Much like being a red shirt in Star Trek or having sex in a slasher film, being mentioned on the first page of a Dan Brown novel is a surefire sign of your impending demise. One can only hope Brown will mention his literary career in the first sentence of his next doorstop piece of shit work.

The recent literary analysis reminded me that I still need to unpack my review trapped in the old phpNuke db… no, wait, I’ll do it now. Here it is. It’s not as rage-fuelled as I remember it. Damn that reasonableness thing!

Davinci Code - 2/5
You’ve probably seen this book around, goodness knows I sure did. It was everywhere, in every store. I figured it was one of those Oprah book club things, so I didn’t pay much attention. Then there was a glowing review in my forums and my wife just happened to buy it for me a couple days later. So I thought I would read it.

Let me summarize my review before continuing: this book is a craptastic exercise in total schlock, and unremarkable even by those low standards. The DaVinci Code is drivel, but it didn’t make me want to hurl it across the room so it gets two stars rather than one. The book is a modern Hardy Boys mystery, but nothing more.

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I watch a ton of movies, so I’ll try to keep the review to headline-level complexity.

Bean, the Movie - 3/5. It’s some of the better bits from the TV show. If it’s your first introduction to Bean, it’s hiliarious, but otherwise unnecessary.

The Black Adder, Season 1 - 3/5. I think you have to both appreciate British history and cheesy sitcoms to really enjoy this. Rowan Atkinson is a spedcial kind of talent, that’s for sure.

Chungking Express - 4/5. Wong Kar Wai’s first crossover movie, and it’s a good one. Two movies, actually, with a split in the middle and only a bit of crossover. Tony Leung and Faye Wong star.

City of God - 4/5. Boyz in the Hood, if the Hood is Rio. Aside from the crushing poverty and rampant violence, one of the most striking things of the movie is how beautiful Brazillians are.

The Cooler - 4/5. Quirky, enjoyable. It’s supposed to be W.H. Macy’s movie, but Alec Baldwin steals the show. The movie follows a guy whose luck is so bad that he is employed by a casino to cool off anyone who is winning by too much. And then he falls in love…

Gentleman’s Agreement - 2/5. Featuring a so-young-as-to-be-unrecognizable Gregory Peck, this movie is a heavy handed diatribe on the evils of antisemitism. Antisemitism is bad! Bad, bad, bad! As a message, it’s great. As a movie, this is dogshit.

Gladiator - 1/5. I hated it in the theatres, I still hate it. Ridley Scott and his awful direction should stick to commercials or glacially paced scifi horror movies. Anyone who pulls the 12fps/48fps directorial bullshit during a fight scene to show the “ebb and flow” of the action deserves to be taken behind the NYU woodshed.

Good Night, and Good Luck - 4/5. Good movie, well told. Some annoying indie schtick (the jazz interludes). Stratham’s role of a lifetime.

Irma Vep - 4/5. Gonzo filmmaking plus satire of French New Wave cinema. Maggie Cheung is awesome in this role written specifically for her by her ex-husband. Think: Being John Malkovich meets In the Presence of a Clown meets Shadow of the Vampire.

La Femme Nikita - 5/5. French original, not shitty American remake. Still Luc Besson’s best, with an edginess not recently captured. I can’t believe they made a TV series out of what is essentially an indictment of the sociopathy of governments.

Matchstick Men - 2/5. Was a 4 right up until the bullshit ending. Grifters getting grifted was good, but don’t fucking show the post-mortem, particularly when it’s just to rescue the reputation of an actress who wants a big time Hollywood career show the grifter with a heart of gold angle. Plus, upon reflection, the movie is told in a fundamentally dishonest way, which is unfair to the audience.

Maverick - 4/5. Good, clean fun, with good acting and rapport. They really needed to do a Maverick 2, but I think Garner’s health and the animosity between Foster and Gibson probably short circuited that.

MST3K: The Wild World of Batwoman - 2/5. Even the MST3K boys couldn’t save this thing. Dear FSM, it’s awful. Best line: “Hello, college Republicans”… guess you had to be there.

The Mummy - 2/5. Mindless crap action. Bonus: Rachel Weisz, not as bad as The Mummy Returns.

My Summer of Love - 2/5. I have no idea what makes this movie remarkable other than a lesbian angle and that its competence won it a BAFTA award. It’s got some potential and cute moments, but overall it feels strained, awkward, and amateurish. Emily Booth could be a doppelganger for Fiona Apple, and may make a career out of this movie business.

Phantom of the Opera - 2/5. It has pretty costumes, shitty music, a retarded plot, and horrid acting.

Romance - 2/5. French existentialism with “shocking” graphic sexual content. Supposedly an exploration of need, desire, love, and sex… movie would have been a lot better - and shorter - if the protagonist had dumped her boyfriend in the first 20 minutes.

Stargate - 3/5. It’s a crap movie, but it’s fun. Too bad it was successful, because it directly lead to the decline of Western civilization via ID4 and Godzilla.

Uzumaki - 1/5. Japanese horror film. Two of earlier examples of which, Ringu and Ju-on, have been remade as Hollywood thrillers The Ring and The Grudge. Uzumaki will not be a third. It’s a cheese fest with Saturday night made-for-TV movie scare attempts. It feels like it had a budget of about $20 and a student film crew headed by the cliched gotcha! direction of M. Night Shyamalamadingdong.

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I’ve been remiss with my reviews, so I thought I’d play a little catch-up.

Kings of Infinite Space - 3/5.
Starts off well, fades badly. Goes from creepy Lovecraftian/Wellsian to Carroll-esque plus cheese.

The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman - 4/5.
Excellent surrealish British fantasy/adolescent novel. There are two more in the series, which I hear turns more into some Manichean religious end times type deal, but the first book was just fine. The Golden Compass is a charming book, though not nearly so excellent as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (admittedly, they are aiming at different audiences), which I link in my head because they both have that indefinable fantasy Britishosity, or at least what I consider to be the archetypical examples of such.

Memories of Ice - Steven Erikson - 5/5.
With this book, Erikson passes George Martin as the best hard fantasy series ever. A world so detailed, so incredibly well envisioned by the author that it requires no extemporaneous explanations. Erikson (a pseudonym) is the Salman Rushdie of the fantasy authors - complex, rich works that require investment on the part of the reader to complete, but are well worth it nonetheless. Like Rushdie, you need a break after one of these novels before you can go on to his next one

The Little Sister - Raymond Chandler - 3/5.
My first Chandler book. The misogyny that comes through so well in the movies is definitely present, but the movies miss the misanthropy, alienation, dissociation, and depression of the novels. It’s a good, quick read with lots of active verbs and not a lot of fluff in the prose… but the plot is as disjointed and jumpy as the worst of the movies, like say The Big Sleep. You want deus ex machina and massive leaps of logic? Chandler’s your guy. On the plus side, he doesn’t laboriously paint every step in the ladder, which is a nice change of pace.

Amnesia Moon - Jonathan Lethem - 3/5.
I loved Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music, and this was his followup novel. They are completely unrelated. Amnesia Moon deals with the subjective nature of reality, dreams, human society, and forms of dominance. It feels incomplete.

Blood Music - Greg Bear - 3/5.
Greg Bear’s first book, and you can see why he became a successful author and one of my favorites (at least up until Dinosaur Summer, but there are at least 4 of his early works that I call great without hesitation). This one is the biological version of the nanotech nightmare of a grey goo planet. It feels somewhat like a bastard child of To Marry Medusa with an update written in the 80’s by a scientist.

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The Aristocrats, in case you didn’t already know, is a famous joke. The joke in plain form is mildly amusing, but not great. In modern times, it has morphed into this grand epic that comedians tell each other in their oneupsmanship games at 3AM in the IHOP after the gig. The humor in the joke comes from the process, not the outcome. The journey, not the destination. And the process is all about shock.

Now, I’m going to spoil the “joke” if you keep reading. Instead of hiding it in spoiler markup, just skip the blockquote if you don’t want to know. Here goes:

A man, his wife, their son, their daughter and the family dog walk into a talent agent’s office and says “I’ve got a great act, audiences love us.”

The talent agent says, “Great, what do you do?”

[ and here's where the comedian shows their mettle, with their description of the act. Typically, this involves shit, piss, cum, fucking, fisting, incest, asses, dicks, pussies, and cunts. Typically. And that's just the first couple minutes. ]

At the end, the talent agent says “What do you call your act?”

The man says, with a big shit eating grin on his face (and a flourish) “The Aristocrats!”

I enjoy watching comedians just going at it. The 4/5 rating is not for The Aristocrats as released - it’s a pretty shitty documentary, probably a 2/5, but for the Aristocrats is actually for the almost unedited full tellings in the special features section of the DVD.

The comedians that most stood out to me were the intellectual ones, not the schticky ones. I thought the cream of the crop was Bob Saget, Kevin Pollack telling the joke as Christopher Walken, the South Park bit, Sarah Silverman (though admittedly my other brain might be clouding my judgement there), Taylor Nagron, George Carlin doing the intellectual angle, and Gilbert Godfried just going for it at the Hefner roast. Oh, and Doug Stanhope telling it to his infant. That was just precious. Oh, and Ron Jeremy too.

Good times, good times.

Here’s five words I thought I would never utter in sequence: Bob Saget is my hero.

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Malena - 4/5

Malena is a beautiful picture without an overabundance of dialogue. It stars Monica Bellucci as the eponymous character, and her magnetic beauty dominates the movie - as it was intended to. Malena works on multiple levels - coming of age, budding sexuality, obsession, human cruelty - but it is primarily director Giuseppe Tornatore’s ode to his beloved Italy.

There’s a lot to like here. Beautifully shot, the easy symbology, the score, multiple points of interest thematically, humor, love … oh, and Monica Bellucci is nekkid. A lot. Full frontal nekkid, even (import version only). There’s something for everyone! Unless you’re into cock, in which case I think there’s half a ball at one point and the rest is up to your imagination. Me? I’ve got Monica. Hubba hubba.

You know, Bellucci probably deserves more credit as an actress than she typically receives. She takes some difficult, uncomfortable roles sometimes (see, e.g. Irreversible), and even here where her primary purpose is to be an unobtainable beauty there are a few excruciating moments. Bellucci and Jennifer Connelly are cut from the same cloth in that way. I’m not comparing their acting chops because, frankly, I can’t tell if Bellucci can act. It’s a language thing; gimme a couple movies, but I’m leaning toward “yes.” Then again, I haven’t seen Tears of the Sun. At any rate, Bellucci’s fearless and she does well at the uncomfortable situations. One of the better models-turned-actresses around. How’s that for damning with faint praise?

As mentioned previously, the symbology in Malena is shallow. Which is good for guys like me, because then we feel all smart but don’t have to actually strain ourselves. W00t! See, Malena is Italy and Italy is Malena. From jaw-dropping beauty to desperate, used, and reviled outcast to acceptance once the beauty has been pummelled - this is Italy from 1939 onward.

Of note: don’t pick up the New Line American release - it’s a far lesser version. They cut 15 minutes of the movie, mostly for the teen sexuality (not only the nekkidness, but a (non explicit) handjob in a theatre, some of the fantasy interludes, and other such imageries that pose a danger to the republic). Fuck them puritanical bitches and get ahold of the uncut import version. Tornatore fans, movie buffs, and onanistic pervs will thank me… not that those are mutually exclusive categories. As of today, there is no uncut American version to buy, so the import it is. As a humorous side note - on the import version, if you are watching with Korean subtitles… there naughty (pubic) bits are censored out with this big black dot. Hahahah!

Malena. A good, solid 4 of a movie. If you like the story, you’ll probably also like Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. Make sure you pronounce it “cheen-ee-mah” at the art house, or your beatnik cred will be revoked.

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The Chronicles of the Jesus lion - 1/5. But only because I don’t give zeroes.

First off, this movie isn’t a parable. It’s not a proselytizing Christ story. No. It’s a 2 hour 30 minute product placement for Turkish Delight. Yes, folks, Turkish Delight is trying to become the next Reese’s Pieces and, frankly, I’m just ashamed for Disney. We’re paying $10 for a ticket and we still can’t get away from the disgustingly obvious commercial product placements like the one here. For Turkish Delight. I hear it costs about 30 shekels.

OK, perhaps there are some Christian overtones, but I really don’t see them. I mean, how can a prophecy where the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve travel to a distant land, meet a powerful lion who dies for their sins and also forgives them, and then kick righteous butt be a parable? I totally don’t see it. Jesus would have been a lamb.

Hmm… what did I learn from the Jesus lion? One, that Jesus has some powerful halitosis. Seriously, yo. He melts statues and kills Satan poor Tilda Swinton with it. Floss, dude, floss.

Two, Turkish Delight is awesome. Also, surprisingly and disappointingly, it’s not a reference to a deviant sexual practice.

Three, Santa passes out deadly weapons at Christmas. Where was this Santa when I was growing up? Why couldn’t my Santa have given me a broadsword or a bow and told me to go whack some evil? I got the whack, but no kickass sword. Jerk.

Four, Christmas is about getting presents. It’s totally not about Jesus. Just ask Disney through the voice of Lucy. Seriously. It’s about presents like a stuffed idol of the Jesus lion.

Five, I’m glad to see Prince William finding a spot of work to help out the royal family’s income stream.

So there you have it. It’s totally not a Jesus movie, because that would be the most brain dead Vogon-level nonimaginative Me Too!!!!!itish by middle managers since Critters followed Gremlins.

If offered the choice between seeing this movie a second time and having a root canal, I would choose the root canal.

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Memoirs of a Geisha - 2/5

Utter trainwreck. Pretty, but empty. Book received the Hollywood treatment. They violated by foreign accents in movies rule (which is: if they’re supposedly speaking japanese but we’re hearing english… why are we hearing accented english? Ridiculous!). The casting is awful as well; not that these aren’t good actresses, but they a) aren’t Japanese; b) with the exception fo Yeoh, are speaking english for the first time (think acting is difficult? Try it in a language not your own); and the casting director should be retroactively fired. The score (by John Williams) is abrasive and cliched. Williams really should stick to the imperial marches.

It’s a topic for another rant some day, but I hate Hollywood casting agents. They have a set list of people to cast, based on who’s hot at the moment rather than who is right for the part. They have an A, B, and C list. For this movie, it was obvious they went “hmm… what asian actresses are on the A-list? Zhang Ziyi (Chinese) is red hot right now, let’s get her. Hmm. That’s it. How about B? Li Gong (Chinese) is still a beauty at 41, was on People’s 50 Most Beautiful list 10 years ago, and the second most famous Chinese actress. Michelle Yeoh (Malaysian)… yeah, people know her. Jackie Chan, Bond, and Crouching Tiger, right? Right. Sweet! We’re set then.” As opposed to, say, casting American actresses of asian descent, Japanese descent if its important.

Hey, at least the dudes are Japanese, right?

It’s a muddle of a movie. Poor pacing, poor metaphors, stupid plot devices (the American colonel part is especially retarded. Are we to believe that the American is speaking japanese, or that they somehow speak english?), and poor lighting in many areas. jAnd, oh, the typecasting… Gong Li plays a conniving bitch (gee, what a surprise), Michelle Yeoh plays the thoughtful compassionate older woman (gee, what a surprise). Zhang Ziyi is supposed to play a headstrong, fiercely spirited woman but somehow that got lost in the translation to screen and she’s much more of an unsypathetic wallflower than any sort of artisan.

Anyway, it’s crap. It’s not as bad as King Kong, but boy did they screw the pooch with this one.

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Eragon - 1/5 … but only because I don’t give zeroes.

Literature is not like the Special Olympics. You don’t get points just for trying and not everybody is a winner.

This is true for everyone except, apparently, Christopher Paolini. He is a winner in the same way that Dan Brown is a My Pet Rock winner for fad o’ the nonce, or the Lemony Snickets are for the Must Find the Next Potter land grab.

The backstory behind Eragon is a whole lot more interesting than the book itself. Paolini wrote the book as a 15 year old. Apparently the “good job kid” pat on the head turned into massive number of book orders by a desperate publisher. Too bad they didn’t choose a book worth publishing.

Want to know how bad it is? Here’s the first sentence:

Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.

That’s right, people, a scent is going to change the world. Only it turns out not to be the scent that changes the world at all. Shocking misdirection or amateur hour at the word processor, you make the call.

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Pi - 4/5

Told you I mainlined the movies in the past day or two.

Anyway, Pi is Darren Aronofsky’s debut (he also did Requiem for a Dream… and nothing since, though it looks like he’s got some projects lined up in the near term). Pi is edgy, shot in high-contrast, grainy, black and white. It follows Maximillian Cohen, a mathematician observing patterns in nature… or in this case the stock market. His theorem is:

1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

As he gets closer to the solution, there are kabbalists and a wall street analyst firm tring to control him. Or are they? Is it real or is it a paranoid delusion? Cohen is sick… it could all be in his head. You never really know. And that’s part of what makes Pi great.

I really don’t mean to be this nice to so many films in a row, but I guess it’s selection bias - I pretty much only have good movies in my collection, so it’s to be expected. I’ll have to increase my Netflix quota o’ crap.

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In the Mood for Love - 5/5

In my mega-ass long review of 2046, I mentioned this movie, but wanted to give it an official post, since it’s such a great movie in its own right.

Set in 1962 Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love features Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung) as neighbors who happen to move in on the same day. Both are married, but their spouses are often absent. Eventually they figure out that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Chow and Su start spending a lot of time together and fall in love… but they never admit it, nor do they consummate it. Because they are determined not to be like their spouses. Eventually, Chow flees to Singapore.

As with most Wong Kar Wai movies, the movie is visually sumptuous, the music stirring, and the acting superb. The chemistry between Leung and Cheung is fantastic and tension-filled. And if Cheung’s cheongsams aren’t a visual metaphor for the constricted and uncomfortable societal rules to which she must abide, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

In the Mood for Love is everything Remains of the Day wishes it could grow up to be. Beautiful, compelling, smoldering, and romantic. Plus, no ewwww Hopkins factor.

For ghostfinger - you’d love this movie, you must put it on your list. Wong is twice the autuer that Baz is, with none of those fucking jump cuts. It’s also a) in color and b) Chinese, so I’m preemptively cutting off your b&w samurai movie eye-roll.

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American Beauty - 4/5

Unlike Braveheart, this movie has aged well. Granted I watched it with the commentary of Sam Mendes rather than the actual dialogue this time, but still. The point holds.

If you haven’t seen it, American Beauty is a tale of life and the beauty therein. Not the superficial beauty, but the beauty of small moments, the beauty of gusts of air, or death, or reality.

The acting throughout is superb and the source material is pretty good as well. My main quibbles with the story is that I find the ending to be trite bullshit (SPOILER WARNING :: the idea of a repressed homosexual southern military man is just too cliche to enjoy. I mean, c’mon, people. :: END SPOILER). This movie made Chris Cooper a name (well, this and Adaptation) and provides some of the strongest performances from Annette Benning and Kevin Spacey’s career.

Of note from the voiceover: I always took Angela Hayes’ (Mena Suvari) declaration that she was a virgin to Lester to be a lie. I thought it was in her character that she would expect that her lover would really want to hear that, so that’s what she said. It had the opposite effect on Lester, of course, but still… a lie, I thought. However, Mendes and the writer Alan Ball said she was speaking honestly.

Frankly, I don’t buy it. It doesn’t fit the character as we know it (though it puts her in a different light, particularly her grilling Jane on sex with Ricky - I took it as a clinging for control over her formerly compliant “friend”). No one as cruel and as self-focused as Angela (who was aware that men wanted her since she was 12), would not have had sex by then. It’s a form of power and self-adulation that Angela would not have hesitated to use. Anyway, I don’t care what the guy who wrote it says, she’s a loose woman and was lying to Lester and very little you could say would change my mind.

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Brazil - 4/5

Brazil is one of the top scifi movies of all time, in the dystopic-humanist scifi section as opposed to the spaceships-n-lasers BOOM! scifi. The backstory behind the battles over the editing, distribution, and release of this film are even more entertaining than the movie itself in many ways (long story short: Gilliam’s American distributor was an exec who cut and recut the film down to 90 minutes and made it into a romance movie with a happy ending. I know, twisted).

It’s a big, shambling mess of a movie. That Brazil is almost a 5 despite of that is a testament to the source material and the people involved with it’s making. The plot relies on too many absurdities and my suspension of disbelief is broken about four or five times throughout. At other times, it seems that it can’t decide whether it’s a farce or merely satirical. As a result, some pieces are aburd in a way that can be appreciated and other are absurd in an eye-rolling way. Not that a movie has to stick to any particular genre, it’s just that when someone’s going “take me seriously! just kidding! no, no, no, take me seriously! again! juuuust kidding! that time. I’m serious now. No, wait, I’m not. Nooooow I am…” it gets tedius.

A film fest of 1984, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, and maybe City of Lost Children would be a pretty sweet grouping.

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Braveheart - 3/5

Not a movie that bears repeated viewings or much scrutiny. I loved it when it first came out, but you can never go home again apparently. The ridiculous gay caricatures and the distorted history really kill it. As if Wallace being a commoner and impregnating Isabelle wasn’t enough, having the battle of Stirling Bridge without the bridge was a mythmaking feat for the record books. Braveheart is also an early look at Gibson’s obsession with torture, blood, and masochism.

Still, it’s a pretty good war hero movie, all things considered.

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Talk Radio - 4/5

Stone’s second best work after Platoon. Eric Bogosian, who wrote the original play and co-wrote the screenplay, is great as the outrageous, courageous, rude, and vulnerable asshole of a DJ. The story is largely based on the last days in the life of Alan Berg, a talk show host in Denver who was murdered in 1984 by white supremacists. Powerful and moving.

Stone’s direction only gets annoying a few times… which makes it stand out among the Stone ouevre. More than half the movie takes place just watching Bogosian talk into his mic, and that’s a really hard movie to make exciting and edgy, but Stone and Bogosian manage to do it, so my hat’s off to them.

A great $6 DVD buy.

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Dead Calm - 3/5

Works OK as a suspense piece. The silence is used as a wonderful tool. Could have been a 4 or 5 if it weren’t for all the ridiculous deus ex machinas (like the spar locking Sam Neil in the room, or the trite return of Billy Zane). The rape scene isn’t painful enough and is another big knock against it. Almost a 2.

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