My Name Is Bruce

2007 junk

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Some Chinese demon is awakened by a storm or by some teenage vandals or by a combination of the two. He begins slicing the heads off the inhabitants of small-town Gold Lick, so they kidnap b-movie actor Bruce Campbell to help them out.

It's hard to tell whether or not this is self-referential or self-indulgent. I do know that every time I see Bruce Campbell, it makes me like Evil Dead II a little bit less. I realize this is actually supposed to be a bad movie, but that doesn't excuse it being so cliched, so unfunny, and, most heinously, so racially insensitive. I'm not sure what the Chinese have done to Bruce Campbell. Maybe there's some joke I'm not hip to, but regardless, I'm not sure I want to be in on it. Most offensive would be the special effects used to create the Chinese demon. No, most offensive are the terrible jokes. There are lots of references to Campbell's previous work (the "Give me some sugar" line is used at least thirty times), but it just seems so cheap. I can appreciate self-deprecating humor, but there is nothing clever about any of this and absolutely no reason to see it.

4

2005 Russian artsy-fartsiness

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Three strangers walk into a bar, have a few drinks, and have what has to be the longest conversation in the history of cinema, detailing every single last morsel of their lives. They smoke relentlessly; dogs bark outside. After more than a few lies, they depart and wander around in their bleak little lives. Then, some other stuff must happen. Then, I wake up, confused. Dolls get eaten by dogs. A large-breasted woman and some elderly women disrobe. A guy's arrested. There are some goofy looking pigs. I don't know what's going on anymore and wait for the credits. But they never come, and I'm still sitting here today, agonizing and wishing I were never born.

I know things aren't great in Russia, but surely somebody in the country has a tripod that Ilya Khrjanovsky could have borrowed. This handheld camera work was maddening and made me a little sick to my stomach. The imagery was grotesque enough; I didn't need to see it shaking around. It might be that I'm not Russian and missed some cultural stuff, but I found it impossible to care about any of the characters or whatever the heck happened to them. I was bored at the start, and the dullness sustained. This sort of reminded me of Tartovsky's Stalker, another long movie that a lot of people would find entirely pointless and boring, but whereas that was artistic and moving, this one just seemed like an attempt to show off how avant-garde Ilya Khrjanovsky can be. Good story and good film-making was sacrificed to the great God Artsyfart, the omni-incapable and all-noodling. Oppressive sound effects, extended scenes of walking through bleak wastelands, bread-chewing and breast-exposing babooskas with faces like catcher's mitts, general ickiness, more specific ickiness. It's even got a pretentious title. I mean, what are they going to call the sequel? 4 II? I think I've decided that I really hate modern Russian cinema and long for the days when things like this would be banned and never heard of again.

UHF

1989 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: George Newman is a manchild with an overactive imagination. After getting fired from yet another job, he falls into a position as manager of a television station, Channel 62. With a little help from his friends, he transforms Channel 62 from a station that shows reruns of Mr. Ed nobody watches to a station with oddball entertainment suddenly able to compete with the major networks.

I've been on a "Weird Al" kick lately, so I decided to revisit this now instead of waiting around for a Criterion release or the five and a half hour director's cut. I didn't think it was funny in 1989 when I saw it in the theater with my brother. Now I'm older and should actually be more mature and should find it even less funny, but that's not the case at all. It's rarely clever, but Yankovic's odd brand of humor manages to connect more than you'd expect if you just described this to somebody. The parodies and satire are about what you'd expect if you followed the man's 1980's work. The Rambo part and Gandhi II are the best ones. Of course, there's so many ideas here (sort of like Weird Al thought this might be his only chance to make a movie and had to use up every single idea he had) that not all of them are going to work. The "Money For Nothing" parody that cleverly spoofs the partly-animated video (an early-MTV staple) but is all about the Beverly Hillbillies sort of seems out of place. Poodles being tossed from a window though. . .that's always going to be pretty funny. Bonus points for its prescience--it's interesting how the crap on Weird Al's t.v. station is not much different than the crap networks are feeding us today. Michael Richards, pre-Seinfeld, demonstrates the physical comedy and dopiness that would be associated with Kramer in a few years. And the Nanny is also in this. This is frequently dumb, the sort of thing fans of Airplane would appreciate, and has a story that almost gets in the way of the fun, but it's bound to make you laugh while it slurps up your IQ points. Funniest moments: Rambo's makin'-things-explode face, the audience of Weird Al's kiddie show, the guy's pet show and Weird Al and his friend's response, the Indiana Jones parody. . .oh, nevermind. I could go on and on.

Fascinating note: The midget in this one (Billy Barty) appeared in over 120 film and television roles, and although he would have been old enough, was not a Munchkin.

Nostalgic:

Peeping Tom

1960 psychological thriller

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A psychologically-damaged serial-killing voyeur films the fear of the women he kills with his portable camera/weapon. As he lurks around acting all creepy, his weird-looking downstairs neighbor becomes interested in him and his work. A blind woman says some perplexing things.

The ideas and images in Peeping Tom ruined director Michael Powell's career. Critics blasted it as "perverted nonsense, "frankly beastly," and as "the sickest and filthiest film [the critic] can remember seeing." One critic wrote, "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeing Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." I haven't seen a film hated that much since that Tom Green movie where he swings a baby by the umbilical cord and diddles a horse's genitals. I remember that artistic masterpiece getting similar reviews.

This one dug into ideas about voyeurism and the role of the audience in horror/thriller movies, and although it wasn't terribly realistic or even close to flawless, it did manage to create tension and suspense and mood without showing any violence at all. Textured, colorful, and visually interesting, this just seems thematically and stylistically ahead of its time. I do question the decision to cut the scene featuring the protagonist admiring and filming an ejaculating elephant, but what do I know...

Here I am watching the first part of Peeping Tom after waking up on the 1st (had to finish it on the 2nd):