I Didn’t Shit Right For a Week.

So filthy. So disgusting. So irreverent… So funny.

Billy Bob Thornton gives new meaning to “Santa Claus is coming to town” as a drunken, lecherous, foul-mouthed thief posing as a department store Santa with his accomplice elf (little person, Tony Cox), only to rob each store that employs them.

BAD SANTA is THE funniest film about that maudlin end-of-year idiot season, told with leering gusto and outrageous bravado by director Terry Zwigoff and writers, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. This ain’t ELF (2003).

It helps if you’re not offended by atheism. It helps if you’re not offended by alcoholism around young kids. It helps if you’re not offended by a kiddie icon with a backdoor fetish and a bargirl with a Santa fetish; it helps if you’re not uncomfortable around extremely old people, little people, fat people, black people; it helps if you’re not an ass-klown; it helps if you’re not offended by the n-word, by the f-word, the p-word, the m-word, the s-word, and of course, the most offensive of all, the c-word – christmas…

It would help if you just didn’t tell your parents you were watching BAD SANTA. Even if you’re an adult.

No matter how much his elf berates him, no matter how many BBW salesgirls he plonks in the dressing rooms, proclaiming, “You ain’t gonna shit right for a week!”; no matter how many times he pukes on kids or pisses himself in the Santa chair, nothing can stop Billy Bob’s Santa spiraling into the drain.

Until he meets Thurman. Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly): the model that evolution used for all neo maxi zoom dweebies. Thurman is 10, chubby, picked on by older kids at school and holds an unwavering belief that this is really Santa, against all the denials and derogation Santa hurls at him. He is almost a stalker – actually, he IS a stalker, who intervenes and saves Santa’s life when Ajay Naidu makes a cameo as a Hindustani Santa-hater and tries to ass-rape Santa while maintaining vociferously, “I’m not gay!”

I’d like to say Santa’s heart is quaintly thawed by neurotic young Thurman and his advent calendar and the gift pickle carved from wood and colored with his own blood, but, well… you can see it ain’t that quaint.

Santa hides out in Thurman’s house, drunk, plonking the Santa-fetish bargirl (sweet Lauren Graham) and stealing Thurman’s chocolates from his advent calendar. The turning point comes when Santa stands up to Thurman’s bullies, surprising himself that he could care for someone other than himself.

Hang on – it still doesn’t get quaint. It just gets drunker. And ends with a pink elephant.

John Ritter (in his last role) is the perturbed store manager who is too afraid to fire Santa and his elf for fear of pc repercussions, empowering security manager Bernie Mac to do it – who doesn’t fire them but blackmails them for a piece of the action.

BAD SANTA is not one of those movies that giggles behinds its hands and pretends to be insurrect while delivering a message of Joy To The World (CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS, 2004), or – worse still – one of those movies that purports to delivering a message of Joy To The World while really preaching antisocialism and evil (DECK THE HALLS, 2006). If you want something refreshing in your stocking besides toejam and creamy contradictory messages of peace on earth, do BAD SANTA.

From behind.

END

Lucky Number Thirteen.

High Roller Poffy

Like a rehabilitated version of its two retarded brothers, OCEAN’S THIRTEEN is still eye-candy (primary colors and insatiable set dressing screams at us within the opening five minutes), it is still big band bop underscoring a lavish, hedonist production, it is still man-toys squirming their taut butts through unutterably outlandish scenarios – but this time ‘round, the direction is wiser, the plot is tighter and some of the jokes are actually funny.

My expectations going into THIRTEEN were not high – the Sequel Syndrome, I believed, would eat this production alive as soon as it was greenlit. You know the formula – you’ve seen it spiral out of control with every “blockbuster” (how I hate that word) from X-MEN to PIRATES; brace yourself for a dumber summer.

So when director Steven Soderbergh fills his first act with “past tense” sequences, showing us the Setup of this heist, I thought we were in for it – now, not only will the heist be in past tense (as in OCEAN’S ELEVEN and TWELVE – where man-toys spend inordinate wrap time explaining every detail which we didn’t really miss, but were never shown in the first place) – we’re also gonna get the Setup and the Formula and the Solution and everything goddam else in past tense as well! Bluster for luster.

But then – salvation!

The story (by Brian Koppelman and David Levien) soon emerges after the first act’s unnecessary smash-cutting. Slamming with the scamming without too much glamming. And hooks us – by crook! Reuben (Elliott Gould – one of Danny Ocean’s “Eleven”) has been taken for an investment ride by devious veteran hotelier, Willie Bank (Al Pacino, super-cool, super-cruel, taking over where Andy Garcia left off), leaving Reuben bedridden from a major heart attack. Both Reuben and Bank have “shook Sinatra’s hand” – a milestone which should forge a tacit bond between them – so Bank’s betrayal is doubly grave, which prompts Ocean (once again, George Clooney) and his Eleven (nay, Remaining Ten, featuring The Damon, The Pitt, The Cheadle, et al) to seek revenge. In the only way they know how – through a major con.

The boys reconvene in Las Vegas to destroy Bank insidiously, by fixing all the games on opening night in his new super-high-roller casino and busting him. To do this, they must of course pull the most convoluted machinations and confidence tricks this side of Houdini. Usually when heist movies show us “how it’s done” we marvel at how easy it is and why more people aren’t heisting, but when the OCEAN’S films show us, it looks so hard and expensive that it’s not worth the effort.

There are a host of funny subplots: David Paymer as a V.U.P. (Very Unimportant Person) – a hotel critic mistaken for a regular guest; Casey Affleck and Scott Caan cause comedic mayhem inciting wage riots at a Mexican dice plant; Don Cheadle (whose Brit accent has degenerated to such an egregious quacking that it’s not worth commenting on anymore) hilariously channels an Evel Knievel clone; while Damon seduces Pacino’s right-hand woman, Abigail (Ellen Barkin, whose breasts are really barkin’).

The film’s PG-13 rating becomes annoyingly apparent when after twenty minutes of seduction, Abigail – uncontrollably crawling over Damon’s big-nosed character due to a “Gilroy” aphrodisiac – still hasn’t shimmied out of her low-cut, sheer, skin-hugging red dress. Are they Amish teenagers to keep necking that long without nakedness? (Barkin’s lucky her breast-aug is so tantalizing, cos she’s always had a face that looks like it took second place in a lemon-sucking competition.)

Eddie Izzard – Brit-suave and clinical-cool – is brought in as a kind of super-crim consultant, for the super-security-computers Bank’s casino boasts.

Vincent Cassel returns as the skulking Night Fox, his presence just screaming Euro Double Cross. Rest assured, the twists are not annoyingly smug – they straighten themselves out after their initial jolt.

One of the more ironic twists is the inclusion of Andy Garcia in the Eleven’s roster, who, along with Izzard, gives us the titular “13.” Playing smarmy Benedict again (the hotelier the Eleven heisted in TWELVE), slicker than an Exxon oil spill, Garcia onscreen with Pacino is a heady nostalgia – their last onscreen pairing in the ill-remembered, yet gloriously-powerful THE GODFATHER PART III.

Speaking of THE GODFATHER, Reuben paraphrases from his sick bed, “I hear cars driving up to the house, I hear Linus crying – why don’t you tell me what everyone seems to know.” The last scene reverberates with in-jokes: Clooney to Pitt, alludes to (dare I say it?) Brangelina: “Settle down, have a coupla kids,” while Pitt in return alludes to SYRIANA: “Keep the weight off between jobs.”

It might seem redundant to note, but this time round, there is much more “cheating” – by the film-makers! After describing the maddeningly precise security systems, when Pitt pays off a concierge or when Caan replaces a dumpling with a spiked one, suddenly those security systems see nothing. The security is impossible to subvert when the Eleven decry it, but when they have to actually “get away” with something, the security is as useless as it is in the real world.

I was glad the chicks were M.I.A. – Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones; there are one-line explanations for each, explaining their absence. (How must that make them feel? Not too indispensable, I bet.) Let’s face it – Vegas is a MAN’S town; we really don’t want the spouses sniffing around. And a heist is a MAN’S game; the only roles women ever play in heists are objects d’sex (but the Eleven have Brad Pitt for that) and maybe squeezing into tiny airducts where men can’t fit (and the Eleven have Shaobo Qin for that – the diminutive Chinese acrobat who speaks only his native tongue yet can understand every reply to him in English).

This beyond-lavish production has renewed my faith in the ensemble power of man-toys – and it only helps that the spirit of Sinatra somehow imbues this entry more so than even ELEVEN (2001). I wrote that THIRTEEN would be the new Zero. It’s not – so maybe FOURTEEN will be the new GODFATHER PART II.

Make me wash my mouth out for that…

END

“1 Louder” Than Ocean’s Eleven.

Sesame Street is having an aneurysm over this movie’s slogan: “Twelve is the new Eleven.”

Poffy Pitt: Cool as a – Cucumber!

Having nailed the formula down pat with OCEAN’S ELEVEN – ridiculously implausible action and pulp coincidences, snide and smarmy rock soundtrack (evoking a Guy Ritchie élan), smash-cuts and wobbling steadicams, overlapping, smartass dialogue, and A-List megastars glutting all 70 millimeters of the widescreen – director Steven Soderbergh now hurls OCEAN’S TWELVE at us like an elitist upper-class Molotov cocktail and hopes we don’t run screaming into the sallow beigeness of our mundane, everyday lives.

Filled as it is with man-toys (from George Clooney‘s too-hip instigator, Danny Ocean, to Matt Damon‘s stuttering novice, Linus, to Brad Pitt‘s glib Tyler Durden franchise, here named Rusty Ryan) and toy women (the stunningly rapturous Catherine Zeta-Jones as Rusty’s ex-sex, Detective Isabel, and the stunningly bland Julia Roberts playing Tess, Ocean’s spouse), we find the camera righteously slewing all over creation trying to cram them all in, making for a movie so self-aware of its megastar cheese-wattage that it can’t quite get over its own smugness.

There is something intrinsically twisted in a society bulked with middle- and lower-class peons, who would patronize a film centering on the illegal exploits of upper-class thieves, tolerating the hijinks of these outlandishly enabled hedonists for the very fact that they are too rich to be stealing for necessity in the first place.

It’s good to be a man-toy.

The megastars quickly exposit why they should all go to Europe for this film (besides to annoy those of us trying to EARN a living): the casino entrepreneur whom they heisted in OCEAN’S ELEVEN, Benedict (Andy Garcia, foreboding as always), has located them all and craves payback – with big vig – so off they traipse to heist Continental rich men for the funds. ROBIN AND THE SEVEN HOODS this ain’t – the rich robbing the rich to pay the rich. See, lower-class peons, how it all works out for everyone?

Thus does malarkey ensue. When their first Euro heist requires a cable shot that cannot be made from one building to another due to the second building being too low, instead of chipping away at the ramparts of the first building, or taking a shot from a lower window, these monumentally-thick thieves opt to raise the second building 18 inches (via underwater pylon-jacks) to achieve their goal. If you sat in your seat without batting an eye during this incomprehensibly-gratuitous sequence (which would have realistically put Ocean’s crew so far into the red financially that they’d be selling their suave man-behinds in Amsterdam just to pay for the plane tickets home), the rest of the plot would make complete sense.

If, on the other hand, you are not in the 1-percent of super-thieves currently trawling the French Riviera billionaire circuit, or if you have not the faintest clue where to purchase building-raising pylons with digital leveling readouts, the plot will become one sad contrivance after the next, magically twisting in on itself whenever it wants to pull another double-con on its audience.

In touch with reality about as solidly as Michael Jackson, the movie’s prime directive is eventually established – a thievery competition between Ocean’s Eleven and acclaimed Euro thief, the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel, suitably Continentally Charming-yet-Treacherous).

The competition’s Prize is housed in a museum room rife with laser fields – which begs the question: when is a security company going to produce a laser field that actually encloses the object it is guarding? From ENTRAPMENT (where Zeta-Jones herself breaches a laser field), to JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK, laser fields only exist in movies to illustrate how pragmatically they can be breached, and are as much a hindrance to super-thieves as geriatric rent-a-guards.

With a climactic soundtrack lifted from Iron Butterfly’s In A Gadda Da Vida, the grand double-triple-con goes into effect – with Julia Roberts suddenly playing Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis suddenly turning up and playing Bruce Willis, and everyone else getting arrested and clanked into a cell, isolated from any real perps lest their luscious posteriors suffer the brunt of caged man-lust.

Ultimately, Ocean and the Night Fox face off to explain to the addled audience (replete with crash-cut visuals) the obvious discrepancies and plot holes that we want to slap the screenwriters over. After the Night Fox gets his Bond-Villain on, revealing his methods in heisting the Prize – including a scene of break-dancing through that vaunted laser field – Ocean accounts what really transpired during the heist. Suddenly it’s RASHOMON with man-toys.

As in this film’s predecessor, seems like a heist can only be pulled off successfully in past tense. (Clooney should wipe that smirk off his face before someone slaps it off.)

As for the two women in the mix (Isabel, out to bust Rusty’s taut butt, and Tess, incessantly prodding Ocean to renounce thievery) – seems they were only hounding their men until a big enough heist brought in enough income to reconcile them with Crime being a viable vocation. The final scene sees all these megastars partying around a poker table – which speaks volumes about the vapid principles that the women supposedly stood on. Sure, their men have “sworn off crime” for the moment – but they’re Duplicitous Criminals! What else are they gonna do once the champagne and cheese dip are cleared?

In moving out from under the daunting yet protective shadow of Sinatra’s ELEVEN, Soderbergh’s TWELVE was less financially-successful than its predecessor. In deference to this genre’s trend, all the bombast, hyper-realism and implausibility must necessarily be ratcheted up on successive sequels, thereby we can rest assured that, although Sesame Street may cringe in anguish, “Thirteen will be the new Zero.”

END

The Hack Pack.

Whatchoo talkin ’bout, Cheadle?

As the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (and every other provincial, back-slapping institution for the purveyance of “arts”) quite often does, another faux-prestigious award needs to be invented for the sole purpose of giving it to just one guy: The Most Embarrassing Fake British Accent Of All Time – awarded to Don Cheadle in OCEAN’S ELEVEN. Surpassing even Keanu’s Idiot-British in BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA or MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, to call Cheadle’s abomination of the mother tongue “inauthentic” would be a compliment.

Cheadle is one of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, a group of super-thieves gathered by an ex-con, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) to heist three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously. Like that 1960 Rat Pack movie of the same name. Only dafter.

In the TV movie THE RAT PACK Cheadle played Sammy Davis Jnr., a role which called for the most talented actor of The Pack, as he had to mime not only singing, but tap-dancing, trumpet-playing and six-gunning, so it is with great concern that we view this exemplary actor’s abject ignorance and lack of perception of one particular inflective tongue, based on his own spoken language! (Well, actually, preceding his spoken language, but this ain’t the forum for resolving etymological beefs.)

Still, casting Cheadle as a warbling limey was only nominally more sensible than casting the shovel-mouthed Julia Roberts as a “beautiful woman.” And as casting choices go, this movie was at a disadvantage from the outset with the impossible task of filling the shoes of one Francis Albert Sinatra. In a role which Frank insouciantly tossed off as a lark (which cast all the more sheen on it for its rebellious bent), head-waggling George Clooney steps up as Danny Ocean. And fails.

With OCEAN’S 11, as with ROBIN AND THE SEVEN HOODS, or JAILHOUSE ROCK, or EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE, we’re not so much dealing with movies, as with “movie stars.” (True to its pedigree, there are modern “stars” and “stars-to-be” sprinkled liberally throughout ELEVEN 2001.) Re-making films such as these will not capture the consecrated quality afforded the originals, the passage of time having transformed those icons into gods. It is merely a fiscal exercise, involving brand-name recognition (buy the rights and sully the nostalgia), curiosity quotient (we’ll get the Frank & Dino fans into the theater at least once), next-generation retro hipness (“I’m so kewl cos I dig the “classics”), crossover marketing (with this ensemble, we’re bound to get someone through the turnstiles) and providing A-List actors with work to keep them off reality shows.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the premise to heist Las Vegas casinos is the only tie with ELEVEN 1960, as this remake had to cater to the state of advances in hi-tech security, the screenwriter tasked with updating the story (Ted Griffin) sensibly eschewing re-creating The Rat Pack’s lo-tech heist note for note.

Of the gang, Brad Pitt is Clooney’s Dino; toss-up on Sammy Davis Jnr. (Bernie Mac or Don Cheadle); Matt Damon is the privileged kid, so suffices for Lawford; excepting Elliott Gould and Carl Reiner, the remainder of the Eleven are “passengers,” including Ben Affleck’s brother and James Caan’s son gaily taking on half-dimensional roles.

Maybe it’s just that previous generation’s devil-may-care tilt at Life (or at least, the media’s reporting of it) that gives ELEVEN 1960 more of a rose-colored flare than all the gadgetry and gags this remake offers as collateral. Though there are attempts at capturing the magic and camaraderie of the original (Clooney’s best line to Pitt, “Ted Nugent called – he wants his shirt back”), this movie’s redemption is in its slick production value – it may ring hollow as a buddy-piece, but it slams along frenetically with a dapper soundtrack to match and is truly a guilty ocular pleasure, highly watchable for its appealing camerawork, lighting and set design.

ELEVEN 1960 packed a hilarious, if not frustrating, twist ending – unequivocally a more substantial wallop than the anchor this remake is built on: the interpersonal fizzle between Danny Ocean and the “beautiful woman.” Both the relationship and the movie end the same way: Nothing Happens.

With this ensemble, one would expect roiling acting chops flung at the viewer like raw meat to lions, but the only players who consistently chew their roles delectably are Andy Garcia (as the casino owner who gets heisted), Gould and Reiner. Everyone else is flailing for substance, including Pitt and Clooney who only have a few good moments together; the rest of the time, vying for enough screentime trying to top each other for one of those provincial, back-slapping, faux-prestigious awards that already exists: People Magazine‘s Sexiest Man Alive.

My vote is for Frank Sinatra.

END

“Hi, we’re here for the Shrikes On Bikes event.”

Too much style IS a bad thing.

Despite the consensus that Cameron Diaz wantonly proffering her backside like a baboon in estrus makes for good cinema, my existence would be incalculably enhanced if I never witness this repulsive rectal display cloaked in ostensible good-natured humor ever again in my short span on this earth.

CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE is so plastic, it hurt my teeth. There is a plot somewhere, but they forgot to film it. There is a movie somewhere amidst all the explosions and over-lighting and inane dialogue, but everyone forgot to act in it.

Soft-porn Poffy

Which boat did I miss? Why are these puerile, cardboard doxies regarded as screen goddesses?; heroines for an arse-tattooed generation of over-fed, class-less, prepubescent, poorly-educated future streetwalkers? The just-plain-ugly Lucy Liu, the matron-plump, lisping, graceless Drew Barrymore and the flat-plastic Cameron Diaz, who’s idiot-grinning and asinine booty-shaking every ten minutes reaches stratospheric ludicrousness unequaled by the worst Ed Wood or Godzilla movie. None of these tarts is in the least appealing to me as a procreative heterosexual male.The Hammer dance? And all that imbecilic giggling? Only minimum-wage flunkies slaving over fast-food counters and born-again christians exhibit such a surfeit of fake sincerity. Either stop all that laughing and hugging on the couch – or continue along this pornographic thread that you yourselves have instigated – and give us a payoff. But at PG-13, as long as there are no swear words, simply insert as much lewd innuendo as possible and slide it past the feeble-minded censorship board.

Over-riding my desire to slap these three emasculating shrikes was the yearning to cudgel every half-wit who greenlit, funded, created and marketed this monstrous cinematic trash which, due to its distribution budget, has ingrained itself deeper into the world culture than the name of penicillin’s discoverer. (Alexander Fleming, on the off-chance you can tear your eyes from Diaz’s baboon rectum on display yet again.)

The unsophisticates may opine: “But it’s all in fun – it’s entertainment!” Well, so is overdosing on heroin, which is what this film’s barf-inducing action sequences resemble. The opening scene, in which the Angels run a truck carrying a helicopter off a bridge and then climb into the helicopter and fire its ignition and fly off (all within a 100-foot drop to a river) is enough to discern that this movie is definitively purely for the plastic popcorn and cardboard hot dog brigade (i.e. the swell of the bell-curve of movie-going audiences who have no discernment – for cuisine or film-making). And the Great Unwashed rise up in indignation, unwilling to be classified as bovine enough to be deceived into paying to be exploited – yet – how else did a movie aiming for low intelligence ever manage to make the amount of money it extracted from the viewing public?

The paradox: Director McG’s target demographic (4 to 7 year olds with an attention span no greater than 12 seconds exactly – the longest interval of time which ever elapses in this movie without an over-tweaked explosion, unrealistic wire stunt, CGI-drenched “action” sequence, irrelevant slomo passage, or gratuitous soft-porn allusion) will never have the perception to fathom the musical and visual cultural references which the movie is bloated with: The Sound Of Music, KC & The Sunshine Band, The Pink Panther, Flashdance, the Cape Fear remake, etc. Almost every sequence becomes a wink to the audience, as McG gets swallowed by his own anus by trying way too hard to impress upon his viewers that he’s in on these gags as well. His groveling as a sycophant far outweighs his talents as a film-maker.

Did anyone else notice the 20 million watts of obvious stage lighting on all characters all the time especially when they’re out in the sunlight and they don’t need it? Are we to consider that these hounds are so freakin’ beautiful that we wouldn’t want to miss one inch of their bootylicious backsides or frontsides in realistic shadow?

And speaking of bootylicious frontsides, the ab-crunched, testosterone-drenched Demi Moore appears in the movie solely to display her nakedness to Ashton Kutcher’s jealous mates in a socially-acceptable forum. Lord knows, she’ll never actually deign to ever visit a beach to do so – if you think these Hollywood starlets get their all-over tans by gadding about in natural sunshine, you must also believe that any film with over seven explosions in its 30-second trailer is a movie worth seeing.

John Cleese is the film’s only saving grace (along with Bruce Willis’ 30-second cameo), but Cleese’s screentime is diluted by his interaction with the mannequin Matt LeBlanc. LeBlanc should be thanking his goat-headed gods that he actually got the opportunity to even stand alongside the icon Cleese, let alone share screentime with him. The downside to appearing alongside Cleese was, of course, that it proved beyond a doubt that Matt LeBlanc isn’t really an actor. Or funny. Or ever has been. And should probably be put out of his misery like the hoss that he is.

A lot of sugar went into making this sour ipecac seem sweet. If I could just purloin one god-given opportunity to wrap my fingers around their collective throats, I’d illustrate the proper method to execute a FULL THROTTLE.

END
Orig: Dec 2004