Quo Vadis, Nacho Libre?

It's Pride week, and while I always enjoy the festivities this time of year, I must confess that my heart belongs to another deadly sin: sloth.

I tried organizing a Sloth Week parade last year, but I couldn't get anybody to show up. Everybody was too busy over at the Envy Week parade. I really hate those Envy guys.

Pride, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Greed, Gluttony and Lust. With as much bad press as these human emotions have gotten, it's easy to forget that they reflect a fundamental wholesome sympathy. This is what Nacho Libre reminds us of.

Nacho is but a humble fryer, but dreams (Pridefully) of having more, of being recognized and known. He yearns to be a luchador a great and Wrathful fighter

He Lusts after Sister Encarnacion, who does not approve of his luchadorable ambition.

Though he loses in the ring, he is paid well and uses some of the money to buy better ingredients for the children and brothers (indulging their Gluttony) and the rest to satisfy his Greed for expensive clothing.

But Nacho is anything but Slothful in his pursuit of glory, recognition and an improved diet for his beloved orphans. His passion is single-minded. He reminds us all of why we it is important to dream.

Food is not just nutrition, sex is not just reproduction, the mind cannot be occupied by prayer alone, the yearning of the spirit must be fulfilled.

But...

It is not just for ourselves that we fight in lucha libre. It is for the children, so that they will eat today, dream tonight and live tomorrow in the sunlight of self-fulfillment.

We are all Nacho Libre, no one of us more than any other.

Three and a half rainbow colored stars. Jason Bob sez check it out.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic

Okay, I'm just going to say it: we owe a great deal to the legacy of Andrew Dice Clay.

At the time of his (rather brief) popularity, "The Diceman" was reviled by critics, both conservative and liberal, who lamented the downfall of our culture at the hands of this obnoxious, racist, misogynistic loudmouth bully.

Appeals to common sense (most notably at the time by Dennis Miller) fell on deaf ears. Patiently explaining that what Dice was attempting was farce, to say loudly on stage what others only whisper at home, to articulate our darkest thoughts, got little traction.

And it didn't help that the Diceman's audience missed this subtlety and he did begin to capitalize on that which he started out mocking. The Diceman lost his way. Added to which, his material just wasn't that funny once you got past the shock value. There was no irony or cleverness to it.

In the years since, South Park, Dave Chappelle and the like have improved on the formula of addressing our deepest contradictions. They've picked up the mantle that Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor laid down and they've carried it better than Eddie Murphy or Andrew Clay did, but not letting their image overwhelm their message.

And now, we have lovely, perky, chewy-Jewy Sarah Silverman, who is to Ann Coulter what Stephen Colbert is to Bill O'Reilly.

What she does that Chappelle and Parker and Stone don't is stay on target. She never winks at the audience. She never lets on that it's all a joke. She sticks to her talking points like Condolezza Rice.

Her material covers the basics: the holocaust (excuse me "alleged" holocaust), rape, AIDS, teen pregnancy. You know, the fun stuff.

And she never flinches. "People always ask when the best time is to have kids and there's no right answer to that question but I think the best time to get pregnant is when you're a black teenager."

This is truly the only way to counter the Ann Coulters of this world. We can cluck-cluck that her outrageous shinanigans on Matt Lauer were cluck cluck unforgivable and cluck cluck insensitive and we'll just make everyone feel that, while they may agree, it's no clucking fun to have the good taste Nazis deciding what should and shouldn't be said.

People have bad thoughts. Nasty, politically incorrect, backwards thoughts. Those thoughts don't always translate into attitudes and actions, but they are there.

Abandoning the middle ground of farce leaves people with only two options: endorsement or purity. If you have the thoughts, you must be cleansed or must reach to justify them.

Stephen Colbert and Sarah Silverman have given us some much needed farce. A place where we can put all those niggling ideas about Mexican immigrants or Jews who buy German cars without having to cleanse ourselves of all darkness or embrace the politics of hate.

Ms Coulter, Mr O'Reilly, we're not laughing with you; we're laughing at you.

Three stars, Jason Bob sez check it out

The Omen (6/6/06)

You know the story: US ambassador Richard Thorne's wife has complications during childbirth leading to the death of their son. While she rests in a coma, Thorne agrees to accept an orphaned child and pass him off to her as their own because, you know, he loves her and he's ALL about communication.

Funny story, turns out the orphaned child was born of a jackal and is destined to lead the armies of men against one another in the final battle of Armegeddon.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being "we're spreading democracy in the Middle East" and 10 being "humans are contributing to global warming," this rates a plausibility factor of about 2.

Nonetheless, it's a fun ride. My biggest beef with the remake is the same as my beef with the original: the second act drags a little as the main characters slowly, painfully work to discover that which you already know: Damien is the anti-Christ. You know it from the poster. These guys require all kinds of tedious evidence.

It's like the DaVinci Code...you can't bank on "the secret" in the movie because, well, anyone who would shell out $10 to see the movie probably already knows..."the secret."

But at least with the "DaVinci Code," the existence of a secret was an original conceit, so it makes sense for the original text to be slow on the reveal. Not so "The Omen." There are no surprises coming for the audience, so please, just get on with it.

But it was a fun ride. The only thing that freaked me out was how much Damien looked like my cat Snake:




And be sure to check out Mia Farrow in her most terrifying role since 'Husbands and Wives.'

Yes But Does It Make SENSE?

There seems to be a sort of limited logic at play. Richard Thorne seems to have set himself up to believe that either all of this stuff is true or none of it is. He becomes convinced that his son is the anti-Christ because a bunch of, okay, OTHER PEOPLE start doing weird things like committing suicide and killing his wife and getting killed in churchyards and the clincher comes for him when he examines Damien's head and finds the infamous 666 symbol.

But it never occurs to him that maybe this very same cabal of mutilated priests, psycho housekeepers and underground mystical knife peddlars who have been selling him (hard, btw) on this anti-Christ story might just be the ones behind everything? And not Damien?

First, take one orphan kid, tattoo his head and palm him off on a gullible American (preferrably one with a creepy-sounding name like 'Thorne.')

Next, bury a jackal in a graveyard, arrange a view convenient "accidents," release a few ill-mannered dogs on the Thorne estate, lace a few birthday party punchbowls with peyote, PCP and/or ketamine and sit back.

Finally, attribute everything to supernatural forces instead of human agency and then convince the father to murder his son before he grows up and, you know, DOESN'T become the anti-Christ, thereby blowing the charade.

If you really believed that Damien was the anti-Christ, you'd want to let him live because, well, the whole anti-Christ battle of Armegeddon thing is part of God's glorious, loving plan for all mankind. Killing Damien kiboshes God's good work.

No, the only reason to kill him is because he's NOT the anti-Christ. Once he's dead, you can attribute all kinds of nonsense to him.

And it's not like murdering innocent patsies and then backfilling prophecy around them to justify the killing is a completely alien concept to Christianity.


Three stars, Jason Bob sez check it out on cable.

Wild Palms


This is one of my all-time guilty pleasures. Emphasis on guilty. There's really no justifying it: the wooden acting, the overblown melodrama, the substitution of vague double-entendre innuendo for narrative substance.

I love every minute of it. It came out 15 years ago when I was starting my career in media tech and I guess the film noir "blood on CD" quality appealed to my romantic self-image.

Set 15 years in "the future" (2007), the plot is, well it doesn't matter what the plot is. Harry Wyckoff is an attorney who gets embroiled in a mind control conspiracy involving a his old girlfriend, a PT Barnum-like senator and a band of misfit rebels called "the friends."

The series envisions a future where government officials use artificial depressions, planned terrorist attacks, secret detentions, high-precision media-message control and new-age mystical tech fetishism to subjugate the willing population under an oppresssive framework of hedonism, vanity and narcissistic self-involvement until resistance becomes impossible to conceptualize.

Whew. I'm glad THAT didn't really happen. Now, where did I put my sex goggles?

The Proposition


Safe to say this movie will not be everyone's cup of tea, but it is a beautiful, lyrical meditation on the clash between human savagery and civil society.

It takes place in the Australian Outback in the Old West era. A lawman trying to "civilize" a frontier town offers a criminal the chance to save his mentally-challenged younger brother from the gallows (on charge of rape) in return for killing his sociopathic older brother (leader of the gang.)

It all goes swimmingly, as you can imagine.

The story, and the role of violence in the story, draws from whole swaths of Western culture, from the Bible (lots of Cain and Abel and Crucifixion material) to Joseph Conrad.

The performances are brilliant and understated. No long rants about the nature of evil and no improbable bits of cleverness. Just very genuine depictions of what people in this situation would probably really be like.

And a frank, unflinching, matter-of-fact depiction of really VERY horrible violence. I've never seen violent material presented so respectfully of the subject. It's isn't overly lurid, like a George Romero zombie-fest, nor does it shy from any detail of the subject. Anyone who's been a victim of violence knows that the details are important. What appears to be a minor wound onscreen can, in fact, be a lifelong debilitation.

The filming style is very reminicent of Peter Weir's best work and the grittiness makes Leone and Peckinpah look like Gary Cooper and John Ford.

Six stars. Jason Bob says, really, check it out.

The Devil's Rejects
aka
(the cast of) Alice...in Chains!

To quote Maury Ballz: Now, THAT'S what I'm TALKIN' ABOUT!

Rob Zombie's 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' meets 'The Dukes of Hazzard' meets 'The Salton Sea' features a clan of mutant rodeo clown serial abductor/rapist/murders and meth-amphetamine enthusiasts on the run from a sadistic, vengeance-driven lawman with a staple gun and a reduced pain/empathy response.

Along the way, they abduct several of the supporting cast of TV's 'Alice' (Earl and Blondie Waitress 2.0, or maybe 3.0) and force them to participate in rather prolonged sessions of Simon Sez.

In addition to the 'Alice' cast, we have independent shock-film perenials Bill 'Chop Top' Moseley, Ken 'Dawn of the Dead 1978' Foree Ginger Lynn 'Wing Commander III & IV' Allen and Michael "The Hills Have Eyes" Berryman.

And, of course, Danny Trejo who proves once again that he's a Mexi-CAN, not a Mexi-CANT.

Shamelessly violent, sadistic, gory yet oddly poetic...up to and including the 'Thelma and Louise' ending complete with Lynard Skynard 'Freebird' accomaniment. That would qualify as a spoiler, except this is the kind of movie that CAN'T be spoiled.

Four stars, Jason Bob sez check it out.

Sin City

It didn't make sense. How did a run down geek like me get assigned to review a high class flick like Sin City?

Take it easy. Be smart. Think it through. Who could have set me up?

No time for that now. The smell of stale popcorn and carpet disinfectant told me I was in the right place. Black and white images flicked across the screen: burned out cops, hookers with guns, corrupt senators, blood, guts, dismembered corpses, ravening wolves and exploding severed heads.

In other words, just another Friday night. Four stars. Jason Bob sez: you ain't got the GUTS to check it out.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Normally, I don't like foreign films, but...

'Shaun of the Dead' meets 'Men in Black' meets 'Brazil'...IN SPACE!

There are a lot of ways they could have screwed this up and they managed to avoid most of them, but there are issues.

So, good stuff:

Pretty faithful to the book, though a lot is cut out for time.

Nice mix of film styles, from Peter Jackson-esque hand-held practical puppetry (think Heavenly Creatures) to Peter Jackson-esque use of CGI with some Oliver-Stoney/Spike Jonzey nature footage intercuts and Nick Parky improbability stop motion thrown in for good measure.

There was some effort to humanize the characters.

The narration and the guide segments (a contender for this year's 'best use of Macromedia Flash in a low-budget science fiction epic' oscar)

Stuff that could have been better:

The pacing. I felt like the film didn't so much interpret Hitchhiker's Guide as it did drive past it at 70 mph. Moments in the book that are meant to be dryly ironic come across as just zany.

They made Arthur way too sympathetic. He's a cowardly shlub who must overcome his neurosis to win the love of Trillian. Okay, the book sort of goes there, but mainly Arthur is supposed to be a bit of a clueless dolt who it's okay to make fun of. He's the avatar of humanity's foibles, not a true romantic lead.

Too little acerbic wit. Adams' characters are supposed to be interpersonally abusive, generally hostile and smug. Again, this has mostly been replaced with zany.

Overall: thumbs up, but I'd like to see a longer, slower-paced version for the DVD. Oh, and less wacky, more egghead, please.

The Sith Report


Okay, the deed is done. It's all over but the snarking.

First, I coulda used a few more lightsaber battles.

Padme wasn't irrelevant enough. Turns out 'Padme Amidala' translates roughly to 'pensive, whiny fetus container' in Nabooese.

It's true what you've heard: R2D2 gives the most subtle, affecting performance in the film.

I enjoyed the subtle parallels to modern politics. "Anakin! Only the Jedi Council are wise enough to reform Social Security!"

I was a little disappointed in that this chapter failed to live up to the standard of gutwrenching painfulness set by the first film and opts for the simple mediocrity of the second.

The Jedi apparently are dedicated to the obtuse side of the force. "I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi." Really? No shit? Kenobi: "Padme, Anakin is the father of your child, isn't he?" What gave it away? The way I throw myself into his arms at ever opportunity? Or the fact that we share an apartment?

Painfully constructed, Yoda's sentence structures have become.

What's the most logical blocking for two lovers who haven't seen each other in months? How about she stands out on the balcony, absent-mindedly brushing her permed hair while he mills around in the living room like he's waiting for an elevator? Yeah, George, that works.

"The Jedi Council have tracked the subplot to an isolated planet ten thousand light years beyond the edge of importance. Kenobi, go check it out."

"Oh, Anakin, I love you!"
"I love you, too!"
"I love you more!"
"No, I love you more! And I love our baby!"
"I love our baby more than you do!"
"No, I love our baby more than you do!"
"Do not!"
"Do too!"
"Oh, let's not fight!"

Anyway, this one actually wasn't painful. Loved the visuals and the effects. The acting was wooden, but the acting is always wooden in these movies. It was thankfully short on idiotic love scenes and long on fighting.

Pi (1998)


dir. Darren Aronofsky

A computer programmer trying to unlock the hidden pattern of reality is pursued by business interests, government agencies and religious fanatics yet somehow manages to avoid acquiring fetish girlfriend and kung fu skills.

Oh, and full marks for presenting Go as a metaphor for the patterns of creation.

Three stars, Jason Bob says check your assumptions at the door...

Videodrome


Boy meets girl
Boy punctures girl's ear with hat pin
Girl is murdered by evil cable company
Evil cable company uses girl's image to seduce boy
Boy gets paranoid and starts to hallucinate
Boy buys gun
Boy inserts gun into his abdominal video cassette slot vagina
Boy meets sinister optomistrist
Sinister optomistrist puts boy in mind-control machine
Boy retrieves gun from aforementioned abdominal vagina
Gun attaches self to boy's hand
Boy kills partners
Boy tries to kill television missionary
Television missionary shoots boy in chest with cathode-ray penis
Boy survives
Boy turns best friend's hand in to potato-masher grenade
Boy shoots evil optomistrist at trade show
Boy commits suicide on abandoned boat, twice

Pretty cliched stuff.

The Ice Harvest

The upshot: 'Fargo' meets 'Bad Santa' meets 'The Grifters' meets 'The Last Seduction.'

If you like dark HUMOR, stay away. If you like DARK humor, check it out.

John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton steal $2 mil from the mob. Then Oliver Platt and John Cusack spends twenty minutes getting thrown out of bars, puking and visiting John's ex who is Oliver's current wife. John almost gets laid. A bartender breaks a stripper's ex-boyfriend's hand. A mobster ends up in a trunk and then in a lake but not before his thumb gets cut off and he gets shot several times. Another mobster pins Cusack's foot to a floor. Innocent bystanders and officers of the law get shot in the head. The Femme Fatale acts all Femmy and Fataly. A winnebago runs out of gas. Oliver and John have pancakes. The end.

Two-and-a-half stars. Jason Bob sez bring some Xanax and check it out.

Good Night and Good Luck


The upshot: a bunch of pinko commie whiners and UN-loving lefties play the blame game in the war against Godless communist heathens.

There are, of course, many parallels between the "war" on terror and the "struggle" against international communism, but this movie effectively highlights one area where that parallel breaks down: namely that in the cold war there actually WAS a global communist threat.

Did we overplay it? Sure. Did we become the enemy we sought to fight? Yes. But there WAS a big ol' arsenal pointed at us and an actual philosophical struggle in the industrialized world.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, doesn't really exist. I mean, it does, in the sense that random gangs of disaffected angry (mostly) men are willing to strap bombs to themselves and kill innocent people under then banner 'Al Qaeda.' But, there is no Kremlin for Al Qaeda, no actual chance that the countries of the world will embrace "islamofascism" instead of modernism in a "domino effect," no great struggle against tanks and guns and planes and nukes.

Just a bunch of assholes with 3 syllables in common.

So, when you watch Joe McCarthy rant and rave and persecute and bully the innocent and his sniveling little toady Roy Cohn whispering in his ear like Grima Wormtongue to King Theodin, we can draw some slight comfort from the fact that at least the Soviet Union really existed and really did try to infiltrate our government (as we did theirs.)

One wonders what Murrow and Fred Friendly would made of our times. Back then, owing to the actual existence of a tangible enemy, Murrow had to qualify his critiques with "I am not a communist, but..."

It seems absurd today to assert "I am not an islamofascist, but..."

It seems apt that this film was released at the same time as "Chicken Little." That's a double bill for you.

It's beautifully shot, wonderfully layered in black and white, all interior.

You don't get to learn much about the characters themselves. It's very focused on the issue at hand. For a more nuanced exploration of how media events impact private lives, see "The Insider."

Three stars, Jason Bob says check it out. Good night, and good luck.

Game Review: Civilization IV

I suppose I owe Sid Meiers a debt of gratitude. I recently installed Civ IV and faced the usual Meiersian cavalcade of spreadsheets and tech trees.

"Well, self," I said to myself, "I guess I'd best settle in and start studying."

Then my Tyler Durden personality popped up and said "Pop quiz: how is your 401k fund invested, in round figures? Do you even know the password for you account?"

So, I've spent much of my free time over these past weeks reining in my long term finances, in case I DON'T die of laziness before 40.

That handled, I spent some time yesterday and today playing through my first game.

The good: It's much like the previous games in the Civ series. Turn-based economic/war strategy boardgame.

The bad: It's much like the previous games in the Civ series. Micromanagement-palooza.

Though, this entry is MUCH better about the micromanagement thing. Worker units (introduced in Civ III) are back, and you can just set them to a task like "build a big ass road network" or "improve everything" instead of having to a) burn an (expensive) settler unit on that task and b) tell it every little thing you want it to do.

I also really like the unit upgrade and skill promotion feature, as well as the collateral damage and anti-city-defense attacks (failure to appreciate which caused me to lose my first war...thank god for reload.)

Anyway, since Spore draws a good deal of inspiration from Sid's game, I'm glad I got a chance to dig into a little. Civ can be a demanding mistress. Most games, you can play for five minutes or five hours at a time and it doesn't really matter in terms of grokking the gameplay. Civ, you need at least three hours for.

Oh, and this one is narrated by Leonard Nimoy, which is always fun.

Three stars, Jason Bob sez check it out if you've got some time.

Lex Luthor Begins


After seeing Batman Begins and watching the new Superman trailer, I'm really beginning to understand the meaning of that frame in Dark Knight where the aging Bruce Wayne glares at the ageless Clark Kent.

In two words: fuck. superman.

"They can be a great people, Kal-El, if the want to be...that is why I sent them you."

Okay, uh, God complex much there Jor-El? We'll work our own greatness out for ourselves, thank you.

I mean, YOUR culture couldn't even wake up in time to smell the impending destruction of its homeworld. But now we're supposed to turn to your (unelected) son as our savior?

Do us a favor and send him to Mars next time. I know it ain't no kind of place to raise a kid (in fact, it's cold as hell), but we're talking about Superman here. I think he can manage.

We don't need Superman to be a great people. In fact, Superman stands between us and greatness. If he keeps pulling our fat out of the fire, how are we ever going to evolve?

Nah, gimme Batman. He's not out to save all of humanity. He's just working out his personal issues with a little freelance police interference. Batman doesn't care if we're self-actualized ubermenchen or not, he just wants to stop the Joker from poisoning the water supply...again.

Cock Block

Last night we were watching 'Big Love' (the plural-marriage drama on HBO), which is pretty good BTW. I started thinking about the high-quality dramas on HBO and Showtime (Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Big Love, Deadwood, Carnivale etc) and I had an idea for a new show:

The series centers around a middle-aged couple, their elderly parents and their adolescent children living a lifestyle that is at once alternative and mainstream. Every week, the characters find themselves embroiled in existential angst as the balance the often conflicting priorities of family, business and community and engage in a series of minorly self-destructive stress-relieving behaviors.

The catch is that their background changes every week. Sometimes they're in the mob. Other times they're running a funeral home. Sometimes they're astronauts or circus performers or medical professionals. Cops. Firefighters. High school teachers. Hill people.

But the themes every week are the same: sexual frustration, generalized dissatisfaction, brooding resentment.

It's called 'Cock Block.' Tune in this week to see how the cock gets blocked!

Ichi The Killer


Were you really bullied in high school and forced to watch while a girl you had a crush on was brutally raped? Or was that idea just implanted in your head by a renegade vigilante cop bent on transforming you into a death-dealing anti-yakuza justice machine?

Does it really matter? Ichi knows that sometimes you have to stop asking questions and just slice a motherfucker in half.

Did your boss really betray you and run off with your money? Or was he sliced and diced by a death-dealing anti-yakuza justice machine?

Does it really matter? Kikihara knows that sometimes you just need to deep fry a motherfucker and skewer his ass like yakuza tempura.

Will your son blame you for slicing a prostitute's nipples off and then kicking her to death? Don't sweat it, Fujiwara, just put your shiny pants on and bar-b-que her remains on your roof.

Ultra-violent Japanese live-action magna Batman does not fail to disappoint. And LOTS of great work for women: whether it's as a prostitue being savagely beaten and raped by a sadistic yakuza boss or as a prostitute being sadistically interrogated and tortured by a yakuza hit man, the full blossom of Japanese womanhood has never received such loving artistic attention.

Plus, there's a refreshing lack of lactation scenes. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for watching middle-aged Japanese women dress themselves in garbage bags and milk themselves into baby bottles for sale to tourists...BUT ONLY IF IT ADDS TO THE PLOT. If it's gratiuitious, well, that's just too easy.

Takeshi Miike is my new hero.

Improving the Past


"Battlestar Galactica" is officially the Most Improved TV Franchise of All Time.

With that in mind, might I suggest remaking another little gem from the 80s:



I mean, we actually HAVE all the magical technology from that movie. Well, except the freeze gun. I want a freeze gun. It would come in SO handy.

And I love the "almost didn't quite get it" premise: supermodels having minor plastic surgical tweaks (I'm talking milimeters of eyebrow...as if scalpels are that precise) so they're, hello, SCANNED IMAGES will look better.

Yes, because In The Future(tm) we have full-body scanners and photorealistic realtime rendering engines, but no Maya or 3DS Max. Nope. Can't tweak a single vertex, honey; you gotta go under the knife. Nothing I can do.

That's so typical of Michael Crichton. You brought dinosaurs back from the dead? Fuck the Nobel Prize! I want to build an amusement park for rich assholes and their obnoxious children!

What's that you say? There's a mind-reading alien time machine at the bottom of the ocean? Better send a suicidal marine biologist and her mind-fucking psychiatrist ex-husband down to check it out. What could go wrong?

So, how's the new CD ROM coming? You know, we have a merger to consider. Oh, there are some fabrication problems? Well, I'm sure my develoment director will be able to work it out with his sexually manipulative borderline psycho ex-girlfriend who I just promoted to product management. No foreseeable issues there.

Game Review: Resident Evil 4



Just finished this one today. Good LAWD it's a long slog, but fun. It's an RPG/Adventure/Crawler/Horror-Survivor funfest which finds Agent Leon Kennedy fending off an army of Spanish CHUDS in a quest to save the President's daughter. It's fun, well-paced and beautifully cinematic.

However, like all good zombie stories, it doesn't make a lick of freakin' sense. First off, this "small Spanish villiage" is about the size of Manhattan and is laid out like an Easter egg hunt on a Bond Villain's estate.

Zombies are not typically well-known for their attention to detail. So laying out a zombie base with a network of hidden keys, switches and pulleys just for getting around doesn't seem like a great idea.

Also there's this merchant who appears throughout the game to sell you first aid, ammo, weapons, armor, etc. The question is, if this guy can just saunter through the zombie compound armed to the teeth, why not let HIM escort the president's daughter out while you draw fire?

Also, Leon can cross a river of molten lava by hopping from one flaming barrel of tar to another, but he can't hop over a picket fence. And chain link? Fughetaboudit...might as well be thirty inches of concrete.

All of this has given me an idea for a new game. It's called: The Muffin in Leon's Driveway

You play Agent Leon. As the game opens, you're on your way to a crucial meeting at the NSA when you find that agents either of a foreign government or maybe an evil corporation or perhaps Satan have placed a blueberry muffin in your driveway, blocking your car in your garage.

Now, your neighborhood is filled with cars, but for some reason, you can't touch them, let alone hotwire them.

Your only hope is to find the Fat Kid(tm) who lives in your 'hood and convince him to...eat the evil muffin.

Unfortunately, the fat kid is being held hostage in an impenetrable fortress by a possessed priest, a psychotic soldier and a mysterious woman in a red dress. What's that? You don't remember them building an impenetrable fortress in your neighborhood? That's what you get for not attending block meetings, Leon.

So, you hijack a helicopter, mow down an army of lookalike zombies, penetrate the impenetrable fortress, seduce the woman in red, assassinate the psychotic soldier, battle the possessed priest with an arsenal of supernatural weaponary you've collected along the way, rescue the fat kid and take him to...the evil muffin.

But! When you arrive, the kid tells you that a) he's on Atkins and b) he doesn't like blueberry muffins anyway. But, he'd be willing to consider eating...the evil muffin...if you put some butter on it.

Which only means one thing. It's time for Leon to visit...the SUPERMARKET OF DOOM!

And so on...

3.5 stars. Jason Bob sez, check it out.

Elizabeth


"I thought I had to go vote at 3:00 AM."

How many things are wrong with this statement? First, who votes at 3:00 AM? Second, if you can't recite the alphabet backwards, you're in no shape to vote. Third, if you're in no shape to vote, don't drive.

I was watching 'Elizabeth I' a few weeks back, starring one of my favorite MILFs, Helen Mirren, and one of the few actors who can hold up his end of a conversation with her, Jeremy Irons.

Elizabeth I is considered one of the great political leaders in Western history, but watching this film, not to mention "I, Claudius" and the various renditions of our own Revolutionary and Civil wars I've begun to realize that these people were not really all that remarkable.

I mean, back before fax machines, email, real-time global market reports and satellite-coordinated troop deployments, it really wasn't such a big deal to be a world leader. World leaders governed for life and made, like four or five decisions that deeply mattered to history.

On a big day, Elizabeth gets up, spends four or five hours getting dressed, broods pensively in her antechamber and then instructs her attache thusly: "Tell the chamberlain that I shall consider his proposal in due course."

And then nothing happens for six months. Then the chamberlain responds: "Madam, you are a most remarkable woman!"

And that's it. Then history unfolds around them and they get all the credit.

A typical corporate middle manager moves more political and economic mass ordering lunch for a team-building offsite. How would Elizabeth have faired if she had to grow her own food? Or coordinate a four-way teleconference between Beijing, New York, London and Paris?

Which brings me to my point: world leaders, by and large, are drawn from the least capable, least useful, least radical, least interesting sectors of the population. It should come as no surprise when they run their cars off the road or start unjustified wars or shoot their friends in the face.

They are the short-bus crowd, and for good reason. Having your OWN ideas is dangerous. Best to just parrot what you're hearing around you.

I mean, whatever your politics, you have to admit that Bush the Elder, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Eisenhower were the most substantial, intelligent presidents of the last 50 years. Look at that list. That's the cream of the crop? The best of the best? The finest of the finest minds?

And nevermind Ford, Reagan, Dubya, LBJ and JFK. These guys couldn't outthink a blueberry muffin.

_Profiles in Courage_ was a high-school level history report. It was no big trick to outspend the Soviet Union. LBJ used to complain about his testicles in official conversation. Ford didn't know that the Russians had control of Eastern Europe. Dubya's leadership plan actively includes the Rapture.

BUT...

It says something that a country can tolerate such mediocrity in positions of power and continue to roll forward, fat as ever. It means that the momentum of our society is ultimately immune to the stupidity of its leaders. And that is cause for hope.

Hostel



When Gary Oldman rather satisfyingly pummels Christian Slater in "True Romance," he comments to his bodyguard: "He must have thought it was White Boy Day(tm). It ain't White Boy Day(tm), is it?"

Now, Tarantino has finally produced a movie that shows us what happens on White Boy Day(tm). On White Boy Day(tm) it traditional for white boys from all over the globe (including Japanese white boy extraordinaire, Takeshi Miike in a cameo) to converge on their Fatherland and torture unsuspecting college sophomores with a variety of rusty implements.

Which is not as interesting as it might sound.

This movie wins the 2006 Blair Witch 'Please Somebody Kill These Annoying People Already' award.

They did nothing with this premise. Nothing. No interesting predicaments, no memorable characters. A waste of a good premise. This thing made the White Castle burger movie look like Altman.

The gore, what little there actually was of it, was well rendered, but the rest of the production was workmanlike. Not bad, per se, but it totally failed to produce a mood.

I'm not a big believer in method acting, but when you have 20-something unknowns and you want to film them under great stress, the best thing to do is put them under great stress.

'Blair Witch' did that much right...the cast really did sleep out in the woods and really didn't know what was going to happen (though they did cheat one night in a motel.) Whatever you think of the film, the emotions on the screen are at least genuine. A bit forced maybe, but genuine.

The original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" did it right, too, filming out in the torturously hot Texas outback with rotting meat all over the place. When Tobe Hooper couldn't get the blood bladder to work for the scene where they cut Sally Ann's finger, he just had the actor REALLY cut her finger and not tell her. THAT'S the scream you hear in the movie. A Travolta once said, good scream.

Or you can go the 'Saw' route and use mostly actors in their 30s who are one or two notches up the ladder and can actually access the emotions you need.

Also, if you're not going to bother to develop any of the characters, then please don't take up the screen time. Just start torturing them. 'The Passion' went this way and made a mint. The people like a beatdown.

Or develop the characters. Even 'Star Trek' levels of character development would be a good start. It doesn't have to be freakin' Becket. But maybe a defining characteristic for each character: a hobby, a pet, a food allergy, something so we care when they get hamstrung with piano wire.

There was one good, solid effective scare. When White Boy #1 is being tortured to death and begging for his life, he offers his assailant money.

"Money? I'm paying THEM!"

Nothing says "my name is Pitt and your ass ain't talkin' your way outta this shit" like that, Brett.

Two and a half stars. Jason Bob sez watch 'Saw' instead.

Things I've Learned from the Movies


1) A woman willing to kill her husband will think nothing of framing her boyfriend
2) Nothing good ever happens in a hedge maze
3) Joe Pesci, Robert DeNiro and Ray Liotta do not excel at putting people at ease
4) Don't marry Harrison Ford
5) If you do marry Harrison Ford, don't get on an airplane
6) If you do marry Harrison Ford and do get on an airplane, don't bring your daughter

Breaker Morant


It was time for another viewing of this early-80s "Australian Renaissance" flick, the true story of Harry "Breaker" Morant and his compatriots who were tried and executed for the murder of Boer civilians in South Africa.

In war, ordinary, good people do terrible, terrible things. It's right to hold them responsible, but we should START with the assholes who put them in that position in the first place.

How about a new rule that says that you must prosecute commanding officers and vigorously as their subordinates? And, conviction of subordinates may be used as evidence of guilt? So, the only defense will be to claim active insubordination: I told them not to and they did it anyway.

Sid And Nancy - Redux


I was up late last night playing poker online (my new obsession) and watching 'Sid and Nancy' which is one of my all-time favorite bedtime stories. The slow-motion falling-garbage alley kiss pretty much sums up how I feel about love: it's not elevated and rare, it's base and universal...and that's a beautiful bit of poetry.

BUT...

It occurs to me that, counter to my high school "fuck the world" hero-worship fantasies, Sid and Nancy were kind of horrible people. Boring, loud, irrational, prone to fits of vomiting and screaming, obsessively drug-seeking, totally unprofessional, surrounded by GREATNESS in the form of Iggy Pop & Joe Strummer (who had similar life challenges but somehow managed to be both creative and reliable) utterly self-obsessed and completely unmotivated to change.

What I'm saying is, if I knew Sid and Nancy, I'd try to keep them at a distance in my life. I'd be one of those dismissive assholes in the movie, impatient with Nancy's shrill tantrums and Sid's random anti-social acts.

This impression is clear in REALITY of course, watching 'The Filth and the Fury' (which is supposed to be S&N at their best, performing for the camera) one is overwhelmed by the oh, just die alreadyness of it.

But I'd always thought that the romanticized S&N stood in for the tragic 'you and me against the world,' 'love in the time of cholera' thing. And it is, except for the fact that it's NOT the time of cholera...it's the time of free money for talentless screaming onstage. S&N are the architects of their own downfall.

I mean, if you can't rise to the minimum standard it takes for Malcolm McClaren to exploit you, you're just not trying. Here's a guy who could turn a pickled pig fetus into a rock star as long as it showed up on time.

So, Sid, call me when you're feeling better. We'll do lunch. Nancy, a pleasure as always. You look radiant.