• Meta

  • Register
  • Login
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.com

•  

  May 2008

  S	M	T	W	T	F	S
  « Apr
  				1	2	3
  4	5	6	7	8	9	10
  11	12	13	14	15	16	17
  18	19	20	21	22	23	24
  25	26	27	28	29	30	31

• Blogroll

  • Framemaker Blog
  • Smash Crew
  • Culturekiosque
  • Documenta Blogs coverage

• Supporters

  • Let a flat in London Find an apartment in major cities like London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.

• Bookmark This Blog

  
  Wordpress Bookmark Widget

Half-forgotten blog/Insomniac ramblings/of a movie buff… 

Denver hotel Hell/on a snowy April night/watching “Half Past Dead“.

Poor Steven Seagal/starring in low-budget crap/that he writes himself.

Wikipedia/Hear the wisdom of the crowd/or one publicist.

Quote of the day: “The neutrality of this article is disputed.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Seagal#Upcoming_projects_and_Cannibal_Holocaust_remake.

“Nature has its brutal side”, says Seagal, “and it’s not always pretty. In many ways, Cannibal Holocaust could be seen as a companion piece to my movie On Deadly Ground: a realistic, honest look on nature, on wilderness, only this remake will be a different part for me. It will be more violent, more brutal, Ruggero promised me that the animals’ deaths would be real, and I am excited”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Seagal#Animal_rights_work

He has worked with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to discourage the fur trade, and has written to the Prime Minister of India to seek increased legal protection for cows. Seagal worked effectively towards saving dogs destined to drown in Taiwan; he successfully sought the Premier of Taiwan to sign legislation limiting animal cruelty.

Seagal was awarded a PETA Humanitarian Award in 1999.

In 2003, Seagal wrote an open letter to the government of Thailand, urging them to enact a law to prevent the torture of baby elephants.

Mystical dog incident

While being interviewed by PETA, Seagal was asked to provide an example of a special interaction with an animal, to lend context and meaning to his animal rights work. Seagal offered the story about a dog which approached him during his early aikido years in Japan. Seagal described feeling as if he had known this white dog forever. After keeping the dog for a few days, the dog (by barking) warned Seagal that his dojo was on fire. Seagal quickly summoned help to put out the fire. He never saw the dog again^.

^{Impossibly apt:/”Never saw the dog again”/That’s the oath I’ll take.}

Just saw a so-so little movie on Encore called Cyber Wars. Cyberpunk wannabe, well-intentioned, hard-working, but just under-resourced, under-fed, under-developed. A world blending and overlaying virtual reality on reality-reality… corporations and massively powerful and capricious individuals running everything like a game, a cop and a bounty hunter of sorts working together to figure out what’s really behind everything, and a world that was clearly meant to be richly imagined and mood-setting in the way that Blade Runner was. But… it takes more than good intentions and a modicum of vision to build something as lush as Blade Runner, and no one involved in this has quite the talent to pull it off.  (Also, it apparently came out of Singapore, which is ironic, given that little dream-city-island’s own semi-fictional status.)

Not horrible, really, just… flaccid, especially post-Matrix, post-Ghost in the Shell, post-Blade Runner. Completely worth missing.

Other working titles: Avatar Exile (Singapore: English title) ; Cyber Wars (USA) ; (DVD title) Matrix Hunter (USA) (video title)

 

Sometimes something turns up on DVD that completely passed you by when it was in the theatres, but when you finally catch up with it you understand why you never heard about it.  This is one of those times.

There’s a terribly wrong sickness inside this weird little inside-a-serial-killer’s-head movie. The chief symptom of the disorder is, unfortunately, the presence of the weirdly intolerable Demi Moore, whose presence in the whole thing makes you think it was a joint vanity project between Moore and movie-disaster maker Kevin Costner, that sucked in a number of other faces you’d know, none of whom deserved to be seen on a big screen in something this unflattering and muddled. But this time out, it’s not clear that the blame for a cinematic mess should be laid at Costner’s feet.

On screen, at least, he does a creditable job as the eponymous murder-addicted cardboard box maker and businessman of the year. He struggles with his conscience, attending AA meetings and swearing off his personal vice; but he also grapples with William Hurt, who embodies the alter ego that whispers inside (and outside) his head, exhorts and coaches him on to one killing after another. (Don’t dissect the psychology of this too deeply– it’s kind of “A Beautiful Mind” meets “Silence of the Lambs”, with Hurt as Costner’s own personal Hannibal. Makes no sense, but can be entertaining to watch.)

There’s eye-candy aplenty, if you like interior design– successful boxmakers to the world apparently have limitless profits to blow on uber-chic home and office space, not to mention putting a shamefully-spoiled little girl through Stanford (or, at least, an unnamed university on University Avenue in Palo Alto). The main plot has more than enough double-helix twists to satisfy: a voyeur who witnesses one of Brooks’ killings makes a blackmail demand you won’t see coming, and daughter dearest proves to have more than just an Electra complex binding her with her doting daddy. And Costner and Hurt’s tug-of-war is diverting enough, if you like serial-killer movies, which I really rather do. It’s especially fun that Costner sometimes doesn’t seem to need but so much arm-twisting to be convinced to kill… certain people.

But alas, this is only about 2/3 of the movie. The other third follows Demi Moore, as a hard-ass lone-wolf serial killer-hunting profiler, with her own father issues, $60M in the bank, a messy divorce from her soon-to-be-ex toyboy in progress, and a previous serial-killer conquest fresh out of jail and hot on her tail.

The improbable ways in which the cop subplots intersect with the main plot undermine the shaky but entertaining concept. Plot threads should twist, (k)not furl or tangle; someone should have reminded the writers and producers that less is mo(o)re.

But the bigger problem is the fact that Demi Moore and her character are here at all. Of course, in such a movie there has to be a cop, but why this cop? Why this character, and why, for God’s sake, cast Demi Moore? Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt would surely have been too expensive, but couldn’t they have just borrowed Lance Henriksen for a couple of days? (Or even that chick from Profiler?) Demi is hideously miscast and miswritten so out of place in every way that you’re left thinking she, or someone close to her, must have had enough money in the project to insist on a rewrite to create a lead role for her.

There was almost a satisfying, if silly, little movie here. If you see this go by on cable, go ahead and peek at it, if you like this sort of thing. But expect something like the Hudson Hawk of serial killer movies– the more it all comes together, the more it all comes apart.

(Which reminds me– Hudson Hawk would be a perfect film to review here… as would The President’s Analyst, another twisted favorite of mine.)

Cheese on Demand: in response to the “Wide Stance” meme triggered by the Larry Craig incident, someone has created a Larry Craig Doll – an actual talking action figure of the closeted (or stalled?) Senator, wearing an “I AM NOT GAY” t-shirt. Too absurd for words.

(Proof that this blog can do more than pan cans of crap…)

Just when you think everything’s gone over to monoculture (aka “American Processed Cheese Food Product”)… you run across a little gem like Bragging Rights: Stickball Stories. The distinctively New York stickball subculture (with offshoots in Cocoa Beach, FL, Puerto Rico, San Diego and some other places) is the subject of Sonia Gonzales’ documentary, that shows a profound affection for and intimate knowledge of the game, the peoples who played it from Depression-era New York (when it served as a bridge among Italians, Puerto Ricans and African-Americans) through today, when new and old generations try to keep the game alive and spread it. Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem (especially Spanish Harlem) stickball teams and players past and present all figure in the story. (And New York being New York, even September 11 figures in the story of stickball– though in a way that is neither gratuitous nor maudlin.)

It’s easy to look at America through the eyes of its mass media and think all the regional difference is dead. And surely there’s less of it than there was. Even with all the homogenization and pasteurization of the US, somehow culture holds on. In this case, Chica Luna (via PBS) has given us a taste of it. 

Cheese of the day: queso de hoja– a Latino cheese that does not melt. (And to honor the New Yorkers of other backgrounds who contributed to the sport, what could be more American, or more authentically New York, than the mozzerella found on the classic slice of New York pizza?)

A shocking never-before-seen video of Anna Nicole Smith surfaced Tuesday night on Fox News.

The footage shows an eight month pregnant Smith acting incoherent while she played with the young child of her friend Ford Shelly. In the video, the nine-year-old girl becomes frightened of Smith. Smith believes the doll she is playing with is a real baby and that the baby she is carrying is “just gas.”

The young girl tells her father that she saw Howard K. Stern giving Anna “something from a white bottle with red stripes.”

Stern told Larry King last week that the small portion of the video previously seen was stolen and that the video was edited to make her look like she was on drugs.

So… the likeness of Anna Nicole is sliced and diced and recycled and reanimated and revandalized and revulgarized…  I suppose this is the Nirvana that awaits all icons in our postmodern age– from Che Guevara to Jackie Onassis to Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana and even Britney Spears.  

Apparently Britney Spears has become obsessed with Princess Diana. After building a shrine to the People’s Princess (whose death in a Paris tunnel ten years ago is now the cause of a solemn, strangely belated inquest), Britney Spears now thinks she shares Diana’s destiny.

The hysterical shrilling about a Britney Suicide Watch actually does seem warranted– she is manifestly unstable. But this story does not even ascend to the level of the sad, stupid, strange resonance between Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith.  “The second time as farce” only applies when something happens the second time, and while Britney may achieve her own status as pop culture mythic icon, it won’t be as a new Princess Di.

Britney Spears, Giving Birth to Sean Preston
(Sculptor: Daniel Edwards)

MSNBC news-celeb Keith Olbermann (or his caption writers) cleverly dubbed Spears the “People’s Pop-Tart“. Personally, I’ll opt for “Diana’s Ditzy Doppelgænger.” Britney herself might have come up with it– if she could spell Doppelgænger. Or if she could spell “ditzy.”

To take this to a higher intellectual level: why are people so determined to work themselves into analogies with history? I suppose such narratives allow people to make sense of their lives, but you might as well accept George W. Bush’s belief that he is somehow the second coming of Winston Churchill, that World War IV, currently playing out in Iraq, is in fact World War II 2.0, and that today’s descendants of the Greatest Generation are in fact something more than the Fattest Generation.
Britney, like George W., looks forward to being gazed upon by the face of history, but is too dumb and deluded to realize that she’s just looking in a funhouse mirror.

One more thought: at least Britney was ultimately forced to leave her children behind– with their father, GED holder K-Fed (a.k.a. Kato Kaelin 2.0).

From a style standpoint these two looked pretty good, if you want eye candy. Cross the Matrix with the Hellraiser movies, and you’ve got most of it.

But Underworld and Underworld: Evolution both suffer terribly from a lack of irony in the blood. The movies take themselves excruciatingly seriously– from the opening monologue of the first movie you know the whole thing is going to be painful to watch.

How can movies this ludicrous and over-the-top give you no opportunity to crack a smile? Really, much better in this vein was the Blade movie series, or at least the first two.

I must not have been paying attention. The blogosphere and news media were recently abuzz with reports of a (stolen?) video of Anna Nicole Smith’s breast implant surgery. I never imagined things could take such a turn, when I wrote my post on Anna Nicole’s mythic proportions. But then, one trait of the post-ironic life is that anything we try to imagine as parody is outdone by actual history-cum-farce before we know it.

Of course, this also begs the question of which implant surgery the video is from– an upgrade, a downgrade, or a retread. Apparently, Ms. Smith had at least five implant surgeries at one time or another, to try out different sizes:

The 37-year-old reveals, “I went up to 211 (pounds) so I stretched to double-Fs, and when I lost all the weight I went way back down, except my skin didn’t. It was not pretty.”

The busty blonde admits she opted for a C-cup implant but didn’t like the way her nipples pointed downwards, so she supersized to a D, then a double-D and then an F before settling for her current choice, the size of which she refuses to disclose.

I think that much the same effect could have been achieved with a little judicious breast-enlargemetnt photoshop work, given that hardly anyone actually saw Anna Nicole in person.

 

---

---

The “real” of Anna Nicole was pretty much the magazine images, the tabloid coverage, the news stories… all of them so mediated by… well, media that the actual Anna Nicole was virtually invisible. So who needs the knife? 

Okay… Discovery Channel and Ion TV (which apparently is the new name for PAX TV) pit two movies against each other on a Sunday night, that are both products of our free-floating anxiety about… just about everything.

Discovery’s Superstorm had Tom Sizemore and Chris Potter (who somehow, years ago, juggled cop roles on TV landmarks Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Silk Stalkings) using a weather control system to inadvertently steer a killer hurricane to New York. (Lots of stock footage of storms and after-storm recovery efforts, lots of B-grade acting… though not nearly as awful as it might have been.) But at least here, “science” was bsaically dancing with nature, with good intentions, if disastrous results, and Discovery followed up with an educational program to look at weather manipulation, storms and global warming in a minimally sensationalized way, including previous attempts at actual manipulations of hurricanes.  And even the movie was peppered with scientific jargon and ideas more or less in line with the science as described in the subsequent documentary. Cloud seeding, they suggest, changed the course of “Hurricane Grace” (which hit New York) in the movie, just as a computer model suggests seeding (on a scale not currently feasible) could have been used to move Katrina by 50 miles or so– enough to spare New Orleans the worst.

Ion’s Killer Waves (which, in fairness, I didn’t have a chance to watch) recounted the use of artifical tsunami-type waves as weapons of mass destruction by a multinational corporation looking for work building seawalls to protect the American Homeland against tusnami-type waves. Angus Macfayden (who?) clashes with Tom Skerritt as the CEO of the killer corporation. This is just silly from start to finish, and grounded in nothing in particular.  I’m thinking propaganda. And they follow up with “Live from Liberty”, a religious program.

So.. there are so many angles to this:

• B-networks now battle in a way that used to be left to the Big 3 (when there were only 3). Peculiar to watch.
• To understand a people, look to how they dream, especially when those dreams are recurring. We’re afraid of Katrina’s sisters, global warming, tsunamis, well-meaning scientists, evil-hearted corporations, terrorist attacks, WMD… It has been suggested that all of this anxiety– especially that over terrorism, since the al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington– is actually a form of nostalgia for the cold war. Interesting for me in looking for the recent reference was the fact that this suggestion predated the Sept. 11 attacks, or even the election of 2000. Uncanny how many of us seem to have dreamed all that has come to pass, for years before it happened…
• La morale nue apporte de l’ennui; le conte fait passer le précepte avec lui, La Fontaine once said, and if that’s what distraction-hungry America needs to learn the lesson, so be it.
• Meanwhile, back in the places we mostly think of as emerging markets, unprecedented flooding displaces ~100M people (think: one-third of the US population, undergoing Katrina-like conditions.) And you mostly hear about this on the BBC.

Alas, I’m too fried to do any thorough reflection beyond tossing out these few conversation starters.

• WP Themes

  • Activate
  • Blindigo
  • Blue Zinfandel
  • Eye Candy
  • Detour
  • Frequency
  • Gladiola
  • Radiance
  • Vertigo
  • Vertigo Squared
  • Wonderland