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I wish USA Network would hurry up and air The 40-Year-Old Virgin already.

Surprised?  Let me clarify.  I don’t plan to watch it when it airs.  But I watch a lot of USA Network, and they have had the same thirty second promo for this film debut for a couple weeks, and they always start it right after the fade to black of my shows’ commercial breaks.  I don’t even get a fair chance to skip them.  Awfully sneaky.

Anyway, God, get it over with, USA, so I can start watch your next crappy in-house promo.

(Wow, USA Network’s ad campaign worked, didn’t it?  They successfully, and against my will, infected me with this “New movie on USA coming” meme.  It annoyed me so much, I turned around and passed it on to thousands.  Hmmm.)

I have six credits at Swap-A-DVD.  What’s worth owning rather than just queuing?  What am I going to get from Netflix and say, “Man, I should have just bought this to start with”?

Intentionally funny:  Elephant soup recipe, which calls for 1 medium elephant, 500 gallons of boiling water, and onions and potatoes by the bushel.  It lists as serving 3800 people, but if more guests show up than expected, you can add 2 chopped rabbits.

Why it’s funny:  If you’re cooking a whole elephant, two rabbits aren’t going to make a bit of difference, are they?  They’ll serve an additional 4 people, maybe.  That’s lost in the noise and overkill of the elephant recipe.

OK, that was pretty basic.  Let’s move on to The Matrix.

Unintentionally Funny:  Morpheus: The human generates more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat.  Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.

Why it’s funny:  If you have fusion power, you don’t really need human body heat, do you?  Just add an extra teaspoonful of water and replace all of humanity.

OK, moving right along.

Pathetically unfunny:  The MPAA rating of the David Fincher film Zodiac, which reads “Rated R for some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images.”

Why it’s pathetically unfunny, and talks about how screwed up our country’s priorities are:  Shouldn’t it just need to stop at strong killings?  Is there really a parent out there who would say, “Oh, graphic images of murder?  That’s fine, as long as there’s no profanity or brief images of clothed people having sex!”  Are these four criteria really of comparable weight?  Depicting bound people being stabbed multiple times is similar enough to the “f” word to list them in the same sentence?  Isn’t all the non-killing stuff lost in the overkill of the murders?

Check out the cast list for this upcoming film.

SwapaDVD is now online, to complement PaperBackSwap, SwapaCD, and SwapaGoat (Maaaa!).

Please use those links to sign up, they’ll help me.

At my last job, several years ago, we were sitting around at lunch discussing the topic of sampling in music.  I cited a few instances I could think of, including the famous monologue from the film Cool Hand Luke being sampled in rock band Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Civil War.

One of my colleagues scoffed and said, “I don’t expect many Guns ‘n’ Roses fans have seen Cool Hand Luke!”

I was about to indignantly reply, “Hey, I like Guns ‘n’ Roses!”  But I stopped myself.  There’s an obvious comeback: “And have you seen Cool Hand Luke?”  I hadn’t, so I kept my mouth shut.

I still don’t grok why being a GnR fan would negatively correlate with having seen the film.  But my not having seen it is probably inexcusable.  So I’ll repair that deficiency soon, and do a moviemath entry on it.

OK, Joel Schumacher and I are done.  I thought we were done after 8MM, then I bought Veronica Guerin (which I didn’t know he directed, and I liked it, Blanchett redeeming it as always), but now I saw The Number 23, which has turned me into a box-reader.  Seriously.  He can fuck off.  His upcoming films are entitled Town Creek, 1:30 Train, and The Crowded Room.

You can now see my Recently Viewed Films in addition to my Recently Read Books.  I attempt to assign an astral scalar value to each.

Ed Vedder’s soundtrack for the film Into the Wild is very, very good, and entirely worth buying even if only for the song Long Nights.

Chad Donella is really a fine actor of my generation.  He, unfortunately, has not gotten a chance to really shine in a perfect role yet, but the performances I have witnessed have all been fantastic.

He was in the X-Files episode “Hungry”, playing a brain-eating mutant.  Just try to pull off that role in a heartwarming way, but he did it.  And then there’s Taco Bell.  Several years ago Taco Bell filmed a commercial with him overjoyed to be stuffing his face with a taco.  We’ll likely be deluged with the commercial again when the X Games start showing in a few weeks.

Thing is, he filmed the taco commercial after the X-Files episode, as far as I know.  And the X-Files episode has a scene where he compulsively and with great gusto sucks human brain matter off his fingers.  Fictionally, of course.  I hope.  Same expression of glee as in the Taco spot.

So what, did some ad executive see his brain-sucking and think, “That’s the guy for us!  Let’s have him dig into our tacos!”  Did they have an open call for the commercial, or did someone call his agent and say, “Hey, send the brain-sucker over to chomp our tacos!”  Would be interesting to find out.  Probably.

There was an interesting-looking martial arts movie that was advertised in the American theaters last summer, I believe, with wire-fu and special effects galore.  Anybody have a memory of the name?

The Nostalgia Factory.  Buy original movie posters and press kits for surprisingly little money and with low shipping charges.  Also, the official provider of poster images to IMDB.

Irène Jacob turned 40 on Saturday.  Famke Janssen is 40, too.  Lena Olin is 51.  All the hottest actresses in Hollywood are over 40 now.

No big deal?  You must not mind getting old as much as I do.  Our fantasy women get older as we get older.  Bummer.

So maybe it’s time for a new generation.  Christina Hendricks, A.J. Cook, Morena Baccarin, Michelle Williams (thinking of the Oscars here), and Keira Knightley are all ‘78ers or later.  Long may they live, and never get older than I.

Add contributions as you will to the comments page.

Err … nice.  I hope the system’s just temporarily offline.

I’m not sure if Steven Seagal ever bothered to jump the shark or whether he was just born with a school between him and the mainstream public, but he’s still jumping something.  As his physical fitness declines and he relies more and more on slow-motion to hide his slow reactions, he’s portraying ever more benign characters forced into violence by ever more tragic circumstances.  I mean, it used to be sufficient for him to be an EPA agent forced to punch and kick by ruthless big-business profiteers.  Then, it escalated.  He had to be a Buddhist recluse forced to punch and kick when his daughter is kidnapped.  I don’t know where he can really go from here.  I mean, what, maybe a guy who nurses sick birds back to health at a wildlife refuge forced to punch and kick by a gang of thugs selling little orphan girls as sex slaves?  I mean, maybe I could write that up this weekend and sell it.  “Birdman rescues vestal orphans.”  It could fly.

(Hold on, gotta take this.  Hi.  Yeah.  No, I hadn’t heard.  Really?  Really?  Oh.  OK then.)

Hi, I’m back.  Umm … seems he’s got that one covered.  Anyone else with a spec script?  I’m out of ideas.

My brother in law has written a review of the Silent Hill movie on his LiveJournal, but I don’t have a LJ account and I’m still working on getting OpenID running on this site, so I’ll post here. Maybe he’ll link back to me.  My review is as someone totally unfamiliar with the video game.

Great: Color timing, cinematography, Pyramid Head, Sean Bean, Jodelle Ferland, the cockroaches, certain in-camera shots (such as the camera descending to frame a character through a broken chair) and certain effects shots (such as the elevator descent).

Good: The score, Alice Krige, Deborah Unger, interior production design.

Bad: The legions of identical reveals of disfigured bodies, the fact that as a horror movie it failed to elevate my heartrate even once, exterior facades of main street, Laurie Holden.

Terrible: Radha Mitchell.

My rating: 7 out of 10.

Last year’s film Suspect Zero wasn’t that bad.  It gets a 5.7 at IMDB.  I gave it a 6.  Unlike my brother, I like to watch director’s commentaries. I almost always watch them, especially if I either loved or loathed the movie. If I’m just apathetic about it and can’t imagine sitting through it again, I might skip it. So I put in the commentary for the movie. I made it two and a half minutes in. I transcribed the beginning of it for you. Enjoy.

My name is Elias Merhige and I am the director of Suspect Zero.

I did not set out to make a serial killer genre film, I did not set out to make a film about serial killers, I set out to express something much more deep, about the nature of the unconscious and the nature of justice and the nature of how the human mind works. These opening titles demonstrate the synapses of Orion’s brain, as each neurological fiber of his brain screams out to find and hunt. Right out of the titles we pull out of a drainpipe off of some lonely, forgotten highway. We come out of the unconscious, out of the earth, out of the bowels of the earth, and what do we see? A lonely can, tossed aside. A baseball that’s been used; for how many games? A broken doll that was once loved. Where is its owner?

We come upon a grimy milk carton. The rain begins to wash away the grime. The dirt falls away and we see this adorable, innocent child. Her date of birth. She’s been missing. Where is she? Most people don’t know, but since 1972, that this close to ninety thousand people: adults, women, men, children, that are all missing [sic].  Their bodies unaccounted for, their whereabouts unaccounted for.  Where are they?  That’s a fact, that’s not a fiction.

I was watching The Two Towers with my brother. It came to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and all the young children were being ushered into caves while the men and older boys were being armed.

“I care about the kids as much as the next guy,” I said, “but surely even a seven year old boy or girl could ferry arrows to the front lines?”

“We don’t talk about the arrows!” said my brother.

The End of Late Fees!  Big advertising blitz!  Rejoicing in the streets!  All hail!

So I asked the young woman at the counter what the details of this are.

Joshua: Could you tell me the details of the new program?
Employee: You still have a due date, but you have seven days from the due date to bring it back.
Joshua: And then what?
Employee: And then we sell it to you automatically, and it’s yours to keep.
Joshua: You what?
Employee: We charge you for the video, and you don’t have to bring it back.
Joshua: That’s pretty sneaky.
Employee: You have 30 days from when we charge you to return it for credit.

But hey, that’s not a late fee, I guess.

I almost want to let them do that to me once so that I can make a tidy profit when the inevitable class action lawsuit goes through.

Oh, and the “refund” you get?  “You will be charged a restocking fee plus applicable taxes.” Why? “BLOCKBUSTER incurs processing, administrative and other costs when we have to convert rental product to a sale, as well as when you return the product after that sale. The restocking fee helps to cover that cost.” Poor buggers. You almost feel sorry for them, don’t you? Pitiful bastards with their administrative costs when the big mean customer makes them take a video back.

I almost left my purchases sitting on the counter and walked out, but I didn’t want to be confrontational with the employee who, despite complicity by having no intentions of informing me of the new policy without my asking, couldn’t seem to care less. And I really wanted to see Life of Brian tonight.  But I had no idea how mad I’d end up.

The address, if you want to cut up your card and mail it with a nasty letter, is

Blockbuster Inc.

1201 Elm Street

Dallas, TX 75270

This company is so going to tank.  Divest now.

I saw Bowling for Columbine for the first time today. It’s in my top ten or twenty favorite films of all time. Michael Moore is a big guy, but his balls are outsized even for his frame. The portion where he stands up to Charlton Heston was really uncomfortable. I have no idea how he did it.

Tom Mauser is my new personal hero.

I watched Outfoxed today. Aargh. What a frustrating movie. It left me in a sour mood for the rest of the day. I have, however, come to the conclusion that Bill O’Reilly either needs to be somewhere where he can be taken care of and receive regular shots, or he needs to be somewhere where he can be taken care of and shot regularly.

Don Hewitt, of whom I’m no great fan, is retiring from 60 Minutes, of which I’m also no great fan.  I heard him on NPR yesterday talking in a highly opinionated fashion about the propensity of Americans to change the channel repeatedly and essentially “walk out” of the program; he compared the remote to “a gun”. He posed the following question: how many feature films have you walked out of in the theater? He claimed that no one would be able to name five. This is supposed to prove that we have “nothing invested” in television programs, compared to movies.

Well, I’ve walked out of four films, and I’ve fallen asleep in three others (post-childhood.) I’m also a third his age. Extrapolate at will. I have a feeling others have comparable statistics. So, if you’re inclined, post at the board.

OK, if you’re curious: I walked out of:

1. Trespass (1992, 5.9 stars at IMDB),
2. Hard Target (1993, 5.3 stars,  stars),
3. Natural Born Killers (1994, 6.6 stars), and
4. Starship Troopers (1997, 6.6 stars)

I fell asleep during:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996, 6.4 stars),
2. The Core (2003, 5.5 stars), and
3. Cavale, aka On The Run, aka Trilogy:One (2002, 6.8 stars)

I tend to forget, with how much gore is permitted in R-rated films these days, how much more gory they can get when they are unrated.  Good grief.

The San Gabriel Valley in Perspective, or, Why You Shouldn’t Feel Sorry for How Much the Wedding in Father of the Bride Cost

Here is a comparison of median household incomes in the San Gabriel Valley, where I live:

Yes, that’s almost a factor of four range, and yes, San Marino (where Steve Martin and family live in Father of the Bride) is twice its nearest competitor.  All of these towns are are close enough to drive to

for a movie (not that San Marino has any theaters) or a meal (San Marino has exactly twelve restaurants, each located on one of only two streets.) To help visualize the towns, El Monte and Rosemead are pretty grimy, Alhambra is beginning to see a renaissance since the rebuilding of its downtown, Monrovia is fiercely small-town America and has some turn of the (last) century homes, South Pas and Arcadia have nice, big, new homes, Sierra Madre is a nice foothills community with a charming downtown, San Marino is clannish, conservative, and opulent, and the rest are fairly basic L.A. suburbs.

For comparison, Los Angeles proper (across its communities, including inner-city areas and the San Fernando Valley) has a median household income of $36,687, right near the bottom.

“Toni Collette has proven she can do about anything — but she can’t do this.”  Ebert, with whom I sometimes disagree but whom I almost always respect, pans Connie and Carla, reassuring me that I don’t have to go see this movie despite, along with 98% of Americans, having liking Vardalos’s previous effort.

Among his other new reviews, he gives Kill Bill: Vol. 2 a perfect four stars. No, I’m not going to link to it. You shouldn’t read it. I sure didn’t. It’s my most anticipated movie for this year. The only reason I haven’t seen it yet is that Jenn wants to see it and we haven’t gotten the first one from Netflix yet. (Come on, red envelope. Come on, red envelope.)

Why was I at Ebert’s site to begin with?  I wanted to see what he thought of Eyes Wide Shut, which I just saw. And his response surprised me: he seemed to pan it in his review, then gave it 3.5 stars. If this was mailed to him blind, with no identifying information, and if he was hypothetically dense enough not to recognize the director screaming “I’m KUBRICK!” through the whole thing with bizarre lighting and endless cart shots, I wonder how he would have scored this auteur piece. I think we give A-list, brilliant, directors a little too much credit when interpreting their works.

Not that I thought it was terrible. I’m trying to be really careful not to ruin anything, so I can’t really discuss the good parts in detail, but I’ll stick to the stuff everyone probably already knows about the film. The orgy scene was incredibly eerie, and had the potential to be world-class if the ham-handed digital insertion of black silhouettes to earn it the R Rating hadn’t been done. (And to digress for a moment, let me say that was completely unconscionable. In no way should someone under 17 see the film. The studio forcing the edit is pandering to our societal stigma of adult-labeled material. Our society, on a general level, wants to see adult material: sex, nudity, action, violence, but for some reason we’re only comfortable seeing it if no one reminds us that kids shouldn’t be seeing it. We’re adults, they’re kids. We’re allowed to like things that are inappropriate for them.) The costumer should have won an Oscar. I get the Homeric bit — the episodic nature of the story, the “variations on a theme” composition — but that’s been done to death. It didn’t work for me. It’s been thousands of years. Not every protagonist needs an Odyssey. But to its credit, the film did something a bit unusual for plots of this type, which was to maintain a perfectly planned plot arc via these disconnected vignettes.

I’m venturing a bit close to the material.  Sorry.  Let me try to step back.

Stepping away from the details, my main complaint with the film was the following. For all the hype of it being ground-breaking, edgy, and artsy, it was one of the most morally parochial films I’ve ever seen. (I won’t go into more detail here, but I’ll take this to email with anyone who is interested.) The juxtaposition of the filming and the philosophy is bizarre, and I think irreconcilable. Kubrick was both screenwriter and director, so it’s not a case of mismatch between two people. If Kubrick really is as parochial as the plots and the too-tidy resolution indicate, then it’s inappropriate to show the images he chose to show to his audience, even — especially — for shock value. If he really was post-traditional morality enough to believe the stuff belongs on celluloid, he should get off his puritanical high horse and admit that relationships are more complex than the pencil sketch he committed to paper and film.

There seems a trend in, say, the last ten years, to make movies where the “twist” is that some portion (frequently a large portion) of what you just watched, action committed to honest-to-goodness celluloid, properly dressed, acted, and scored, never actually happened in the story, that you have been watching the delusion of a main character filmed not as a delusion but as reality. I’m not going to list the films I’m thinking of here, because doing so will spoil the point of the movie, but I can name four five six without putting much thought into it. The questions are, how many can you name (again, please don’t list them)? And do you think this is losing its novelty?

I saw The Wicker Man the other day.  I may be naïve, but I had no idea they made movies this disturbing in 1973.

(No, I won’t link to it at IMDB. If you want a disturbing film, better that you know absolutely nothing about it, other than the fact that I gave it nine stars at IMDB.)

If you, dear reader, watched two thirds of David Cronenberg’s Spider in October while distracted with a new baby, then watched the remaining third five months later after forgetting several important points, you owe it to yourself to watch the film again with the commentary running.  Also, if you watched the film under any other circumstance, you owe it to yourself to watch the film again with the commentary running.

I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 1 today.  I loved it.  Adored it.  A phenomenal film.  I gave it ten stars at IMDB.  I’ve only done this a couple of times before.  Schindler’s List.  The director’s cut of Das Boot.  You get the idea.

You can learn all sorts of interesting information from the IMDB page.  (Including that Chiaki Kuriyama is not really seventeen.  She’s legal.  Even when the film was made.  Barely.  Helps assuage some guilt feelings.  What a difference a year makes.  Anyway.^*)  The trivia page is especially fun, and while it doesn’t actually tell you the name, it tells you where and how The Bride’s name can be found in the film.  (Lazy?  Do a Google search.  Or look here.)

But the most interesting thing comes on the goofs page.  Under “Incorrectly regarded as goofs”, we find the following:

The many continuity lapses and other apparent technical errors are a matter of deliberate stylistic choice in this pastiche of 1970s “B” action movies.

Which is groovy and everything.  Really.  But isn’t it just a bit too convenient?  I mean, don’t you think every film director would like to have this notation in his or her film’s goofs page?  Or just shorten it to “The mistakes are intentional, deal with it?”  The Big Stuff: I’m with you on that.  Nobody bleeding on the snow, for instance, even when sporting massive gaping wounds.  But the tiny stuff, like the mascara smudge under Go Go’s left eye disappearing during the fight scene.  Are Tarantino worshippers really going to tell me that the makeup artist went in and painted a smudge just so we can have a continuity lapse to marvel at?

One thing especially unusual about this film is how quickly time seemed to pass.  The movie was scheduled to start at 2:30, but I had forgotten to reset my watch for the return to PST.  So as the previews started, I reset my watch from 3:30 to 2:30.  Then, at a certain point in the film I glanced down at my watch to gauge where we were, and it read 4:30.  But by this point I had forgotten I had fixed my watch (following this still?)  So I thought, “Oh good, there’s an hour left.”  Then the film cut to credits.  No idea what happened to that extra hour.

If you haven’t seen this film, have a strong stomach when it comes to amputations, and trust my opinions at all: go see it.  It’s fantastic.

(Note added 29 October 2003: “To my credit,” I told my wife, “I think I was supposed to find her sexy, and I think I was supposed to be uncomfortable about it.”  “I’m sure,” she responded.  “Ninety percent of a Tarantino film is making the viewer feel uncomfortable.”)

I watched a movie on Mystery Science Theater 3000 the other day: 1993’s Quest of the Delta Knights (see a preview here, if you don’t mind every important plot element being revealed.)  It’s currently rated 1.8 out of 10 at IMDB: when it gets 200 more votes it will, if the score stays the same, qualify for their list of Bottom 100 Films, and will come in somewhere between position 7 and 10.  A score of 1.8 will tie it with Hobgoblins, and will leave it just slightly higher than Gigli and Manos.

Thing is, I liked it.  Not “It’s so bad it’s good.”  Not “It was an unintentional comedy that had me cracking up.”  Not “It’s great for the cheese factor alone.”  I liked it.  It was just fine for what it was, an ultra low-budget adventure story filmed with various Renn Faires as backdrops.  It starred Emmy-winner David Warner and Golden Globe-winner Olivia Hussey, and they and the young Corbin Allred gave perfectly respectable performances.  I’ve saved the episode on the TiVo, as I intend to subject someone to it to gauge another viewer’s reaction.  I just don’t think it’s that bad.  Anyone else willing to fess up to liking this movie?