Bad Movie Club: Tommy and the Cool Mule


2009 talking animal movie

Bad Movie Rating: 2/5 (J.D.: 2.5/5; Fred: 2/5; Josh: fell asleep; Lisa: fell asleep)

Rating: 6/20

Plot: A kid whose dad died in combat finds a talking mule that helps his family through all of their problems.

This should have been called Tommy and the Flatulent Mule. That is one gassy mule!

Tommy and the Cool Mule is almost good enough for the Hallmark Channel. There's real human drama on display in this family movie with dead fathers, teenage girls who really want tattoos, bullying, and financial problems. At the same time, this would be fun for the whole family because they can sit around and laugh at all the farting. Farting can bring the whole family together.

It's never really determined if the cool mule really talks or if it's the result of a few head injuries that Tommy the not-so-cool kid gets in the first quarter of the movie. He falls off a horse and bonks his head on the ground. He's clobbered in the noggin by a board while in a paintball war a few days after that. That's when he sees some dazzling special effects--twinkling colors--and meets his mule, who he later calls his best friend. The mule is naturally voiced by Ice-T who apparently has nothing better to do with his time these days. I expected the cool mule to throw out a "Fuck the police," but I was disappointed.

If you have told me in the early-90s that Ice-T would someday provide the voice of a talking mule in a family movie later in his career, it would have been hard to believe. I'd think, "Shouldn't that be the kind of thing Vanilla Ice is doing with his career? I think you've got the wrong Ice!" Before the movie started, I told my Bad Movie Club friends that I would likely shit my pants if the cool mule started rapping at any point. He sort of rapped at one point, and I sort of shat myself. Anyway, Ice-T's performance can only be described as inspired. As in--inspired to make an easy paycheck with an afternoon of work reading lines that he probably didn't even understand. "Lean into the barrel? What kind of motherfucking movie is this? Fuck the police!"

I have to give the movie credit because I really thought the dad was going to end up coming back to life or something. That didn't happen. A whole bunch of other stupid things happened, but at least that didn't happen.

Kevin Sorbo is also in this. He plays a villain named Dodge Daviss who has too many s's in his name and a wide variety of cowboy shirts. The mom was played by Siri Baruc. I don't know her at all, but I'll tell you one thing--her ass sure was talking to me.

I shouldn't type movie reviews this late at night. I apologize for all of the above.

Monsieur Hire


1989 drama

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A pervy guy witnesses something criminal when peeping at a girl he's infatuated with and has to make a decision when he becomes a suspect in a murder.

What a horrible realization I had near the beginning of this movie! I'm Monsieur Hire in about 10 or so years, eating hard-boiled eggs while peeping on girls from a lonely apartment.

Boxing/caressing juxtaposition, architecture as foreshadowing, a somber death scene. There are some great quiet moments that add up to create a near masterpiece. It's whispery neo-noir.

Henry V


1989 Shakespeare adaptation

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy risks the lives of a small army by taking them to France for a war in order to impress a girl.

I need a Shakespeare aficionado to confirm that somebody says "balls to gallstones" in this.

New York Stories


1989 anthology movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Three New York stories taking place in New York, a place of stories.

Each of these three shorts has a cameo that put a smile on my face. I loved seeing a young Buscemi in the Scorsese short. That is actually more than a cameo though. He gets a nice monologue and everything. Then, Coppola's story has Chris Elliott playing a thief. And then there's none other than Larry David in the Woody Allen short.

Scorsese's chunk of this, a story of an ornery abstract artist played terrifically by a barely-hinged Nick Nolte--the best kind of Nick Nolte--is almost great. The stylish peep-hole shots were cool, reminding me a little of a silent movie move, and I really loved watching all these incomprehensible paint swirl shots. Nolte really is great even if most of his lines in the second half of this are some variation of "I love you" or "I'll do anything for you."

Woody Allen's turn comes last, but it's the second best. The idea is solid, the kind you get the sense was bouncing around in various forms for a long time before he finally decided it just wouldn't work as a feature-length film. Mae Questel is great as Woody's mom, and a handful of funny lines--typical Woody Allen 70's stuff, I'd say--and Allen's expressions during a magic trick make this worth watching.

I hated every second of Coppola's story in this, and I think I might hate Coppola. How can somebody related to Nicolas Cage be so devoid of talent? Things start badly with a 12-year-old's voice over where she goes on and on about a flute, and then it somehow gets worse with this gross King Creole song about that 12-year-old, Zoe. The acting, aside from Chris Elliott who is always great, is terrible across the board, and I swear, two actors look directly at the camera at two different points in this thing. It's an embarrassment in the middle of two much-better offerings.

My Left Foot


1989 biopic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: The reminisces of a mental defective.

In putting together a "Best of 1989" list, I figured this was something I needed to rewatch. My noticings:

I had forgotten how great Daniel Day Lewis is. I knew it was a great performance, definitely deserving of the Academy Award. But part of me still thought it was sort of one of those imitation performances that seems a little more special than it is because he's playing a condition (or a larger-than-life character) instead of an actual human being. That's not what this is at all. Daniel Day Lewis becomes Christy Brown. There wasn't a single moment in this when I couldn't believe they hired a guy with cerebral palsy to play the part. This isn't just a deserving-of-the-Oscar performance. This is an all-time great performance. There's the physical stuff (the painful-looking movements, blowing out birthday candles, playing soccer, putting a Mozart record on in the stunning opening sequence), but there's this emotion with the character that you just feel.

Brenda Fricker has no chance to be as good as Daniel Day Lewis, but she very nearly pulls it off as Mrs. Brown. That's another great performance. Additionally, Hugh O'Conor, the kid who plays the younger Christy Brown, is really good. He handles the physical stuff so well. At first, I thought it was Daniel Day Lewis method-acting and somehow transforming himself into a child, but it turns out that it was a different person.

Another observation--Christy Brown's "handwriting" is actually a lot better than mine.

I was surprised at how much of this revolves around Christy Brown wanting to get laid. 

The best scene is a dinner scene where it takes Christy Brown about a half an hour to say the word "congratulations," a swirl around the table, this intense physicality.

Wheels on Meals


1984 action comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A couple of guys who run a food truck help a chubby detective protect a woman who has some stuff going on.

This really takes its time getting to an action sequence. There's a brief, random fight scene where Jackie Chan and Biao Yuen take on a few thugs, and then there's a whole lot of plot and comedy, the former which isn't all that engaging and the latter not all that funny. A car chase--well, a car-and-food-truck chase--works, but car chases isn't exactly the reason I pop a Jackie Chan movie in.

The final twenty minutes or so contain the kinds of stunts and sequences that are exactly the reason I'd pop a Jackie Chan movie in, however. There are acrobatic climbs up castle walls and then a triptych of fighting mayhem with director Samo Hung and a bad guy engaging in sword play while Chan and Yuen show throw their fists and feet and bodies around with this impossible choreography in fights of their own. It's thrilling stuff, and it's easily five times as good as anything else in this movie.

Does Jackie Chan do his own skateboarding in this? I can't remember another movie where he shows off his skateboarding skills, and I couldn't really tell here because there were some shots that made the whole thing look fake.

Speaking of skateboarding, this has a montage with the two fellas and the girl skateboarding around that looks like it's straight out of a Bollywood movie. And I don't mean that in a good way. Or maybe I do mean that in a good way.

If you're overly sensitive to films that find mental illness funny, be aware that this has a scene in a mental institution where a guy laughing at his own jokes, another patient fishing, and a guy who believes he's a clock are, I guess, all supposed to be something to laugh at. It's not a very realistic look at mental illness.

Wheels on Meals is a dumb title.

Minding the Gap


2018 documentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Three skateboarding friends face the challenge of transitioning from adolescent problems to adult problems.

"This machine cures hearthache." That's written on one of the boy's skateboards. Skateboarding for these teens who are facing abuse, absent or deceased fathers, and alienation is therapy. There's joy in the scenes showing these kids skateboarding through the streets or on top of a building or in a skate park. Seeing the boys' smiles and watching what has to be the only times they feel completely free is exhilarating.

I'm not sure how people skateboard actually. I can't even stand on top of one. And I'm really not sure how some of these skateboard scenes are filmed. I assume the director--Bing Liu, one of the three kids--is just following along on a skateboard while holding the camera, but that doesn't seem safe. Of course, one of the guys also skateboards while holding a baby which also doesn't feel entirely safe.

This is compiled from what must be thousands of hours of footage taken over what seems to be more than a ten-year period. There's lots of video from before anybody had an idea to turn this into a feature-length documentary, but it's clear later that the young adult versions of these two friends, along with the baby mama of one of them who also becomes a main character, are aware that a documentary is being made. You see the trio grow from adolescence to young adults, most touchingly in a flashing montage at the end.

This isn't a movie about watching three boys age physically, however. This is more about that "gap" between adolescence and adulthood, and as the movie progresses, you see what kinds of adolescent problems these three are using skateboarding as an escape from as well as the kinds of adult problems that are replacing, and in some cases seeming to be the results of, those adolescent problems. The footage works to create a mosaic, the issues these people facing becoming more gradually revealed rather than spelled out right away. And I think that's Liu's greatest feat with Minding the Gap--the way he creates their individual narratives and their shared narrative of friendship in such a lovely way.

Eventually, it's revealed that the process of making a movie has replaced skateboarding as therapy for Liu. One of them--the one dealing with trying to figure out how to be a father and struggling with alcoholism--also comments that being the subject of Liu's camera is like free therapy. The other guy--the one dealing with living life as a young black man with a missing father--doesn't share that sentiment as overtly, but it's clear in touching sequences where he unloads.

This is one of the most honest documentaries that I've seen in a long time. There's subjectivity, of course, but watching these guys struggle with issues was heartbreaking and beautiful. I kind of fell in love with them, warts and all, and I'm really hoping that when a sequel comes out in a few years (like the 7 Up series), they're all doing fine.

I thought that 2018 was the Year of the Horse Movie, but it might actually be the Year of the Skateboard Movie. Jonah Hill's upcoming movie and a movie out now called Skate Kitchen both have lots of skateboarding.

Finding Frances


2017 season-ending episode of a television show

Rating: I can't rate a television episode.

Plot: See below.

Nathan for You is one of the funniest shows I've ever seen, and if you haven't seen it, you should stop what you're doing and watch some immediately. Watch them in order from the first season to the fourth season because you'll see characters recur. The show has Nathan Fielder, whose deadpan expressions would make Buster Keaton envious, helping out struggling businesses with terrible ideas. He's helped a realtor by teaming her up with a ghost whisperer to make her the only realtor in Los Angeles able to guarantee that houses are free from ghosts. He's helped a movie theater fight popcorn sharing and masturbation. And he's rebranded a struggling coffee shop as a "Dumb Starbucks" to compete with big business.

One of those recurring characters is William Heath, a Bill Gates impersonator he used in an effort to help out a souvenir shop in Hollywood. At the beginning of "Finding Frances," a film-length final episode of season four, it's revealed that Heath keeps showing up at Nathan's office to visit or drop off little presents. He mentions a long-lost love named Frances, and Nathan decides to use the show's resources to help the old man find his old flame.

The more brilliant episodes of Nathan for You start with a germ of an idea and evolve or mutate in these unexpected ways. As Nathan and William head to Arkansas to find Frances, it starts a trip down a rabbit hole that is as hilarious as any of the stuff in his shorter normal episodes but also becomes surprisingly touching. William Heath becomes more mysterious and more fascinating as the episode progresses, and it builds to a climax that nearly brought tears to my eyes. At the same time, Nathan reveals things about his character--or at least the character he is playing--which provides some meta commentary on the nature of the show.

The entire season is really good, but there's something extra special about this final episode. It's one of the best things I've seen from television in a long, long time.

Kuso


2017 something-rather

Rating: 13/20

Plot: I don't really know. There's been an earthquake in Los Angeles, and everybody has boils.

This is the directorial debut of musician Flying Lotus, a guy who is related to Alice and Ravi Coltrane. He's got no shortage of ideas; unfortunately, a lot of them are just bad ones. The visual sense is often there, especially in this gorgeously perverse collage stuff with this dope electronic music accompanying it. I have no idea what story he's trying to tell or what any of this adds up to if it adds up to anything at all. There are five or six characters' stories being told here, and the characters are all linked by boils and this earthquake that is alluded to a few times. Bugs, pus, deterioration, fecal matter, and bodily fluids are all gross-out motifs. At times, it feels like a collaboration between William S. Burroughs and a gas station restroom. It's Adult Swim-style nonsense turned up to 11 and very likely the squelchiest movie I'll ever see. At the very least, I can now say I've seen a Tim Heidecker sex scene.

It's really a unique little movie, unique enough that I'm willing to give it a rating boost just because it's showing me things I'd never seen before. Of course, it's showing things that most normal people would not have any interest in seeing. I believe I read that there were a lot of walk-outs when this was shown at a festival, and I can imagine why. It had to be the bug-emerging-from-a-doctor's-butthole-to-provide-juice scene. The movie that is reminded me the most of is a Japanese movie called Funky Forest: The First Contact. This was a little more blustery than that one though.

A lot of this, I suspect, is supposed to be funnier than I thought it was. I did almost laugh at an abortion scene though. That's got to be worth something.

I believe I heard a Wilhelm Scream at one point in this. And I know I saw Richard Dawson at one point.

Ok, I've said next-to-nothing about Kuso, and I still have nothing else to say.


The Road Movie


2016 documentary

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A compilation of dashboard camera videos from Russia.

Hold on a second. This isn't a movie. This is just some guy compiling Russian dashboard camera footage and calling it a documentary, isn't it?

That's probably true--the closing credits actually confirm it--but that hasn't stopped critics from really liking this one. I'll confess that I enjoyed watching it, too, but I don't really think there's enough done creatively with the assembling of these videos to make this a real documentary. There's no meaning with the progression of the videos. They could have been put in any order at all and had the exact same effect. They don't really paint a comprehensive picture of Russian people or anything like that. It's really just like going to YouTube, setting it so that videos will autoplay, and watching a bunch of Russian dashboard camera videos.

I really did enjoy a lot of it though, and there are a lot of memorable highlights. A monkey-man jumping on a stranger's hood and gesticulating wildly, a woman wandering aimlessly and eventually reaching the hood of another car, a tank being washed at a car wash, the dodging of horses with the driver exclaiming "Fuck a duck, bitch!", seeing that giant meteor thing that was all the rage a few years ago, a guy stealing the camera from a parked car, some sledgehammer road rage, a parachutist. A lot of the videos are accompanied with whatever music the driver and passengers are listening to, and a lot of times the selections bring an irony to the whole thing.

The real highlight is a terrifying, psychedelic forest fire that some people are, for whatever reason, driving through. That was something else!

I'd recommend this even though I'm not sure it's a movie.

Bad Movie Club: Pocket Ninjas


1997 action comedy

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Josh: 4/5; Lisa (who actually bailed midway through to watch meteors instead): 5/5)

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Some pocket ninjas try to stop bad guys from doing something.

This was the 200th Bad Movie Club meeting. There was little fanfare, and only three of us showed up for this one with one leaving early to look for meteors, but I'm still strangely proud that we've done 200 of these now. I mean, why wouldn't I be? That's like 18,000 hours we've spent watching bad movies together, and if my math is right, that's 750 total days.

My math is not right. I'm not sure where I messed up.

I know where the makers of Pocket Ninjas messed up though. It's where they tried to make a movie--even an 80-minute one, without having a real story. Seriously, I would say somewhere around 65% of this movie consists of training montages. I didn't think anything could compete with the montage/non-montage ratio in Kindergarten Ninja, but this one very well might beat it. I'd have to be better at math and willing to watch both of these again to figure all that out.

About 1/10th of the movie was also the opening credits, by the way. I'm telling you, there was barely any movie here.

This tries to combine slapstick comedy and action, but it does it about as ineptly as I've seen anything done lately. And I see myself attempt to educate the youth of America every single day, so that's saying something. Even some of the training montages have the bad guys hamming it up, complete with some slide-whistle and cartoonish percussion sound effects. The most comical scene takes place in some sort of funhouse/warehouse hybrid with all these balloons. Robert Z'Dar, criminally underutilized in this, and a foe are bouncing up and down on balloons as they battle, and effects to speed up Z'Dar as he throws out these one-man Stooge moves make the whole thing baffling. The titular ninjas aren't particularly skilled (not enough to be showcased in countless montages anyway), but they do have roller blades on during them. That's something. All of the fight scenes are very slow. I doubt there was any fight choreography actually, probably just instructions to "not hurt each other" or something. The sound effects make the whole thing even more ridiculous with a sound guy utilizing a library of over three impact sounds to accompany the punching and kicking.

Did I mention that Robert Z'Dar and his mighty chin are in this movie? It's only in a pair of scenes though--both completely inconsequential. The first is a fantasy sequence (the infamous balloon scene I mentioned up there) that comes from a comic book the Pocket Ninjas are enjoying while spending quality time together in their treehouse. The second is a ludicrous virtual reality sequence that is tacked after the movie has already ended when the director realized he didn't have enough montages to make a feature-length film and needed some filler. 

This was directed by Dave Eddy, and it's his only movie unless you count a TV movie documentary he made after somebody decided that the guy who made Pocket Ninjas is the best choice to make a documentary about 9/11.

Steppenwolf

1974 novel adaptation

Rating: 12/20

Plot: The exact same as the Hermann Hesse novel!

It's been a very long time since I read the Hermann Hesse novel, but from what I can tell, this is a very faithful adaptation of that. This movie, the only one Fred Haines ever made, has a lot of great moments, but you have to wade through a lot of talky scenes to get to them. There's an animated biographical glimpse of Harry Haller, played by the always-solid Max von Sydow, that is really great. It's got that Monty Python cut-out look that you know can only be created by Czech animators. The whole thing climaxes with Haller finally venturing into the Magic Theater, a trippy tripy through surrealist paintings. A lot of the effects are dated, but the visuals still bring a kind of hallucinogenic punch that makes this whole thing worth seeing even if the rest of it is very sleepy.

This has a great performance by a little person named Alfred Baillou. He plays a little Goethe. He's got a great voice, performs an awesome little dance, and keeps calling the main character "honey" for some reason. The best scene with him is, like the rest of the movie, a little talky and way too dense, but there are these ever-shifting painted walls in the background the keep things visually interesting.

I had been wanting to see this one for a while. It was disappointing as a whole, but it does have some moments that I've never really seen before which made it worth seeing.

The Baby of Macon


1993 comedy

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A miracle baby is exploited, first by a sister and then by a church.

"Be grateful of the music. Most of us die in silence."

This Peter Greenaway movie begs a question: Would you want to be the 208th guy in [redacted]?"

I'm not sure why this movie wasn't a huge box office hit. I mean, there's [redacted], [more redacted], and the whole thing climaxes with a crowd of people [redacted]. If that's not enough to put asses in the seats, I don't know what is!

What Greenaway and his usual cinematographer, the great Sacha Vierny, do with this space is amazing. Essentially, it's a filmed version of a play though the camera is frequently turned on the audience who gleefully become participants in a lot of these shenanigans, including a [redacted]. I was pleasantly surprised when the camera moved underneath the stage to show action down there, but when it eventually moves through the back of the stage or sides to show the immensity of the space in which they're all working, I became pleasantly stunned. A lot of that is shown in these exquisite extended shots, some which I'm not sure how are pulled off. I mean, I was hooked with the opener--a shot of a naked guy with this big hat who kind of ushers in everything with a speech-impeded soliloquy--but after that, I almost anticipated getting a little bored. Greenaway and Vierny consistently sucked me into what was going on in this play-within-a-movie though. I'm a sucker for extended shots, and there are some great ones here, especially the scene where [redacted].

The movie seems to be about regular old human beings' responses to the miraculous. Some try to explain it away, picking it apart by explaining how it's got toes and a penis. Some engage in jealous bickering. Some use it as a moneymaker. Some consider it balm or medicine. Some are inspired to contemplate ambitions. The church's response is the one Greenaway seems most critical of. With the response to "It was a virgin birth" being a hypocritical "Ha! Impossible!", it's clear that Greenaway sees the church as only being happy with the miraculous when it's able to get something from it. You know, like when it can make a buck or two auctioning off vials of the miracle baby's urine or something.

[Redacted paragraph]

Anyway, this is definitely for the more adventurous cinephiles out there. But if you don't mind a little [redacted] or [redacted] in your dark dramatic comedies, this visual feast is probably the film for you. It could make an interesting double feature with mother!.

[Redacted]


BlacKkKlansman


2018 Spike Lee joint

Rating: 17/20 (Jen: 19/20)

Plot: Denzel Washington's son and Kylo Ren buddy-cop up and infiltrate the KKK.

I know making movies--from the writing to the casting and the shooting and the editing--is very difficult, but Spike Lee has made something that seems effortlessly brilliant here. I remember somebody saying after Trump's inauguration about how at least it will be fuel for artistic minds. I'm not sure if that's the case or not with Blackkklansman or however I'm supposed to type that title, but the troubling times we live in at the very least squeeze out more meaning from this story than would have been squeezed out if it had been made ten years ago.

First, I want to say that aside from the political relevance and timely messages here, Lee has made one hell of an entertaining movie. The movie is often really funny, it has dialogue that sizzles, and it builds dramatic tension naturally and effectively. The director isn't making a movie just to entertain, but it definitely does just that. One could ignore the didacticism and just watch a lively crime drama with some comedic elements if one wanted to do that.

But Lee almost makes that impossible. Always the provocateur, he relentlessly pokes at issues to bring them to the surface, and he does it in a myriad of ways. He does it with his images. The camera shows these characters--both the white and black characters--in ways that they wouldn't traditionally be seen. He does it in the writing, subverting the lingo of white supremacy and black power or sometimes juxtaposing them to give them entirely new meanings. And he does it with allusions, bringing in images of blaxploitation flicks from the 70s, shots from classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation, and news footage where rhetoric makes intentions crystal clear. It's honestly a whole lot that we're asked to digest, and that's why I think this will be a movie that is going to be analyzed and discussed for a long time, even after our current political nightmare has ended.

Sure Lee is dealing with racism, both in a traditional and obvious sense with the old-school Klan and the more subtle ways that people who aren't the victims of the racism wouldn't even perceive. But I think he's also saying a lot about the language and images of popular culture, especially movies, and how their power has been used for nefarious purposes. And he's saying a lot about the power of language itself. There's loads to unpack here, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

I have some blindspots with Spike Lee that I probably need to take care of first though. I'm not sure I've seen any other movie he's directed in the 21st Century actually. [Note: I'm wrong about that. I just looked it up and have seen The 25th Hour and Inside Man.]

I didn't realize that John David Washington was Denzel Washington's kid, but maybe that's because I just don't pay that much attention. I'm really impressed with what he did here. There's a real wisdom exhibited with these subtle things he does with this performance. I always like Driver when I see him although I have trouble articulating why because I don't think the guy has much range. Alec Baldwin is frightening and hilarious and terrific in a brief cameo right at the very beginning of this movie. And I kept thinking that a guy playing another cop looked a lot like Steve Buscemi. Turns out it's his brother, Michael Buscemi! I didn't even know he had a brother. Topher Grace brings the right amount of ridiculousness and scary hatred to David Duke, and some guy named Jasper Paakkonen is great as the scariest of the KKK guys. The most overtly scary anyway.

Both my wife and I cried at one point. I shared that information with the guy I was telling you about in my Blindspotting write-up, the black guy who works across the hall from me who I desperately want to trick into thinking I'm cool. He told me to "rub some dirt on it," and now I'm afraid I've ruined my chances of getting him to think I'm cool. It was probably a lost cause anyway.

I can forgive a director for making me type a title that way as long as the movie is this good.

The Meg


2018 shark movie

Rating: 10/20

Plot: While poking around on what they think might not actually be the bottom of the ocean, scientists unleash a megalodon and have to call on Jason Statham to help get rid of it.

I may have bothered other people in the theater when one of the characters said "Hatch to hatch" and I started laughing because I thought of the "Ass to Ass" scene in Requiem for a Dream and then, to help them understand why I was laughing, explained it by saying, "Ass to ass." I'm giving the movie bonus points for that.

I'm not sure if it's false advertising or if it's just false expectations that I created all by myself, but I am disappointed this wasn't a movie about Jason Statham kicking a 70-foot shark to death. Instead, it's a whole lot of scientific gobbledygook in the almost-cool-looking sealab funded by Dwight Schrute from The Office. Here, Schrute is playing a character who could only be described as a jerk-off. He's probably one of Trump's friends actually.

And before I continue, I do want you to realize that I know the actor who played Dwight Schrute has a real name. But come on--the guy has George-Constanza'd himself because of that sitcom, right? He can't escape that character easily, and roles like this where he's not really very good won't help him shake off the Schrute stink.

But I've digressed. This is a shark movie, not an Office spin-off. I have doubts the world needed another shark movie because Jaws 3-D pretty much perfected the genre, but I guess if you're going to make a shark action adventure, you might as well juice things up by making the shark super big.

Studio Executive: Ok, what do you guys have for me?
Person Trying to Convince the Studio to Make Another Shark Movie: Well, there's this shark. . .
Studio Executive: Wait a second. We've had an oversaturation of shark movies in the last decade or so. No pun intended.
Person Trying to Convince the Studio to Make Another Shark Movie: I'm not sure that's even a pun. But look, this isn't just a shark movie. This shark movie has a fish that is way bigger than the other movies!
Studio Executive: Sold! Here's 150 million dollars to make this thing right. I don't think sharks are fish though.
Person Who Has Convinced the Studio to Make Another Shark Movie: Yeah, who knows?
Studio Executive: See if you can get Jason Statham in the movie. He can, you know, kick the shark.

But Statham doesn't even kick a fucking shark in this! He's a ludicrous action movie hero in this and all, but why would you even bring Statham on board (no pun intended) if you're not going to have the guy kick and punch things?

In a movie that doesn't seem to have a single original idea, Statham punching and kicking a megalodon would have been welcomed. Instead, we get a pastiche of all these other shark movies--from Jaws 3-D to the Sharknado movies with everything in between. But since it's not as well crafted as Jaws 3-D or as dopey as the Sci-Fi Channel offerings, it doesn't deliver any artistic thrills or really any fun. It tries very hard to be a very serious science fiction movie while at the same time existing as this ridiculous spectacle of sharkish slaughter but succeeds in doing neither very well. If you give your audience close call after close call, they're going to get boring after a while.

The special effects are very good with the exception of a scene in the waters of a crowded beach where CGI people are being tossed around. The action Spielbergianly reveals the prehistoric antagonist little by little, first by just sound and a cool visual of its destructive force and then some glimpses of parts of him and finally the whole darn thing. But in building up the tension and anticipation to see the megalodon, it really doesn't do anything interesting with these human characters or the conflict. All it does is make a movie that isn't much fun way longer than it needs to be and give the audience some time to think about how everything seen in this movie is something that's already been seen before.

The words "Wait, what?" have become a major pet peeve for me, by the way. I think they're written into this script about ten times.

Wolf Guy


1975 werewolfsploitation flick

Rating: 9/20

Plot: The last of a werewolf tribe tries to get to the bottom of some criminal activity.

I didn't intend to watch a 1970's werewolfsploitation movie called Wolf Guy, but when I saw it starred the great Sonny Chiba, I was intrigued. The title screen says the title is actually Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, an even better title than Wolf Guy.

There's a lot about this movie that is terrible. The plot's stupid, and a subplot focused on syphilis is just as stupid. And the camera work is about as terrible as I can remember seeing although a zoom to Sonny Chiba's face is always a move that will work. The movie's many flaws are easy to excuse, however, because of what director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi got right. First, there's that funk score! From the splash of fun guitar that opens this thing to the jabbing bass sounds at the end, this psychedelic funk score just rules! It's by Hiroshi Baba. And how did they find a baby with eyes convincing enough to make the audience believe that it's Sonny Chiba as an infant. It's not, ladies and gentlemen, a baby that I would want to mess with.

The autopsy results are in--a demon. A fight scene that involves a metal rod stuck in a gun barrel and a bad guy sporting his sunglasses at night who pulls a mouse out of his pocket in order to distract our lycanthropic hero. Gory invisible tiger deaths. A scene of psychedelic sci-fi surgery. A scene where Chiba sucks his own intestines back into his body. A fight with Wolf Guy and Wolf Guy's alter ego, brief no thanks to supernatural science mumbo-jumbo. A great dummy thrown off a cliff. Probably some other things.

A character says, "It was all so horrible and meaningless," almost writing a good tagline for the movie. But that's a little too harsh. There's lots to enjoy about this dopey werewolf movie.

I'm interested in seeing more Yamaguchi movies. Karate Bullfighter and Karate Bear Fighter sound like can't-miss productions.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter


2014 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A Japanese woman who mistakes Fargo as some sort of documentary ventures to North Dakota to find the bag of money that Steve Buscemi buried in the snow.

This is from the Zellner brothers who made an askew Western called Damsel that I wasn't able to see because it didn't screen anywhere around here. It was on my radar anyway because I liked the premise. Like Fargo, this is based on a true story, and like Fargo, most of that true story is manufactured by the screenwriter. To be fair, this has more of an element of truth than the Coen brothers' classic. There really was Japanese woman who was found in the area, but her name wasn't Kumiko. It was Takato Konishi. Some sources reported--maybe erroneously--that Konishi really was hunting for a windshield scraper and the bag of money buried beneath. But like Fargo, it doesn't matter if it matches any reality anyway. In the Coens' movie, it works as a "true story" because humanity has this dark undercurrent and the sort of things that happen so shockingly in Fargo could happen almost anywhere in America. In Kumiko, the "true story" works because people really are as lonely and/or alienated as its central character. The VHS panning fuzziness promising that this is a true story doesn't need to be true because the story resonates anyway.

I'm not sure if Rinko Kikuchi, the woman who plays Kumiko, is a good actress or if she's just good at creating this character that sucks all the energy out of everything. She doesn't say a whole lot although she does have interactions. She's in a library, she has interactions on a bus, she meets some religious fellows at an airport, she is befriended by a woman who picks her up on the side of the road, she's driven miles and miles by a hearing-impaired cab driver, she encounters a piano tinkler and expert map unfolder named Brad, and she spends a lot of time with a policeman with an out-of-control siren who has the good sense to take her to a Chinese restaurant in order to have a translator. She also meets Brad, a piano tinkler and expert map unfolder.

But Kumiko is a character who works best when she's all by her lonesome. She's most natural when she's completely unnatural, walking around with a red hood like a fairy tale character, nature itself playing the part of the Big Bad Wolf. Or maybe she's more of a tall tale character, an urban legend. She does come face to face with a Paul Bunyan statue, but she has little in common with him because he's got a friend--an anatomically-correct Babe the Big Blue Ox. Of course, she actually has an animal sidekick of her own--a rabbit. There's a really touching scene when she has to get rid of her sidekick though. I don't remember Bunyan leaving Babe behind to chop down trees or anything.

A big flaw in the Zellner's movie is an oppressively loud ambient score. I had the closed captioning on, and at one point, it said "Chimes evolve into magical music." I like that caption a lot more than almost all of the music in this although we do get Pete Drake's "Dreams" at one moment. Drake was a country singer who tried to take advantage of the potential of the vocoder. You should probably YouTube that one.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties


2018 sci-fi rom-com

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A punk kid meets an interesting girl at a party, but she turns out to be an alien.

I'm not really a fan of John Cameron Mitchell's other punk movie--Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but I thought maybe being based on a Neil Gaiman story would give make this worth seeing. It really wasn't worth watching although I might not be the right audience for it. There are some interesting visuals as Mitchell tries to create some weirdness with this cultish alien crew, but it never maintains its weirdness in a way that makes it consistently interesting.

I did like one line a lot: "Punk music is really the greatest thing to happen to ugly people."

Christopher Robin


2018 Disney movie

Rating: 12/20 (Jen: 17/20)

Plot: Christopher Robin, now an adult, gets a little help from some old friends as he balances job and family.

My wife has always been a fan of the A.A. Milne books and, maybe to a lesser extent, the Disney animated movies. This came out right around our anniversary, and I suggested that we go on a little date and see it. I was surprised when she said no.

"No? Why not?"
"It just looks creepy."
"Really? I think the characters kind of look like they do in the books, don't they?"
"I guess, but I just don't like science fiction and time travel movies."

Science fiction and time travel movies? If my wife, a fan of all things Pooh, thought this was going to be a science fiction movie, it seems like Disney really screwed up with the marketing.

For the record, I didn't think the CGI Pooh characters looked creepy at all. I liked how they looked and moved, exactly like stuffed-animal friends should. And I've always been a little sexually aroused by Kanga anyway. There are some mildly humorous moments, and some great moody shots of a Hundred Acre Woods that looks much different from the early scene where Christopher Robin is a child who is likely already a little too old to be having tea parties with his stuffed toys. 

Jim Cummings better have been paid loads of cash for voicing both Pooh and Tigger. He's great! On paper, Brad Garrett seems like the perfect actor to voice Eeyore, but I just thought he sounded too much like Brad Garrett. Peter Capaldi and Toby Jones also provide the voices of Rabbit and Owl.

Other than that, I didn't like much about this movie at all. A lot of the problem is that it really lacks a distinctive voice. It coasts along on the charm of already-established characters and even borrows a bunch of well-known lines from those characters, but what is charming and whimsical in most of the Disney animated versions and the Milne books seems really flat here. Where this should be magical, it's just not.

Another problem is that the adult Christopher Robin is a total prick. This is a bit of a redemption, but the character development is weak and there's never really a point where he grows or learns in an authentic way. There's a turning point where something potentially tragic happens, and even then, he seems unwilling to turn his back on his job to be with family.

There's one point when I laughed out loud. Christopher Robin's wife and daughter have gone away to a cottage, apparently one adjacent to the Hundred Acre Woods, and Robin, who is trying to clandestinely return his bear friend and get back to work, is spotted by is family. He's traveled by train to get to this remote location, and now his family has seen him. He does exactly what any normal person would do--explain immediately apologizes and says he has to get back to work. And the wife and daughter don't even seem to have questions about why he was there in the first place! It's ludicrous.

The storytelling is really lazy here. It's like the Disney people got the idea of having a live-action Winnie-the-Pooh movie and figured any kind of story would just take care of itself. There's no magic to the narrative either, and even though I'm a bear of little brain, I had this whole story accurately mapped out in my head long before it all unraveled. Though there are some charming moments, so much of the humor is the same kind of joke over and over--one with Pooh saying something and people around him looking bemused.

I really wanted to like this. Everybody who knows me knows that I like talking bear movies more than most middle-aged men. But unfortunately, Christopher Robin is nowhere near as good as those Paddington movies.

Blindspotting


2018 movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A guy in Oakland has three days left of his probation but a childhood friend threatens to mess everything up for him.

I may have only seen this movie because the guy who works across the hall from me, an African American who is at least ten times cooler than I am, was planning to see it and I needed an excuse to talk to him. It didn't work.

I am happy I saw this, and I'm fairly sure that I had a completely different experience with this movie than the two black gentlemen sitting on either side of me in the theater. We both laughed, and I'm sure we both had an emotional reaction. I teared up a little even, especially during a manipulative-but-emotional moment near the end and when the title is explained and a theme fleshes out. But I think our individual contexts made this a different experience for us.

This movie has loads to say, so much that combined with the central drama and the dramatic subplots and all the comedy squeezed in, it's really something that should be a lot messier than it is. Themes about identity, gentrification, police brutality and/or killings, language, children, the role models of children, and perception are all squeezed in. Credit writers (and stars) Daveed Diggs (who I know from Blackish) and Rafael Casal (who I don't know at all) and director Carlos Lopez Estrada (who has made himself an impressive debut feature film here) with keeping it all together. There's a vibrancy to the storytelling and character development, and the ideas, when they aren't being hammered home, are nicely nuanced. The characters are extremely easy to root for, even when they are being shown at their most flawed. You understand their own contexts, mostly without ever being shown anything about their individual backgrounds, upbringings, or past experiences. There's one exception with a darkly-humorous and ultimately life-changing flashback.

Where this really succeeds is in its ability to force the audience to empathize. There's a moment when a light is directed at the camera--and therefore the audience--and it really puts you in the shoes of human beings that not a lot of people in Trump's America are willing to try on. A similar moment happens later with a gun.

Lots of good Oakland movies this year--this, Sorry to Bother You, Black Panther. Oakland must be where it's at. Is an M.C. Hammer biopic right around the corner?

New band name: Flammable Hipsters.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout


2018 sequel

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Tom Cruise attempts to kill himself once again.

Tom Cruise rides a motorcycle in this one.

Eden and After


1970 mind twister

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Some 20-somethings find themselves in a bit of trouble after ingesting a stranger's fear powder.

This twisty mind warper of a movie from the perverse mind of Alain Robbe-Grillet is really nothing more than anti-fear powder propaganda. And I have to say--like a lot of anti-drug movies, this one only makes me want to experiment with fear powder. This is a fun sort of nightmare, and there's always nudity right around the corner. At the very least, there's women like Catherine Jourdan in a short little skirt.

Those late-60's Europeans sure liked their playful opening credits, didn't they? This one has spoken opening credits over shots of a dull house and shots within a factory. There are also random words that I probably should have paid attention to because they might be a key to help unravel the nonsense within this kinky little movie puzzle.

The action opens in a colorful and sligtly rapey funhouse club that seems to be run by a butler named Franz. Franz is oddly postured. Math and Russian roulette probability discourse shows these 20-somethings as just bored enough to try out a mysterious stranger's fear powder. There are recurring images and themes--blood, the idea of doubles, paintings, doors, and prisons--but it doesn't add up to anything that I understood one bit, and the narrative is too disjointed to make much sense either. Robbe-Grillet actually made a second movie out of Eden and After by adding some footage and shuffling everything around, so it's safe to say that creating a solid narrative wasn't something he was all that concerned with. That's called N. Took the Dice, and I guess I'll see that sometime, too, because I can't get enough of Catherine Jourdan and her legs.

A while back, I made a list of museum movies, a collection of movies that I think could be projected on a wall at a museum, sometimes because the visuals are more important than the stories. This would be a good candidate for a list like that.

There's a great death scene with poisoned Boris, not really a spoiler at all since this isn't the kind of movie where the death of a character sticks or even matters. There's also a terrifically fun musical number where everyday objects are used as percussion instruments.

Bad Movie Rating: Abraxas, Guardian of the Galaxy


1990 sci-fi movie

Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Lisa: 3/5; Josh: 3/5; Fred: 2/5)

Rating: 5/20

Plot: Kind of like Terminator but much stupider. I'm sorry. This is the best I can do. I have a lot of these things to catch up on.

Josh pointed out that Abraxas would be a good Scrabble play. It's a bingo, of course, assuming that you're playing off another word. And if you put that motherfucker on a triple-word score space, you're looking at close to 100 points.

This Terminator rip-off has Jesse Ventura, a wrestler/actor who would also rip-off Arnold by becoming governor. Actually, I just looked it up and Ventura was a governor first, so you have to assume Schwarzenegger got into politics to somehow get revenge on Ventura for being in this Terminator rip-off. I'm pretty sure that's how most people decide to get into politics.

Ventura became the governor only nine years after this movie was made. That's almost shocking because you'd think any opponent would just have to show clips from this movie to sway voters.

If you're a science fiction screenplay writer like Damian Lee, you probably have to know a lot about both science and fiction. Lee is the director of Food of the Gods II, and let's face it--movie producers aren't going to trust any guy off the street with a project like that. But shockingly, it seems like Lee doesn't even know where his own planet is as a character clearly says Earth is the fourth planet from the sun in this. Maybe the actor just messed up the line though. Lee also doesn't know how to tell a story, so I guess he doesn't really know a lot about fiction either.

"Are you a birthing member of the human race? I need your body." I'm trying that as a come-on line if my wife ever decides to leave me and forces me to look for another birthing member of the human race. Ventura isn't great as the titular Scrabble winning word, but Sven-Ole Thorsen, as the guy who is looking for that birthing member, isn't bad. There's a fish-out-of-water element that almost works. Thorsen's had a career playing an assortment of thugs and goons in movies like The Running Man and Gladiator.

There's also a mute kid in this, and one has to assume that they decided to make his character mute because talking only made his acting worse. We kept waiting for a first spoken line from him, something that was really built up. I was hoping for a "God bless us, everyone" since this is practically a Christmas movie, but what he eventually says is disappointing.

I gave this a 3/5 on the Bad Movie Rating Scale, but one full point was added for Jesse Ventura's braid. I just wanted to be upfront about that.

Drugstore Cowboy


1989 crime movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A couple couples rob drugstores and try to avoid being arrested.

"We played a game we couldn't win to the utmost."

Another 1989 film, this one Beat-drenched. And artistically trashy. There's even a home-video quality with scenes book-ending the action. Drug trips with floating superimposed trinkets and hazy idealization, but I couldn't keep my eyes off Matt Dillon's pants. A story about Panda the dog, played wonderfully by Woody the dog, is told with a television filled with dogs and, naturally, an amplified cat's meow. And did I mention Matt Dillon's pants?

I like the score here, squelchy hiccup jazz and carnival jizz.

Anything in life is better with William S. Burroughs. There's never been a human being who can say words like "Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demoralized" quite like he can say them.

Born on the Fourth of July


1989 war movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A real American boy turns into a real American man, heads over to Vietnam, and loses the use of his legs. How's he going to impress his mother with his wrestling abilities now?

I put some thought into this, and I think Oliver Stone has to be partially responsible for turning me into a person who thinks more seriously about movies. This movie has just the right kind of cheapo symbolism and film school acrobatics that appealed to me when I first saw it as a guy who was starting to figure things out.

Things are cheesy in the early going, maybe intentionally so as Stone paints this idyllic America. Or maybe I should say it's idyllic while still seeming somehow off. A nostalgic and idealistic voice over narrates a time when you could take your dogs into battle, back in the good old days when war was nothing more than sweaty fun, but a subsequent parade with firecracker smoke obscuring the pageantry and flags and rock bands and clowns is foreboding. I mean, you've got these shots of a clown on an absurdly tall unicycle followed by limbless veterans rolling themselves down the parade route in their wheelchairs as they wince at the firecracker cracking. A translucent flag replaces a tossed twirling baton, one that I heard somebody say was a visual allusion to the monkey-tossed bone in 2001, and there's talk of a little Yankee doodle dandy boy, and everything is peachy because that's the kind of words they used back then.

Tom Cruise's parents play their roles. They're the exact kinds of parents you'd expect the greatest generation to be. Dad screams "That's my boy!" after a slow-motion Little League movie homer. Mom spouts heavy-handed nonsense about dreaming of her son making speeches, a monologue that should have ended with her looking directly at the camera and saying, "That's fucking foreshadowing, you commies" before cackling. The word "best" is thrown out often, as well as the idea of what makes a man a man, other than that pair of testicles that Lebowski mentions. But of course, we'll later see that this movie is really all about testicles. Cruise's wrestling coach talks about being the best, something that involves suffering, victory, and even killing. An Army guy also talks about manhood and looking for the best. Then there's mom, saying that being the best is all that matters to God. God, as most Christians will tell you, values pride. He did, after all, create the testicles, I think on the 8th day. And obviously, God's going to play a big part in this time back when America was great. Sure the prayer offered by our character might seem a little confused as a real man probably wouldn't tell God that he'd rather say in Massapequa instead of killing communists or whatever, but you know the guy on the crucifix next to Mickey Mantle (or is it Mickey Mantle on that crucifix?) understands.

But is the Big Guy cool with the Playboy magazines spotted twice in this early chunk of movie? Of course he is! He created testicles!

War is expected, the front line is "neat," and a love of country and a hatred of abstract communism is the norm. This is a time when real men stood for the national anthem, and they didn't think twice about it.

The big surprise once the action moves to Vietnam is that Vietnam is orange. It's orange and filled with "beaucoup goops," words so fun that you just have to thrown them into the screenplay multiple times. Beaucoup Goops wouldn't be a bad name for a punk band, but I'm not sure it's politically correct. Vietnam is as terrifying as it's supposed to be.

[Note: I just remembered that there is already a band called The Goops, so Beaucoup Goops probably wouldn't work. Scratch it from the record.]

If you'll allow me to digress, I'd like to bring up my dad. My dad was in Vietnam before I was born, but when I ask about it, he never has anything to say except that the bugs were gigantic and there were all these hamburger stands around but no cattle anywhere to be seen. I'm not sure if the insects and hamburgers are related or not, but sometimes I like to think they are. I don't know if my dad saw horrifying things or if he encountered beaucoup goops. He doesn't talk about it, and I don't know if he went to Vietnam as a man, became a man while he was in Vietnam, or became a man when he returned and did his part with his testicles to produce me.

These men experience horrifying things. The terrifying "Do you see the rifles?" sequence. Intestine glimpses. Characters asking "Where's the devil at?" or announcing "It's so hot out here, I want to kill somebody." Men or animals? They're terrifying and terrified creatures regardless of what they are, and that's before the blood spurts and the gurgles and the great upside-down perspective shot we see when Forrest Gump picks up Tom Cruise and saves his life.

Stone doesn't spend all that much time in Vietnam, a lot less than I remembered anyway. There are more scenes in an equally horrifying place--the Bronx veterans hospital. Actually, I'm not sure if it's horrifying or if it's just so completely hopeless that it seems horrifying, and I'm also not sure whether horrifying or hopeless is worse. The hopelessness butts up against Cruise's optimism, and it's almost like another little war has popped up. Cruise dreams, struggling in this land of zombies, and he fights to keep his leg and be treated like a human in a place and a situation where being treated like a human is seemingly impossible. Catheters and primal screams and doctors delivering the worst kinds of news for a guy who desperately wants to be a man, a shot of a flag behind blinds.

I haven't said anything about Cruise's performance. He doesn't hang from helicopters here, but there's still this physicality with the performance, evident in these hospital scenes even when he's lying motionless. And that scene where he "walks" as fellow patients and the movie audience cheers him on might be the saddest bit of dramatic irony I've ever seen.

The next chapter of the story has Cruise arriving home again, and he's still a man because he can do twenty-three pull-ups. I can use all of my limbs most of the time, and I'm not even sure I can do a single pull-up. I know I've never shot a goop.

When he gets home, there's a great sequence--perhaps the longest scene in the entire movie--where about a hundred or so of Cruise's friends, family, and neighbors tell him how he looks great. "You look great," they all say--those exact words over and over because they can't think of anything real to say. Their words are as artificial as that America we saw in the opening parade. Times have certainly changed. I mean, there are doughnut-hole burgers and short skirts worn for tips. Parade #2 is a foil for Parade #1, similar images taking on different sinister meanings. The background shows a head shop facade, and hippies are flippin' birds, and now it's Cruise who is wincing at gunshots as sad clowns and sadder Indians look on.

There are speeches to be made, ones where it's announced that death is the highest price that can be paid for freedom or some cliche similar to that. And there's Cruise listening to that and wondering about the price he's paid. He's alive, but he's in a kind of purgatory, and that seems like a pretty high price, too, doesn't it?

A baby becomes a motif, a part of a propaganda machine. Nobody eats a baby in this movie, or at least none that I remember.

As if Oliver Stone figured this was around the time that his audience would forget that this is a movie about testicles, he has a pal visit Cruise to talk about how he's not whole because he's missing his dick and balls. Maybe you can lose a dick or a ball or both balls, but I don't think you can lose it all and still be considered a man. The idea of being the best comes to the forefront again, but it's its flipside--the idea of failure or of not winning. Cruise's girlfriend also pops in, and she's moved on while he's still thinking of "Moon River" and enthusiastically telling himself that he will get a hard-on again, right around the time when he will be able to jump on somebody's couch.

And if you think it's just me being filthy and bringing up all this penis talk, just remember the drunken screaming fight with his mom, possibly Cruise's best moment in this movie. After Mom demands, "Don't say 'penis' in this house," Cruise screams, "Penis! Big fucking erect penis, Mom!" And then sobs, "I want to be a man again." It's devastating. When America was great, it could simultaneously make a man out of you and take away your balls. No amount of wheelchair wheelies and songs and picked fights with World War II veterans can bring those back, Tom Cruise.

And then we're in Mexico as Cruise replaces one brand of purgatory with another. And he gets to meet Willem Dafoe who shows off his tongue work, swallows the worm, calls people "Taco Head," and screams with loads of spittle that "the bitch thinks it's funny [he] can't move [his] dick!" That's right, even in Mexico, you can't escape the void created by losing your penis. The prostitutes and the weeping remind us of the importance of the penis, and it feels like we're right in the middle of a Leonard Cohen song.

If the scene where Tom Cruise yells at his mother about erect penises isn't the best scene in this thing, then it's got to be the scene where Cruise and Dafoe fight in the middle of nowhere, a fight that starts with an argument over who killed more babies. You can feel the despair of these two men, longing for things that made sense. Man, Willem Dafoe is great.

Back in America, there's a chance at redemption. I'm not sure I like the last twenty or so minutes of this as much as the rest of it. The character is still wrestling, this time with the truth. I'm not quite sure why he tells his family all about the babies unless that's part of his journey in reclaiming manhood. There's another parade of sorts, that translucent flag image repeated again but this time backwards. It's more of that easy symbolism, but I'm telling you, it goes down awfully smooth. There's another parallel, too, as Cruise finds himself in another war and carried over another Gump's shoulder. No goops though.

And finally, we make a ridiculous jump to 1976 and unfortunately have to hear about Mom's dream again in a flashback. Oh, my. That's uglier than the intestine glimpse from earlier, Oliver Stone. Cruise's last words (or close to his last words) are "I feel like I'm home," and I think that's a missed opportunity. It really should have been something about his penis.

This movie's so on the nose that it nearly crosses the line into embarrassing territories, but that was what made it so easy for me to analyze as a youngster and that's probably what I appreciate the most about it. It's an Oliver Stone movie through and through, and that means you get the director at his most brilliant and his most obnoxiously flawed.

Bob Dylan song: a perhaps too-obvious "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." And if you don't think you're getting some Creedence in this movie, you're probably the type of person who doesn't even know that Vietnam is orange.