You never know when a cinematic release will move one to write.
When you have to race home from the theater, break out the Big Chief Tablet (now called an iPad) and bear thy soul for 26 pages like Trips Right after watching The Notebook, his reluctant magnum opus that remains to be published.
Maybe that petulant pussy A.O. Scott doesn't know shit and needs to be told otherwise, but whatever it was, this week's crop of current releases inspired the Barkers.
Seeking justice, scally tracked down some strangers from high school he hadn't seen in 20 years and watched Super 8 to see if it had the answers to LOST. Scipio brought the geek hammer down hard with a narrative discourse on why the X Men series and comic book film derivatives are generally better than overrated Oscar-winning films as Crash and The Life of Emile Zola.
I would hold our movie critics up against the lovechildren of Roger Ebert, Harry Knowles, and Pauline Kael (now that's a scene!) after 16 years of balanced homeschooling by the personal assistants of George Lucas and Robert Downey, Jr.
So here is a compendium of some of the finest cinematic reviews you'll see anywhere -- in print or online. Seriously. If that asshole Tim Ferriss wrote a book called Film School in 20 minutes! it would read something like this.
Vote in the comments for which one you liked best, which childhood memory it evoked, or what perverted acts it inspired. And feel free to request a movie that has yet to be reviewed. Given we've only published about 20 of them you should have plenty of options.
A. Minnesotahorn likes midnight viewings of Star Trek, usually alone but sometimes with friends ...
A buddy and I have a tradition of seeing most of these sci-fi/comic book/adventure films at their opening midnight showing as the people watching often surpasses the quality of the film itself. To date we’ve seen dorks of all ages dressed as Yoda, Dr. Manhattan and I think even Mola Ram although that might have just been Brandon Carter.
B. HenryJames offends every person that ever liked Matt Damon, Jason Bourne, and/or Jews.
Bourne is a cross between MacGyver and Jet Li with the face of a man with Down Syndrome. Take Damon’s character in Saving Private Ryan, send him to an assassin school where he learns to call Brendan Fraser a Jew and strangles Ben Affleck to death with a gym sock and you have Jason Bourne.
C. scally likes making home movies in his closet with nothing but a bowl of jello and a Super 8 camera
The adult actors are just as compelling...
There was a time when women were considered attractive without the aid of compounds from the periodic table of elements injected into their bodies and their eye make up wasn’t applied with a sharpie. They did things like wander around the house in their panties and a button down shirt. None of them were remotely interested in joining a rock climbing gym.
This movie has a young Linda Fiorentino. With fantastic big hair.
If you’ve bought none of my other arguments, this movie demands your respect on that basis alone.
E. BrickHorn will make up anything to get you into his Hot Tub ... Time Machine
But despite my impressive erudition, I am not above a foray into the boorish world of lowbrow humor. Truth be told, I enjoy it, in much the same way Hugh Grant relishes the occasional crackwhore knobjob. My latest crackwhore knobjob, if you will, was a viewing of Hot Tub Time Machine at the Alamo. And it may very well have been the best BJ I’ve ever had from a grimy crackwhore. Figuratively, of course.
Once again we have two cultures with one being good and the other evil and we need not trouble you with any complications there. The personifications of militarism and corporate greed make their necessary appearances and are entirely unsympathetic and one dimensional but don’t worry! We gratuitously slaughter them and many of their grunting unenlightened male minions for your viewing pleasure! As always there’s at least one or two of us pasty white dudes with the sense to buck the system, give The Man the finger, take up the native ways and become the savior of those noble savages. Fuck yeah! It almost makes you wonder what dark skinned people would do without disestablishmentarian white people. And I stress you. James Cameron, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise and I know they’d be boned.
Underground: Palm d’Or winner at the ‘95 Cannes Festival, this whack-job of epic Eastern European cinema portrays a Serbian village isolated underground during the Cold War. It is colorful and hallucinogenic, mad, torrid and manic. The music, the cinematography and acting performances will either enthrall you or piss you off to no end.
The film speaks to the fear and uncertainty of the time period. An example of paranoia to the nth degree, Underground speaks to film lovers in all the classical terms, then turns into a movie within a movie, when the revisionist leader turned national hero conceals his true motivation. Corruption and deception run rampant, and all because of a woman… and another man.
Yes, HAL was aware. HAL had been briefed on the mission before the astronauts. The movie doesn’t tell us if HAL guessed the aliens were going to introduce a next step to the sentient beings that made it to Saturn (and wanted to take it himself), or if, as the book explains, he didn’t trust the humans to complete the mission correctly. I suspect the former, mainly because it fits the “tribal war” theme. Remember, Kubrick and Clarke did not feel compelled to tell the same story in their respective media. I think this viewing makes for a much tenser film- this isn’t a man trying to survive a malfunctiong tool; it’s a man fighting for our species’ survival vs. a rival sentience.
Memorandum
To: Hollywood
From: Scip E.O. Tex, Internet Provocateur
CC: God Loving Free World
Date: This very instant
Re: You are destroying America, motherfuckersDear Hollywood,
You’ve gone and done it now. This is war. WAR!
At what point during your Hotel Bel-Air mid-wine flight post-synagogue movie pitch to Harvey Weinstein did you get the idea that Joe Willie Namath should be played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a confirmed cinematic sodomite?
Right after the course of foie gras, I’ll bet.
No David Hasselhoff? No Joe Penny from Riptide? What about, like, Wolverine? You could have offered us the simple courtesy of casting the Brokeback pitcher instead of the catcher. Heath Ledger was masculine and phenomenal in A Knights Tale.
It’s only fair right? Who am I to judge a movie while not offering up myself to be judged as well?
First off, my only clean shirt was the black, totally kick ass Venom shirt, with the huge white spider symbol on it. This is a bitchin’ shirt that I wear proudly. Problem was that nobody wanted to go see it with me, so yeah, I was that guy. Alone, middle of the afternoon, wearing a comic book shirt to a comic book movie. To kill time I had a Nintendo DS handy.
Luckily, I was surrounded by that guys, so I didn’t stand out too badly. Unluckily, I also wore my lady pants. In short, they are too tight, they are too low, and anytime I’m not standing perfectly erect my ass crack spills out like the high school slut that I am. But I keep them because I look fucking fantastic in them. They are my lady pants. Lady pants are not for mid-afternoon nerd movies, though, and they are too tight to sneak any candy in so I had to pay $3.50 for Skittles. Awful...
To the movie I give a solid but still disappointing B, to myself a resounding F-.
This movie does the best job of expressing a Christian spirituality than any I’ve seen besides “Tender Mercies”. Now before you say, “Great! I now know what we can show the kids at the next youth group meeting at our house!”, there is something else you need to know. The film is rated NC-17, and boy, does it earn it. You have drug use (smoked, snorted, an injected). You have nudity (hookers, nun, and Harvey Keitel). You have violence commited to a church, and a car tape deck. You have Darryl Stawberry action. This is one depraved movie.
And the Oscar goes to...