As soon as we saw that scene where these cats head out to a Pabst brewery we walked right out the door and straight outside and down to the P-Deuce 'cause we didn't have any PBR in the entire house! Man, am I ever embarrassed to tell you guys that. I hope you can forgive us. At least take comfort in knowing we rectified the problem ASAP. It won't happen again.
Originally part of our proposed "Michael J Fox Meets Turkey Sandwiches and Sierra Nevadas Thanksgiving '06 Film Festival," but since other Thursday activities came our way we had to pop this one in early. And, holy shit, Mark L Lester made this?!?! Yes, that Mark L Lester, the guy who not only lensed Commando and Armed and Dangerous, but who also directed an all-time Highland Cinema classic you know as Showdown in Little Tokyo. Can't believe we missed that piece of info. Showdown is such signature Highlander stuff it's a wonder we haven't run through this guy's oeuvre already.
Okay, this was another lame screening at the Highland Cinema. In spite of the fact he insisted Wang Chung score this flick, Billy Friedkin is still a favorite of ours. He could do no wrong for a good coupla years, but, man, did he ever lose it. Not as bad as the Copes, but still...
HBO's worst show (well, make that second worst), but the only one we've wanted to watch the whole way through. Oz hooked us a few years ago: it was the dawn of 2003 and the combination of our nascently-undergraduated philosophical leanings and the show's apparent Panopticism, beastly Hobbesian social contracts, and slap slap slap u around brutality made for a perfect fit. How could we ignore the voice-of-God narration, the overwhelming presence of "that guy"s, and those horrible performances from Rick Fox and Evan Seinfeld? How could we look away as the once well-to-do attorney became the bitch of the Aryan Brotherhood? Or when that CO gets his eyeballs stabbed out? Or when Luke Perry gets sealed up Edgar Allen Poe style? Ah yes, so many Oz memories, each more ridiculous and improbable than the last.
We're not entirely sure why we stuck it out all these years, but we suspect it has something to do with Dean Winters, the actor who probably got the job 'cause his brother's a head writer. Winters held his own and somehow lasted through all six seasons as scheming Irish-American thug Ryan O'Reilly, a guy responsible for killing half of the dudes we saw die. Thing is, Winters never broke character and never let the asinine scripts impede his scene-chewing performances, a feat all the more remarkable considering the local dinner theater performance of his real-life brother as his on-screen brain-damaged inmate brother. Yeesh. But it's because of actors like him, that dude who played the wheelchair guy, and that other fella who played the strikingly stupid inmate who hound-dogged the cellblock director that Oz kept us around. Also the guest appearances from Peter Criss and Pepa!
Okay, but in Season Six, you ask, what happened? Beats us, we watched this like three weeks ago. All we can remember is that a bunch of main characters get offed, that old dude falls in love with Patti LuPone, and that other old dude punches out the parole board when they deny him his right to artificially inseminate his children's tv show host wife. We found it way stupid that Beecher got paroled and sent back to the pen on a set up drug bust, but way cool when he got set up to kill Schillinger and then wound up pushing Keller to his death. We'd hoped this season would end with everyone dying, but instead we saw a handful of lifetime characters get shipped to a new prison right before the credits. As long as we never get a reunion episode...
I already said most everything I want to say about John Sayles way back here. The abbreviated version is the guy's fucking great. Secaucus has been on the back-burner for the past few years -- I can't say I was all that intrigued by a directorial debut, especially one involving a group of post-activist thirty year-olds hanging out and talking. Zzzzzz. But then last week as I finished reading Sayles on Sayles, I figured it was time. And I'm glad I made the decision 'cause I still can't believe how enjoyable and well-done this movie turned out to be. Sayles has gotten better behind the scenes, but he's had that typewritten skill and talent all along -- the flick may start boring, but by the end you "get" (errr..."understand"?) all the characters, even the ones who only show up for ten minutes. The Sayles even turns in a role and somehow manages to out-act the mighty Straithairn!
Our least favorite Chan-wook Park/Park Chan-wook outing. I'm supposed to have sympathy for Lady Vengeance but I neither cared about her nor her predicament. Not once. And I should've! She was blackmailed into confessing to one of the worst of crimes (child murder). She's out to exact revenge on the sleazebag responsible (schoolteacher). There's women in prison doing things prisons are most famous for. All my favorite stuff. Problem is, there's no passion, no sadness, no bloodlust...no fucking feeling in any of this movie. Seriously, I "whatever'd" it through this whole thing, something made even more lame since crying kindergarteners should ruin my week and sweet ladies turned bad should ruin my pants.
It's too bad this came out right before the "Behind the Scenes of a Jungle Epic" docs were in vogue 'cause, man, we're certain this would be one helluva making-of. That Billy Friedkin, he is a class-A nutjob, and any time you trek to them lands that time forgot you know there's a catastrophe or two in the works. Sorcerer isn't nearly as bad as its reputation, but it's strictly cable-tv fare. I mean, really, a '70s thriller with Roy Scheider?!?! How come Turner hasn't already shoved this down our throats? This flick should start at five after the hour at least once a week. Probably hasn't since it's the only picture about highly volatile explosives with zero suspense.
Now this is more like it. Another Korean classic from our favorite Korean director. Sympathy is good ol' violent O. Henry digitally enhanced color fun that goes a little something like:
Let's call this the return of In My Skin. The Piano Teacher started as a tale of sexual repression and ended as a tale of a sado-maso fantasy gone awry. I didn't dig it at all which came as a bit of a surprise since "Cannes accolades" plus "disturbing" equal serious Highland Cinema interest. Still had me a-wincin' during such uncomfortable scenes as the discarded tissue bouquet and the razor blade nick, but the whole thing felt cold, distant, and way too emotionless to be entertaining or engrossing. I think that was the point. The emotionless part, not the boring part. Still didn't do much.
More Jack, more Towne, more...Quaid?!?! Yes, Randy "the Helper's just fine by itself" Quaid was really on fire during the early '70s: Oscar nods and Golden Globe nominations for two completely different flicks! Who knew?
Roman Polanski! Robert Evans! Jack Nicholson! Faye Dunaway!
We fucking dig David Cronenberg around here. And what's not to like? You can't tell me you're not dying to see Debbie Harry's nipples, James Woods make out with a tv screen, or a ridiculously cool stomach vagina that'll gape for Betamax cartridges and make a guy's hand explode.
It's time for the Highland Cinema to nerd it up a little bit and profess our love for Futurama. Television's shining (half-)hour? You bet. Sixty years of TV and I don't think it's ever gotten better than this. Too bad it's just like Fox to getcha into some show and then change the airtimes all around till you don't know which end is up. Faster than you can say "Herman's Head" your show's gone the way of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer and you're stuck watching this.
Irreversible is even more disturbing and depraved than I Stand Alone, and way more fucking genius. This thing is another one to put at the top of your "must NOT see" list thanks to an opening sequence of basement bondage club glimpses, hateful dialogues, and brutal face annihilation at the hands of a fire extinguisher's blunt end. This is some serious shit, shit that gets all the more serious a few sequences later when Gaspar Noe subjects us to ten nearly-impossible-to-endure minutes involving Monica Belluci that make me realize I misplaced my Straw Dogs reference in that last post. If you don't already know, you don't want to.
Irreversible is nothing if not shocking, disorienting, and...necessarily cinematic! I sincerely don't think I'll ever see anything as nauseatingly perfect as this picture's opening thirty minutes -- a thirty minutes filled with barely-contained judgment-lapsed blind rage, barely-lit sexual deviance, horrific violence, and swirling, swooping, upside-down, falling-down drunk camera work. Amazing, moreso considering the eventual development and the plain-stated poignancy of the relationship between characters Alex, Marcus, and also-ran former boyfriend Pierre. You'll ask yourself if you're even watching the same movie. Staggering.
I've sat here for over a week trying to come up with a decent write-up for this picture; it's proven to be a difficult task the likes of which few have seen. I Stand Alone is rage and hostility, misogyny and racism, narration and Genealogy of Morals. I don't even know what to say about the thing except that it most definitely isn't for you. Alienated like Taxi Driver and graphic like Bad Lieutenant, only more fucking real. This guy isn't a mass murderer just yet, but by the end of this one you know he's only inches away. Filmmaker Gaspar Noe treats us to a bleak and desolate character study and gives us a final fifteen minutes that are initially blunt and violent and then disturbingly insinuating, all the more so considering the "protagonist"'s sense of his own liberation through this impending actualization of his desires. Whoa, and not "whoa" in the Love Object sense. Don't ask.
In spite of it all, I Stand Alone is a real movie. It's steeped in venomous inner monologues and peppered with blunt force trauma, but within it all is a shocking tale of morality, justice, and probably early 1980s Franco-politics. Noe is a force to be reckoned with, a director who'll out-Straw Dogs Abel Ferrara and still have you reaching for your upper-division philosophy notes. He's already thesis-fodder, but once he has a body of work longer than two features and some shorts, he'll really be a iconoclastic grad student magnet.
Marty's "for all intents and purposes" debut gets a CRAP. Waffle Factor=3 for acting talents of Harvey Keitel and Bobby DeNiro, who prove to have been swell actors even before they were stars.
Youngish corporate woman slices her leg up real bad at a party, doesn't feel a thing, and then feels compelled toward cutting. Whatever. I was mistakenly under the impression that this would be really good and it wasn't even passably good. Plods along like a movie that means something, but never told us why she liked to prick herself with steak knives or made us empathize with her addiction. Esther's inability to feel pain requires her to create a visual and corporeal representation, maybe? Maybe not. Sicinski momentarily compared it to American Psycho in terms of the desensitizing nature of corporate politics. That's intriguing, but when left to the film itself it's not something of which I was entirely convinced.
Good friend and proud owner of the Nekromantik series Anti-Michael made a guest appearance at the Cinema a few days ago, and you know when something like that happens you'll be ankle-deep in Keystone Light cans and Skulhedface box covers faster than you can say "remember that time...?"
Is there a Golden Globe for most difficult montage? Tonight's thoughts also included:
Call this Rambo and you'll find yourself at the receiving end of the Cinema's fists of fury.
I like this and this, but wasn't too hot on this. Sporadically an enjoyable mystery, but the collision between old- and new-world faiths was completely lost on us. What the hell do I know about moon-dancing or Jesus? That said, the finale was surprisingly more effective what with its naked depictions of blind faith.
Had Andrew Jarecki come to the Cinema for advice we'd have told him:
Forest Whitaker lives by a code. And kills for wiseguys. I sure wish he hadn't shot that fella who knew all the words to "Cold Lampin'." There's already too few of us in this sad and beautiful world.
Dr Pepper, Cool Ranch Doritos, Billy Blanks. The Holy Trinity of the Highland Cinema. Sure, we've upgraded a little, but little else has changed.
The point is that Blanks is the fucking man and when I sat there scrolling through the list of Billy's cinematic achievements I stopped here. Talons of the Eagle? Must've slipped through the cracks. Holy shit! Also stars James Hong! Priscilla Barnes! Matthias (S)Hues! All of our favorites of years past. And present. Who doesn't fucking love Big Trouble? Or Three's Company? Or TC 2000? Here we are, legitimate adults and every single one of us here at the Cinema thinks hands down that Talons of the Eagle is the best movie in celluloid history. There's a theme song at the end credits! You see that picture up there? It's the fucking Eagle's Claw! Imagine you're hearing DVDA sing rawked up shit. Soooo good. Dude, these guys drive through a fireball! Blanks slices a guy's throat! That kind of shit never happens in these B-movies. A few necks get snapped, but you never see a karate dude work a blade through a jugular. But it happened here, and you know you're watching some serious shit.
How awesome is it that Brian Posehn got excited about buying candy? That guy can come to the Highland Cinema anytime. Our concession stand is here for you, buddy! And what's more is that this Posehn cat is goddamn hilarious. He has a Death Angel t-shirt! Remember when we saw them? He even makes a side-splitting "Straight Outta Cockpit" joke when they talk about Northwest Airlines. Hey, didn't we have that same conversation last night? Krusty Kuffs! Bleeps and creeps! George Lucas in a Greedo mask!
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