "patriotic duty" don't you ungrateful bastards understand?
But every dark cloud has a silver lining, even on this sad chapter in Happy Madison history. A movie FINALLY edged The Help out of the #1 spot. Yes, the Godless Heathens of Hollywood put their best and brightest forward with a nice, good ol' fashioned schlocky horror flic, the kind Robert Wise used to make, and it's called Contagion, the story of a non-anthrax germ that conquers the known world, doing a better job than... well, than Bucky Larson, frankly! The other debut this week is Warrior, and not the 2002 Warrior like those jokers over at the IMDb mistakenly thought was #3. No, it's the latest entry in the Fighting/Girlfight/Fast and Furious without cars genre for the high school grad set. But let's get back to this whole Bucky Larson thing. According to Variety... yes, THAT Variety, B.Lar was going to hit paydirt among the 25 year old demographic. For those of you who don't yet know, Bucky Larson is the story of a guy named Bucky Larson who follows in his parents' footsteps and becomes a porn star. Turns out the 25-year olds out there apparently would rather just watch porn instead. Okay, I better leave it at that.

Be-vare, take care.... Be-vare... VAIT! PULL DE STRING! PULL DE STRING!

2011-09-09T01:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry, that's the only pun I could think of. Can't spend the usual amount of time or energy on this week's Stooge film, and perhaps that's the appropriate response. A film like this, why... you just should sit back and enjoy it on your own terms! Charley Chase strikes again as Stooge director with Flat Foot Stooges, but it's the second to last one. Saved by the Belle's the last one. I didn't remember the title, but I did remember that it was full of earthquakes. Looked pretty good, too! Damaged buildings, not just the shaky camera. Anyway, back to this one. This is another one where the Stooges play firemen. It doesn't seem to be terribly clever, as Chase was usually wont to do, unless one considers where the fire takes place. Was it original, though? Who knows...
As for the cast, the dude who harassed the Stooges in The Great War appears here as a fire station boss. Dick Curtis and Chester Conklin, on the other hand, they're clearly slumming. I think this is the first Stooge short that Curtis is in, maybe Conklin. But seeing as how Curtis appeared in Capra's You Can't Take It With You, and Conklin worked with Chaplin so much, well... guess the Stooges were the paying jobs, who knows. They can't all be labours of love; otherwise, one can't eat! Anyway, like all classy films, the Stooges deals with a turning point in history. In this case, when the horse-drawn fire engine was being replaced by gas-powered ones. Surely the gas-powered ones had almost total market share by this point? And W.C. Fields and others made comic hay out of that damn ladder! The urgency of getting to a fire combined with the need to hang off of that ladder as it hangs over the side, right in the way of oncoming traffic. Well, spoiler alert: none of those kinds of shenanigans here, but shenanigans nonetheless. For starters, Curly's come up with a new invention. Yes, even Curly has ideas for inventions, just no startup capital to bring it to greater fruition. One just has to find the right string to pull... (from the film)
As the Stooges don't tend to set the plot in motion, enter the villain: a dude wanting to sell the old man a new-fangled fire engine. Capitalism at its finest. After getting caught taking matters into his own hands, a chase ensues that results in a fire starting in the upper floor of the firehouse. The Stooges, showing why it's the nightmare scenario to have them as firemen, mistake the place of origin of an emergency call as the place of origin of the fire, and off they go. Through a comic mishap involving a beta version of Curly's invention, the horses take off running, leaving the horse-drawn fire engine as a Stooge-drawn fire engine. Using their populist powers, they quickly summon an army of volunteers to pull the fire engine, Keystone Kops style, to where the call came from. It's only through a miracle they discover they're going the wrong way: the dude who started the firehouse fire, finds himself trapped by it, and yells very VERY loudly for help. The fire engine gets dragged back to the fire house by all those people, the... I tend to not be exhaustive in my plot descriptions. The fire chief's daughter was also trapped by the fire. The net crew end up saving her, while the bad guy falls safely into a giant pothole in front of the fire station... they really ought to fill that up, lest another stunt man fall into it! Ultimately, the victory belongs to the modern fire engine. The bad guy gets away, and the Stooges start to chase after him. They fall into the hole the bad guy fell into, but the Stooges aren't as savvy about getting themselves out of a hole. Too busy hitting each other. Ain't it always the way?

good double bill with: False Alarms

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan

Auteur Watch - Jane and Alexandra Lipsitz

2011-09-04T13:36:00.001-07:00

Well, somebody's got to profit off of the Reality TV-ization of American culture, so why not Jane and Alexandra Lipsitz?

Wounds healed and flaunted alike

2011-09-04T13:15:00.001-07:00

I use a non-Firefox browser at my own peril... I was getting worried there for a second! Another holiday brings another delay in box office reporting, and all the stand-up comedians get yet another freebie: "Why do we celebrate work by taking the day off? Huh? What's that all about?" Because work sucks, you moron. Even the average stand-up comedian has taken a hit in their pay lately, I'm assuming. But never fear, because healing is on the march. The whole North-South divide is finally over. We are a united people because of a little independent movie called The Help. This time next year? Tate Taylor will be the name on everyone's lips. So young, so wise, so rugged, so handsome, such an Oscar winner. Copies of Pretty Ugly People will be that much harder to find. What will his next project be? What rift will he breach, what wound to heal? I suggest the East Coast/West Coast rap wars be addressed in HBO Miniseries style. No shame in helming that these days! Look at what's his name... what was that guy's name, just won for The King's Speech. James Cameron's twin brother... Mr. Hooper! That's it.
Anyway, critics are a little mixed about The Debt. They wouldn't be if Peter Morgan wrote the script. No, the powerhouse couple behind Kick Ass is responsible for the script. Now they're just getting greedy... rowr! Oh, she's so not single. Kick Ass 2: Balls to the Wall not going to happen? Blasphemy! Oh, I don't want to know any more. As for the instant case, well, I guess I would've paid better attention had I known that Jessica Chastain would be thrust upon an unsuspecting movie-going public like so much Amanda Seyfried. What is this, her third movie this year? How do some people get so busy? Also, everyone's, like, just jealous that Helen Mirren's trying to play someone in their 40s. She can do it all, baby! And she's done worse, lemme tell ya... I'm sorry, Maxim Magazine, I mean this. Or this! They like The Godfather too, after all.
The other debuts this week are... let me look. Some light, fluffy fare for the horror movie fans out there, probably nothing that will make it into the permanent collection. First, there's Apollo 18, a film that smacks faintly of a Christian production that managed to make it into the lamestream. God bless the motivated! There's also Shark Night 3D. Oh, Colbert's going to have a field day with this one... no, wait, he's afraid of bears. The plot? Sharks eat the cast of Jersey Shore, and the casts of several other reality shows. The American public, having long been trained to efficiently run through the five stages of grief, makes a surprising recovery.