There Are No Walls in the House of Jearl
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Infernal Jeer" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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09:49 pm
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Mystery DVD #153
My Name Is Bruce
The mining town of Gold Lick, Oregon is haunted by a Chinese guardian spirit, who is offended by clumsy teens who disturb his burial ground. The creature and emerges to do mayhem, and promises to kill off every soul in the town. Fortunately, B-movie stalwart Bruce Campbell is filming a terrible monster movie just a few hours away. One of the teens is a huge Bruce fan and does the logical thing: he kidnaps Campbell and beg him to lead them against the monster. The whole town endorses this plan. It is because everyone likes Bubba Ho-Tep. Unfortunately Campbell is just an actor - and as it turns out a coward, and generally a douche. He attempts to leave the doomed townsfolk but a spark of conscience compels him to return and try to help.
On the one hand, the movie is so exactly what it sets out to be that it gains a sort of nostalgia-based power-up. It approaches the Platonic ideal of a cheesy low-budget monster movie. You've got the horny teens unleashing a monster, you've got the ambivalent love interest, you've got the reluctant hero, the comical dismemberments, the 'choose your weapon' scene... Once the film gets to Gold Lick it's sweet in the purity of its vision.
But. Sorry. The 'Bruce Campbell as himself' character is so thoroughly pathetic and repulsive that it makes the main conceit of the film - that Bruce Campbell really acts like this, ever, and that he would react in this way to a demon invasion - really hard to swallow. If he'd played it more straight maybe I could have bought into it, but he was so obnoxious I kind of wanted the whole thing to just go off the rails. I wanted to be on its side, but it just didn't pull me in. And even though the whole film is this over-the-top character assassination, in the end they subvert that too by having a different Bruce Campbell as himself character pitch the film. Come on, its like you don't trust me or something.
The DVD extras - and sorry, Arranger, Blu-Ray discs take me longer, there are scheduling issues - the extras are all right. The 'making of' featurette is cheesy but full of love for the project. The guy who played the monster also made the mask for it and he seemed pretty awesome.
Tags: dvd review
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10:03 am
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Mystery DVD #152
The Philadelphia Story
My thought process after viewing The Philadelphia Story:
1. Man, that was awesome, how Tracy Lord totally ate the reporters alive in that scene. I shall make a LolHepburn.
2. Okay, done. Now to figure out how to express my unease with the Tracy-bashing by the first husband and the father and the marriage stuff at the end while still expressing my great appreciation for the dialogue and eyebrow work.
3. ... Dude, it is still a romantic comedy, what do I even say.
4. Okay, better watch it again.
Man, the little sister is a treasure too. RESIST URGE TO WIKIPEDIA THE ACTRESS JESUS IT HAS BEEN LIKE SIX WEEKS.
5. Well, I am inadequate to this task, but let's just get on with it.
( Spoilers Don't Matter, But Here Are Some )
Tags: dvd review
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07:44 pm
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Mystery DVD #151
Olivia Newton-John: Video Gold 2
I have to share the Netflix blurb, it's so bad.
This retrospective collection of Olivia Newton-John's greatest hits illustrates her appeal as a timeless pop artist, a gorgeous Aussie transplant who came of age in the video arena. Tracks include "I Honestly Love You," "Suddenly," "Sam," "Heart attack," "Tied Up," "Livin' In Desperate Times," "Take a Chance," "Shaking You," "Xanadu," "You're the One That I Want," (from Grease) and "Twist of Fate" (a duet with John Travolta).
Are they leaving any out? Oh man, if they are leaving any videos out of that blurb they must be pretty sad indeed. Holy crap, there are twenty videos in this thing.
You know what, Olivia Newton-John actually seems like a pretty cool person and I get no pleasure dissing her videos. Most of them are just not my thing. Perhaps I have never been mellow. Anyway, I have the feeling all the really fun ONJ videos were on Video Gold 1.
I'm even less capable of criticizing music than I am criticizing film, so I feel pretty lame saying anything about the songs themselves. My main beef with most of them is that there's hardly any development of an idea, just a few repeated couplets over and over, and a lot of them are cheesy love songs that I instantly forgot after they were over. And that's all I can say about that. So off we go to the videos.
( Cut for length and how. )
They don't even get the disc length right. It's like 80 minutes, not 60. 20 extra minutes of ONJ is not something I want to be surprised with. Not cool, blurb writer.
Tags: dvd review
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12:01 pm
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Mystery DVD Special Project
I had conceived of the original Totally Subjective Biaxial Scatterplot to succinctly explain why Snakes on a Plane was disappointing. It got a generally positive reception, but enough of a negative one that I dropped it in shame. However, enough people brought it up last time I was being social that I decided to try to flesh it out and make it a real critical tool.
So here is a really basic prototype, complete with silly little buglike icon.  Clicking it will launch a new window. Hopefully.
The Flash movie pulls in review data from an XML file and then plots it. Right now it's hardcoded with just Lifeforce, but passing parameters should be doable. Getting the basic functionality in Flash was not too difficult, but I had a really hard time getting control over the text. It turns out that styling XML text in Flash is a massive pain in the ass. I also wanted to have a scrolling bottom pane for more text, but it so happens that the TextArea component has strong ideas about what it wants to look like, and I know from earlier projects that editing a component style is serious business. Maybe Flash is not the way to go at all and I should be doing this in Javascript. But that would remove the option of cheesy vector overlays and slideshows. This is your cue to direct me towards amazing Javascript graphics libraries.
It's still very bare-bones - the Flash movie's just grabbing the entire contents of the XML file and plotting all of it, and I should probably have it pick out data points via an array or something. I'm not sure if I should keep at it in this direction though. The current setup has some vexing limitations. I don't want to embed the Flash movie in a Livejournal post because I think it would be overlarge and silly looking. I don't know if LJ lets you embed arbitrary Flash anyway. On top of this there is a Flash caching issue. Javascript is looking better and better. But! I wanted to have the icon trigger a pop-up window at an appropriate size, but I can't, because LJ strips out javascript. So all I can do is have it open a new window, which I can't reliably resize. I gues it could open to a scatterplots home page which then links to each one, but that's getting further away from my admittedly vague vision for how this should work. Most likely I should set up a proper blog, but then I have to worry about stuff like spambots and RSS feeds and have I mentioned recently that I am very lazy?
So this post is more or less an informal survey. What features would you like to see? I asked ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) georgedorn this question and he spun out a dizzying fairytale vision of an app that people could submit movies to and vote on with a database backend and whoa. Maybe someday. I was just thinking more axes would be nice. In fact the need for a way to offer Points for Effort to account for Lifeforce's valiant attempt at awesomeness is why I added variable dot size. Might try color as well.
Tell me what to do, reader. It might get done one day.
Tags: dvd review, nerdery
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10:13 am
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Mystery DVD #150
Lifeforce
Talk about review paralysis. I suck, let's get that out of the way. We can discuss my suckery in the next post, which will be along very shortly, I swear.
This is too earnest and too weird a film to simply dismiss as bad sci-fi/horror. Though on first glance it is in fact pretty bad. A manned mision to Halley's Comet discovers a huge, organic-looking spacecraft filled with dead bat people. They also find three human bodies in space caskets. Naturally they take them on board. Months later, the Halley mission spacecraft is careening towards earth, with no communications, so NASA send the Columbia up to rescue it. Hats off to Columbia please. Everyone is dead, an escape pod is gone, and everything in the ship has burned, but somehow they still manage to get those space caskets down to earth.
Two of the caskets hold perfect naked white guys, and the third holds a perfect naked white chick. Obviously it is time for them to get out and start killing people by sucking out their life force. The European Space Agency sends exactly three people out to do something about this. One of them is an SAS agent, one is the guy that fled the doomed spacecraft in the escape pod and the third, I guess is bait, pretty much. But he is important and makes important phone calls.
The astronaut is tormented by psychic visions of the queen space vampire, who mind-melded with him to get the lowdown on Earth stuff and now wants him back as a pet. The visions lead him to a mental hospital, where they menace Patrick Stewart in a fairly harrowing 'Patrick Stewart can really scream' sequence. But he was also just bait and London is pretty much burning at this stage. There is a bunch of fighting and special effects, and then a very ambiguous ending. I honestly do not know who won. So hopefully I didn't spoil this completely, because as I said, it's too weird to just dismiss as a bad film, even though it does get pretty silly. You may want to check it out.
Lifeforce plunged me into an Uncanny Valley of Spectacle - what does it mean when something should, on paper, be highly awesome but instead lands in a pratfall of lameness? Should we award bonus points for trying, or penalize for poor execution? Mulling over the nature of Awesome kicked off the inexcusably long period of review paralysis, so I fear that I may never be able to discuss what is Awesome properly again. Unless I see a lot of it in one place or something. Recommendations?
Important moments include: a dessicated victim of the space vampire gestures plaintively for a hug. And gets one. Oh you British. Zombies can't hug you without killing you. Even if they want to! It's the oldest law.
Tags: dvd review
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05:41 pm
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Mystery DVD #149
Pure '80s DVD: Totally New Wave
More music videos! I'm not going to question my fate this time, let's just get to it. I will say that this is probably the sweet spot for music videos of the 80s - interesting narratives, wacky special effects, Blondie...
( I got a little wordy )
Tags: dvd review
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03:51 pm
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Mystery DVD #148
#147 is demanding somewhat higher production values than normal. We'll have to get back to it.
Little Man
I made the mistake of watching the totally endearing DVD extras right after the actual movie, which took the edge off my desire to bludgeon it.
Marlon Wayans plays Calvin, a 2' 6" thief. Kerry Washington is Vanessa, a woman with an indeterminate but successful corporate career, and Shawn Wayans is Darryl, her doofy husband who desperately wants to start a family. John Witherspoon plays Vanessa's obligatory crotchety father. Also with Tracy Morgan as Percy, an idiot man-child, Molly Shannon and various others as terrible, terrible people.
Percy and Calvin steal a giant diamond for a gangster, but their getaway goes awry. On the run, Calvin sticks the diamond in Vanessa's handbag while scuttling around the drugstore they're shopping in. Calvin and Percy elude the police, but naturally they must now recover their giant chunk of macguffin. Rather than just, you know, steal it back that night, they decide the best plan is to sneak Calvin into the house, disguised as a toddler. Being basically sensible people, though perhaps nearsighted, in the last moment of sanity of this film, Vanessa and Darryl immediately call Child Services. They are closed for the weekend.
And so we embark on at least a week's worth of disturbing childrearing adventures. It's pretty awful and wrong. Basically the next hour is a series of skits where fake-baby Calvin acts on an inappropriate impulse and gets away with it, because he's just a huge creepy baby. He does get beaten up by a hockey player at one point. Every now and then he makes an attempt to steal the diamond back, but it just gets more and more inaccessible. Meanwhile Vanessa and Darryl's friends descend upon them with baby stuff and dysfunctional yuppie-parent behavior. Generally most of these skits run on violence and bodily functions.
If I tried to rate this as a movie, it would check in just barely above Dirty Love, but that just seems unfair. It's a cartoon. Only in a cartoon you could believe that people would be this blind and this demented. Scenes that are pretty disgusting in live-action would be tame on Drawn Together or South Park. Plus it does star a visual effects shot.
Everyone learns valuable life lessons and there are a great many groin injuries. Those two things don't actually correlate, though you'd think they should. Molly Shannon appears for a minivan chase scene that is kind of awesome.
The extras include a featurette about the tiny child actor playing Calvin's body, and he seems like a very awesome kid. The visual effects are also explained and that's pretty impressive. I love when the technical film people geek out about the crazy stuff they had to do to make it all work. There's a whole line of discussion on a rig they built to make one of the yuppie moms' racks scary enough. But mostly they geek out about how awesome Linden Porco (Calvin's body) is.
In conclusion. Very cute extras. Impressive effects, not unlike having a film starring a horny version of Gollum. Terrible yet funny movie.
Tags: dvd review
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07:20 pm
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Mystery DVD #146
The Descent
Seven friends who enjoy dangerous outdoor activities meet to explore a cave in the Appalachians. They have emotional baggage and interpersonal tensions. The cave adventure goes terribly wrong, with injuries and getting lost and things happening that you really don't want to happen while caving. AND THEN THEY FIGHT CHUDS. WOOOOOT CHUDS.
Only. It's not that awesome.
The seven main characters are distinguished mainly by accent, and are rather tough to tell apart. I had learned their names and A-Team-like specializations only after about 60 minutes into a 99-minute film. They take FOREVER getting to the actual story.
I'll say this - there's a great atmosphere of dread during the pre-chud caving adventure. For me, personally, that sort of thing is really hard to watch. I have broken my arms and various fingers a number of times, and even though that was a long time ago, to this day my hands hurt if I see someone about to fall hard. So freaked-out characters stumbling around in the dark was really rough, never mind the possibility of drowning or dying of starvation.
One problem I had was that they set up a bunch of interpersonal backstory that never got resolved, or really even explained. My Chick Flick receptors were activated but never got the appropriate molecules delivered. There was also a distracting contrast between the horror effects and the emotional impact the actors were going for. There's one truly horrible, wrenching death scene, where two of the actors are just staring at each other with all this huge unspeakable emotional weight, and then a second later it's all back to strobe lights and a troglodyte comically spurting bright red blood. Unfortunate.
Anyway the film does set up one vital Image of Pure Badass where the most emotionally wrecked character gets the horror-movie baptismal scene and stands on a dead cave-thing looking calmly deadly while you hear the faint, musical sound of her urge to do anything but kill shattering on the floor. I will forgive a bad movie a lot for providing a really convincing Image of Pure Badass.
And I salute the makers for creating something I don't think existed before: a horror film where women fight chuds that is not the slightest bit exploitative. I mean, they're in big heavy gear almost the whole time! I also liked that there's no 'flail, scream, die.' The ladies fight hard. Can't be helped that the odds are really badly against them.
I think I've talked myself into thinking it was kinda good. It's just that getting to the cave was very boring, and never finding out what the emotional history was was very unsatisfying.
Tags: dvd review
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12:13 pm
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Mystery DVD #145
Jack of All Trades: The Complete Series: Disc 3
This is my punishment for going weeks between reviews. I know, I'm sorry. Oh man, I have been so busy. Usually when I fall far enough behind in the reviewing to get a visit from Jack it's because of my own damn sloth, but this time, seriously, lot of mind-sucking stuff going on at work. NO EXCUSES, says Emilia, with a whip. Yes, my mind has completely gone.
( Please follow me into a six-episode vale of darkness, haunted by stinking black birds, which flap and gurgle, and a faraway screaming of someone who needs your help but who you can never reach. )
Tags: dvd review
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11:05 am
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Mystery DVD #144
Spaced: The Complete Series: Bonus Disc (Disc 3)
Deleted scenes, cast and crew biographies and a "making of" documentary called "Skip to the End." Kind of nice, but nothing really essential to enjoying "Spaced." The two main take-aways for me: everyone really, really enjoyed doing the imaginary gun battles from "Gone," and Mike (Nick Frost) was a friend of Simon Pegg's who had never had an acting job before. Not bad! Only IMDB has him down as a construction worker and 'Sgt. 1' - maybe they don't count if you don't speak.
Anyway, if you buy "Spaced" you probably get this, and buying "Spaced" would not be a crazy decision overall, and after 14 episodes you will want more, and you can watch this. It will be fine.
Tags: dvd review
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06:49 pm
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Mystery DVD #143
Spaced: The Complete Series: Season 2 (Disc 2)
Season Two is not as head-meltingly ruletacular as Season One, mainly because it doesn't have the same startling novelty. A couple of things that were funny once are lame the third time. Also it gets a little over-the-top -- where Season One would have a great visual pun and a throwaway reference to Star Wars, and then move on to the next thing, Season Two does a whole subplot pastiche of Fight Club or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's still totally worth watching though.
"Back" - Daisy returns from a vacation to discover that no one missed her. Sad panda. Brian and Twist are still seeing each other, and a happy Brian is an extremely disturbing and artistically unproductive Brian.
"Change" - Tim gets sacked over The Phantom Menace. Daisy gets kicked off welfare. Mike moves into Marsha's spare room. Marsha torments Brian until he's fit to paint again. It is awesome.
"Mettle" - Brian does an art installation. Tim and Mike try to get on Robot Wars. Daisy gets one of a series of crappy temp jobs.
"Help" - Dark Star Comics wants to see Tim's portfolio. Tyres returns. There is a lot of running about.
"Gone" - A strange yet sort of awesome pub crawl. Contains two ridiculous, fantastic fight scenes. Daisy subverts the male psyche. Totally choice.
"Dissolution" - Daisy's Birthday. A series of misadventures. Everyone in the house hates one another.
"Leaves" - Marsha puts the house up for sale. A series of spectacular apologies.
I'm not doing the individual episodes any justice - it's just really hard to get at the zillion little things happening in every scene. It's better than I'm making it sound! except maybe the last two. Bit serious.
Tags: dvd review
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03:34 pm
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Mystery DVD #142
Spaced: The Complete Series: Season 1 (Disc 1)
I've once again taken unconscionably long to review this disc, and I'm already being punished. You'll see.
There are two things that cause me to grind to a halt with the DVDs -- either the disc is so bad I don't want to come up with words about it, or it's so good that I am ashamed to try. Spaced is in the latter category. And how. Sorry, can't talk, too busy watching episode six for the ninth time... but I don't really understand why it's good. It's written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (at the time, Stevenson) - so it's scratching the same sort of itches as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
On the face of it it's rather stupid - two lazy stoner types meet in a coffee shop and pretend to be a couple so they can rent a sweet apartment -- like a reverse Three's Company. I anticipated British Cringe Humor, which gives me nightmares. Indeed they are British and there is much cringing. Oh is there cringing. Jessica Hynes has at least a dozen ways of being an abject yet defiant bullshit artist with just her eyebrows. What I didn't anticipate is the amazing chemistry the cast has, or the exquisite timing they give the dialogue. There is also the highest pop-culture-reference to line of dialogue ratio outside of Family Guy, and a sort of low-budget magical realism thing that I just gave up on trying to explain. I feel strangely guilty about this. Am I just enjoying it because I never expected anyone to pander to my demographic to this degree? Is it wrong to award points because a guy enjoys drowning Lara Croft? Can I ever just review a few hours of highly amusing TV without descending into an existential spiral? apparently not. Anyway, it's hilarious. Check it out.
Season One episodes:
"Beginnings" - Introducing Daisy (procrastinating journalist wanna-be), Tim (recently single, stoned comics artist wanna-be), Marsha (sloshed, bored landlady), Mike (Tim's best friend, Rambo wanna-be), Twist (Daisy's best friend, evil diva wanna-be), and Brian (Marsha's sometime concubine, actual artist and emotional cripple).
"Gatherings" - Daisy puts off writing by throwing a housewarming party. It is shamefully pathetic.
"Art" - Brian is invited to a play put on by his ex-partner, Vulva. He is tormented. Daisy drags Tim along, who is on speed and has been playing zombie apocalypse videogames for 36 hours. Hijinks ensue.
"Battles" - Tim and Mike play paintball. Daisy adopts a dog. Tim confronts the crotchmonger who broke up his last relationship. Tim's phobias concerning dogs, lightning and bamboo are explored.
"Chaos" - Colin the dog is abducted. The flatmates rally and storm the lab for great justice. Twist makes eyes at Brian. Don't do it Brian she's a Skrull.
"Epiphanies" - Introducing Tyres (magical tweaker). The flatmates and allies go clubbing. They have an awesome time. That's all. This episode makes me so freaking happy. It sets up all the sitcom-plot ways of kicking a dude in the kidney, and then...they just have an awesome time. Yay.
"Ends" - oh no sexual tension. Tim's ex sort of wants him back. Daisy freaks out and has a superhuman burst of productivity. Brian and Twist go on a date. Mike re-applies to the Territorial Army, from which he was expelled for invading France. Everyone ends up sort of ambiguously happy.
Tags: dvd review
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01:38 pm
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Mystery DVD #141
The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
One again I have been crippled with Unreviewable DVD Syndrome. This time it was pure ennui that laid me out. I didn't want to think of words to express my feelings, so I had a plan to just post a photograph of a bowl of oatmeal and maybe a salt shaker labeled 'Rage.' But then I would have either had to steal a photo of oatmeal, or clean my kitchen so the photo wouldn't have a spotty banana and a pile of dirty glasses for a backdrop, and I'm not a good photographer anyway. So words it is. Anyway all I mean is that it's really bland and lame, and sort of lumpy, but not made of poison.
I didn't see the first Scorpion King, but I don't think this really had a thing to do with it. This Akkadian kid named Mathayus is the son of a great mercenary warrior, so he joins the same order, the Black Scorpions. During his tryout he somehow mortally offends General Sargon (Ultimate Fighting champ Randy Couture), who is a Scorpion himself. Unable for plot reasons to take out his pique on the actual source, Sargon uses sorcery to kill Mathayus' father. Mathayus gets accepted as a Black Scorpion, and returns from his training to discover that Sargon is now king of Akkad. Sargon, in the manner of crazy evil kings throughout history, assigns Mathayus to his personal bodyguard. Mathayus refuses to execute his brother for talking smack about Sargon's despotic rule, and like that he is on the run to find a magical weapon and foment revolution. A plucky female sidekick and a Greek poet/con artist join him. I am not going back and learning their names. The writers name drop historical and mythical references in no sensible order just to keep the alert viewer wracked with confusion and disgust. Anyway they go to Greece and blunder into trouble, pick up a company of Illyrians and a Chinese acrobat, fight the Minotaur, go to the land of the dead, piss of the goddess Astarte, get the magic sword, and oh my god this thing is nowhere near over yet.
Back in Akkad, Astarte wants to punish the insolent mortals so she gives Sargon more sorcerous power. He tries to sacrifice a stadium full of Akkadians, I guess as a thank you gift, I dunno. This scene exists to let the acrobat and the sidekick run around on peoples' heads for a bit, and was actually a little bit awesome. So anyway Mathyas and the Greek poet fight Sargon, who turns into millions of scorpions, but magic sword, blah blah, somehow he wins in a confusing burst of CGI and the power of heart. Huzzah.
Tags: dvd review
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11:00 pm
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Mystery DVD #140
Death Proof: Disc 1 (Grindhouse)
Holy crap, that was awesome!
I was not looking forward to this, as I only knew that it involved Kurt Russell as a stuntman who kills ladies with a special car. I enjoy explosions but not so much the violent dismemberments. But then the movie started, and I usually call them films, but it's a movie, tricked out in every way like a cheap B-movie from the 70s, so much so that I was very startled when someone pulled out a cell phone. Anyway, the foul, sweaty, filthy-mouthed and extremely entertaining movie started, and yeah, he kills some ladies with the car, and it was sad and gross, but it was just getting started.
Kurt Russell plays a beat-up old stuntman named Stuntman Mike, and his hobby is killing attractive ladies with his penis I mean his Dodge Charger, which he has reinforced to render Death Proof. His penis he has simply chromed and put on the hood of the car. It's shaped like a duck but you know. He is actually very disarming as he stalks his prey, acknowledging that he is a very creepy man and then charming his way back into a lady's lap dance I mean comfort zone. And then killing her with a car.
But then he goes after a group of ladies that contains two stuntwomen, and they are not having any Death By Kurt Russell shit, thank you very much. There is, you might imagine, a lot of stunt driving. OMGWTF the stunt driving. The two stuntwomen (Tracy Thoms as Kim and Zoe Bell as herself) and their hairstylist Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), who is present to curse when the other two are taking breaths between curses, are terrorized by the Death Proof car, but they happen to be driving an equally badass car, so they terrorize him back. By the end Stuntman Mike is reduced to high-pitched sobs and I think we're supposed to feel sorry for him. Then they punch him a lot. The end. Awesome.
Also there is an awesome sheriff to take us into Act Two.
It's Tarantino. There's cursing, there's feet. There are weirdly attractive storefronts. There is some sexualization of violence/role-reversal stuff but it's pretty transparent and I think he just put it in to give a grad student friend something to write a paper about. There are two formal appreciations of Vanessa Ferlito's back end, and you know what? Thank you, Vanessa Ferlito. Thank you, Quentin Tarantino. Thank you.
Netflix Arranger Pattern Matching: Rosario Dawson, at least. I'm losing track.
Tags: dvd review
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02:27 pm
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Mystery DVD #139
Jack of All Trades: The Complete Series: Disc Two
oh god what
agh
nooooo
okay. be the ball.
I have a new theory about Jack of All Trades. I think Palau-Palau is a manifestation of the Singularity. All terrible fiction comes here and interbreeds. What we observe as Jack of All Trades is just a snapshot of the tempest sliced from literature referencing the early nineteeth century, tearing into itself like a swarm of maddened eels. I further conjecture that at the time of the Singularity terrible erotic fanfiction will outweigh all other writings by wordcount, which would explain the strained sexual tension and awful puns the following episodes are so saturated in. Somehow the signal has propagated back to us, via the social construct that is Sam Raimi.
My housemate julrosec says that it's all just a pity party for Bruce Campbell.
To recap a bit: the year is 1801. Jack Stiles is an American secret agent sent by Thomas Jefferson to the French colony of Palau-Palau to keep an eye on Napoleon's Pacific empire. He teams up with British agent Emilia Rothschild and moonlights as local folk hero the Daring Dragoon. Previous episodes reviewed here. Oddly, I seem to have missed four episodes. I don't think they were on Disc One.
( Okay, let's go )
Tags: dvd review
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06:57 pm
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Mystery DVD #138
Nacho Libre
This one arrived in Blu-Ray format. Sadly, I do not have an HDTV so I don't know if there were especially expressive sweat droplets or any other details.
Jack Black is Ignatio, aka Nacho, a monk in rural Mexico. He cooks for orphans, but in his husky breast burns a lifelong dream of glory as a masked wrestler. Also inappropriate feelings towards Sister Encarnación (Ana de la Reguera), who teaches at the orphanage. Nacho buries his dreams until the day a feral street person fights him for a bag of leftover tortilla chips Nacho was picking up for the orphans. Seeing an opportunity, Nacho sets a trap for the street person, Esqueleto, and convinces him to join him as a tag-team wrestling partner. Hijinks and weirdly adversarial training montages ensue. The duo does not win matches but they are crowd-pleasers, so they make money anyway. Esqueleto has a wiry strength but mostly exists to scream like a girl when other wrestlers attack his hair, which is all the time. Of course Nacho's colleagues at the monastery would never understand, so they keep their career a secret. There is religious tension, as Esqueleto only believes in science.
It's funny in a physical comedy way and a Jack Black makes funny faces and uses funny nouns in a funny accent way. That's pretty much what it has going on and it knows it. Unfortunately they had to stretch it out to feature length, so there's a lot of tormenting of Esqueleto, pointless nun-wooing, spiritual journeys and so forth.
It wasn't as crude as I was expecting. Nacho farts a lot, and there's one bit in a training montage with a cowpie that didn't make a lot of sense, but generally it's silly, clowny fun. But it's not exactly 'good'. Not terrible either. Jack Black does make pretty funny faces.
Tags: dvd review
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07:09 pm
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Mystery DVD #137
Paycheck
Based on a story by Philip K. Dick and directed by John Woo. What could go wrong?
Ben Affleck plays Michael, a brilliant but mildly skeezy engineer. He is hired by electronics companies to reverse-engineer the products of competitors, and paid handsomely. The catch is that his memory gets erased after each of these projects, so he can't turn it around and sell what he's learned to anyone else. He lives off the big paycheck for months and then does it again. Life tootles along for Michael and his manager/memory-wiper/friend Shorty (Paul Giamatti) until their industrialist friend James (Aaron Eckhart) offers a big score. A three-year project with a big enough payoff to set Michael up for life. Also Michael wants to be around James' biologist employee Rachel (Uma Thurman) so he goes for it.
But of course everything goes wrong. Three years are up and Michael goes to his bank for his big payoff and learns that he signed it away a month ago and sent himself an envelope of junk like hair spray and half-finished crossword puzzles instead. And then people start trying to kill him. Apparently he decided to get out of the project, and he has to pice together why, and do something about it.
It's a pretty fun movie to watch. There are some creative action scenes, and there's the pleasant feeling of watching a smart hero and a smart villain try to out-think each other. However, after many scenes of Ben Affleck's forehead all knotted up in puzzlement it got a bit pitiful. It was also kind of nice to see the government come in as the good guys and for them to be halfway competent. Uma Thurman's character proves to be a wily and creative badass. All to the good.
But the world they do all this in left me feeling like way too much had been left out. It was entirely about the one big puzzle and anything not immediately serving that or exploding was cut. I bet that included a lot of plot-relevant context. The Feds can grab you and strap you into a machine that lets them replay your memories? Could someone have thrown in a line about due process or is this normal? Or how about explaining why the bad guys decided to kill their friend? It's never really explained why the hero couldn't convince them that the project was bad. There's a long, long explody fight scene towards the end where John Woo slowly dials up the Wooness until it's Woo-parody, culminating in an angelic white bird flying right out of the screen. I thought I had somehow dozed off and dreamed it.
Netflix Arranger Pattern Matching: Still more Aaron Eckhart! I was hoping he and Ben Affleck would have some kind of giant chin fight, but I guess they thought it would be too homoerotic.
Tags: dvd review
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03:16 pm
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Mystery DVD #136
The Core
It's a Netflix Arranger Pattern Matching extravaganza, bringing together Aaron Eckhart from Thank You For Smoking, Stanley Tucci from Sidewalks of New York, and the half-baked pseudoscience from Deep Blue Sea. There might have been more pattern matching, the cast was pretty big. One day I'll have to make a spreadsheet or something.
Normally I try to keep these reviews pretty short and to not spoil everything, but it's really not possible with this one. I can't get into it without really getting into it. So before you wade into the great discursive spoilertacular below I will sum up my impressions in brief: Pretty, entertaining but desperately silly.
( Really long, spoilery blather )
Man, that was a long movie. You don't wanna know how many meta-review ideas I thought up and rejected before giving up and just rambling it to death. One involved sending The Core out on a date with Deep Blue Sea. It wasn't pretty.
Tags: dvd review
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09:15 pm
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Mystery DVD #135
Bowfinger
A caper film! That doesn't suck and is not too weird. The kind I am the worst at reviewing, I am sorry.
Steve Martin plays Bowfinger, a cross between a movie producer and a grifter. Eddie Murphy plays Kit Ramsey, Hollywood's biggest action star and secret paranoid. Bowfinger is almost 50, and if he doesn't make a hit film soon he'll turn to dust. Not literally but he talks like he really might. He has a gaggle of friends, all basically losers trying to make it in the movie business. They're all about to give up and get real jobs. To stop them, Bowfinger promises a Big Score - he's going to take an alien invasion screenplay written by his accountant and turn it into a blockbuster. Everyone drops whatever humble but actual opportunity they were pursuing, taken in by the power of hope and bullshit. Bowfinger grifts his way in to see Kit Ramsey, but can't seal the deal. He concocts an elaborate plan to make the film anyway, by stalking Ramsey and having his actors run up to him and say their lines. Since Ramsey has a fear of evil aliens already, this slowly drives him insane. Heather Graham plays a terrible ingenue from Ohio who seduces everyone. Her bad acting is so bad it becomes a new sort of art. I mean her acting like a bad actor. I guess that makes her a good actor.
Bowfinger is okay with driving Kit nuts and lying to all of his friends, but discovers his conscience after befriending a homely Ramsey butt double and discovering that the butt double is also Kit's brother and that the film people are his only friends. Just as the grand project looks doomed, the players find some good blackmail material in all their stalking footage and use it to force Kit to shoot the final scene.
Eddie Murphy is truly hilarious when terrified by fake aliens. Steve Martin grifts with a disarming pathos. Heather Graham kind of scares me. There's a such thing as having eyes that are too big. It's pretty good. Also: Terence Stamp as a cult leader, only he seems to be trying to help.
At the end all of the players, except possibly Kit, gaze up at the finished horrible film and each one sees his true bliss. That was rather wonderful.
Tags: dvd review
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07:45 pm
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Mystery DVD #134
Thank You for Smoking
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is Big Tobacco's smiling face to the world. Blessed with a quick wit and teflon morality, he goes on television to cast doubt on the science linking smoking with disease and does battle with smarmy environmentalist do-gooders. His only friends are a couple of lobbyists for Big Alcohol and Big Firearms. Meanwhile he is raising a smart and curious 12-year-old son (when he has charge of him. He also has an ex-wife with an interfering boyfriend).
Anti-smoking forces are arrayed to put a 'poison' label on cigarette packs. Despite the fact that they're not planning to ban them, or tax them, just label them, Nick's bosses are in despair. He is dispatched to California with a plan to make smoking sexy again by getting it back into the movies. He brings his kid Joey along for manly bonding and educational adventure. Rob Lowe has an awesome little bit part as some kind of superpowered movie agent/producer/kingmaker guy. Sorry, he was talking really fast and it didn't make that much sense.
All the villains are villains, but they're charming and pleasant and laugh-with-them funny. All the good guys are dicks and harpies and laugh-at-them funny. Senator Ortolan Finistirre (Ortolan Finistirre! Ortolan Finistirre!!!) (played by William H. Macy) leads the label-cigarettes forces and seems like a horribly unpleasant man. In a lovely touch, he is wearing Birkenstocks, which the film instantly turns into the equivalent to smoking on TV as a 'villain' signifier. Katie Holmes is also in it as a predatory reporter. Nick disregards accurate warnings about her breasts.
It's a sharp, funny, really enjoyable film that depresses the hell out of me. The Nick Naylors of the world, and their bosses, are the worst thing in the world. By selling doubt they undermine our culture's trust in reason. No one has time anymore to become an expert in every area one needs to make choices in. Well-funded anti-science just makes those choices harder. Kill a man and you're a murderer. Tell a billion men lies that will kill them and you're an industry spokesman. But anyway it's good and the opening credits are very cool.
Netflix Arranger Pattern Matching: Cameron Bright plays Joey, and was also the hybrid/clone/weapon child in Ultraviolet.
Tags: dvd review
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