Follow That Bird

1985 first Sesame Street movie ever!

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A nosey social worker decides that Big Bird doesn't belong with the Sesame Street gang and needs to live with his own kind. She finds a bird family to adopt him, but he gets homesick for his imaginary friend Snuffleupagus and decides to journey back home. The muppets of Sesame Street, upon hearing that Big Bird is missing from his new home, decide to venture out to search for him.

Did you know Snuffleupagus has a first name? Aloysius Snuffleupagus. Jen tells me that originally Snuffleupagus was an imaginary friend for Big Bird but that they eventually had to ditch that idea because children were confused. "Snuffleupagus" is also apparently a move similar to teabagging where you put your scrotum on somebody's nose. That doesn't happen anywhere in Follow That Bird, by the way, so it's safe to show this to your children. Here's another fun fact: Elmo's in this movie, right near the end when Big Bird comes home. He pokes his head out of a window and says something in a voice that is not the Elmo voice we know and probably despise. Anyway, the movie. Why is it a 14/20 instead of a 20/20? No Roosevelt Franklin. I haven't looked this up or anything, but I'm fairly positive mid-80's movie rules made it clear that you had to have black representation in your movies because black people weren't allowed to vote back then and couldn't be president. Forcing Hollywood to include at least one black character in each movie was the government's way of compromising. Which is a good thing because it really started the healing process after segregation and slavery and all that. The makers of Follow That Bird already had Gordon, the very realistic human muppet from the television show, in a prominent role and had no use for Roosevelt Franklin. Plus, Roosevelt Franklin had a tendency to frighten honkies anyway, and honkies were the main audience for Follow That Bird. How bitchin' would a Roosevelt Franklin movie be, by the way? Damn, my hips are moving just thinking about that. But no, the Sesame Street people are too busy with Elmo, the "idiot" who replaced Sesame Street's original "idiot" (Big Bird) and somehow became the only character who mattered anymore. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with Elmo, but that little red monster (not to be confused with the little blue monster Grover who my brother refers to as "the mentally-challenged muppet" although if you think about it, they're all kind of mentally-challenged) has "future serial killer" written all over his fluffy little face. Where are his parents anyway? Dismembered in the basement? But I digress. You honkies want to hear about this movie. Anybody who knows me knows I'm a sucker for puppets. I really like the effects that blend these lovable characters into the world outside Sesame Street. No, they don't look realistic. They still look like puppets, but they look more natural flying planes, driving slick-looking automobiles, or using telephones than you might think. Muppet Gordon is especially great to see in such a heroic role, and a death-defying stunt involving a slow-moving truck with a cage on the back of it and a slow-moving Volkswagon Beetle has to be seen to be believed. There's a lot of music in this, much provided by the legendary Van Dyke Parks (Jungle Book songsmith, Brian Wilson cohort) and one song started off by none other than Waylon Jennings. The "Bluebird of Happiness" song and its accompanying imagery might be the most depressing thing I've seen in my entire life. I'd like to see some statistics on how many 3-6 year olds committed suicide in '85 compared to previous years. Anyway, other than the toddler suicides and veiled racism, this is fun for the whole family! Oh, and to bring things full circle: Snuffleupagus has the worst singing voice I have ever heard.

Captains Courageous

1937 boat movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A spoiled and likely neglected rich kid has his silver spoon yanked right out of his ass when he's expelled from his boarding school, takes a tumble from his daddy's cruise ship, and is put to work by a crew of fishermen. It's comeuppance time for young Harvey as he befriends crusty fisherman Manuel and learns how to not be a complete pain in the ass.

What do I hate more than anything else in movies? Child actors from the 1930s! And Captains Courageous has an annoying kid (Freddie Bartholomew) playing an annoying character. I suppose we're not really supposed to like Harvey (Why do I keep wanting to call him Nathan?) throughout the first half of this movie, but I don't like him so much that I find it impossible to like him during the second half of the movie, too. I actually broke bones in my hand taking punches at my television screen during a scene involving ice cream. The other children at the beginning of the movie are equally bad. They probably all tried out to play Nathan, and director Victor Fleming just threw up his hands and said, "Whatever! They're all annoying. Just pick out the one with the best face and keep him the hell away from me!" I really liked when one of the kids asked, "Did you call me a sissy?" in a voice that makes him sound like a big sissy. I was really surprised that I didn't really hate this movie, a Cory recommendation, and Spencer Tracy gets all the credit for that. I really think all you have to do is give me a movie where Spencer Tracy is on a boat, and I'll be cool with it. His Manuel is funny, almost like a Marx brother with a little of Groucho's bite and a lot of little of Chico's voice. And he reminded me that I really want my own hurdy-gurdy. I really liked his character, and the bond between the annoying little brat and Manuel is realistic and touching. I'm also immature enough to crack up every time he sang, "Yeah ho, little fish." Once little Nathan is on the boat, this movie picks up, probably because bad things start happening to a bad little kid. I liked watching life on the fishing boat, too. This is the type of movie that kind of makes you wish you were doing what the characters were doing, and after a while, I kind of wanted to work on a boat with a bunch of smelly fish and probably smellier fisherman. Basically, I just want a job where I don't have to shower anymore. I'll even take the occasional hook in my arm if it means I don't have to shower. I also really liked the fisherman trash talk, and Lionel Barrymore as the grizzled captain delivers those lines well. All in all, this turned out to be a nice little adventure story on the high seas with believable characters and the right amount of heart. Yeah ho, little fish! Yeah ho!

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #14: Bangkok Dangerous

2008 action thriller

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Joe's a hitman with a set of rules that have made him very successful at his job. Successful and alive. While doing a series of jobs in the titular capital city, he breaks one of those rules twice, forming personal relationships with a cute little deaf girl and mentoring a young punk who he picked up to run errands for him. Should have stuck to the rules, Joe, because now you've got a mess on your hands. I think that's a Jimi Hendrix lyric, isn't it? Hey, Joe, you were messing around with a pharmacist and a pickpocket and now you've got a big old mess on your hands. Something like that.

First off--nice hair, Nicolas Cage. Second off--really terrible movie, Nicolas Cage. This is really boring stuff, and Cage sleepwalking his way through Bangkok definitely doesn't help. A better title for this would have been Bangkok Wearisome. Cage's character once again performs narrator duties, unnecessarily since in this one, the narration adds no color, no depth, no wit, no nothing to the storyline as it does in, say, a Raising Arizona or Lord of War. Speaking of that storyline, there barely enough here to be able to give anybody writing credit. It's derivative and predictable and, in case I didn't make it clear before, extremely bland, the movie equivalent of a white guy singing the blues. This is a movie that takes itself so seriously, really sapping the life and fun out of the son of a bitch. So seriously, in fact, that it strangely becomes almost impossible for the viewer to take it seriously. It all builds up to a preposterous bullet-fueled ending that ends up as more of a pretentious whimper than the kaboom it wants to be. Cage's character has this really cool ability to vanish and rematerialize a foot and a half from the person trying to kill him which is kind of neat though. There's a really great scene where Cage and another guy with a gun run on either side of stacks of water bottles in a warehouse bathed in red light and just shoot the hell out of those water bottles. This has to break the record for the highest water bottle body count in cinema history. It's all really stupid. Maybe they should have called this movie Bangkok Ridiculous instead. Or Bangkok Predictable. Or just Bangkok Silly. Whatever name you put on it, it's a terrible movie.

Cory's Birthday Movie Celebration: Godzilla vs. Mothra

1964 monster movie

Rating: 13/20 (Dylan: 2/20)

Plot: A big storm washes a giant multi-colored egg ashore. A greedy land developer purchases said egg and attempts to exploit it for profit. Creepy miniature twins come from an island to retrieve the egg which they tell everybody a hundred times is really important to the people of the island. The greedy guy refuses and ends up waking up Godzilla from his hibernation. He goes on his typical destructive rampage, and Tokyo has to depend on a giant moth and the contents of the egg to save them from making all the buildings fall down. Spoiler: Silly string or caterpillar ejaculate saves the day!

A warning from the Japanese against being greedy. Or a warning about nuclear weapons. Or maybe it's a warning about being greedy with nuclear weapons. At any rate, once you get to the part where you see what nuclear testing did to that island with that lame giant turtle puppet and the red people, you'll be convinced to get rid of your nuclear weapons immediately. This seems to be an especially colorful and weird entry in the Godzilla canon, and it left me with some questions. First, why dub in broken English? "Look out there! It's gigantic monster egg!" It makes all the dialogue ridiculous which, I'lll admit, is actually part of the fun. Second, why can Godzilla knock down giant concrete buildings with one or two paw swipes while he can barely do any damage at all to a greenhouse or an egg? Finally, where did the Japanese military get so many giant nets? I liked that, by the way--Plan A: Electrocute Godzilla; Plan B: Throw giant nets on Godzilla and then try to electrocute him. I like those creepy singing twins, by the way. With their first appearance, some characters hear their voices speaking in unison and decide that they're spies. What? Spies? They'd have to be like the loudest spies ever, wouldn't they? I also liked Godzilla's first appearance in this--undulating ground and a phallic tail thirty-two minutes into the movie. You also get a Japanese guy sporting a Hitler stache. But the quality of these Godzilla movies is probably based on the scenes of monster wrastlin' and architectural destruction. The big battle (not to be confused with the final battle) is a whole lot of weird close-ups and jittery camera work. Mothra perhaps isn't the most formidable foe for Godzilla. He's too fuzzy, and flapping-hard and expelling chalk dust didn't do much for me. Dig the close-up of Godzilla's pissed face when he first spots Mothra flying toward him though. The actual final battle is all perverse caterpillar flailing and attacks with silly string. Mothra was kicking Godzilla's ass for most of that first big fight but couldn't finish him off. And then he's done in by silly string? Dylan liked the music in this enough to give it a 2/20. The song that played during the giant net drop sounded really familiar to me.

Rubber

2010 killer tire movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: An abandoned automobile tire rolls around the desert and uses its telepathic powers to destroy any trash, bunnies, or people who get in its way. A crowd of people is given binoculars to watch the proceedings.

Like Christine or Maximum Overdrive or Duel but with only a tire. Or like your typical 50's monster movie except instead of a guy in a rubber suit causing mayhem, you just get the rubber. From a technical standpoint, I enjoyed trying to figure out how the tire was brought to life. It may be a much easier special effect than I think it is, and it certainly wasn't a special effect you'd describe as flashy. Most of this movie is the tire rolling around, only stopping to quiver and make a loud noise and make something explode, or people sitting around watching the tire, a meta-cular cinematic joke that's the sort of thing Soderbergh might put together in his spare time between Oceans 19 and Oceans 20. We're told at the beginning that this film is an "homage to the most powerful element of style" in movies--a lack of reason. It frequently falls into annoying cutesy-clever territories, turning into the kind of indie production that you want to take out back and slap around a bit. But was I entertained? Heck, yeah! It's a tire rolling around making bunnies explode! How could I not be entertained? Funniest bit involves a cop taking a tire off a car and saying, "This is what our killer looks like." No, the funniest bit is probably where they set a trap with an explosive dummy. I also can appreciate any movie that has a scene implying that a tire has jerked off while watching an exercise video. I'll give director Quentin Dupieux credit for seeing this ridiculous idea to its end, but his message about movies comes across like a film school student trying to impress his professor who rambles on and on about arthouse cinema every class.

I'll probably lose any chance at a Father of the Year Award for admitting this, but I was watching this with a couple of my children until the moment when heads started exploding and I told them to go upstairs. They didn't enjoy the bunny explosions at all and were probably disappointed that their father laughed at it.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #13: The Ant Bully

2006 animated ant movie

Rating: 9/20 (Emma: 9/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: Poor Lucas is a bullied little kid who takes out his frustrations on a colony of ants in his front yard, squirt-gunning the hell out of them and being generally menacing. Nicolas Cage ant uses a potion to shrink Lucas down to ant size so that he can learn a lesson about teamwork and being nice. As he adapts to ant culture, he has to figure out a way to save the anthill from an exterminator he hired a few days before he started living in it. Oh, snap!

Nicolas Cage, Bruce Campbell, and Ricardo Montalban? And the movie still is barely half as good as the other two CGI-ant movies? Nothing grabs you in this one. The animation is mediocre, the story is predictable, and the protagonist isn't easy to root for. He's really, probably like all children, unlikable. Like so many modern animated classics, this very clumsily attempts to appeal to adults and children, and I don't really see how it would be completely satisfying to either. There are a lot of big little action sequences with a thwomping score that was probably lifted from another animated movie, but all they managed to do was make my eyes hurt a little bit. I got bored with this very quickly. Cage, as expected, does fine voice work, but it was a waste of his time as he could have been working on a sequel to Vampire's Kiss--Vampire's Kiss II: Watch Out, Roaches, Because There's a New Vampire in Town. This is a completely soulless, headache-inducing affair that actually made me want to either a) get the old magnifying glass out and kill some ants myself or b) give the kid a few doors down an atomic wedgie and make him eat grass. Ricardo Montalban, by the way, needs more work. I think I'd rather watch those commercials where he talks about soft Corinthean leather over and over again than watch this movie again.

Bad Boy Bubby

1993 cringe-fest

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The titular bad boy lives alone with his portly mother and doesn't leave their humble apartment since the air outside is poisonous and all. He spends his time playing with his kitty and sitting absolutely still until his biological father visits one day. Consequences of that visit force Bubby outside where he makes all kinds of new friends and embarks on a career in the arts.

Challenging, oft-difficult movie featuring incest, fat naked people, cat suffocation, and Bad Boy Bubby's lil bubby--all in the first fifteen minutes. Bubby won't exactly capture your hearts, but parts of his story will make you queasy in your stomach if you're into that sort of thing. I have to give credit for Nicholas Hope's performance of the character. Mentally challenged characters are difficult to pull off, especially when an actor is delicately maneuvering back and forth between tragedy and comedy with the character, and Hope does it very well. This movie is very funny, very very darkly funny, and I always appreciate it when a filmmaker can make me laugh and disturb me at the same time. Bubby's world can't possibly be real, more of an apocalyptic wasteland or the ghost of a third world country than anywhere in wherever the hell this is supposed to take place. Australia? It's a world bathed in gray, drab and dumpy, and there are definitely shots in this movie where it actually does look like the air is poisonous. Bad Boy Bubby doesn't have much depth although I do like the possible satiric jab at rock 'n' roll, but it's a unique and, if you're a little twisted, entertaining character study.

Note: Jen watched a big chunk of this one and really seemed to like it. She missed the aforementioned cat suffocation, incest, naked fat woman, and lil bubby, however.

Happy Feet

2006 Best Animated Feature

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Mumble is a retarded penguin because his father, Elvis the Penguin, dropped him when he was in the egg. And before you start, I'm well aware that "retarded" is considered politically incorrect, and I apologize for its use here. I don't like the word much either, and I almost never use it. I'm doing my best to get some blog traffic, so maybe throwing the R-word around will get some people involved in those advocacy groups who are always ticked off with Lady Gaga or Lebron James to accidentally find their way to my humble little blog. And I'm going to do my very best to make this one of my best-written reviews ever so that once the advocates for people like Lady Gaga and Lebron James get here, they'll read this and be hooked. And then, boom! Readers! Anyway, back to Mumble. While all the other penguins use their singing voices and over-produced pop songs to find the perfect mate, something that Morgan Freeman told me is actual legitimate scientific information, Mumble can only tap dance. He's an outcast, and some of the other penguins, each inexplicably with different accents, blame him for the lack of fish. Mumble runs off with some Hispanic penguins to find some aliens who might be responsible for the famine.

First off, who's the audience for a PG-rated movie like this? I can't imagine this appealing to most adults despite the modernization of some pop tunes from their childhood (like the Artist Who's Now Known As Prince Again) to make them sound like annoying modern pop tunes. And I'd think the plot would be too confusing for children, and there are some pretty intense scenes that might make it inappropriate for younger viewers. I did watch it with Sophie, however, and she seemed to fall asleep just fine during it. Plus, I don't normally think about Prince as a good soundtrack choice for a kiddie flick. It wouldn't surprise me if the Dreamworks people decided to throw "Darling Nikki" in their next feature though.

Secondly, I'm just going to say it: I'm sick of penguins. I've seen them marching while Morgan Freeman tells me all about it. I've seen those annoying little guys in Madagascar and in the television spin-off that my girls used to annoy me with all the time. And although it's extremely unlikely that somebody will force me to watch the upcoming Jim Carrey Mr. Popper's Penguins movie, its existence still makes me tremble and weep. Don't get me wrong. If I'm at a zoo, I enjoy seeing the sad little penguins in their glass box as much as the next guy, mostly because it makes me feel superior as a human being and gives me a chance to wallow in my awesomeness, so to speak. I'm the guy at the penguin exhibit who's torn his shirt off like Hulk Hogan and flaunts his stuff, flexing and beating my chest and trash-talking the birds. "Emperor, my ass! Check out these nipples! Do you birds even HAVE nipples? Booyah!" And to answer your question: Yes, I have been forcefully removed from zoos. Unfairly, I might add. I've seen a giant turtle having an orgasm at that same zoo, and you're tell me that my nipples are inappropriate for children's eyes? What's wrong with this world? Back to the penguins--these animals are animated very well (more on that below), but all penguins kind of look the same (I know. . .borderline penguin racism there!) and there's not enough variety in their movements to make them interesting for the duration of this too-long movie.

The animation is second to none. The Antarctic setting and all of the animals look terrific. There's a great realism to these characters and their surroundings, and if they weren't talking in weird accents and performing choreographed dance routines, you'd almost mistake them for the real thing. But really, what's the point? I think I like my animated movies to look animated. I'm not sure cute penguins would have made this a better movie but it might have made the characters more likable. I didn't like a single one of these penguins--not the three or four voiced by Robin Williams, not the protagonist voiced by one of those Hobbits, especially not his parents, not his girlfriend. None of them. They just aren't likable, and the disjointed adventure that Mumble goes on is predictable and bland. A few of those aforementioned intense action sequences make little sense scientifically and only work to clash with the realistic look of the movie.

Cars actually should have beat this for Best Animated Picture. Or Monster House. There are things that annoy me about both of those movies, but the onslaught of pop music and black and white dance choreography drove me bonkers. It was like a more-polished Dreamworks movie with a story that I couldn't care about. And very very loud. There's a nice message in this movie that's hammered into you like you're a baby seal being clubbed to death by whoever hilariously clubs baby seals to death (again, the right search might bring anti-seal-clubbing advocates this way), but after so many penguin movies, I'm not sure I'm ready to keep this particular bird alive anyway.

Baby seal and retarded people advocates, Lady Gaga fans, and anti-racism and anti-nipple people: Don't forget to subscribe/follow my blog for more brilliantly-written reviews just like this one! Boom!

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

2005 Quay Brothers fun

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An evil doctor kidnaps an opera diva. He hires the titular piano tuner (of earthquakes) to perfect his seven automatons so that he can stage an opera he wrote for himself featuring the kidnapped opera diva, also turned into an automaton.

Reading a plot like that, you'd think this is awesome! Unfortunately, that's not the case. This movie crawls, moving so slowly that it barely qualifies as a moving picture at times. I've liked the Quay Brothers in the past; their only other full-length Institute Benjamenta is artsy-fartsy fun and you can read a bit about their short puppet/stop-animation films here. This doesn't have nearly enough puppet action. The mini-lumberjack on the poster makes a few short appearances, and the animation for the guy's automatons, when it's shown off, is beautiful. There's also some mysterious backward filming shenanigans where the Quays "animate" some real people. Without a doubt, you get some beautiful imagery in Piano Tuner, but it's all so sluggishly displayed that I wonder if it was made as a cure for insomnia or something. Stilted dialogue doesn't help. Neither does the fact that, especially early in the film, I couldn't really see or hear what the hell was going on. It makes putting the pieces to this little puzzle of a movie especially tiresome, and after a while, my mind dropped out and I just waited for the little doll lumberjack to pop in again. After all, that's why I bothered to watch this in the first place. Speaking of that, this might have the current record for the number of times I started this and had to give up and start again later for whatever reason (general boredom, sleepiness, too much noise in the room). I had it recorded on the t.v. about two years ago and never got through it, and I made at least two other attempts to watch it on Netflix.

Here's a question for my readers, by the way: Have you ever heard a person, during the time preceding sexual intercourse, ever heard your woman (or guy, I suppose) say the words "Take me"? I have my doubts that anybody ever says that, but you hear it in movies all the time. Kiss, kiss kiss, fondle, rub, rub, kiss, nibble, kiss, rub. . ."Take me!"

And now, here's the first ever shane-movies contest! Successful blogs have contests and giveaways, and I sure would like to have a successful blog. So, here it goes: If you can watch The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes uninterrupted, send me video evidence plus letters from at least two eyewitnesses, and I will make you a grotesque puppet out of food. It must be your first attempt to watch the movie, however. Offer not valid in Oklahoma because people from Oklahoma are creepy.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #12: Lord of War

2005 character study

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Yuri Orlov didn't have the easiest childhood growing up with Russian (well, one of those pieces of the Soviet Union) immigrants in the big city. As just a little fella, he starts selling weapons to the mob in his town, and uses the experience to move into a very successful career as a gun-runner with his troubled brother Vitaly. He also manages to slide into a marriage with Ava Fontaine, his boyhood crush and hot model. Keeping details about his career secret from his family and evading pesky federal agents is a lot to juggle though.

I didn't really know anything about this movie going in, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed its playfulness. Here's another movie that makes me wonder if I actually do like narration in movies. I've always labeled that a pet peeve. Maybe the narrator just has to be French or Nicolas Cage. Or both, I guess. The narration in this definitely adds flavor to the drama though. Cage's character is one of those who does completely immoral things--the obvious gun-running, lying to his wife--but he's got this charm or flair about him that still makes him likable. It's a solid performance with no real room for him to work his hammy elbows. Jared Leto fits as his brother and foil, and Ethan Hawke, a kind of sickly-looking Ethan Hawke, is good as a somewhat cliched idealistic federal agent. This film has a different style that gives it a unique color and keeps you interested even when there's not much going on. There's also a little dark humor in there, especially in the interactions between Orlov and Liberian president Andre Baptiste, one of those giving us the origin of the film's title in a cute little recurring joke. Eamonn Walker is great as Baptiste, really capturing the funny that's in most of your violent dictators. The not-always-predictable tale of Orlov is consistently entertaining and concludes in a way that I thought was really satisfying. Oh, one more thing: I really dug the opening credits, a really neat series of shots (no pun intended) from the perspective of a bullet. This (and that) hammers a message home. Cool stuff.

The Great Silence

1968 Spaghetti Western

Rating: 17/20

Plot: In blizzardy Utah in the late 1800s, bounty hunters run amok, bringing in loads of dead outlaws for financial gain. The titular mute doesn't like them very much and finds ways of getting them mad enough to draw their guns so that he can shoot them in self defense. One widow tries to get Silence to kill a bounty hunter named Loco who shot her husband.

The Great Silence is one of those westerns where the setting is almost more important than the characters. The hills these hills inhabit are drowned in snow, and watching these horses trudge through the mounds of white is impressive. The mute good guy played by Jean-Louis Trintignant is fine as a sort of Eastwood Man-With-No-Name-But-With-a-Nickname. Apparently he was a mute because the actor would only take the role if he didn't have any lines to learn. But he's a cool character with a cool gun. Klaus Kinski dominates as Loco, however, stealing each scene with his eyes. What a great villain! The dubbing in this isn't great although I wonder if Kinski actually did the dubbing for Loco. It sort of sounded like him. I did enjoy the exaggerated dubbed chewing sounds because there's nothing like hearing a guy slurp a chicken. My favorite scene that is not at the end of the movie: a tossed match into a glass of whiskey during a poker game. Nice tension. But the end of this movie? That's what pushes it a notch higher than its Italian Western peers. It's an ending that'll leave your jaw dropping. Great Morricone score, too, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Visitors

1993 time travel comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A knight and his squire are transported by a senile wizard 800 years into the future. They have to simultaneously figure out life in the 20th Century while trying to return home.

This is a very amusing take on the stranger-in-a-strange land premise. leaning on slapstick and ironic situations to get more than a few laughs. It's very nearly whimsical! This film's shot well, and I really like an actor like Jean Reno in the lead role, a guy who is going to play it all so straight that it somehow makes it all even more hilarious. Narratively, this might get a little tiresome by the end, but it's a fun comic adventure and you know I'm a sucker for time travel movies that don't involve Kevin Costner. I wonder how much punnage and other word play I missed by having to read English subtitles for this one. You don't want to dig for depth with this one; it's more like a ninety minute joke peppered with punchlines, some intelligent and some dumb but most pretty funny.

Anvil: The Story of Anvil

2008 heavy metal documentary

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Lips and Robb Reiner (note the extra "b") have rocked as the founding members of heavy metal almost-wases Anvil since they met at fourteen. Now well into their fifties, they haven't given up the dream of becoming
rock 'n' roll gods. This documentary follows them on a disastrous European tour and the recording of their thirteenth album as they try to fulfill their dreams.

"Out in the schoolyard--
Little peaches play,
Rubbin' their beaves,
Got a lot to say."

At first, you just think you're watching some This Is Spinal Tap knock-off. Then, you realize it's not a mockumentary at all, that Anvil are real hosers who have been reaching for rock 'n' roll stars for about forty years. There are comic moments, including more than a few that recall Spinal Tap, but it's the very human moments that makes this one so special. You really grow to like Lips and Reiner, connect with their struggles, and root for them to taste at least a little bit of success. And I'll tell you without any shame, that I teared up quite a bit during one scene. It's likely going to be my favorite movie moment of the year, in fact. Sonically, Anvil's music isn't really my bag, but I was really impressed with Robb's drumming abilities. His stick work made it impossible for me not to hold up the devil horns. And I'll tell you what--I'd consider myself an artistic success if I had fans like Mad Dog and the guy who drank beer through his nose. A roller coaster of a documentary that juggles humorous moments, really sad scenes, and ultimately touching and beautiful footage this well should be seen by anybody regardless of how much they like bands that play their Flying-V's with a dildo.

Sir Kent recommended this little gem to me.

Daisies

1966 Czech feminist film

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Two girls (Marie I and Marie II) decide that the world is bad. As a result, they decide to be bad, finding various ways to misbehave by conning perverse butterfly collectors, playing with the food, playing with their food more, breaking stuff, drowning, and being general nuisances. Honestly, you're going to be frustrated if you like movies that have plots and characters who aren't named the exact same thing.

Yet another Eastern European movie, Czech even. At times, you could accuse this of looking like a film school project that the professor didn't even like very much. It's an artsy-fartsy dadaistic clash of visual trickery and tomfoolery. You've got rapid and maddening color changes, weird sound effects (like creaking door sounds when the gals move their limbs or typewriter noises when there's nary a typewriter), lots of scenes involving the slicing and dicing of phallic symbols, the best scissor fight you're likely to see, and lots of scenes that seem to go on forever. But it does all add up to something, again with sort of an obvious film schoolish theme, and it is visually arresting and completely interesting considering the time and place it was made. It didn't last long, by the way. Czechoslovakia banned, so nobody would get to see the fantastic scene where the Maries take after Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel (a movie that should have been banned in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else; and I'm not even pro-censorship!) and mimic trains while in blackface. There's some Svankmajer-esque animation with the quicky-shots of things like locks, butterflies, word shavings, and colors. This is not exactly a movie that stands the test of time, and the stream-of-conscious delivery and too-lengthy scenes will annoy most people, but I'm nevertheless happy I watched it.

Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie # 11: The Rock

1996 wrestler biopic

Rating: 10/20

Plot: A disgruntled high-ranking marine steals some Gungun bombs and heads over to Alcatraz, now a tourist attraction. He kidnaps a handful of tourists and threatens to use his new biological weapon if he's not sent a zillion dollars. Chemical weapons expert Nicolas Cage and prison-escape expert Sean Connery, the latter being the only man to ever escape from the titular rock, sneak onto the island with some Navy Seals to try to thwart the terrorist's plans.

OK. Rest assured I really pay attention any time Nicolas Cage is on the screen, and that's doubly true when there's a Nicolas Cage sex scene. Some things I've noted: all the Nic Cage sex scenes I can remember feature The Jackhammer or Cowgirl, woman-on-top for you squares. And Nic always has a look on his face like he doesn't really care what's going on. In The Rock, he gets to be bored by coitus with somebody named Vanessa Marcil after telling her that "Pigtails are naughty, naughty, naughty" in an accent that could have been an audio outtake from Vampire's Kiss, a much better Nicolas Cage movie in which he gets to be bored by The Jackhammer while the Cowgirl devours his neck.

When Cage the actor doesn't know what to do but knows his character is a little ticked off, he reaches for the best tool in his repertoire: the blah blah blah blah blah (dramatic pause) BLAH BLAH, enunciating each blah and screaming each BLAH like he's trying to melt your face off.

"This isn't HAPPENING!"
"What do you say we cut the chit-chat (dramatic pause) A-HOLE?!" I'm not censoring that. He actually said "A-HOLE?!"
"What do you say you cut me some (dramatic pause) FRIGGIN' SLACK?!"
"How in the name of (short dramatic pause) ZEUS'S BUTTHOLE. . ."
"It might help our current situation (big dramatic pause) MAYBE!"

He throws in a few well-goshes like he's Keanu Reeves, and with his older thespian peers, plows through some really predictable and clumsy dialogue and some silly jokes. Speaking of his co-stars, I've got to admit that I don't actually like Sean Connery most of the time or Ed Harris almost all of the time. Ed Harris is a lame bad guy, and the writers of The Rock (an anthropomorphic cash register and an anthropomorphic stick of dynamite) apparently decided that making him and his motivations really inconsistent would help give his character some depth. Sean Connery looks like he's in this just to collect his paycheck as he stumbles through some jerky handheld action sequences and manages to survive, as you know he would since his face is really big on the poster, while improbabilities are piled on more improbabilities. Gigantic action, a gigantic Hans Zimmer score, gigantic sound effects, and gigantic special effects might have some people reaching for their popcorn, but it just makes me wonder how in the name of Zeus's butthole anybody could forgive the predictability and cliches enough to give this action clunker a passing grade.

I apologize for all the Nicolas Cage sex talk. I'll try to control myself as the Summer of Nicolas Cage continues.