Thell Reed ... The Armourer

Charlene Rose ... Dolly Parton lookalike / Opera Singer

Christian Slater ... Ray

Jeffrey Tambor ... Geek / Jeffrey / Dr. Geekman

GET PUMPED!

Movies I've watched since the last time I wrote one of these things, from favorite to least.


Most biopics stray from reality to either streamline the story or make the characters more palatable. The French Connection alters the outcome of its story in a crass attempt to let both political sides get what they want from the film. Here, Robert Bolt imports issues about egotism and violence into a story that didn't really have them, subverting the heroism with anti-war angst while maintaining the grand spectacle. Not really fair to its subjects, but possibly more fascinating than if it had been.


What Rich said. I bet Brian DePalma was real impressed, too.


Not only is Jason Statham shorter than the villian, he's shorter than the villain's girlfriend. Nothing else in the movie is particularly atypical for an english-language movie about fast cars and kicking people, other than its consistent enjoyability.


Slow, gorgeous, punctuated with just enough violent interludes to keep you awake - perfect for a massive hangover. Charles Bronson isn't the most engaging "man with no name," but the peculiarites of the climax can be chalked up to macho dream logic.


So England's going to turn all of its major controversies into cinema verite biopics now? Good thing they've got all those actors!


One of those Michael Bay movies I only found offensively incoherent and retarded after it was over (probably helps that I was drunk). While it was on, I laughed at the Transformers-out-of-water jokes, was impressed by the CGI and admired the decision to dress the teenage love interest like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. John Turturro, obviously excited to be in a blockbuster, gives the film his all and I think he deserves an Oscar nomination. Letting a Transformer piss on you has to count as "a brave choice."


Kevin Costner takes on his most daring role since Robin Hood, playing a family-oriented businessman addicted to serial killing. William Hurt, Demi Moore and Dane Cook do their best to make his performance look intriguing by default.


Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton's picnic is interrupted when he and a group of bystanders attempt to rescue a small child from a wild hot air balloon. They fail, and one of the good samaritans dies. Craig suffers intense guilt and gains a homosexual stalker as a result. None of this succeeds at making you think.

Two things that music nerds who don't read ILX would actually regret not knowing about.

Bone Thugs'n'Harmony feat. Phil Collins - "Home" (from 2002!)


Shred videos by StSanders

(much more where that came from, folks)


The next post will be a bunch of blurbs about DVDs, I swear!

SONGS FROM MY "2007 HITS" IPOD PLAYLIST XII


Darren Hayes, "On The Verge Of Something Wonderful"

Only this and the outstanding Camille tribute "Bombs Up In My Face" stuck out when I heard the former Savage Gardener's new DOUBLE CD on aolmusic, and what I remember of the rest was too dense with ballad for me to revisit unless a free copy wandered into my housemate's promo pile. His suit and hand gestures in the video go for timely Timberlake (the clip for the chirpy follow-up "Me, Myself & I" drowns in it), but I doubt anyone in America will be fooled. This is pre-9/11 AC technopop of the highest order, and it's a shame he and Enrique Iglesias can't seem to make this shit cross over anymore - it's strictly for Popjustice enthusiasts and the Logo network now.

The lyrics are the kind of portentous prattle Tiga would kill for, opening with "a serpent, a rabbit, a walk in the forest" and climaxing with "but life is for leading, not people pleasing," somehow wedging a trip to the dentist and "there's a decent living to be made in the selling out of ideals" in between. My favorite is the line about the guy who "said he never meant it BUT HOW HE STILL DROPPED THE BOMB," which I took for righteous indignation over celebrity hate speech. His site claims its "but HARRY still dropped the bomb," so maybe it's about Hiroshima. I prefer my version, seeing as how this is Hayes' first track since admitting that "I Knew I Loved You" wasn't about Kirsten Dunst or anyone else with a vagina. Song ends exactly like "Where Do I Begin" by Chemical Brothers and Beth Orton, which happened to be released the same year as Savage Garden, where he began.

Movies I watched this afternoon, from favorite to least.



Frequently praised as a "fairytale for adults," but its not the fairytale that got the R rating. It's a shame how much of the film revolves around a chock-full-of-stock fascists-vs-resistance storyline that the young lead doesn't personally witness, as critics and poster designers alike clearly get more juice out of her fantasies, which are rendered mundane once you recognize the "fascism is bad" analogy Guillermo Del Toro was going for (something you might let pass if it was for kids). A stuttering freedom fighter gets more screen time than the eyeballs-in-his-hands dude, so I have no problem claiming false advertising. I originally planned on quipping "Spielberg's Labyrinth," but that isn't fair to Del Toro - who's nowhere as brazenly pathological - or The Muppets.


The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.

SONGS IN MY "2007 HITS" IPOD PLAYLIST XI


Muse, "Supermassive Black Hole"

Muse has more Queen in them than any other post-Radiohead combo I've heard, a juicier brand of grandiosity I doubt any of the competition has the impetus (or energy) to attempt. This does one better by replacing the Radiohead with Crystal Method, giving us the Hot Space 2000 Freddie never got the chance to make. Singer Matthew Bellamy (who really needs a more Maxwell Dragon-esque handle) seems to be losing some of the Yorke in his throat and word is their next album will be more dance AND more symphonic so hey hey, somebody's got the right idea.

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Last week I didn't get around to watching any movies I hadn't already seen before, so there won't be any image swiping from my employers until next.

Top Ten Of 2007 That Weren't In My Last Top Ten Of 2007

Against Me!, New Wave

People bummed by the new Springsteen (any self-respecting fan should be, but I doubt he has any self-respecting fans left) should check out this A+ real rock cheese. Now this is colon blow!

Chromeo, Fancy Footwork

It's possible that I'd be nonplussed by this if I'd heard everything they were ripping off, but I'll still take the best Stereolab over Neu. Plus, I think I have heard a healthy amount of '80s electro, thank you very much.

Clinic, Visitations

Fresher after four albums than Linkin Park after three!

Electric Six, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master

When there's a youtube for this album, I will share the youtube for this album. Don't ever think I wouldn't. Don't you ever think it.

Roky Erickson, You're Gonna Miss Me Soundtrack

The 12 tracks here may look skimpy compared to the 21 on You're Gonna Miss Me: The Best Of Roky Erickson, or the 43 on the I Have Always Been Here Before box. But better to leave the listener hungry for more than certain they've heard more than they need to. Plus, unlike on the best-of, the title track on this ain't a live recording.

Lloyd, Street Love

I was genuinely surprised to see how Omarion he comes off in videos; the album's lush ease promised something more assured and adult. This bodes well for the future, as the guy's just old enough to drink.

Rakes, Ten New Messages

No post-punk dance band has matter-of-factly bopped through its sophomore slump this consistently since REM's Reckoning, and in both cases I actually prefer it to the debut. And if Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out counts as "post-punk dance," that fits too.

Rihanna, Good Girl Gone Bad

This year's Itunes queen, casual and comfortable in a world of cheap stimulus.

Tegan & Sara, The Con

Having realized their sound with So Jealous, they start to play with its parameters here - not aggressively fucking with it, but definitely getting a feel for what it can take.

Timbaland, Timbaland Presents: Shock Value

Lots of dance-pop, some pop-rap, some teary ballads, some mall-punk, She Wants Revenge - Timbaland seems to think my "2007 hits" playlist would sound better if he produced all of it. His beats, so lively if hardly futuristic, make a great case.

This week, I downloaded almost every song this band recorded, and discovered I enjoyed about 95% of them. I also turned 28. Only a few years ago, I couldn't get past those sub-Bowie vocals. How my tastes have refined since then.

Movies watched last week, from favorite to least.


The sound editing deserves all the acclaim it gets - Peter Greene's psychotic would fascinate either way, but the collage of sounds closes the distance between us, showing us his horror as much as that of what he does.


I didn't think it'd be so easy to listen to Spalding Gray talk for an hour and a half. His affectations should be unlikable (that flat, shrill scream!), but instead they're hypnotic. If his observations were offensive or smug it would fall apart, but his ability to be wide-eyed about every detail of his life keeps the film afloat.


The last movie I saw about the frustrations of a chubby, pre-growth spurt adolescent was Happiness. This movie does much better by the archetype.


No director with visual imagination equal to Bob Fosse matches his appreciation for simple kinetic movement, which is part of what makes this the most enjoyable ponderous valentine a director ever made for himself. His cast is the other. I never imagined Roy Scheider could be so playful.


The hawk attached by a rope to Paul Giamatti's arm as he deals with severe guilt and insecurity may be an extremely obvious metaphor, but its also a very visceral one.


The idea of Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis (as Elvis and JFK!) fighting a mummy in a nursing home is so brilliant for a b-movie that its heartbreaking when the climax turns out as lifeless as it does. The actors truly deserved better.


A bloated John Cusack, haunted by the past, goes through some wicked DTs. Starts more promising than your average Stephen King adaptation, but the ending is as contrived and unengagingly grand as all the rest of them. Samuel L. Jackson role is so small that it would have worked better as an uncredited cameo rather than top billing.


At first I was impressed that director Robert DeNiro wasn't going for an obvious Scorcese vibe until he crosscut between Matt Damon hugging his son and the kid's fiancee being thrown out of a plane by Damon's goons: "Oh, right...he worked with Coppola too." The two hours and forty five minutes of murmuring, secret handshakes and homoerotic subtext add up to nothing, but Damon's closed-in performance is uniquely transfixing, always promising that the film might eventually deliver.


Gooey body organs, a nerdish but charismatic male lead, stiff attempts at perverse sexuality, wan inscrutability - something from every era of Cronenberg's career.


You'd think a movie where Sting molests an invalid and jumps through a window would be entertaining, but you have to watch Joan Plowright and Denholm Elliott go through some bad, bad English family drama to get to those last few minutes of insanity.

With a quarter to go, my top 20 movies of 2007. Some December '06 stuff is included - I don't care about when it first showed up at a festival so much as when your average film buff could have had a chance to catch it.


1. The Ten
You know how if you beat Super Mario Bros. you can play the whole game again in "hard mode"? This feels like comedy's "hard mode."


2. The Host
I reserve further comment until it comes off my store's "new release" section and I can rent it again for free.


3. Knocked Up
If there's a better plot-based comedy this decade I will be very, very surprised. The bonus disc is better than 90% of them. Try to complain about gender disparity or the fact that it didn't stop being funny in order to earnestly recreate your stance on abortion and I will take you to the mat. You will be forced to snivel about how you just didn't like it that much and how "everyone's allowed to have their own opinion" without a goddamn leg to stand on. I will own you with science. I know kung fu.


4. Planet Terror
The closest Hollywood has come to bringing an Electric Six album to life.


5. Superbad
It could have used a touching anecdote about their past to explain why Jonah Hill got so emo about his eventual split with Michael Cera (they could have swiped the one from Wedding Crashers); bromance doesn't get that co-dependent without some shared trauma. Aside from a desire to see women get a movie like this about their adolescence, that's my only complaint.


6. Spider-Man 3
Me, I think more movies should have so much emotion, razzle-dazzle and energy that they threaten to morph into a Bob Fosse production. In comparison, Batman & Robin threatened to morph into Andrew Lloyd Webber, and that's a truer sign of improvement in superhero films than any deadly serious adaptation.


7. Notes On A Scandal
Argues for the value of oscar bait by making a more entertaining Mary Kate LeTourneau film than Lifetime ever would. Even if TV had the gall to add an aging repressed lesbian to the story, I doubt they'd find anyone who could chew it up and spit it out like Judi Dench.


8. Breach
Director Billy Ray once again tells us the real-life story of an amazing liar and the guy who happened to be there when he fucked up.


9. Balls Of Fury
Highly recommended to fans of State humor, Christopher Walken and Kickboxer. The incorporation of ping-pong into action sequences is the reason CGI was invented.


10. Venus
The last chapter of a ladies' man, equally pathetic and graceful.


11. Reno 911: Miami!
"Any last words?" "Ummm... Uhhhh... Ummm, 'He liked it'? NO! Wait!"


12. Shoot 'Em Up
Clive Owen gives another ridiculous violent fantasy some heart by protecting a baby, only this one takes pride in its ridiculousness. Knocked up a spot or two for setting a shoot-out to the entirety of "Ace Of Spades" and making it work.


13. Away From Her
Another swinging sixties icon confronts the ravages of age. Expect more of this as boomers get autumnal.


14. Black Book
Paul Verhoeven's "serious" film is his second most exciting* since Total Recall. Another case for Oscar bait!


15. Bourne Ultimatum
I've run while holding a DV camera, and there's no reason for the screen to shake THIS much. But Paul Greengrass makes sure you still see what you need to. I'm hoping if they make a fourth that they'll finally create a climax that's as gripping as the end of the first act. I don't have to worry about Bourne not kicking butt and taking names.


16. Children Of Men
I might be drastically underrating this movie in hindsight, but as much as I enjoyed Clive Owen and the long takes, I'm still hung up on how much Hollywood they're hiding behind the cinema verite. Possibly the best dystopian sci-fi movie of all time, but it's still dystopian sci-fi.


17. Lookout
A great short film about post-accident disability followed by a tolerable heist flick.


18. Shooter
Mark Wahlberg still hasn't turned a movie into gold without joshing on the other actors, but his attempts are getting better.


19. Hot Fuzz
I can get over the fact that I'm supposed to find mass-murdering pronvicials hilarious as long as I focus on what was, namely Timothy Dalton and Nick Frost.


20. 3:10 To Yuma
If you're making a classy action movie and need someone to pull off a character whose motivation is unclear, Russell Crowe can make sure we don't really care while he's on the screen, even if we notice.

The other 20 I've seen so far this year, in order of diminishing preference: The Hawk Is Dying, I Think I Love My Wife, Zodiac, Alone With Her, Blades Of Glory, Alpha Dog, Letters From Iwo Jima, Black Snake Moan, 28 Weeks Later, Perfect Stranger, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, Death Proof, Rescue Dawn, Ghost Rider, Smokin' Aces, The Number 23, The TV Set, Dead Silence, Hannibal Rising and...*drum roll*...Fracture.

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*I can't ignore Starship Troopers, as much as it gets in the way of my point. But I can make it an asterisk.

Over ten years ago, Beavis and Butthead refused to watch this video in its entirety. Thank you, Youtube, for finally showing us what we missed (and thanks to Eisbar on ILX, for hunting it down).

Movies I watched last week, from favorite to least.


The first half establishes Ralph Nader as one of the most admirable, fascinating and influential men of the last hundred years. The second makes clear just how pathetic and misguided blaming Nader for the rise of the Bush administration is. Recommended to anyone who scoffs at either stance or merely takes them on faith.


Peter Fonda as a blue collar Henry Fonda paying for his son's crimes. Probably the best role of his career, and he does Dad proud.


Not as erotically provocative as hyped (I wouldn't be surprised to find out it pales to Paul Verhoeven's '70s work), and many of the double-crosses come off as Hollywood implausibility ("the events are true, the story is not" he says), but it's been a long time since he's made a film this lively without relying on camp for juice.


Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause are respectively a passive-agressive douchebag and a passive douchebag. Laura Dern and Naomi Watts are their respective frustrated housewives. All check to see if the grass is greener on the other side. None of the actors play for sympathy or devolve into gross caricature, which makes it pretty respectable for a "marriage is hell" flick.


A problem with films about artists defending their work from commercial compromise is how hard it is to make us believe that the artist is defending something worthwhile rather than being pretentious. For instance, Call Me Crazy IS a better title than The Wexler Chronicles. Leila says Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip is even worse in this regard, which makes me wonder if that show at least achieves unintentional hilarity. The only funny things here period are David Duchovny drugged, the idea of Slut Wars, and Fran Kranz imitating Penn, DeNiro, Brando and Pacino at the same time. Everyone in this film needs a better agent.

SONGS IN MY "2007 HITS" IPOD PLAYLIST X


The Cribs, "Men's Needs"

The Brakes, The Rakes, Arctic Monkeys, these guys and all the rest - sure Britain had Franz Ferdinand to jumpstart their DOR scene, but the Strokes were on album number two by then. Our lack of jittery, sequencer-imitating bands is inexcusable.

I have been waiting SO long for this movie. I can't believe it's finally coming out. How could the director of Donnie Darko actually get me excited for a movie? Well, he could blow all the Hollywood cred he got from that overrated sleeper hit by making a two-hour-plus apocalyptic epic starring The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, and handful of SNL actresses, Seann William Scott (as TWINS), a BOTTLE BLOND Jon Lovitz, a BADLY WIGGED Wallace Shawn and a BADLY SCARRED Justin Timberlake. He could spend more than a year between its disastrous Cannes debut and its eventual release adding MORE visual effects while apparently KEEPING the musical interludes. Judging from a quick shot in the trailer, it appears that cars will STILL be having sex in the movie. Granted, part of why Donnie Darko disappointed me was how excited I got after the trailer, but I'm expecting something overbaked and superficial now.

NOVEMBER 9! So far away...and yet, so close.

Movies watched last week, from favorite to least.


Macbeth is one of the few Shakespeare plays I'm totally unfamiliar with, so I wasn't really watching this in relation to its source material. Still, I believe Pauline Kael when she says there's never been a Lady Macbeth as chilling as Isuzu Yamada. More ornately composed than most Kurosawa I've seen, but the performances are so grand and emotional you could hardly call it static.


Brad Dourif's evangelical athiesm baffles a southern town's religious hucksters (Harry Dean Stanton & Ned Beatty), as he eventually collapses under the weight of his fanaticism. It appears to be set in the '70s, though it's hard to imagine Dourif's character as a Vietnam vet (the novel's from 1952). The mood is so farcical (especially when the score gets zany) that there's a disconnect from the lead's anguish, but it's as enjoyably coarse and lively as John Huston's later Prizzi's Honor, only darker. Beatty's racketeer is possibly my favorite of his more gregarious roles.


Two friends, one suffering from homosexual longing (subtly implied by back massages, the occasional leer and a pink undershirt), go on a camping trip. In an extreme case of avoiding cliches without finding anything to replace them, writer-director Kelly Reichardt skips the hysterical confrontations of Chuck & Buck and Brokeback Mountain by removing the third act entirely, leaving the film seventy minutes long. Will Oldham follows my Dwight Yoakam rule, though, and listening to Yo La Tengo while searching for a hot spring seems pretty nice.


A weapons manufacturer's company retreat is interrupted by psychotic war criminals. The pick-em-off-in-the-woods horror sequences are handled well, even if the humor's weak and there's a big space where the political subtext should be.


Nic Cage in crazy mode (jellybeans in a martini glass, anyone?) and Eva Mendes in form-fitting clothing beats Superman Returns, Batman Begins and The Hulk, if not any movies that are actually good.


Bill Paxton licks a corpse's tit, pigpiles with three obese women, eats moldy chicken and spends most of the movie playing the accordion, laughing maniacally. No one else involved in this pointless weirdness seems too inspired, but Bill gives this shit his all.


I get why Frances McDormand's character would rather help Folk Implosion and some British dick pick the right Sparklehorse track to cover rather than confront her estranged son, but I don't get why the director thought the movie should revolve around said recording session.


This isn't the first time I've seen two actors I like produce a vehicle for themselves that was off-key and patently absurd even before the inexplicable twist ending - anyone else seen Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman in Under Suspicion? Of course not. You know better than to rent straight-to-dvd crap like this.