R.I.P.

An Opiate for the Mongoloid Masses.

Ghost Rider
2007, USA
Mark Steven Johnson
35mm


I don't know why I'm surprised that Ghost Rider is a bad movie. It's a bad comic, so an adaptation is like trying to spin straw into gold, or more accurately, trying to spin a puerile pre-adolescent fantasy into something the whole hillbilly family can enjoy. And that's exactly what has happened here. It's as if the wet dream of every glue-sniffing tween too brain damaged to ever have an erection again has taken form on celluloid, all motorcycles and skulls and fire and chains. This whole movie is the paint job on a hot-rod, a decal on a monster truck, a drawing made during free time at a mental hospital for the severely retarded. In fact, that last comparison is the most accurate, for the following reasons:


1) Ghost Rider contains no sex. This is because the retarded have no sex drive. Firstly, they're too medicated to move most of the time, and secondly, they've deliberately not been taught anything about sex. It's mainly a preventative measure, since no one wants them to breed, and also because everyone knows that retards have the
strength of 10 men, so any copulation with anything but a chimpanzee or an elephant would result in the ejaculation breaking the spine of the poor victim. I mean partner.

When they breed, they make wrestling fans.

2) Ghost Rider contains no plot, or at least no plot that makes sense. That's because retards don't want to see things happen. They want to see things explode. Also, they like bright and shiny things, like chrome, and red. That's why Michael Bay keeps making movies, and the American Idol sets are all in primary colors.

3) Ghost Rider contains no dialogue, only explanation. This is because the retarded don't need to know why things are happening; they need to know what is happening. So, anything anybody ever says in this entire film is dedicated to a) explaining who they are, and b) explaining what is happening on screen. Lots of "I am Blackheart, a demon", and "We are fighting".

So, I can't really fault Ghost Rider, which stars Nicholas Cage as a daredevil who sells his soul to Peter Fonda, because it’s helping to keep the retards pacified. In case you’re wondering, the film is Faust for Dummies. In exchange for his father's life, Cage, as Johnny Blaze, is cursed to walk the Earth as the Ghost Rider, a vengeful spirit who punishes the wicked. I don't really understand why this is something the devil would want to do, but hey, I'm not retarded.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Sympathy For The Retarded Coat Hangers Of The Fashion Industry

The Devil Wears Prada
2006, USA
David Frankel
DVD

I think I'm done with the fashion industry. I know that may not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever seen me in person, with my stylish look mixing James Dean, homeless couture, and Evil Ernie, but what I'm trying to say is that I’m more than just rejecting baroque and meaningless excess of the fashion industry. No, I've been done with that for years. What I meant is that I'm done making fun of it, because that just brings every useless coke-sniffing twat involved in the industry more attention. Fashion isn't important. We all know it isn't important. It's a bunch of flamboyant poofs with no marketable skills crudely stitching garish fabrics together to drape over skeletal drug addicts with the same level of self-importance a scientist would have cloning Jesus. Then, fashion writers seeking to justify their paychecks arbitrarily pick which laughable vinyl atrocity is the trendsetter of the season, and which is a wearable version of an inflatable pool. The models, of course, are paid to walk a straight line and try not to get too pregnant. They are all, obviously, various incarnations of The Great Satan Paris Hilton, talentless and unbearably rich, hellish spawn that number legion, and in The Devil Wears Prada , Meryl Streep fulfills this role to a T, or more accurately, to an inverted cross.

Meryl Streep .

Anne Hathaway plays every girl in every teen movie where a studious young lady in frumpy clothes falls in with the hip crowd and takes off her glasses. Except in this movie she's a college graduate working at Vogue, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Meryl Streep is Lucifer, offering fame, fortune, and purses in exchange for learning how to stare down your coke nose at the girl working the counter at Starbucks. But I'm getting ahead of myself, already abandoning my vow to ignore the fashion industry. Instead, let's just focus on Streep's Oscar nominated performance as the Devil. Her muted, soft-spoken but ludicrously unreasonable demands toe the line between pure evil and paste-eating psychosis. And her smooth, seemingly paralyzed features present an agelessness that speaks less to botox than it does to a portrait hanging in her mansion which ages instead of her. Her black wings are leathery yet supple, and her enormous curled horns have been delicately arranged to be elegant with just the slightest touch of spontaneity. Her performance dwarfs those of her co-stars, partially because of its subtlety and reserve, but mainly because at 12 feet of winged glory, she literally towers over the other actors. Her forked tongue slithers and darts about like an eyeless black snake, and her eyes brim with sulfurous fire, pits of glowing darkness that reflect the majesty of infernal power. The heat from her internalized flame sublimates the cracked and blackened hide that covers her ebony bones, reducing it to clouds of black smoke that almost instantly coalesce back into thick skin covered in razor sharp bristles. While this description of Streep's character may have lost its grip on verisimilitude a while back, it's as distracting as her performance was, standing out from the mediocrity of the film like Mozart at the keyboards of a Yes concert. But most importantly, it keeps me from making jokes about the fashion industry.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.

Full Metal Handjob

Full Metal Jacket

1987, USA

Stanley Kubrick

DVD

It's a shame that the best Vietnam war movie ever made will forever be known for popularizing the term "reach-around". I suppose I'd rather hear people quoting this than Scarface, but it's still reducing a complex, realistic meditation on war to a fag joke you can tell at a frat party. And while the first half of the film, the legendary boot camp sequence starring R. Lee Ermey as the foul-mouthed drill sergeant, is the more entertaining part of the film, it means nothing without the portion of the film that takes place in Vietnam. Both sections mirror each other, ending with a gunshot and a loss of innocence, and that similarity, that one shared point of reference, is what pulls the somewhat amorphous form of the film into some sort of structure.

Full Metal Jacket unfolds anecdotally, the only backbone to the scenes the linearity of time. Scenes are disconnected vignettes, pages from a diary, except instead of being full of breathless closet make-out confessions or details of an awkward handjob in a public park, it's details of watching a close friend's intestines pour out over their combat boots; dispatches from Vietnam, written in blood and stamped in gunpowder, and thankfully full of enough references to sodomy and fucking Asian prostitutes to make it appealing to young males who like NASCAR, as well as people who can spell things.

Wonder Woman: Warrior Princess, Queen of the Amazons, and Lord of the Retarded.

It's actually a fairly significant achievement, to have created a film that's appealing to both the mentally capable demographic and people who got sports scholarships to state universities. That's a broad spectrum. Normally, one could only please both groups by running an episode of Ali G in the corner of a screen playing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nevertheless, Kubrick manages it, getting both demographics off at once, proving that not only is he a master of film, he's clearly a master of the reach-around, as well.

The Phantom Of The Trailer Park

Phantom of the Opera

1998, Italy

Dario Argento

DVD

Dario Argento isn't trying anymore. That's the only explanation for this nonsense. His last few films have been shot on video, shoddily written, and show all the effort of a 7-year-old shoveling the driveway. He's old and tired, still insane in the sense that his scripts have the cohesion of a half-remembered episode of G.I. Joe, but disinterested in all the things that made his movies fun in the first place. Without gore or the wildly inventive visual style that made films like Susperia and Opera viewable, all we're left with is plots that would confuse a chaos mathematician, and actors whose use even as a moveable prop would be debatable.

In this particular installment in Argento's journey from horror auteur to high school kid with video camera, Julian Sands and Argento's daughter Asia star in an adaptation of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera. And by adaptation, I mean rough approximation, the sort of thing you might write if you've never read the book, but your roommate really likes the musical and plays the soundtrack every morning while he gets ready to go to the gym. It bears a rough similarity to the novel, though as I recall the Phantom was somewhat disfigured and hadn't been raised by rats like a rodent version of The Penguin. For some reason, my guess is either a second mortgage or alimony, Julian Sands is in this movie, perhaps expecting to parlay his roles in Arachnophobia and Warlock into a career in B movies on the continent. He has an English accent, which invariably commands both respect and the desire to eat spotted dick, but the Fabio hairstyle is starting to clash rather harshly with a face swollen from Vicodin and alcohol, like Conan the Barbarian has gone puffy and fey. But while that might stand at odds with the perception of the darkly brooding Phantom, it certainly matches Asia Argento's look like a brown belt does leather shoes.

Argento's castle.

Asia is, of course, pure, unadulterated Euro-trash of the worst kind, the type that takes their title seriously, mixing the aristocratic, spoiled haughtiness of their continental stereotype with the type of skanky classlessness that licks the mirror after a coke binge. And it's the way you imagine her tonguing the mirror that's so disgusting, like she'd be looking you in the eyes, daring you to imagine your phallus between her gap teeth, when in reality you're just wondering how this dog-faced woman got into the dinner party, and why one of her tits is hanging out of her shirt. The whole movie, she seems barely capable of looking at her co-stars instead of leering at the camera like one of those girls in the phone sex ads on cable TV after midnight. I can't for the life of me imagine why she would be doing that. Why would I want to call her? I can barely look at her. She looks like a pig in an ill-fitting mini-skirt, pink and slutty, to be sure, but I'm of a different species than Euro-trash. Not to say that I'm better, I just prefer standard white trash to the European variety. Sure, the latter has rich parents that can afford better drugs, but there's something in the desperation of a truck stop hooker's eyes as she goes down on you for crystal meth that really turns my crank. Turns hers, too, if her dealer hasn't blown up his trailer yet. And while both hide generations of inbreeding under poorly applied makeup, the smoky eye shadow of the Eurotrash is a poor substitute for the blackened eyes of the white trash woman, as one is merely cosmetic, and the other a mark that the housebreaking process has already begun. In short, the allure of the Eurotrash, her Stoli Vodka, and the title to her land pales in comparison to the promise of toothless fellatio from someone who can probably go a week without sleeping, or probably breathing. Plus, she'll be so drug addled she'll barely be able to ask for food, let alone complain about the servants, or lack thereof. Who knows, maybe she'll be confused enough to understand Phantom of the Opera.

Sunday School On The Short Bus.

An American Haunting
2005, USA
Courtney Solomon
DVD

As if I didn't worry enough about molesting children, now I have to worry about poltergeists? Man, the Christian right in American is doing pretty much everything it can to bury every pleasure beneath a mound of guilt. And ever since The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, they've discovered that horror may well be the way to reach the youth of today with their messages of repression and self-denial. First, we're not allowed to kill, then we're not allowed to eat unleavened bread, and now we can't diddle our daughters or the spirit of their lost innocence will haunt us to death? Jeez, Christianity sure is a drag.

Yeah! Take that! Try to protect my kids, will you?

An American Haunting is based on a true story, allegedly, about a cursed family, headed by Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek. Those two have already been cursed, apparently, by either bank debts or a bad agent, because they both should be above toothless ghost stories directed by the guy who did Dungeons and Dragons. There are some unsettling scenes, to be sure, but the pioneer setting definitely engenders more mirth than fear, since it's difficult to find anyone in a bonnet terrifying. But the moral lesson of An American Haunting, that you probably shouldn't molest your kids, is just the latest in a long string of fun spoiled by moralist filmmakers.

1) The Exorcist taught us not to use a Ouija Board by ourselves, and not to piss on the rug. This ruins everything drunk 17 year old girls like to do at house parties, aside from throw up tequila in a punch bowl.





2) Halloween showed us the perils of drinking beer after comically brief sex, showing your left nipple, and speaking in a high, annoyingly squeaky voice. So really, don't be P.J. Soles. Well, there go my plans for Saturday night.



3) The Saw films taught us not to do anything, ever, lest we get judged by a sanctimonious prude with voice like a paper-shredder chewing a thesaurus with a infantile sense of ironic punishment. If you want to live without being tortured to death via an elaborate device, do absolutely nothing, ever. Still, even as you sit in your apartment, fearing to leave should you accidentally violate a commandment, Biblical rule, or by-law, you should try to get some exercise, lest you get fed to a mechanical sloth or something.



There are lessons to be learned, to be sure, but frankly I'd rather learn them with, say, Jason Voorhees than with some septuagenarian in a frock at Sunday school. If I'm going to have my fun spoiled, I'd at least like it to be done with a machete, not a bonnet.

I Smell Sex And Candy. Also Rotting Vagina Stuffed With Dirt And Twigs And Left By The Side Of The Highway.

Perfume: The Story of Murderer
2006, USA
Tom Tykwer
35mm

You know, I would have never thought to use 12 dead women to distill the scent of love. To top off my shoebox full of genitals? Sure. To make a dead skin mask? Of course. To help build a larger, stronger women out of the parts of smaller, weaker ones? Maybe. But a perfume? Never. I guess I just don't have the imagination to really succeed in the serial killing industry, since the most inventive pecadillo I can come up with is snorting the bone dust of a pulverized Native American prostitute. But in Perfume, murderer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has done me one better, by reducing beauty, adoration, and the stink of sex to an essence. The closest I've come is making glue from a hooker's hair, a poor substitute for a perfume that, as the movie's climax suggests, will cause crowds to be so overcome with affection they will tear their clothes off and ravage each other. The only smell I know that will get women to take their clothes off is the stench of ether, and usually it's me doing the actually stripping while they loll around and try not to choke on their own vomit. The film is about Grenouille, who is born with a perfect sense of smell and no conscience in 18th century Paris, where his obsession with preserving the scent of perfection leads him to a career first as a perfumer, and then as a serial killer.

And they make fine sweater-vests, as well.

Perfume is directed by Tom Tykwer, a great filmmaker who has been applying poetic interpretations to literal themes for quite some time. The frenetic pacing he established in his breakthrough film Run, Lola, Run is absent here, replaced by a brooding, hypnotic speed that seeks to entrance the viewer with languid poetry. Unfortunately, the thrall of Perfume is often interrupted by bad performances, heavy-handed direction, and over-the-top theatrics. Towards the end of the film, this settles into its grove, and everything fits into a sort of magic realist interpretation, but in the first half, it's quite jarring. Dustin Hoffman, in particular, is violently terrible as faded master perfumer Baldini, with an accent that would shame even the people who do bad Christopher Walken impressions. He bursts every bubble of engrossing enchantment, so out of place it feels like your father is standing in the room while you masturbate over the body of a dead prostitute. Which, incidentally, is the best way to get them ready to be glue.

Underage? Read a PG-13 review at The Comic Book Bin. Then come over to my house and let me watch you touch yourself. Girls and effeminate boys only need apply.