Nazi Murderer in Repose.

Szpilman’s Liszt.

THE PIANIST follows Jewish concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman as he hides out from Nazis during the invasion of Poland. It’s not a story about heroes, rather, the story of a Polish man who avoided being one. And lived to play another day.

1939. Wladyslaw “Wladek” Szpilman (Adrien Brody), whom many contend was “the most accomplished pianist in Poland, if not all of Europe” during the 1930s, is thrust into WWII fingers first when a German bomb blows up the radio station where he is broadcasting a piano performance.

When he arrives home, his large family, who were just desperately packing to flee, hears Britain on the radio declaring war on Germany, and promising Poland she “is not alone.” However, like every political promise made in the history of politics, it will mean less than the airwaves it was broadcast on. Even whilst they enjoy dinner and drinks to celebrate the end of a war which is actually just beginning, German troops are goose-stepping into their town. There is an authenticity to this ambivalence that is lacking in many war movies: In hindsight, we know what a scourge Hitler’s regime was, but in those more innocent times, when only one “World War” had ravaged humanity, Poland (and the world at large) did not take Hitler’s extremist policies of relocation and extermination seriously.

We see the slow undermining of Poland’s freedoms: “Jews Only” cafés, Star of David armbands forced on Jews to identify them like cattle, laws prohibiting Jews to sit on park benches… it gets real when Wladek’s father is stopped by Nazis and beaten for not bowing to them in the street.

November 1940: 360,000 Jews – Wladek and his family among them – are herded into the Warsaw Ghetto.

During the evacuation of the bombed radio station, Wladek met a blonde fan enamored with his playing, Dorota (Emilia Fox). While the station crumbled around him, Wladek’s mind was not on German raids but on raiding panty. Even during a bombing – men be pigs! He took Dorota on a date, where he lamented, “What’s the use of fighting back?” – which, we presume, caused him to miss out on some fine blond tail that night…

Now, while Wladek drudges alongside a cart with his family, he sees Dorota by the roadside, watching the exodus. Oh, Humiliation, thy snide mistress! And Dorota, tears edging her eyes in disbelief, says what must have been in everyone’s minds as it was happening back then, “It’s too absurd.”

You should see this place on a Friday!

From this point THE PIANIST starts resembling that other great WWII drama, SCHINDLER’S LIST, in its depiction of German soldiers’ brutality and sadism. Scenes of unthinkable misery: a man in a wheelchair thrown off a balcony; a father dead in the street, his head cradled by his crying son; a woman asks a soldier, “Where are you taking us?” – a nonchalant bullet to the head. Like SCHINDLER, the violence is sudden, glaring and shocking; the misery and poverty of the downtrodden Jews almost too much for us to bear even as viewers.

A chance separation; a critical turning point – a friend from the Jewish Ghetto police recognizes Wladek and pulls him deliberately from the line, while his family are being herded into windowless cattle cars. To their knowledge, they were being taken “somewhere” as an enslaved labor force – at the least, they were a commodity, none could conceive of the trip being a journey to their deaths. There was truly no rational reason to simply wipe out people. But there was no reason or logic to the fanatic racism of the Nazis (which they have carried down to their most recent capos like Dumbo Donald, Closet Mike Pence, Ku Jeff Sessions and the whole foreign-bought enslaved American republiKKKan administration).

In a labor camp, Wladek meets an old friend, Marjorek (Daniel Caltagirone, the Andy Garcia of Poland), who helps Wladek escape into the Jewish Underground. And so begins the hiding. From deserted apartments to bombed districts, forever moving and being aided by free, rich Jews sympathetic to the cause. At one point Wladek encamps in the lion’s den – across the road from German Police. With a piano in the room, which he couldn’t play, because the apartment he was hiding in was regarded as empty! Only a musician will know the pain.

When ventriloquial dummies won’t cooperate.

There are two themes at play in THE PIANIST – the first message is simply about the inartful, ungodly luck that separated life from death during the war. In his flight from the Nazis, Wladek would encounter so many chances and coincidences and near-death experiences that the overarching message of the movie is not one of heroism or canniness, but of randomness. Though we may regard Wladek as intrinsically worthy of saving (because he is an artist? the star? a sexyboy?), he did not do anything heroic in his quest to survive; it was not as a “reward” for saving a school of children from bombs, or trying to sacrifice himself for another, no, his existence was what most would regard as “cowardly” – fleeing from hideout to hideout, noiseless, like a mouse, the merest hint of discovery causing him not to take up arms against his aggressors but to flee again and again. He did this until his country was liberated by other people, negating his need to flee. At one point, Wladek helps a young boy crawl under a wall, but the boy dies in his arms – this is not so much a heroic act as another demonstration of randomness, as when Wladek was pulled from the line and saved unintentionally from death.

This randomness would have a part in the second theme of THE PIANIST, which illustrates the true sense of being humane. Wladek is discovered by Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann – no matter how Aryan this guy looks, he’ll always bring our tears to the surface in his touching roles!). Coincidentally looking like Liam Neeson (cough-Schindler!), Hosenfeld is a music lover, and after discovering Wladek is a pianist, starts supplying him with food! In a heart-rending turnaround, Hosenfeld finds himself a Soviet prisoner when the war is over, and beseeches a passing Polish musician, “Do you know Szpilman? I helped him while he was in hiding! Tell him I’m here!” But Hosenfeld would die an unheralded death in that camp in 1952, unapplauded, unforgiven. Yet wasn’t his fate a treatise on Christianity in its purest form? How God entreats Christians not to seek plaudits or reward for their good deeds, nor to shout them from the rooftops, but to perform them in earnest, away from prying eyes? Truly, this is Hosenfeld, who returned a creature of art to the world. And when he asked for reward (in the film at least), none was given. Yet, he never looks regretful of his humane actions…

The Pianist and The Captain – Wladyslaw Szpilman and Wilm Hosenfeld.

BEST DIRECTOR: Ronald Harwood screenplays from Szpilman’s book, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story Of One Man’s Survival In Warsaw, 1939-1945 (Picador, 2000), a story which resonated with director Roman Polanski, who was also a fugitive from Hitler’s regime at a young age. There were many who felt Polanski redeemed himself of his statutory rape crimes with his creation of this touching film– (oooh, don’t say ‘touching’). THE PIANIST also won BAFTAs (including Best Film 2003), and a host of other awards.

BEST ACTOR: There were the “big” aspects of Adrien Brody’s Method: he dropped down to 130 pounds, moved to Europe, got rid of his car and phone, to experience isolation and loss, and wasn’t sure he would make it through the experience entirely sane. Then there were the little things: after he realizes his whole family has been taken from him in one fell swoop, Wladek meets a fellow fugitive and is in such a state of despair he cannot speak coherently (we think he’s going to give the customary exposition about the train taking the Jews to the ovens, for historical context blah blah, but Brody brilliantly, gutturally tries to squeeze out a few words and says nothing; or the amazing visual when Wladek speaks to Germans, where he adopts a cowed manner, and we are taken aback when we see Brody (the obvious star) murmuring with head bowed, until we recall this was the manner of all Jews toward occupying Nazis; or Brody’s pretty convincing piano miming, most of which is Chopin – challenging stuff, even to mime. (Actual closeups show the hands of pianist Janusz Olejniczak – which may also be the last remaining letters in any given Scrabble game.) And one thing Brody didn’t need to work on – that honker! Whatever nationality/religion Adrien Brody is, that nose of his is strictly Jewish. Adrien won the Oscar for Best Actor. His nose won at Cannes.

The one thing that gives us pause and robs the film of a little authenticity is – ironically – the sound of the piano in the bombed house where Wladek is discovered by Hosenfeld. It is beautiful, magnificent, in perfect tune and conditioning, not one key sticking, not one key broken, not one string even slightly flat, its feel and touch perfect. In Holocaust Poland. I’ve played pianos in modern music studios that are in worse condition than this instrument in Holocaust Poland.

Closing titles: “Wladyslaw Szpilman continued to live in Warsaw until his death on 6^th July 2000. He was 88 years old.”

His nose continues to tour with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

END

When you’re this much a street brah, sleeves are optional.

2 Fast 2 Bi-Curious.

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS was so successful that Universal Pictures had to have a sequel, so they did the smart thing and threw out all the characters from the first movie and only kept the prettiest girl for the sequel, Paul Walker. (Actually, all the characters were asked to return, but Vin Diesel turned down “the shitty script” in favor of RIDDICK, which negated the reason for most of the other hangers-on being there.)

In 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, Walker is ex-cop Brandy O’Conner—I mean, Brian O’Conner (sorry, it’s his eyes, I think, or maybe the frosted hair), who has relocated from LA to Miami and is now just some kind of itinerant. Ludacris appears, with an afro the size of the ‘70s, and calls Brandy for an illegal street race that’s going down. Just Because. Brandy, who seemingly has nothing better to do, wins the race, by switching through all his 38 gears, then gets busted by the cops, and is forced to go undercover to bust a kingpin smuggler.

The characters all talk in a too-kewl-for-skool street vernacular that jangles the nerves, so I might be a bit hazy on the plot, which involves cars the color of irradiated cotton candy and women in various states of undress.

The villain is Patrick Wilson lookalike Cole Hauser, named Verone so that it lends a Euro air to the Miami vice. His girlfriend is undercover agent, Eva Mendes’s Breasts. The two agents who recruit Brandy are Agent James Remar and Agent Bikini– oh, wait, that’s Agent Bilkins – what do you expect me to have on the brain with so many chicks in mini-skirts shaking their hips sensually for no reason?

Ladies and gentlemen, to balance the testosterone – Eva Mendes’s Breasts.

Brandy recruits Roman (Tyrese Gibson) as her driving partner, because the filmmakers needed to replace the dark meat of Diesel with some darker meat. At first they fight, because apparently Brandy put Roman away, but we know they’re deep brahs from way back, on accounta Paul Walker reading some dialogue with no emotion, that goes, “’Member when we were young, and we kept getting busted?” Okay, good rehearsal boys, let’s go for a take– oh, that was a take?… When Paul Walker’s onscreen, it always looks like they’re filming the rehearsals…

Verone recruits drivers for his drug-smuggling operation (although in the whole movie we never see any drugs) by making them compete in a street race where they must reach an impounded car and retrieve a McGuffin. This Brandy and Roman do, in cars the color of a Disney princess’s wet dream, switching through all 38 of their gears again, that allows them to attain speeds faster than the director can make sense of the visuals, so throws a whole bunch of 1-second edits together and then goes for a footrub.

Verone hires Brandy and Roman for a mule job worth “a hundred g’s”, providing them with cars the color of a douchebag’s vomit, which they find out are bugged. So they street-race some other dudes to win their cars and switch ‘em. Which is a great opportunity to show more girls exposing as much ta-ta as possible for a PG-13 wankfest where the cars earn more jizz than the women.

Verone tortures a fat cop with a rat, Eva Mendes’s Breasts turn up on Brandy’s boat to warn him Verone is going to kill him (–wait, Brandy has a BOAT? And Eva Mendes’s Breasts had to be dressed like a slut to come tell him this?), and Verone’s two henchies get their bit parts extended when they are told to go on the mule job as ride-alongs.

With John Singleton (SHAFT) directing like Michael Bay, the final scenes involve hundreds of cars provided by Ludacris’s Afro, all the color of a baboon’s vagina in estrus, to confuse the cops.

I had a gay comment for this picture, but I forgot what it was.

Then the feature stunt, as Brandy jumps a car from a road onto Verone’s yacht. That’s the big ending, although in future entries in this FAST AND FURIOUS franchise, a jump like this would be only the beginning of a much longer and stupider action sequence. For now, the dust settles, Agent Remar and Bikini cuff everyone, Eva Mendes’s Breasts walk in one direction, Brandy and Roman walk in the other, hand in each other’s pants, as we see they have kept some of Verone’s drug money, with plans to open a garage. It’s so touching, I didn’t even notice how many gearheads around me had cum into their oily rags…

Thus the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise sets itself up for a third movie, TOKYO DRIFT, where they do the smart thing and throw out all the characters from THIS movie…

END

A Scene, a Policy, and 9/11.

Rudy Giuliani – there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”
— Joe Biden, Democratic Candidate for President, 2008.

In 2008, Joe Biden would aptly describe Rudy Giuliani’s tactics for his presidential candidacy. And this 2003 film, RUDY: THE RUDY GIULIANI STORY, does exactly the same: a character-driven scene, a policy shouting match, and 9/11!

Actual footage of 9/11 clutters this TV movie, rooting it solidly to the event that defines Rudy Giuliani’s latter career. (On THE DAILY SHOW, Jon Stewart would joke about Giuliani getting a royalty check every time someone says 9/11.)

9/11 opens the film, 9/11 closes the film, and even though most of the film is in flashback showing Rudy’s officious rise to political power, the film constantly cuts back to – 9/11. And why not? Rudy’s been eating out on 9/11 for the past 17 years. When, as New York Mayor, Giuliani’s favorability numbers were tanking somewhere around 21%, along came the razing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 aka 9/11 to save his bacon. He became “America’s Mayor.” He was the Time Magazine Person of the Year. And he exploited one of the greatest tragedies on American soil to run for President of the United States…

When someone old, ugly and fat proves their idiocy in such a strident manner, as Republican Rudolph Giuliani did in 2018 with his loose-lipped lawyering in support of Dumbo Donald Trump, it is hard to remember that once, all these bald, obese, unprincipled fucks were once young, vital, intelligent men, who had sex drives and ethics and attractiveness. Well, RUDY doesn’t go so far back that Giuliani becomes attractive; rather, starts at the grossness level of James Woods.

Woods plays Giuliani as a man so principled for justice (“Democrats always talked about things getting better. Republicans did whatever they could to make them better!”) that he makes Penelope Ann Miller juicy for his balding, runnel-faced raconteur. Miller would play Giuliani’s new second wife, TV host Donna Hanover, and together they dance and laugh and kiss gruesomely. (Sorry, but it’s really really hard to envision that anyone would find Rudy Giuliani attractive enough to put their mouth on his face, and I come away bilious.)

Opening scene shows Rudy in a limo being driven around New York by a pudgy liege who looks unnervingly like Sam Nunberg (the cannon-mouthed gimp questioned in the 2018 Mueller Russia investigation re. Kremlin puppet Roger Stone).

Four minutes in – 9/11! The intercutting of real footage is edited well. We don’t sense too much of a disconnect between Woods re-enacting Rudy on the street and the real chaos.

Then we flashback to 1982, lawyer Rudy being interviewed by Donna on TV (Miller sounding like she’s reading her lines for the first time). Rudy reveals his deepest, darkest secrets to the strawberry-blond, wide-eyed Donna, that he was once a Dem, his heroes, Churchill and Bobby Kennedy. (So what happened?) This apparently makes her hot enough to put her mouth on his face…

A wife, a mistress, and 9/11.

From a book by Wayne Barrett, directed by Robert Dornhelm (ANNE FRANK, 2001), movie portrays rowdy Rudy as energetic and canny, rocketing through Giuliani’s legal accomplishments in New York, as he faces down mob guys on the docks, lunches with informants, and shouts at his underlings. A montage of mob guys busted on RICO charges (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations); his “broken windows” policy; his losing race against Democrat David Dinkins for the 1989 Mayoral seat; his philandering with his press secretary, Christyne Lategano (Michelle Nolden, with a body built for sexual favors)… It’s funny, back then Rudy was so intensely against mob guys like Joe Bonanno, Paul Castellano, the Genoveses, the Gambinos – and nowadays he’s working hand-in-glove with international gangster Vladimir Putin, and with Putin’s puppet, Dumbo Donald.

Rudy makes a big deal about his anti-abortion stance “because he’s Catholic,” but then – what about adultery, Your Honor? As usual, Rudy’s wife is used as a prop to complain that he can’t make it to dinner because of business meetings, and to storm into his office and discover him with his mistress and whine about marriage vows.

In July 1994, Giuliani is sworn in as mayor. (They even include some re-enacted footage of his crazy little son at the inauguration stealing the show!) Towards the end, we see him battle prostate cancer, and hook up with Wife #3, Judith Nathan (Kirsten Bishop).

RUDY keeps flashing forward to 9/11, and we see Giuliani give an epic speech about cleaning up after the rubble. At the release of this movie in 2003, Giuliani’s cachet was still high, so he is unequivocally a hero, as he gazes at the Twin Towers brought low, “What have these bastards done to my city?” (Did he really say that? James Woods makes it so.) Giuliani would pass himself off as a steadying presence during the heady, emotional chaos of 9/11, and many of us would believe him. Until he overplayed his hand grasping at the Oval Office, and enough evidence came out to illustrate how he was merely a douchebag in the wrong place at the right time.

Movie doesn’t tell us that Giuly was only walking the streets with firefighters (and getting photo-opped left and right) due to his flawed decision to locate his Emergency Operations Center on the 23^rd floor of 7 World Trade Center – which was razed on that day. So he had no EOC to regroup at! (Giuliani overrode the advice of security and terrorism experts to locate the EOC in a building that was already a terrorist target, and had been attacked in 1993; there were issues with diesel fuel storage, backup generators, and many other weaknesses that were ignored.) During Giuliani’s ill-fated presidential run, there were numerous groups intent on revealing Giuliani’s negligence-not-heroism on 9/11: not providing working radio equipment to first responders, thereby causing deaths that could have been avoided; health problems ignored, not treated, no warnings or breathmasks provided for responders, etc. As many thousands as died that day from the attacks, Giuliani might well be responsible for thousands more health problems and deaths precipitated by the toxic atmosphere at Ground Zero.

Someone wrote that the “incidental presence at the location of the worst attack on U.S. soil did not make Giuliani the foremost expert on terrorism.”

The most pathetic aspect of this film is that James Woods himself is a rabid Giuliani fan, worshipping the ground that the succubus glides across. The filmmakers step so far into hero-worship, the movie poster portrays Giuliani in that famous pensive Kennedy pose of crossed arms and head bowed! Even though Woods would win a Golden Satellite Award for RUDY, the character is simply Woods doing Woods in a “Hollywood” performance, and we never get lost in his portrayal.

Only for fans of Rudy, Woods and 9/11.

END

It is not a good film! It is naaht!

A scheming whore and a bad actor circle the drain in THE ROOM.

Strange visitor from another planet, Tommy Wiseau writes, directs and stars in what has become infamous as “the worst movie ever made.”

Johnny (Tommy Wiseau, who looks like a holdover from a Sunset Strip metal band in the early ‘90s) is a banker or something, don’t worry about it, who comes home to his girl Lisa (dowdy blonde Juliette Danielle) and has sex with her in the bellybutton. Their creepy young friend Denny (flopsy-haired Phillip Haldiman) asks permission to stick around for the sex scene: “I just like watching you guys.” What the hell? We uncomfortably ask ourselves whether Denny has no filters, or whether he’s slightly retarded. (Denny seems to fulfill the role of Sal Mineo in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, the ambiguously gay young ward of the leading man, who kept falling into “innocent” three-way rumbles with James Dean and Natalie Wood. This similarity will become more apparent when Wiseau tries to do James Dean later.)

Lisa seems content to be screwed incorrectly, but when her Mom (Carolyn Minnot) visits later, Lisa moans that she doesn’t love Johnny any more. Apparently, Mom has breast cancer, but don’t worry about it.

Lisa seduces Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero, whose acting is so bad that even though he has a real beard, it looks glued on). Mark resists Lisa’s advances at first because she is Johnny’s fiancé, and Johnny is his best friend. But they split the difference and do it on the stairs where it’s uncomfortable. And Greg can reach her bellybutton easier.

Filmed like a cable TV porno, this is the second sex scene in the first act. The 3^rd sex scene is just a few moments later, with Johnny again exposing his ripped, pasty-white boddeh and ass-crack, although it may just be recycled footage from the first sex scene. Either way, we consider vomiting.

The 4^th sex scene, between Lisa and Mark, looks more natural because Mark’s aim is a little better, as he impregnates Lisa’s thigh. It would be a real turn-on if Mark would just stop moaning like a bitch.

The 5^th sex scene, between Lisa and Mark, is interrupted by Mark’s fake beard falling off. I don’t want to talk about it.

There is even a 6^th sex scene that involves the hottest chick in the movie, Robyn Paris, and a dork with frosted hair that I wouldn’t mind punching into a coma, and Lisa’s Mom, who finds dork’s underwear.

Between sex scenes, everybody congregates on the roof of the apartment building. So much so that we wonder if there wasn’t a typing error and this movie’s actual title is THE ROOF.

Written, produced and directed by Tommy Wiseau (so he is responsible for the unbelievable lack of everything), and made on a reported budget of six million mysterious dollars (the source of which Wiseau is still cagey about in 2017), THE ROOM is filled with terrible looping, cringeworthy dialogue (“You’re tearing me a-PART, Lisa!”) unnecessary lines (“I’m gonna do what I wanna do. What do you think I should do?”), scenes that mean nothing and go nowhere:

• Mom’s breast cancer
• Denny’s drug problem
• Mom’s friend Shirley Hamilton
• Frosted dork’s underwear
• Tuxedo football
• Psychologist and Mark on roof
• Lisa’s fake pregnancy
• Mark moving to a bigger place

… and is a showcase for Wiseau’s zen:

• “Toose great but three’s a crowd.”
• “Don’t plank too much. It may not come out right”
• “If a lot of people loaf each other, the world will a better place.”
• And the timeless classic, “Don’t worry about it.”

In a frothing cauldron of inept performances, Wiseau is a standout champion, with his ambiguously-Euro accent (he swears he’s from New Orleans), obtuse mismatched line-reads to emotions, his insufferable little laughs (which can only be described as chortling), down to the way he throws a football. (In trying to pander to the American male ego, scenes of Wiseau and buds tossing the pigskin around are almost as ubiquitous as sex scenes, but Wiseau’s womanly throwing style only proves he has never touched a football in his life).

Mom visits, and Lisa lies that Johnny got drunk and hit her last night. We can see the semblance of a plot forming. But then it doesn’t. Hi doggie.

Mom says she’s going home. CUT TO: Mom, and everyone else, on the roof, saving Denny from a ferocious drug dealer. Johnny and Mark drag the dealer away. “Let’s take him to the police!” (It must be noted that Dan Janjigian as the dealer “Chris R” is possibly the standout performance in the film. That’s no joke. This guy might have had a future in acting had he secured a connected agent and a few acting lessons, but alas, his fate would mirror everyone else’s in this production – obscurity.) After five minutes of Lisa overacting over Denny, replete with tears streaming down her face in a performance that won’t get close to an Academy Award, suddenly Johnny and Mark return. I guess the paperwork was light down at the police station that night.

Johnny becomes suspicious of Lisa and complains to a psychologist friend: “We didn’t make love in awhile”— dude, wasn’t that your pasty body humping her bellybutton twice in the first act? Oh, he probably meant making love in the vagina.

Trying to do one invisible chin-up is tearing him apart!

Johnny speaks to himself in what we might consider the titular “room” (that lounge room that they keep entering and exiting, that looks like it smells as oily as Tommy’s hair): “I don’t believe it. I show them. I will record everything!” Immediately a cassette player (that’s an olden days iPod, kids!) appears out of his pocket, like a cartoon. Then he holds up a cassette tape (that’s an olden days mp3, kids!), and spends five laborious minutes, filming every second, meticulously connecting the tape machine to the telephone (that’s an olden days iPhone, kids!). Then he presses RECORD and hides it. I guess there’s enough space on that 45-minute tape to record a few hours of dead silence before Lisa gets home and uses the phone.

It all comes to a head after Johnny’s surprise birthday party, where so many bad actors are all gathered in one space together that Johnny goes on a “rampage” by gently trashing his Room and taking his own life.

Terrible filmmaking to the very last second, Lisa had argued with Johnny and left for Mark’s place. After Johnny shoots himself, both Lisa AND Mark come into the bedroom and find Johnny’s body– so she was bringing Mark back to Johnny’s apartment after their argument? Denny barges in – already crying, mind you! – and shouts at Lisa and Mark, “Leave us!” You’re telling Lisa to get out of her own apartment? We hear sirens in the distance. They just discovered him. Even if they called the authorities as soon as they walked in, the ambulance would have to teleport to get there as fast as it did. He ended up in a hospital on Guerrero Street.

This billboard was up so long, it became a part of the skyline. I always thought I was missing out on something by not calling that number. I was wrong.

The more you delve into THE ROOM, the more intriguing it gets. There was that famous massive billboard, facing south on Highland Avenue (south of Hollywood Blvd.) in Los Angeles for over five years, showing Tommy’s lazy-eyed face that could melt grout. How did he pay for this? THE ROOM only made $1,800 upon its 2003 release in two cinemas, before it was pulled.

Tommy’s age, his background, his finances, his accent – all still enigma. And he keeps changing his origin story whenever it suits him. He says he raised the movie budget selling jackets and jeans. He’s not fooling anyone.

It could be argued that many contenders for actual “worst movie ever” can be found in the annals of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 (MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, THE CREEPING TERROR, ATTACK OF THE EYE CREATURES, the Coleman Francis trilogy, etc.). All these movies – like THE ROOM – suffer low budget, zero production values, haphazard writing, horrendous acting, looping and continuity, but unlike the MST3K duds, THE ROOM is still being screened as a cult favorite 14 years after its release, in cinemas across the United States and around the world, much like THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. (We must clarify that ROCKY HORROR is actual intended camp and is a quality production.)

Wiseau has cashed in on the unintended cult audience, making numerous public appearances in his “cowboy-vampire” persona to promote screenings (I guess the dyed hair and dark shades hide your age, but are the triple studded belts really necessary?). And his celebrity has only risen with the 2017 release of THE DISASTER ARTIST, James Franco’s movie about the making of THE ROOM. True to form, Wiseau’s stance on his film has changed from being a drama to a comedy. He’s not fooling anyone. But does it matter, in this social media world devoid of facts? He’s famous. And that’s all he ever intended.

When the drink flows and the clothes come off – it’s bellybutton time!

Becoming infamous for its lack of moviemaking aptitude doesn’t make THE ROOM any better a movie in retrospect. For all those newbies lining up expecting a life-changing cinematic experience, leave your stupid comments in your pocket. Where do we draw the line on wearing ironic t-shirts of Tommy shouting “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” and actually promoting ineptitude? THE ROOM is like THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE or STAR WARS – a cultural phenomenon; you’re watching it to partake of a social experience, not view a movie per se.

The funny thing is: you can see Wiseau is paying nominal attention to the mechanics of movie-making, such as framing, pans, moving into closeups; he’s got the establishing shots of San Francisco (not that it makes one lick of difference where this somnolent story takes place); he also shoots “camaraderie” scenes between the best friends, so that their breakup will be more intense; and anyone who doesn’t see that is a chicken chip chip chip chip.

Just before Johnny announces, “We’re expecting!,” amidst the swirling piano motif of Mladen Milicevic’s soundtrack, suddenly a snatch of Beethoven’s Sonata No.8. Is this a subliminal reminder of this Sonata’s alternate title, which also describes the movie – Pathetique?

Oh, hi Mark.

END

Machinery Obscenery.

James Cameron had nothing to do with this film. The End.

TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES stars Ah-nuld in his third appearance as the Terminator, his first role since his heart attack and last role before Governor of California.

It also stars some hot chick as Robert Patrick trying to kill some guy who’s meant to be Edward Furlong, while palling around with that terrorist chick from HOMELAND.

Kristanna Loken is the new malign TX Terminator (who arrives in a time-bubble Disney-naked, which means her hair covers her nipples which would destroy the world if they were seen oh god on high), much more powerful than the old Arnold-model, with electric steel morphabilities and smooth munchable titabilities, sent to kill John Connor (Nick Stahl, looking eternally dazed that he got this role) who is on the run with his future hookup Claire Danes, who screams a lot. And Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger fulfills his promise by Being Back (who arrives naked in his time-bubble having worked out to achieve the same shape he pumped back in TERMINATOR 2, twelve years ago!), as the loving fluffy Terminator who helps them. “Are you Chon Connor?” (If a Terminator is helping you LIVE, technically, should it even be called a “terminator”?)

Chase sequences ensue, massive, thrilling, original… but they’re still just chase sequences. After the exposition of how the four characters interlock, it is all running in lieu of excitement and shouting in lieu of acting. And setting up Schwarzenegger for incongruous gags: “Talk to the hand,” “She’ll be back!” Callbacks to previous films in the series abound, as do Pretty Orange Explosions.

I still can’t figure why Terminators throw people. The first time the TX grabs Claire, instead of grabbing her throat and asking her where John Connor is – it throws her away first, then goes over and asks where John Connor is. At the cemetery, the TX fools Claire by assuming the shape of Claire’s boyfriend, so that Claire runs toward her. Long before Claire gets to her, the TX morphs back into her lesbian self. Have you any idea of tactics at all, drain-brain! She might be able to change into any electrical appliance, but she retains the intelligence of a toaster.

Connor’s goal is to stop Skynet – the company that makes robots and cybernetic organisms that attain artificial intelligence and overthrow humanity. So the climax is ironic, as the Terminator and the Throwinator engage in expressionless combat – two robots deciding the fate of humans.

Later, when the TX “corrupts” Arnold’s system, Arnold goes after Chon Connor to kill him. So he grabs Chon – and throws him…

Written by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris (THE NET), with a few good story turns and a satisfactory ending that is just the beginning, and directed by Jonathan Mostow (U-571) like he’s bursting to go to the toilet.

END

Same Shit Different Director.

So why is it that films made from Stephen King’s stories turn out, for the most part, to be movies that look as if they’d been chiseled out of Silly Putty by escapees from the Home For the Terminally Inept?
— Harlan Ellison, Oct 1984, “In Which We Scuffle Through The Embers” (Magazine of S&SF).

DREAMCATCHER perfectly embodies Harlan Ellison’s lament: from a novel by King, screenplayed by director Lawrence Kasdan and William Goldman, we palpably feel the tone of King’s words in the tense, superbly-mounted first third of this film, and then seasoned King readers will feel it unravel into formulaic dross due to filmmakers who will never be able to grasp the nuances in King’s tone.

Four best buds take their annual hunting trip into the Maine woods and find that this year, something horrifying is spreading its seed there. Not only that, this year they all seem to be teetering on the edges of midlife crises, visions, suicidal wishes, lovelorn, lost and indecisive. And a “slow” childhood friend named “Dudditz” seems to have summoned them psychically. They employ an old saying that describes their daily grind: “SSDD” (Same Shit Different Day).

The four friends are Beaver (Jason Lee, whose penchant for chewing on toothpicks will be his undoing), Henry (rugged psychotherapist Thomas Jane, who is saved from suicide by a phone call), Jonesy (Damian Lewis, teacher with a library of memories that he guards from evil in the most intriguing way), and Pete (ubercool Timothy Olyphant, whose psychic powers scare off potential panties).

When the four friends are in the woods, the movie is at its peak. When Beaver and Jonesy find a lost stranger wandering the woods with a bloated chest and stomach, burping and farting, they give him shelter – and the horror begins. Meanwhile Henry and Pete find a woman almost frozen in the snow and Pete stays with her while Henry goes for help. Again, bad decision.

The two strangers in the woods are somehow connected to Dudditz. Dudditz as a young man is Donnie Wahlberg, playing slightly retarded – but is he? Or is he from “somewhere else” and only inhabiting this human form?

Cue unravel.

Extraterrestrial aliens have crash-landed and are infecting humans with worm-like things that psychically overtake the brain. The military (led by Morgan Freeman as a crazy general) are planning a deathstrike on the whole area, which would wipe out innocent townships for miles – unless the four friends and Dudditz can stop the aliens infecting the water supply. Okaaay…

The Dreamcatcher is a Native American totem that filters out nightmares; this movie’s title pertains to Dudditz being a “dreamcatcher,” filtering out evil before it gets to Earth.

DREAMCATCHER is very well made, with good effects and some excellent thriller elements in its first half – Beaver holding down the toilet seat while something bashes at it from below trying to escape is especially nail-biting. But like the blind men and the elephant, if we just catch the second half, we can safely dismiss DREAMCATCHER as a formulaic alien invasion movie with penis-shaped aliens and Morgan-shaped madmen.

In King’s books, the most outlandish plot points sound as plausible as your own name – I remember how easily he rationalized John Smith’s common name and psychic ability in The Dead Zone – but on film, the explanations are more forced. So when the extraterrestrial element is introduced, it doesn’t feel organic to the mystery atmosphere pervading the film up to that point. It feels like a shark jump is imminent. Miscast Morgan Freeman as a fanatic general and throw in Tom Sizemore as his wanton liege, both hunting aliens with army tech-ware and straight faces – and The Fonz is on skis behind Richie’s motorboat…

END

Graveyard Cowboy.

A Time to Ill.

An ingenious tripwire thriller, where a series of unrelated events all come together in the wrong place at the wrong time – 11:14 pm.

Writer-director Greg Marcks crafts 11:14 like a master weaver of spells, throwing us into compelling vignettes already in progress, in the grand tradition of Tarantino. That being said, 11:14 is reminiscent of Nolan’s MEMENTO, where we see the time stream reversed after every vignette to show us different perspectives of one crazy night in a small American town. The driving narrative gives us no pause to consider exactly how each of five tales jigsaws into its adjacent tale; we just know we’re running down an antelope with an indie tracksuit on.

Five groups of people, five bad decisions, five tales of woe, five tales of deceit, chronology bent out of shape, until all the time streams converge with explosive consequences. Doc Emmett Brown warned us what would happen if time streams collided.

Henry Thomas drives down a deserted stretch of highway at night. As he drives under an overpass – a body falls onto his car. It is 11:14 pm. He has been drinking, he has no license and now there’s a dead body by the side of the road with him. A lady driving by thinks he has hit a deer, calls the cops “to help” and drives off. See what happens after he stuffs the body in his trunk and a cop arrives…

Colin Hanks leads a trio of hooligans (wasn’t that what young, rowdy boys were called back in the ’70s before wiggas and gangstas?), tearing up suburbia in his tiny minivan. (One of my friends owned a van exactly like this when we were – ahem – hooligans. He affectionately called it the “rice bubble.”) His van clock reads 11:09. They’re doing nothing outlandishly evil, just drinking and driving, punching each other, throwing a burning book out the window, pissing out the window and generally not paying attention to the road – until they slam into a girl.

11:14.

They hit the brakes as the girl is thrown forward in a crumpled heap, dead. A young man runs to the girl’s body, tragically bends over it, then resolutely pulls out a gun and starts firing on the rice bubble as it screeches off. See what happens when the guy who was pissing out the window (Ben Foster) realizes his penis was chopped off by the rice bubble’s slamming window at the accident site…

Dirty Swanky.

Patrick Swayze (who loves his daughter but hates her boyfriend) takes his dog out for a walk at 11:04 – and finds Boyfriend dead in a graveyard, with Daughter’s keys near the body. See what happens at 11:14 when he tries to dispose of the body to protect his daughter…

At 10:58, Shawn Hatosy petitions his mini-mart co-worker (Hilary Swank) to help him rob the joint, to pay for his girlfriend’s abortion. See what happens when Swank insists he has to shoot her to make the robbery look legit…

Rachel Leigh Cook is a teen trollop who is conning many teen beaus into thinking she is pregnant with their child and needs cash for an abortion. She has spun a web of duplicity with almost all the males in this twisted tale. See what happens when her car doesn’t start…

At 11:14.

Take it for granted this ensemble cast create disturbing, memorable performances, the beauty of the movie is that each of the five groups keeps crossing paths in the tiniest ways that would be negligible and ineffectual were it not for the interesting way we know they are intertwined. Watch for Barbara Hershey and Jason Segel in almost unrecognizable cameos.

Oh and – don’t be late.

END

Brother Hood.

At long last, an Australian crime actioner with all the guts and grit of any British or American film of this genre.

THE HARD WORD is brutally raw and raunchy, pulsing with a truly Aussie spirit and a DownUnda cheekiness. There is much subtext of honor among thieves, mateship and family – nothing we haven’t seen before in American gangster movies – but with a CROCODILE DUNDEE accent.

In Sydney, the three Twentyman brothers, intellectual Dale (Guy Pearce, the brains of the group, and oilier than Aragorn in all three RINGS movies), amiable Mal (Damien Richardson) and volatile Shane (Joel Edgerton) are released from prison on the same day. What do they do as soon as they are free? Have lunch at Bondi Beach. Then rob an armored car – at the behest of their lawyer/heist manager, Frank (Robert Taylor). Then they fence the loot to two crooked cops.

Now that’s recidivism in action.

We meet Carol (nasally scrumptious Rachel Griffiths) after the heist, Dale’s devilishly libertine woman, who has been making time with Frank while Dale was doing time. Dale “knows” this, but “doesn’t know” it. Whatever the case, he’s blissfully unthinking of it as he loudly slams her clams in a back room after the heist.

Double-cross: Frank and the crooked cops land the Twentyman brothers back in jail again – for that very heist.

While Dale thinks up ways to fix Frank’s little red wagon, while Mal once again cooks up a storm in the jail kitchen, while Shane has an affair with his redheaded MILF jail counselor (Rhondda Findleton), Frank is plotting a major heist on the outside – robbing the Melbourne Cup (Australia’s equivalent of the Kentucky Derby).

But he needs the Twentyman brothers to pull it off.

Wondrously, he gets them out of jail again; more wondrously, they agree to do the job – on the proviso it is their last; and most wondrous of all, Guy Pearce remains oilier than a drip pan at a NASCAR convention.

The Twentymans’ code is: No Outside Help and No One Gets Hurt; of course, Frank brings in outside help, and everyone gets hurt. One of the outsiders, a dyslexic, impulsive thug named Tarzan (Dorian Nkono) goes ape, and the Twentymans, with bagsful of colorful Aussie cash, end up on the run from crooked Frank and the crookeder cops.

Written and directed by Scott Roberts, driven by David Thrussell‘s sassy soundtrack, story moves sharply from the botched Melbourne Cup heist, to an unexpected chemistry between Mal and a ditzy woman (Kate Atkinson) whose car the gang boosts, to a surprising, explosive confrontation between Dale, Carol and Frank after double-crosses galore. And the heart-tugging hook of THE HARD WORD is that all through their adventures, the bond between the Twentymans remains endearingly solid as brothers, businessmen and thieves.

Makes me proud to be Australian and a criminal. (Isn’t that the same thing?)

END

Revenge is a Bumblebee.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.
— opening text, KILL BILL, VOL. 1

Something about Uma Thurman in her yellow and black top-to-toe leather, lopping limbs and severing arteries – how hot is that?!

Quentin Tarantino writes and directs KILL BILL VOLUME 1, an epic masterpiece of simple brutal story, brutally vicious direction, viciously creative dismemberment, and revenge as cold as liquid nitrogen.

Tarantino once again defies modern movie convention and structures KILL BILL not in Three Acts but in two whole movies, this VOLUME 1 made up of five chapters of dynamite keg vignettes. And, sticking to his own inimitable convention, each of the Chapters hits the ground running like a reservoir dog.

We are told the KILL BILL epic is “Based on the character of The Bride, created by Q & U.” That would be Quentin and Uma. This was the period in Tarantino’s life when he was infatuated with Thurman, calling her his “muse”; and why wouldn’t he be? Uma possesses that intangible inclination to sometimes look like a man with her big nose and strange lips, yet throughout this rambling saga, she is absolutely beautiful – and my summation of why may not sit with most men; it is because she never tries to be feminine or sexy or alluring – most of the time she is covered in blood, mucus, sweat, grime, snow, water; she is intense, threatening, sarcastic, haughty, baleful, desolate, determined. Never weak. Never dependent. Never “feminine.” So hot.

chapter one: 2

CATFIGHT! Girl on girl violence between Thurman as a vengeful warrior known as The Bride (although her actual character name is purposefully bleeped out) and Vivica A. Fox as Vernita, her opponent from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. We do not realize until the end of this sequence why the Chapter is called ‘2.’ Before she drives off, Uma crosses Vernita’s name off a list – it is the second name crossed off. The first name already crossed off is “O-Ren Ishii.” True to non-chrono form, Tarantino has dropped us somewhere in the middle of his movie and half the fun is in putting the jigsaw together while his crazy train is going off the rails.

chapter two: the blood splattered bride

MASSACRE! A wedding chapel in El Paso, Texas; a heavily-pregnant bride (Thurman) left for dead. Four Years Later, this Bride wakes from a coma in a hospital bed, just in time to stave off another unconscious rape from one of intern Buck’s paying customers. She makes off with Buck’s “Pussy Wagon.” (“You know that I ain’t braggin’ / She’s a real pussy wagon – greased lightning!”… Greased Lightning, from GREASE, 1978.) He won’t need it anymore on accounta her thoughtful crushing of his head in a hospital door.

Though we still do not know exactly what is going on (except that The Bride is out for revenge on the people who “killed” her), Tarantino has an uncanny knack of keeping his films kinetic with his gunslinger direction and eclectic soundtrack. Every element of the film works in concert to create a perception of immediacy, of wanting to be a part of this hip, cool animal; there is narration, there are flashbacks and flash-forwards; there are split frames and crafty reveals; there are Eastern musical motifs overlaid with Western rock, and suddenly–