A Monkey Movie Review

So this is the film Dustin Hoffman chose to direct.  Yes.  It's true.  He is responsible for this, this film that has more wrinkles than the scrotal sacks of one hundred old men.  But that's the least of this film's problems.

The film is about a group of ancient musicians and opera singers who live in an old folks home.  They put on a gala every year to raise money to keep their impossibly lavish senior citizen's home open.  Into this tight knit world comes a woman who is supposedly Britain's greatest female opera singer.  They want her to be in the gala but she doesn't want to do it.  After a but of flirting and conniving, they convince her to do it.

Here's what's wrong with it:

• It takes place in an alternate earth where everyone is wild about opera.  Old people, young people, everybody loves opera.  Except in the real world, that's bullshit.  I'm not saying that people don't love opera, I'm saying they don't get excited and shit themselves over it they way people in this film do.
• The entire film they build up Maggie Smith's character as the greatest opera singer who ever lived.  And then guess what?  SHE DOESN'T FUCKING SING.  NOT EVEN A NOTE.  SHE DOESN'T EVEN FAKE IT.
• Billy Connolly is by no stretch of any imagination an opera singer. 
• The whole thing is not believable.  None of it.  The home is too lavish, the characters are too pat, the dramatic interpersonal relationships are about as interesting as watching paint dry.

I'm not saying it's awful, I'm saying this vanity project of Hoffman's is not worth your time.

Movie Review Round Up

Lovelace-Good but unsettling film about the brief porn career of the female lead of the infamous porn movie Deep Throat.  Great performances all around, especially Amanda Seyfried, Peter Skaarsgard, Sharon Stone, and Chris Noth.  There's some nudity and violence directed against women in this film, so be aware.  I recommend this one but no for the squeamish among you.

The Loving Story-Very informative documentary about Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple who took the interracial marriage ban case all the way to the US  Supreme Court.  The Lovings were a simple couple who just wanted to be together and raise their kids near their families in Virginia.  They just wanted to live their lives together and to be left alone, but sometimes history has a way of making ordinary people heroes.  I defy you to watch this film and not fall in love with the late Mildred Loving.  Highly recommend this one.

Silent Running-Bruce Dern is on a spaceship with three smart asses and a shitload of plants and animals.  The guys get recalled back to earth and are told they must destroy all the ships and all it's cargo.  Dern freaks out, kills the others, and sails off with a shipload of trees, plants, animals, and some two legged robots.  I remember seeing this film in the early 1970's and thinking it was the coolest thing ever, sadly, upon reviewing I must revise that opinion.  This one sucks.  It's the logical extension of all those dystopian films like Omega Man, Soylent Green, and Planet of the Apes.  Earth has gone to hell in a hand basket, so a heroic earth worshipper sails away with plants and animals in the hopes that one day he'll colonize another world that we won't fuck up.  It's laughable really.  Recommended only for the cheese factor.

Dean Splaney-A Vicar who was a dog in a past life remembers his dog days when he's lost in drinking his favorite wine.  A pretty slight premise makes a pretty slight film.  Kind of boring too.  Not recommended.

Bounty Killer-In a dystopian future corporations take over everything and bounty killers spring up to kill corporate overlords in an effort to reign in corporate power.  High octane fun this film is.  Writing like Yoda talks I am.  Loving this ultra violent sexy film I am.  Highly recommending it I am.

Burke and Hare (2010) and Burke and Hare (1972)- These two very different films tell the story of Irish murderers Burke and Hare.  These two men found out medical schools in Edinburgh in the early part of the 19th century paid cash for cadavers to dissect so they went out murdering people and selling their corpses.  The earlier of these two films is more historically accurate but the later one is a far more entertaining film.  I recommend the 2010 version, despite it's historical inaccuracies.

Contracted-A woman shags a dude who just fucked a corpse.  The next day she starts bleeding from her orifices and then things go downhill for her from there.  Ugh. I rooted for the disease in this film.  I found most all of the leads annoying and the supporting characters to be idiots.  As the woman degenerates and her disease worsens her friends keep asking her if she's 'doing okay' when one look at her tells anyone with at least one working brain cell that she's not fucking long for this world.  I hated this one and I wanted every charcater in it to die a violent horrible death.

The Iran Job-Eye opening documentary about a b grade basketball player who wasn't quite good enough to play in the NBA but was good enough to play internationally.  He ends up playing in Iran, which is a basketball mad country.  The film documents his life during his first year playing in Iran and it shows just how tough it is to live in a modern day theocracy, especially if you're a female, he befriends a group of women.  Highly recommend this one even if you're not a basketball fan, which I am not.

The Kids Are All Right-A long time lesbian couple's kids find the guy who donated sperm their mothers used to have them with.  One of the lesbians has an affair with him and her partner finds out.  Not a bad film and I could easily see Annette Benning and Julianne Moore as the couple in question, in fact I probably fantasized about them doing it long before this film ever came out.  My only problem with this movie is it's lays all the blame for the affair at the feet of the sperm donor, Mark Ruffalo.  He's not blameless in it, but it takes two to tango.  Recommended with reservations.

What I've been watching

I watched all five series of this sci fi show and I'm surprised at how much I miss it now that I'm done with it.  The premise is a storm hits London and somehow it endows some with superpowers and it causes others to become what they truly were inside.

Like most all great series that originate in Britain each series is only 6 to 8 episodes long and usually, the cast changes from series to series, especially so after series 2 in the case of this show.  At first I found some of the changes to be off-putting but eventually I grew to like all the main characters.

This show is funny, exciting, suspenseful, and fun.  It's also chock full of beautiful young women, which is always a plus for me.  It's currently airing on HuluPLUS and on DVD.

I'm not ashamed to say this creepy little limited series about the goings on in a creepy WW2 English orphanage made me choke up a little.  I hate to see kids mistreated, even if it's a fictional story.  And of course I always identify strongly with the kids who are being abused and bullied because I was mistreated and bullied growing up.  This one is suspenseful and enjoyable if you like supernatural shows.  I liked it.  It's on HuluPLUS.

Sugartown is another in the long line of shows about how a scrappy bunch of quirky oddballs save a small English town from greedy developers.  It's quirky and fun but you can see everything coming a mile away.  It's on HuluPLUS.

Bob Guccione was the sleazy flip side to Hugh Hefner.  He made a fortune off his porn magazine Penthouse and he in turn lost most every penny he made because he was stubborn, pig headed, and thought he was smarter than everyone else.  Yes, he made money off sex, but most all his employees were women who were devoted to him.  Yes, he sold porn and made money off the sexuality of others but he also used his publishing platform to push science literacy, fine art, and other issues that benefited mankind.  I know many people today, both men and women, have problems with and hate porn but back in the '70's, Guccione was one o the people who helped bring us to where we are today, we're better off because he did what he did both for the sexual side of things and also for the first amendment cases he helped along.  At one time he thought he'd live forever but in the end, he died nearly penniless and a pariah.  His life was quite a ride and this film tells his story in an eye opening non prurient way, although there is a fair bit of nudity in it.  This documentary is on Netflix.

Mini movie reviews

A swimming pool is no  place to hold a whale, especially if it's one where you 'train' a whale to do tricks to amuse human beings.  Sea World is a terrible awful place that needs to be shunned and shut down.  This film tells the story behind some gruesome deaths that occurred in water parks because these magnificent whales had finally had enough.  Sea World and other parks insist on imprisoning these whales and because of that more deaths are going to happen.  I highly recommend this film and I recommend you stay the fuck away from Sea World.

This film is a bleak dark comedy about two oddballs who hook up and let their serial killer sides out.  It's not for the squeamish, it's not very bloody or violent, it's just oddly disturbing.  I found it funny and recommend it.

Really fun creatures from outer space attack earthlings film.  The twist is the aliens land in the ocean near an island in Ireland that's inhabited by a bunch of locals who love to get their drunk on.  This one is lots of fun, it's exciting, and laugh out loud funny.

I saw this one when it first came out and it's even more over the top with a little age on it.  When a prehistoric horror is brought back to life in a tiny British village. life is upended for a few choice locals.  You'll recognize most everyone in this film, most of them went on to do bigger and less cheesy roles, but this one is a lot of late 1980's fun.

I usually love Martina Gedeck and most modern German cinema is very good too but...this film is a load of pretentious twaddle.  I fucking hated it.  Maybe I missed the symbolism, maybe I didn't.  Either way, avoid it.

Film reviews

 I saw the original theatrical release of this film when it came out and I was blown away by it.  I finally saw this version on Netflix Instant the other day and it was just as striking as the first version I saw.  The film holds up well and it gripping in places, in places it sags a bit but overall it's still very good.  The only quibble I have with it is how Coppola treats western women in this film.  They are all pure sex objects who exist solely to titillate and to show their bare breasts. 

 At times this film is visually stunning and almost like a modern renaissance painting, at others it's repellent and disgusting.  I found it overall kind of off putting.  It made me hate restaurants and gourmet cuisine and it almost made me dislike Helen Mirren.  Director Greenaway seems only to want to shock in this film and really that's not enough to build a film on.

 Serviceable documentary on the life of Hunter S. Thompson.  It was a little too heavy on the whole 'Oh the 1960's were paradise but the 1970's were awful' schtick.  Overall, if you don't know much about Thompson then this would be a good place to start learning about him.

This film should be required viewing for any one even remotely considering a career in acting because it shows the business of acting for what it is, a hard incredibly difficult way to make a living.  The men profiled in this film have been working actors for years and still they find it a struggle o make a living.  And it's even worse for women because of sexism and ageism in the film and TV business. 

Attack of the three headed movie review!

I quite liked this meta horror film, despite the  fact that my beloved Anna Hutchinson had to die early on in it.  The whole thing took me by surprise and the ending was fittingly not a sweet happy pat one.  All in all, well done and highly recommended.

 You hear Citizens Band described as 'charming' or 'quirky' and or 'charmingly quirky' all the time.  It came out in 1977 and I've missed seeing all these years until last night.  And yes, it's quirky, but it's also so very dated.  It tells the intersecting stories of some people in a small town during the height of the 1970's CB craze, which I lived through and remember vividly.  It's got all the '70's movies tropes, the sexy swinging trucker, liberated women who still have to have a man, CB radio use, lots of coffee drinking, bad fashion, and magical old men who somehow just can't connect with their sons but who bring the whole town together.

I suppose when it came out it was kind of cute but now it's just kind of tiring and very 1970's.  It's not bad, it's just not that great.  It's like the director Demme was doing his best Robert Altman impression on film.  I'm not recommending it, but it's not horrible.

Lush and beautiful but workman like adaption of Yann Martel's fine novel.  I liked it but some of it seemed stagy and forced.  It's beautiful to look at and the kid playing young Pi is a delight but the fact the tiger is CGI never left my mind.  I loved the book and I liked the film.  Recommended.

Film and TV reviews

 Top of the Lake is a moody little police procedural that takes place in the southern lake district of New Zealand.  A 12 year old girl is caught trying to commit suicide, gets saved, and the authorities find out she's five months pregnant.  Her family is a pool of lowlife drug dealers and worse, so she runs away.  All the cops investigating her disappearance are harboring secrets, some darker than others.  Toss in an enigmatic American woman leading a group of dysfunctional women back to normalcy and you've got quite a story. 

I really enjoyed this atmospheric series, it's seven episodes long.  It's well written, well acted, and well photographed.  I highly recommend it.

 This fly on the wall documentary tells the story of some door to door bible salesman in the late 1960's.  It's a fascinating look at a a few guys doing a tough job.  Sales isn't easy and what these guys do is tougher than most.  Going into people's homes is hard, selling them is hard, I know because I used to do it.  Ironically enough, I used to sell cancer insurance door to door, I did it for a few months.  It's tough.  I have a lot of respect for these guys, I have no respect for the goods they sold, but for the men themselves, yes. 

I found this one on the Criterion Collection section of Huluplus, it's well worth your time.  It is indeed a classic.

What I've been watching

Since I had a lot on couch time on my hands while I was recuperating I watched the shit out of some movies and TV series on Netflix and Huluplus.  Here's some capsule reviews of some of it:

The Straits-Another very well done taut Aussie crime series.  It's King Lear meets Lady MacBeth meets a crime family unlike any you've seen on American TV.  Definitely worth your time.

Zonad-Hilarious Irish film about two guys who escape from an alcohol treatment facility only to land in a small backwater town where they manage to convince the locals they're from outer space.  Highly recommended.

Pleasures of the Flesh- 1960's Japanese film about a man who kills another man and is then blackmailed into holding 30 million yen by an embezzler who saw him commit the murder.  The murderer holds the money until he can't take it any more and he decides to spend it all a year before the embezzler is due to get out of prison.  He spends the money on women and all sorts of libertine things.  But during all his fun he becomes wracked with guilt and he ends up getting arrested for his crime.  It's an odd mix of misogyny, petty crime, prostitution, and moralizing.  It's a neat look at Japan in the 1960's when everything was so cool and retro modern.  I recommend it.

Slap Shot- I saw this film about down on their luck minor league hockey players years ago and watching it over this time I was struck how misogynistic and homophobic it is.  I had also forgotten that a young Swoosie Kurtz was in it.  I can't recommend it because some of the dialogue is so repellent but it's a real time capsule of the mid to late 1970's.

The Dish and The Spoon-Greta Gerwig stars in this strange yet sweet little film about a troubled woman who when on the lam from her troubled marriage hooks up with a young man and leads him to believe they they are in love and will be married.  She's really really really cute and fun to look at but at times the characters turned me off.  It's not a romantic comedy by any means, it's more of a character study about some needy people who've got many issues to deal with.  If you like Great Gerwig, and I sure do, then you'll like this film.

Ran- Stunning film about a King Lear type character in feudal era Japan who decides it time to step down and let his sons lead his clan.  The youngest son tells him it's a bad idea and he gets banished for telling the truth.  Once he steps down his older two sons betray him and then they run on each other.  This film is beautiful to look at and it's a good story told very well.  The only quibble I have with it is the Japanese tendency to over act in films like these.  But don't let that stop you from seeing it, it's a masterpiece.

Sunny Side-This is a strange little Chaplin short about a farm hand who loses and then wins the hand of a girl in the village.  It's not really classic Chaplin but it does have it's moments.  Meh, see it if you like but you'll never get back the half hour you'll invest in it.

A Monkey movie review

After the military junta took over in the 1970's in Argentina, which was backed in real life by the USA, a teacher in a private school falls for a rebellious student.  She never consummates her relationship with him, she only goes as far a briefly touching his hand and smelling his clothes.  She's lonely and closed off and she more than tacitly accepts helping the school authorities keep a tight rein on the students, lest they rebel and join the anti government protestors in the streets.  In an effort to get promoted and be seen as a teacher who can be trusted, she convinces her superior, who also has a crush on her, that she is on the look out for students smoking in the school.  She hides in a restroom stall to spy on her most favored student and while it brings her a few seconds of stolen pleasure it ends up having disastrous consequences for her.

This film, The Invisible Eye, is a stunning piece of work.  It's powerful, taut, and almost impossible to look away from.  Julieta Zylberberg as the teacher who is torn between doing her duty to the school, and by extension to the military rulers, and to the boy she imagines she's in love with is fantastic.  She closed but yearning, shut but open.  She's in most every scene and she's a marvel.

This period of time in South American history, when the USA and the CIA was backing right wing military coups in most all the countries down there in order to impose Milton Friedman style free market style economic systems, is fascinating to me.  I'm fascinated by how people lived their lives when so much awful shit was going down around them, so it's no wonder I found this film to be so good.  I highly recommend it.

Movie reviews

This is a very serviceable and faithful adaption of one of the few Terry Pratchett books I've been interested in enough to finish.  It's fun and well played by all involved.  Claire Foy is as cute as ever and Richard Coyle is very appealing.

Recommended.

Fun little thriller by horror/thriller mast John Carpenter.  It's about a woman who is picked up after she burns a house down and is taken to a mental hospital.  She's put in a wing of the hospital that contains some really beautiful women and Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep's daughter, who let's be honest here, would not have this part if she wasn't La Streep's kid.  Shocking and horrible things are happening to the beautiful women and Mamie Gummer in this wing and when the shocking twist that you can kind of see coming happens, the bad things finally stop, or do they?

Like I said, this is a fun little thriller that got hammered by critics, needlessly so in my opinion.  It doesn't pretend to be great cinematic art, it never tries to be anything other than an entertaining thriller.  I recommend it.

Blood and guts movie reviews

Japan's economy tanks, unemployment soars, disaffected kids begin to take out their frustrations on adults, especially teachers in the nation's classrooms.  In response, the government passes a law that says kids in unruly classrooms can be herded off to islands and be made to fight one another to the death until there is one kid left standing.  That's the premise of this action packed violent as hell film starring Japanese gangster film icon Beat Takeshi.  He plays the teacher to a particularly horrid set of teenagers who get shipped off to the Battle Royale island.  The kids are given a backpack with a little food and a weapon, some get knives, others get guns, while others may get a pot lid, a taster, or an axe, and they have three days to fight it out and kill one another until only is left.  The kids are repulsed at first but they eventually get into it.  Some form alliances, some of those alliances end up not working due to mistrust and paranoia, and some try to opt out and of course they end up dead.

It's all very violent and the body count in this film is astronomical, but it's all kind of cartoony and unrealistic.  There is a plethora of overacting, Japanese style, in this film, and there's a slew of super cute teenage girls and boys in it too.  I found it all highly enjoyable and perversely fun.  Accept it for what it is, and don't attach deep meanings to it and you'll find it fun too if you like action films.

House of the Devil is a slow as molasses and ultimately really bad almost unwatchable horror film.  I was pre programmed to love this film, it's got many people who I love in it, Tom Noonan, Mary Waranov, Greta Gerwig, Dee Wallace, and it's a horror movie homage to the 1980's horror films I cut my teeth on.  But I fucking hated it.

Why did I hate it?  Here are some of the many reasons:

• The lead actress was as charismatic and interesting as a fitted sheet.  She was the most bland boring lead in the history of cinema.  She gave made Timothy Dalton's James Bond look like Lawrence Olivier.  Watching paint dry is more exciting and interesting than watching her mope her way through this film.
• The film was s..............l............o...............w.  Excruciatingly slow.  It clocks in at around an hour and a half but it feels like it's about 6 hours long.
• They killed off Greta Gerwig way too early.  Once her character died, it felt like they let the air out of this movie.

I could go on and on but I won't.  If they'd cast the lovely Ms. Gerwig as the lead, maybe this turkey could have flown.  But they didn't and this turkey lands with a thud.  Avoid it like you'd avoid an overly handsy relative at a family reunion.  

Je suis un cinéphile

I watched two French films recently.

Everybody is getting sexed up in this hot to trot French family except the youngest son and after he gets caught  beatin' his baguette in biology class, his mom, a super hot blonde hottie, decides to poke her nose into everyone in the family's sex life.  I thought at first this was going to be one of those Euro incest epics where the hot mom introduces everyone to sex but as the film wore on I was proven wrong.  Everyone does have sex a lot in this film, mom and dad, grandpa and his hot hooker, the adopted daughter and her boyfriend, the oldest son and his bisexual lovers, and finally the youngest son with his semi exhibitionist girlfriend.  And really, that's pretty much the plot, everyone has sex with their partners.  It's all very pretty to look at and kind of hot as well, but it's all essentially fluff.  No deep plot points, no messages, just cute French people having loads of sex.  Not that I'm slamming it, I'm not, the thing is the film is like a Hostess fruit pie, it's very tasty and you enjoy it while you're eating it, but it's not that nutritious and you feel kind of guilty for eating all the empty highly processed sugar drenched calories when you're done with it.  If you're into seeing good looking French people getting it on, you'd do better to look up French porn on your computer, at least that way you'd see the 'full Monty.'

The other French film I watched recently also deals with sex, but not in a lighthearted or sexy way.  The Story of Women tells the story of a woman in Nazi occupied France in WW2.  Her husband is injured and in a hospital and she's not sure if he's coming back or not and she's got two small children to care for, so she ends up becoming an abortionist.  She helps women who feel they've got too many kids already, women who've gotten pregnant while their husbands are in POW camps, and women who the Germans knocked up.  While enjoying the monetary success of her 'favors' she meets and befriends a prostitute.  She allows the prostitute to use a room in her house to entertain her clients in exchange for a cut of the money made.  Things go smoothly until her husband shows back up and she discovers she doesn't find him sexually attractive anymore, so he cuckolds him.  Things then go downhill for her from there. 

This film a a very powerful heartbreaking story about what people will do to survive and thrive under harsh conditions.  Isabelle Huppert is magnificent as the anti heroine of this movie, I say 'anti heroine' because it's hard to like her character since she uses and abuses people on her way to making sure she and her kids are taken care of no matter what.  Huppert is beautiful, brittle, and in the depths of self delusion in this film.  She does whatever it takes to be on top, no matter who she hurts or accidentally kills, it's all about her.  Right up until they execute her for crimes against the state, she thinks that she might still be set free because she's a pretty woman with a tiny bit of talent.  Her delusions are heartbreaking, her relationship with her husband is heartbreaking, the toll her favors take on innocents around her is heartbreaking, and how it all affects her kids is heartbreaking. 

But for all the heartbreak and bad behavior, this film is a must see.  It's haunting and incredibly well acted, shot, and directed.  It's a modern masterpiece.

Beware of Greeks making strange films (UPDATED)

A father and mother keep their three almost adult children locked away inside a palatial estate, they instruct them in not quite correct ways of behavior, and they teach them odd definitions of words.  Into this mix the father brings a young woman in to sex up his son, but on one trip the kid can't get it up and the woman seeks out one of the daughters and she convinces the girl to perform cunnilingus on her.  Later the daughter uses the act to wheedle some videotaped movies out of the woman and the daughter becomes entranced by the reality she sees in the films.  Once the father finds out, he get furious and he beats the woman and he forces his son to choose one of his sisters to provide him with the sex he was getting from the outsider.

Yeah, it's all pretty bizarre, strange, and very unsettling.  I won't say I liked this film, because I'm not sure if I did or not, it's that creepy.  I found the scenes where the father was being abusive to the women, and he abuses all of them in on way or another, to be very hard to watch and sickening.

I'm sure this film is symbolic on some levels because what it comes down to is the film is about control and the lengths some will go to keep it.  So, draw your own conclusions after you see it, and I do recommend you see it because it's so fucking odd.

 *****UPDATE*****

If you've never been to the south and you insist on making derogatory comments about it by claiming the this film sounds like something your stereotype loving ass might find in the deep south, then please by all means kiss my ass.  Your 'joke' isn't funny and it shows you to be a clueless idiot.  Seriously, go fuck yourself if you think the south is the way it is portrayed in the corporate media. 

Hell in a handbasket

In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was a genre of films I am dubbing 'hell in a handbasket' films.  These are films that take place in a large city where it looks like everything is coming apart at the seams.  Usually this city is New York city, but it can be London, Los Angeles, or others.  Usually in these films there's a put upon middle age white guy who's at the end of his rope and who wants to get out of the hellish city with his woman, she's usually not his wife and she is usually much younger than he is, but he eventually sees the value in trying to pull everything back together, or he's the only thing who can save the whole place from falling apart so he resigns himself to fate and he sacrifices himself for humanity by staying in the hellscape city so that others may flee or that others may simply live.  These films are still made from time to time but they reached their zenith in the late '60's early '70's when it seemed like the world was coming apart due to the anti war protests, the women's rights movement, the genesis of the LGBTQ rights movement, and the flowering of all the ethnic pride movements. 

I watched one of the hallmark films of this genre the other night on Netflix:

George C. Scott plays the head doctor at a major hospital in NYC that's beset with all manner of protesters, over run with people seeking medical care, layers of bureaucracy that is hamstringing all the virtuous medical staff, and on top of everything else, he's dealing with his impotence and a serial killer that's roaming the halls of his hospital.  So how does he deal with all this shit?  He turns to drink, as did most of the heroes of this genre of film, but he's also seriously contemplating suicide.

Into his life comes a super sexy young and firm Diana Rigg.  She plays the daughter of a man who is allegedly in a coma due to the inept machinations of some interns.  Scott and she hook up, well 'hook up' is too nice a term for what they do because he actually rapes her in his office and he even admits that he raped her after they spend the night together after the initial rape.  But Rigg's character is cool with getting raped by a man twice her age because she gets all hot and bothered by middle age dudes with limp dicks because she's got daddy issues.  And after they spend the night together after some Daniel Tosh approved raping, she confesses she's in love with Scott even though she's only known him for about 12 hours, part of which she was raped during.  Turns out Scott knows a good thing when he sees it because he's in love with her too.  Hell, who wouldn't be, Ms. Rigg was outstandingly hot back in 1970 when they shot this movie.

After all the sexing goes down they, Scott and Rigg, solve all the murders and decide to scamper off to Mexico where they can rape one another with impunity and do some fancy doctoring on the native Mexicans who for whatever reason have no doctors of their own which is why they need a ton of rapey doctors from the USA to come live in their country.  But on the way out Scott has a change of heart and he knows that unless he stays, the whole hospital will go to hell in a handbasket, so he heroically sends Rigg off to Mexico so he can use his middle age white guy powers for the good of all the little people. 

This film isn't bad, it's actually pretty good once you get past the rapes, the bad 1970's hair, the intrusive soundtrack, the hand held camera shaking 'you are there' style of film making, and the stereotypical characters who love to repeat themselves, and the over acting by George C. Scott.

There's a ton of people in this movie and many of them went on to bigger and better things.  In uncredited cameos are Dennis Dugan, Stockard Channing, and I swear I think I saw Dick Van Patton as an intern.  Nancy Marchand is in this film and she must have been about 30 and boy was she a knock out.  Francis Sternhagen is in this film and I had no idea she was a red head originally.  There's too many more to mention because this movie literally has a cast of thousands. 

Like I said, it's not bad but it's not that great either.  It's like they set out to make a sprawling Robert Altman like urban film but they forgot to hire Robert Altman to direct it and so they just ended up with a noisy sweaty movie that wants to be something more than it is but it doesn't quite get there.  All in all though, if you're a fan of '70's cinema or the 'hell in a handbasket' quasi dystopian films, then by all means check it out.

Monkey movie reviews

The Howling III is bad.  Super bad.  So bad it's crazy, and yet it's enjoyable because the makers of this film embraced the cheese and they made a movie that you can laugh along with.

The film is about a race of werewolf marsupials who have evolved along humans for many years.  They exist mainly in Australia but there are a few in Siberia.  When one young female werewolf escapes her pack in the outback she makes her way to the big city where she meets a guy who gets her into a film and then into his bed.  They make sweet sweet love and a month or so later she gives birth to another were-supial.  The authorities figure out what's going on and of course they try to stamp out the menace of the pouch having werewolves.  Then things get crazy.  And since this film is set in Australia, Dame Edna has to be in it.

The werewolves are the least scary ever.  The special effects stink.  Everybody sweats like it's 110 F with 1000% humidity.  And you can see every plot twist coming a mile away.  Yet, it's all so bad it's fucking great.  I highly recommend this one.

Tim and Eric are an acquired taste.  Most people hate them, me, I love them.  I get the joke.  This film won't do anything to change anyone's mind about them but holy hell it had me cackling like crazy.

A sleazy corporation, are there any other kind?, gives the boys a billion dollars to make a film.  They make a three minute movie and they blow the rest of the money.  The corporation sets out to kill them if they don't repay all the money.  Tim and Eric flee to a small town where they get duped into running the worst mall in the USA.

It sounds stupid and the execution of the stupid sounding idea is annoying as hell and it's also comic genius.  John C. Reilly is a hoot as Taquito.  His death scene had me in stitches.  Will Ferrel is great as the owner of the mall and Zac Galifianakis is quite funny as well.  And Tim and Eric are sidesplitting as Tim and Eric.

If you're a fan of these two, see this movie.  If you hate them, then stay away.

Movie review times 2

Toast is one of my favorite food related books ever, because I empathized with Mr. Slater like crazy.  Like him I had a mother who could not cook but who I adored nonetheless and like him I lost mine when I was young and was forced to go live with a domineering woman who used food as a weapon.  So I was excited, yet hesitant to see the film adaption of the book.

The film is okay.  It compresses a lot of the events in the book and it makes the father character very unsympathetic, which is not the way he came off in the book.  Yes, he seemed cold in the book but he it's obvious he loved his son, it's not that obvious in the film.  The basic elements of the book are here in the film, the mother gets sick and dies early on, the father and son miss her terribly, the son wants to learn to cook so he can please his father, the father courts his married housekeeper and then marries her, and the son and his step mom clash until the son moves out after his dad dies.  The film is well done but it's not as warm and loving as the book.

To be honest though, I liked to book so much that no matter what they did in adapting it to film, it wouldn't be good enough for me.  But I still recommend this film.  I especially recommend the Dusty Springfield heavy soundtrack.

 The Countess is exactly the kind of film that Netflix instant was made for.  It's not a movie I would ever have rented or bought but since it was on Netflix, I decided to check it out and boy am I glad I did.

This creepy little gem tells the story of a wealthy Hungarian countess in the late 1500's.  Her husband is rich and they own more land and have more cash than the king of Hungary, who borrows money from them to finance his war against the Turks.  When the count dies, his wife, played brilliantly by Julie Delpy, who directed this film as well, finds a young lover to share her bed with.  Turns out the young lover is the son of her cousin, played by William Hurt, whom she spurned in marriage.  Hurt wheels and deals and prevents his son from seeing the countess after he learns how deeply Delpy loves him.  He marries the kid off and ships him away.  Delpy, frightened of aging, has no idea what Hurt did to her and she imagines the kid ran off to be with a younger woman.  One day, after her young lover has disappeared, she flies into a rage and she hits one of her servants.  Some of the servant girl's blood gets on the countess's face and she imagines that the blood makes her look younger.  So the countess begins bleeding the girl and rubbing her blood into her skin to make herself look younger and more attractive.  When the first girl dies she and her maids begin bleeding village girls until they die and when the supply of village girls runs out, they conspire to kidnap, bleed, and ultimately murder the virgin daughters of the nobility.  It becomes an open secret in the surrounding area that all this is going down but it becomes intolerable when the daughters of the nobles start dying, so the men of the kingdom, led by Hurt, step in.

Or was it all a lie?  Hurt wanted the lands and fortune of the countess in the first place but when she spurned his offer of marriage did he plan, scheme, and plot a way to get what he wanted?  Did he conspire with the king to rob the countess and make up monstrous lies about the countess so the country and the villagers would turn against her?  After all, history is written by the winners, as the film points out.

This film works on many levels.  It's about a woman's search for love and youth.  It's about how women are roped into being sex objects and forced to stay eternally youthful.  It's about how men scheme and plot to deprive women of their rightful possessions and property.  It's also about how the rich and powerful force the peasants to do work against their own self interests, or to put it in today's terms, how the 1 percent use the rest of us to do their bidding.

Julie Delpy is fantastic in this film.  As the star and the director, she knocks it out of the park.  She's in most every scene and even in the scenes where she's bat shit crazy, or is she?, she exudes a steely determination to stay on top and a quiet but smoldering sexual vibe.  Age has not lessened or softened Ms. Delpy's beauty, if anything, it's deepened it.  She is the perfect actress to have played this role.

This film is a creepy unsettling film, it's not quite horror but it's pretty close.  I recommend it highly.  It's a gem you don't want to miss.

A Monkey movie review

I confess, I am besotted with the young Argentine actress Ines Efron.  I first became aware of her a few months ago when I watched her in The Fish Child.  And now after seeing her in XXY I am ready to do her bidding no matter what the cost.  Want me to rob a bank Ms. Efron?  No problem.  Will bringing peace to the Middle East ease your ennui and get me in your good graces?  It's done.  Need someone to rub your feet after a long day on the set?  Tell me when and were I need to be and I'll be there.  But enough of my creepy old man crushings on a lovely young Latin actress, on to the movie review!

XXY is about a few momentous days in the life of a family that has an inter-sexed teenaged daughter named Alex.  Alex was born with a vagina and a penis and has been raised as a female by her parents but now that she's going through adolescence her penis is becoming an issue with her, her teenage peers, her parents, and the whole small coastal town in Uruguay where the film takes place.  Into the lives of this family come, at the behest of Alex's mother, a surgeon who specializes in plastic surgery, his wife and their teenage son.  Things get complicated when the kids fall for one another and the adults pressure Alex into deciding whether she is going to keep her penis and become a man or have it cut off and continue to be a woman.

This film is a very sweet melancholy story that's tastefully told.  It's sensitive to all parties concerned.  They don't go for easy solutions and they let the story play out with a minimum of histrionics and with a maximum of emotion.  Ms. Efron is brilliant as the tortured young woman with a little something extra and in her silences she says more than many actors twice her age and experience level.  Most things of a delicate nature are just talked about or hinted at, you never seen the penis/vagina in question, but Ms. Efron is topless quite a bit, which didn't bother me but I can see how it would others who watch this film, especially considering the fact that her character is supposed to be 15.

On another level this film is also about South American reaction to and acceptance of transgendered people in particular and gay folks in general.  Years ago it would have been unthinkable for the characters in this film to be so accepting of someone like Alex and the hinted at homosexuality of another character, now most all the characters not only accepted Alex and her situation, they were ready to support her if she kept her dick or had it cut off.  Only one character has a problem with homosexuality, the rest accept it as a part of life.

I really enjoyed this movie and I especially enjoyed Ms. Efron in it.  Being a former awkward teen who felt like a fish out of water in that backwards area I spent my teenage years in, I could not help but feel for Alex and what she was going through.  I imagine that being a teen is tough enough in today's world and being one with both sets of sex organs would make it tougher to the extreme. 

I recommend this film most highly. 

A pair '80's movies I missed back in the day

I remember vividly when this film came out in the early 1980's:

It was hailed as a great film with a superb cast.  It rightfully made a star out of Bob Hoskins.  And it brought even more acclaim to Helen Mirren.  And having finally seen it for the first time yesterday, I can say it's a pretty good film and Mirren and Hoskins are pretty great in it.

The film tells the story of how a London mobster, played by Hoskins, who calls his gang 'The Corporation,' loses it all on one fateful Good Friday.   It's pretty tame by today's standards and it's leisurely paced, but in spite of that it's still a good well told gangster story.  The clothes are a hoot, the guys wear these crazy tight high waisted pants and some of Helen Mirren's hairdos are just plain crazy, but those things only add to the charm.  The only problem I had with the film was they portrayed the gay character as sexually voracious and out for only one thing, sex.  I was kind of surprised that they included a gay character at all, which is why it disappointed me greatly when they made him so one dimensional.

I recommend this film.

The same can't be said of this piece of cinematic shit:

I remember when this turkey came out as well.  It was written about rapturously and highly regarded by film journalists, especially those who wrote for Film Comment and other like minded film mags.  I was single at the time and the only 'woman' I had any sexual dealings with was Rosie Palmer so I felt like I needed to see this because I was in the same boat as the film maker, a guy looking for love and sex.

The film is documentary that is supposed to be about General Sherman's march to the sea during the Civil war.  But because the film maker is such a whiny needy twat struck jackass, it's really about his pathetic search for a hot girlfriend.  He wants you to think he's a good guy who gets jilted by women and will be alone forever, but in reality, he was surrounded by women and he was having loads of sex with some of them.  What he really wanted, aside from attention, was a hot woman, a woman he could show off, one that made him look like a huge stud.  And his neuroses about nuclear war, give me a fucking break.  He has dreams about nuclear war, after seeing this film I have dreams about him living in a house that gets hit when they do drop a nuke.

I hate this film.  HATED IT.  I had no female companionship through most of the '80's, I however didn't make a misleading film about it.  I lived under the threat of nuclear war, I however didn't obsess over, and in fact, I never worried all that much about it because I knew we'd never be stupid enough to launch our missiles.  I knew I'd find someone and I knew the Russians weren't the people our propaganda made them out to be.  In addition to hating this film and the guy who made it, I hated most of the women he was with, except for the would be actress in the first part of the film and the woman who lives on the island off the coast of Georgia who dumped him during the making of this film, they both had the right idea, get as far away from the film maker as they can get.

Avoid this one, it needs to stay back where it came from, the mid '80's.

Another Monkey Movie Review

In this creepy little film the kid from Billy Elliot has mommy issues.  He's convinced that his hot step mother, who he bangs in his tree house, has killed his real mother.  He gets tossed out after having dipped his young wick in his hot step mom and he heads to Edinburgh where he spies a woman who looks uncannily like his deceased mom.  So he does what any young horny kid with mommy issues does, he stalks the super sexy woman who looks like his deceased mom and he spies on her.  He ends up following her to work, gets her to hire him, ends up bedding her, and then when she finds out about his mommy fetish, she dresses up in one of her old dresses and she bangs him again.  After all that sex with his mommy look alike he goes back home to settle things with his hot step mom, which he does by nearly drowning her.  After his father finally fills him in on all the detail about his mother's suicide the kid finally decides to lay off and go back to Edinburgh, hopefully to make the beast with two backs with his hot as hell mommy look alike.  But it seems she's moved on when he gets back to town because hey, one night alone is enough to drive a gal to a different penis.

Yeah, it's just as creepy as it sounds, except it's even more creepy because the kid is a voyeur who also enjoys a bit of crossdressing.  And his hot step mom, played by the insanely hot Claire Forlani, clearly has no problem with banging him and would do it again if it helped her get what she wants.  The real star of this movie for me though is Sophia Myles as the woman who looks like his dead mother.  She is white hot sexy and it's hard to notice anything other than her when she's onscreen, well it was for me anyway.

As disturbing and creepy as this film is, I still could not help but like it a bit.  What can I say, I'm a sucker for Sophia Myles.  Watch it if you like, but be warned, it's chock full of Oedipal issues.

Movie review times 2

An intellectual school boy in Wales falls for a pretty girl as his parents go through some marital problems in this fine little oddly affecting cinematic gem.  The boy's parents are dealing with issues surrounding the father's depression and the fact that an old flame of the mother's has moved in across the street.  The boy in question, played to perfection by Craig Roberts, deals with his issues regarding his odd parents problems, as he deals with his own coming of age and sexual awakening.  His paramour, played by Yasmin Paige, deals with her own issues with the relationship while dealing with her mother's impending cancer surgery.

It all sounds depressing as hell but it's a sweet funny warm little film.  Every one in it turns in fine performances and it's written and directed by Richard Ayoade, best known for his portrayal of Moss on The IT Crowd.

I highly recommend this one.

This wildly odd and visually stunning film is about a man who hasn't left his apartment in months.  He's paralyzed with fear over going out due to an incident that happened when he was on an extended holiday with his friend Bunny, played by Simon Farnaby.  So instead of going out he relives the holiday over and over again in his mind until we get to the point where we find out what happened to make him afraid to go out. 

I fucking loved this movie.  It was written and directed by the guy who directed The Mighty Boosh, so you know it's going to be different.  And different it is.  It's like a Michel Gondry on steroids on a Red Bull bender film.  Every scene is a work of pop surrealism art.  It's laugh out loud funny and a pleasure to behold.  I'm sorry I haven't seen it sooner and I know it will be in the pantheon of films I watch repeatedly.  It's got cameos by some of the modern British comedy royalty, Richard Ayoade, Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, and Rich Fulcher.  The only thing I didn't like about the film was the accent of the Spanish actress, Verónica Echegui, who played the female lead.  At the best of times it was hard to understand her, and most of the time it was impossible to do so. 

Do yourself a favor and see this film.  It will blow your mind.