The Hills Have Eyes II (2007)

If this ain't some sort of allegory about our post-Trade Center Afghani relations, then we don't know what is. Barren wastelands of miserably scorched earth, cave-dwelling psychopaths borne of our own hand, under-trained soldiers, and enlisted guys who don't give a shit. It's all there! And them killings, mutant rapes, and face-smashings are too. All in gruesomely prolonged detail. We're sure glad these major-studio horror flicks aren't the self-reflexive slasher garbage they were a few years ago, but this current wave of vile brutality and torture will ensure that your special lady'll wanna stay at home. Hey, that's great 'cause I think Grey's Anatomy is on right as we speak!

Napoleon Dynamite

Hey, I just saw this for the first time! It was pretty funny.

Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies

As part of our continuing effort to expose ourselves to the most hideous things in the history of all existence we decided to watch Hated for the second time. Yeah, I can't believe it either. Wouldn't you think our need to watch a jockstrap-laden psychopath rub his own poop on his face, throw some chick into a wall, and slice himself with razor blades had already been satiated? Did we really need to hear #1 GG fan tell us about Allin's pen pal friendship with other waste-of-life John Wayne Gacy? Or see shocking Polaroids of these naked sleazebag Murder Junkies in various states of arousal? Probably not. I think we just like talking about Todd Phillips.

Shivers

More of the goopy body politicking from our good friend Canadian Dave. We sure love the Croney so of course we got a kick out of his debut even though it didn't quite deliver the goods the way his subsequent flicks do. Shivers still hit us with a bitchin' plot 'bout a lab-borne clap-ridden parasitic slug that turns high-rise condo tenants into sex-crazed zombies. We dug the mid-70s Earth tones, the way that dude puked up bloody chunks on an old lady's umbrella, and we especially enjoyed the blatant Romerian finale where a hillside of the stumblin' dead force our protagonist into a poolside Dionysian/pseudo-Sapphic orgy the likes of which you won't admit to having ever seen before! This flick is most likely some sort of comment on the changing sexual standards and practices of the post-Pill, dusk of Free Love generation, but we'll hold off on our dissertation until at least a second viewing.

Music supervised by Ivan Reitman!

Do the Right Thing

The only Spike joint that matters. A shining piece of American cinema and a testament to the genius of Ernest "Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight" Dickerson. Also features a guy who played for Sonic Youth! Race in the U.S. of A sure is complimicated.

Combat Shock

Check out this bleak and hopeless flick about a Staten Island-livin' Viet-vet. It's full of cheaply recorded misery, despondency, and dreariness, but for every truly effective grimy broken-down homeless man scene there's at least two others bookended with the worst bargain-basement Carpenter-aping synth score you can imagine. Sure it was the early-mid-80s, but that stuff was inexcusable, inappropriate, and just plain bad. Really, how am I s'posed to be repulsed over seeing a gutter-bound junkie pour heroin into his bleeding abscess when ten seconds later I'm listening to some struttin' Moog vibrato?

Combat Shock is the type of flick that actually deserves its Kaufman-awarded "Troma Classic" status and we're darn certain that had Buddy G gone onto other big-time pictures you'd hear about this one soooo much more. Dude, the last scene is a guy shooting both his pregnant wife and crying mutant infant son (the Lynch has to be gettin' a cut)! Then he drinks down last year's chunky milk and pastes his gray matter on the filthy kitchen wall!

Classic cinema.

Last House on the Left

I've got this article that calls this Wes Craven-Sean Cunningham picture one of the most disturbing of all time. All time, people! Right up there with the Nekromantik. Sure, it's a sleazy one. One full of some implied rape scenes, a don't matter just don't bite it sequence gone wrong, and a chainsaw-slicing handgun suicide finale. But what we liked most of all about this was that you could totally write your entire cinema studies dissertation on shit like this! We're certain lots of folks already have. Welcome to the bleak end of the hippie era! Hello, Cambodian invasion. Hello, Watergate. Goodbye, unrealistic and naive ideals. And take those goddamn beads with you. The world belongs to the PTS-riddled degenerates now, fuckers. You've been warned.


This is the kind of flick Zombie wanted Devil's Rejects to be: sixty uncomprimising minutes of Manson family psychopaths humiliating nice girls who were just out for some harmless sex, drugs, and rock and roll followed by twenty vengeful minutes of a middle-aged mom and dad going ape-shit crazy on your mothertrucking ass. So great. Even Fat Ebert loves it!

Also features Martin Kove! And a ridiculously awesome Lightfoot-folky score!

Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood

The rumor is that Charlie "don't call me Estevez" Sheen nabbed a copy of this way back in '85 and then narced to the Feds thinking it was an actual snuff movie. Now that's a story that's waaaay too good to be true. Come on, dude, a snuff movie? You honestly think you could get your hands on pure cinematic death? Of course you couldn't! And if you could it sure wouldn't look like this. Sure, this whole thing looks like every shitty Korean program on your UHF dial, but we're saying that a real deal snuff flick would have one static camera and maybe some POV. It sure as hell wouldn't have close-ups of syringes pricking latex skin and it surer as hell wouldn't cut between limb severing and the severer's maniacal grins. Jesus. And it'd be at least a fifth-generation VHS dub by the time you saw it anyway. Fuck you, Sheenie. Get a clue.

Flower of Flesh and Blood is only worth if for you Rick Baker Jrs to ooh and ahh about. So much grossness and so many impressive effects! Here at the Highland Cinema we especially enjoyed that scene where the dude evicerates a bound, gagged, and unconscious lady and yanks out her intestines right as she spits up blood! Great, right? You'll probably walk away remembering other choice scenes like the eyeball spoon scoop, the severed head smooch, and the bloody fishtank of floating hands and forearms. Doesn't this sound even better? Everything you wanted to see in one easy-to-find flick! And no pesky subtitles or bad dubbing to get in the way. Have your J-pop friends translate and double your viewing pleasure.

The World According to Sesame Street

Jeepers, how much weepy nostalgia does the S-deuce conjure up? Too much, we say! Don't know what it is, but whenever the Cinema sees some foam rubber puppets acting and singing we get some teary smiles a-goin'. Must be something inherent about those ping-pong eyeballs and bargain-basement carpets 'cause it can't all be sadness over our deceased childhood. We darn near cried right there in elementary school when Big Jimmy bit the dust and that's no lie.


This Sesame Street flick isn't about our 'Pets experience at all. It's really just a ninety minute commercial for the international wing of Henson Enterprises and how great they are for their respect and compassion for all them distinct sub-cults within each of them different worldly cultures. Noble, indeed. But we're too cynical for it all. More puppets! Less neo-lib, post-post doctoral-Age of Aquarius jibber-jabber!

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama

With a title like this we expected eighty minutes of gratuitous boobies and day-glo spandex. Instead we ninety minutes of terribly lit puns and a jive-talking goblin trapped in a senior league trophy. That's right, a jive talking goblin. At least George "Buck" Flower character acted his way through that mumbling janitor role to save the day. He's like the Homeless Man's M Emmett Walsh he is!

Afro-Punk

You don't like music as much as the Highland Cinema does. Okay, maybe if your name's Heavy Duty you do, but including that crew is cheating.

We checked this Afro-Punk out the other night after we saw an article about it in Punk Planet and after we added the Bad Brains' ROIR to the library. The fact that this DV-cam doc is pretty decent and will ensure that you'll immediately involve yourself in a never-ending conversation about race and ethnicity in America is noteworthy, but what's really important is that alongside that epic discussion we paced around talkin' 'bout punk rock, metalcore, Necro, Cage, karate kids, Eritrea/Somalia, intensity in ten cities, Rocky George, Rollins' bands, aging, scenes, hip-hop performance, record sales, the music industry, Megadeth posters, rock and the pop narcotic, parenting skills, manTooth broads, Randall modules, fuzz pedals, women's pants, and Joel RL Phelps the Downer Trio until the wee goddamn hours of the morning. Honest.

And you thought we only liked movies.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Sorry, but I'm tired of this unnecessarily stylized post-Tarantino Get Shorty junk. The story itself is good enough for this Guy Ritchie world, but why drag it down with smarmy obliterate-the-fourth-wall narration and overly chummy back-and-forth rapport? Hipster tricks like the wink-wink Sam Spade noirisms turned this thing into watchable if not memorable Saturday afternoon on Showtime fare when it certainly could have been more.

But we still think Val Kilmer's cool.

Match Point

You guys remember how Ewen Bremner absolutely killed it in julien donkey-boy? That one scene where he's on the phone with Chloe Sevigny and they pretend he's talking to his deceased mother...wow. Dogme95's finest moment. So many great performances in that film and so full of choice reviewer fodder, but we could never understand why none of those guys ever talked about that scene where Julien dons Nazi garb and talks about Hitler. They went on and on about Korine's exploitation/empowerment of the differently-abled and went overboard trying to form a schizophrenic narrative out of it all, but we can't remember any real mention of that basement scene. Weird.


Oh, Match Point. Yeah. The best SERIOUS one since Interiors. Actually we'll amend that to say, "The best SERIOUS one since ever." And that capitalization ain't no joke. Unlike some other heartbreaking Allen dramas there's no comic relief anywhere. No nebbishes. No Dixieland score. No foibles, no "bends/breaks" supporting characters, and no suede elbow-patched psychoanalytic banter. The Woods turned out quite the well-crafted flick, one that's cold and reserved and yet completely understandable, a feat we found all the more remarkable considering the sheer assholery of the main character. Don't cheat on someone, especially if that someone is your wife who loves you. Even with Scarlett Johansson.

Hey, speaking of assholes, here's another thing we don't understand. How is it possible that we like Harry Block but can't stand Alvy Singer? Everyone says, "I love Annie Hall," but when we gave it a second, third, and even a fourth chance it always failed to charm us. Our rational mind says Singer's only a kinda-jerk and Block's the hostile sonofabitch, but damnit if our irrational mind feels for the latter way more than the former. Strange, huh?

We also can't figure out why we never ever made it to the Cineplex to see Match Point. It played there for, like, six months and we saw Melinda and Melinda opening week!

Casualties of War

Heavy-handed and obvious. Yeah, yeah, War Is Hell, Viet Nam Ruined Everything. We know. Marginally better than what may be the worst of Ho Chi Minh flicks, but only in terms of real actors, directing, and set design rather than in terms of Highland Cinema talkin' 'n chompin' enjoyment.

For my money I'd rather watch Mikey J chew the dramatic scenery in that two-parter Family Ties where his buddy dies in a wreck (here's a refresher) 'cause we had one heckuva hard time stifling "Doc!" outbursts during this flick. And why did The Pennster insist on B-movie channeling Bobby D anyway? At least we had dark horse supporting players Big John C and Johnny Legs to keep our trivia knowledge in the black.

The Michael J, Turkey Sandos, and Sierra Nevs Film Fest has officially come to a close...although it has been awhile since we've seen The Hard Way.

Midnight Madness

As soon as we saw that scene where these cats head out to a Pabst brewery we walked right out the door and straight outside and down to the P-Deuce 'cause we didn't have any PBR in the entire house! Man, am I ever embarrassed to tell you guys that. I hope you can forgive us. At least take comfort in knowing we rectified the problem ASAP. It won't happen again.

This Midnight Madness, she is a movie that so predates the Highland Cinema that she ain't even a part of the El Moro Cinema, the Sixth Street Cinema, or the Victorville Cinema. A movie that goes so far back for our second-in-command that it's probably part of the, I dunno, Santa Maria Cinema or something. All I'll say is that I've been hearing about this flick for darn near 15 years and it was about time it got a spin around here. To get the real scoop read the super-sweet comment that will be posted below since nothing I'll say will do this movie justice in the eyes of the Timmons brothers.

For now know that this thing has motherfucking Eddie Deezen! Remember how he was in Punky Brewster? And a million fucking other movies? Everything from your Rhonda Shear-hosted Up All Night Classics to that Sesame Street movie and that cereal commercial. And, shit, the IMDB just told me he was in Laserblast! He plays a guy named Froggy! That's, like, so many Highland Cinema related references that I don't even want to explain them all.

Class of 1984

Originally part of our proposed "Michael J Fox Meets Turkey Sandwiches and Sierra Nevadas Thanksgiving '06 Film Festival," but since other Thursday activities came our way we had to pop this one in early. And, holy shit, Mark L Lester made this?!?! Yes, that Mark L Lester, the guy who not only lensed Commando and Armed and Dangerous, but who also directed an all-time Highland Cinema classic you know as Showdown in Little Tokyo. Can't believe we missed that piece of info. Showdown is such signature Highlander stuff it's a wonder we haven't run through this guy's oeuvre already.

Class of '84 is standard Blackboard Jungle/Lean on Me fare where I Want to Change the World teacher finds that the World Changes Me (err...Him). The tough guys deal coke in the graffiti-laden bathrooms (OJ tags! No, really!), dress like windblown Suburbia punksters, and go so far as to rape Teach's wife right before the big school band concert. Pretty boring stuff actually, but the 2 AM TBS vibe, the pudgy Mikey J, and gratuitous Roddy McDowell kept us entertained and gave us much to yak about during the runtime. You may be tempted to change the channel at hour one's close, but stick around for the bloody finale where the bearded teach who looks like a character from every '80s late-night tv flick lights a dude on fire and slices up another on a tablesaw. And dig that bloody-face, wish-we-saw-a-protuding-eyeball hanging scene right before the end credits. Too cool!

Can you believe Roger Ebert loves this movie? Get well soon, Big Rog, you just gained some serious Cinema cred.

The Russian Specialist

Dude, I totally have to buy that Dolph t-shirt.

The Vice Guide to Travel

David Cross is a preachy, smarmy, unfunny douchebag. Fuck him.

Fortunately he's just in that one extra.

The Vice Guide review on aQuarius is better than the actual flick. Read it, use your imagination, and it will save you mucho disappointment! Then enjoy the ViceLand website. If you're me you'll find that it fits your sensibility if not your lifestyle. It's like the Rotten Library became a magazine.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Fuck it, Werner Herzog's good. That scene where Dieter Dengler talks about seeing his friend's head sliced off in the jungle will bring a mortal man to tears. I was asleep at the wheel for a few days and cursed myself for allowing this flick to show up at the doorstep, but my low expectations were erased within the first ten minutes. Dengler got shot down in Laos, escaped from a P.O.W. camp, and revisited the jungle thirty years later to tell you his story. True stuff filtered through a prism so Herzogian that the only thing that could make it moreso would be if Werner himself was onscreen. A great flick and a tale so good they decided to film it again.

To Live and Die in L.A.

Willem Dafoe and John Turturro in the same scene. Take that, Heat!

Okay, this was another lame screening at the Highland Cinema. In spite of the fact he insisted Wang Chung score this flick, Billy Friedkin is still a favorite of ours. He could do no wrong for a good coupla years, but, man, did he ever lose it. Not as bad as the Copes, but still...

We also gotta give props to Billy L. Petersen. Talk about a shoulda-been go-to guy for them 1980s cop roles. So good in that movie that was later remade into a revisionist Lechter flick, but then...The Contender?!?!? Hmmm...quite the familiar arc. I'm sensing a trend here. Watch out, everyone else from this movie: you will start oh so cool and end oh so lame! At least Steve James left our sad and beautiful world before he turned into a shell of his former self. Rest in peace, my brother.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

Renee Zellweger looks hot in them corrective spectacles and Matt McC steals the show as a hollerin' motorized remote control leg crazyman.

This flick left us in a bit of a bind as it was nowhere near cool enough to justify us hanging up our once-forgotten TCM: The NG poster in our hallowed halls. What's a cinema to do?

Oz: The Complete Sixth Season

HBO's worst show (well, make that second worst), but the only one we've wanted to watch the whole way through. Oz hooked us a few years ago: it was the dawn of 2003 and the combination of our nascently-undergraduated philosophical leanings and the show's apparent Panopticism, beastly Hobbesian social contracts, and slap slap slap u around brutality made for a perfect fit. How could we ignore the voice-of-God narration, the overwhelming presence of "that guy"s, and those horrible performances from Rick Fox and Evan Seinfeld? How could we look away as the once well-to-do attorney became the bitch of the Aryan Brotherhood? Or when that CO gets his eyeballs stabbed out? Or when Luke Perry gets sealed up Edgar Allen Poe style? Ah yes, so many Oz memories, each more ridiculous and improbable than the last.

We're not entirely sure why we stuck it out all these years, but we suspect it has something to do with Dean Winters, the actor who probably got the job 'cause his brother's a head writer. Winters held his own and somehow lasted through all six seasons as scheming Irish-American thug Ryan O'Reilly, a guy responsible for killing half of the dudes we saw die. Thing is, Winters never broke character and never let the asinine scripts impede his scene-chewing performances, a feat all the more remarkable considering the local dinner theater performance of his real-life brother as his on-screen brain-damaged inmate brother. Yeesh. But it's because of actors like him, that dude who played the wheelchair guy, and that other fella who played the strikingly stupid inmate who hound-dogged the cellblock director that Oz kept us around. Also the guest appearances from Peter Criss and Pepa!

Okay, but in Season Six, you ask, what happened? Beats us, we watched this like three weeks ago. All we can remember is that a bunch of main characters get offed, that old dude falls in love with Patti LuPone, and that other old dude punches out the parole board when they deny him his right to artificially inseminate his children's tv show host wife. We found it way stupid that Beecher got paroled and sent back to the pen on a set up drug bust, but way cool when he got set up to kill Schillinger and then wound up pushing Keller to his death. We'd hoped this season would end with everyone dying, but instead we saw a handful of lifetime characters get shipped to a new prison right before the credits. As long as we never get a reunion episode...

Hey, anyone remember Cos, the hilarious MadTV parody? No? Good.

My Best Fiend -- Klaus Kinski

The best part about them Herzog films is the director's commentary, and this one's got the commentary built in! We're sending it straight to the top of the charts.

Return of the Secaucus 7

I already said most everything I want to say about John Sayles way back here. The abbreviated version is the guy's fucking great. Secaucus has been on the back-burner for the past few years -- I can't say I was all that intrigued by a directorial debut, especially one involving a group of post-activist thirty year-olds hanging out and talking. Zzzzzz. But then last week as I finished reading Sayles on Sayles, I figured it was time. And I'm glad I made the decision 'cause I still can't believe how enjoyable and well-done this movie turned out to be. Sayles has gotten better behind the scenes, but he's had that typewritten skill and talent all along -- the flick may start boring, but by the end you "get" (errr..."understand"?) all the characters, even the ones who only show up for ten minutes. The Sayles even turns in a role and somehow manages to out-act the mighty Straithairn!

Okay, so obviously the screenplay and performances are great, but I really couldn't help but find myself in sheer awe of the back-and-forth scene where Mark Arnott's character chops kindling. It's probably the Herzog on Herzog talking, but it is an image more poetic, revealing, and well-placed than anything anyone could have imagined. A true thing of simple cinematic beauty.

Gozu

At the end of this movie this dude bones a happening chick, then fears for his bits n pieces, and then watches his lady birth a full-grown man. And that's not even the strangest part of the movie! Seriously, this one's full of weird fuckers, lactating menopausal ladies, dudes who really like "spooning," and lots o' other stuff we'd probably appreciate more if we were Japanese. Or if we had cool Jim Jarmusch hair. Or if we could spell "Jodorowsky" without looking it up in the Wiki. I don't get Gozu. I don't get Takashi Miike. But Ichi the Killer's still in the queue! Hey, I don't know why either!

Lady Vengeance

Our least favorite Chan-wook Park/Park Chan-wook outing. I'm supposed to have sympathy for Lady Vengeance but I neither cared about her nor her predicament. Not once. And I should've! She was blackmailed into confessing to one of the worst of crimes (child murder). She's out to exact revenge on the sleazebag responsible (schoolteacher). There's women in prison doing things prisons are most famous for. All my favorite stuff. Problem is, there's no passion, no sadness, no bloodlust...no fucking feeling in any of this movie. Seriously, I "whatever'd" it through this whole thing, something made even more lame since crying kindergarteners should ruin my week and sweet ladies turned bad should ruin my pants.

Spoiling either of the preceding revenge flicks this dude put out would've made me feel guilty, but this one? Who cares? I already sorta-spoiled it for you anyway. Finale: serial child kidnapper tortured and killed (mostly offscreen... = ( ...) by abductees' parents. Oh, and Lady V loves her adolescent daughter whom she hasn't seen since infancy. Cue pretend snowfall. Cue credits. Cue the Cinema removing other Park flicks from our acquisitions list.

Inside Man

The Cinema's first Spike Lee joint and we'll be damned if it ain't the best one since, I dunno, Clockers! Sure, we liked Bamboozled more than the next guy (though we suspect it was the Union Jack talking more than our own gray matter...explanation upon request), but this Inside Man, she is full of the twists and the turns. Such a wonderful Mamet Jr script! Such witty dialogues and exchanges! They are both corny and clever at the same time. And the plot? The stuff of the suspense-building it is. Rest assured you 40 Acres devotees, you're still getting some trademark Spike, but the stuff you expect to see like the often too-loud and nearly distracting score, the heavy-handed scene or two about....racial relations (?!?!?!?!), the brief trolley cam, and the washed-out film stock show up a whole lot less than what Mo' Better accustomed ya to. Inside Man is a neat bank robbery caper if you can you believe it. The kind of flick the studios didn't have to give to Spike but did anyway. Hopefully he made those suits some cash 'cause the world is so desperately waiting for that Girl 6 sequel.

Go Knicks!

Another Woman

More of the serious from Woody Allen. I had nothing interesting to say when I watched it and that was days ago!

September

They told me this was a "Chekhovian drama," but I didn't see nuclear wessels anywhere.

I did see a lot of Woody Allen mid-80s Interiors tropes and eighty minutes of unrequited, idealized love, longing, and sadness. Essentially a filmic play, September only hit me during its first half and let me down big-time on the back nine. Lots of commendable performances from Sam Waterston, Dianne Weist (not annoying), and Mia Farrow (wow, even she's not annoy...well, no wait, yeah she still is...), but a story that plods along a little too much without really turning into anything.

Still some great camerawork from Allan Konigsberg's main lensman and great performances from an old couple who starred with Norm MacDonald in two different movies! Don't believe me? Look! Now look here!

Sorcerer

It's too bad this came out right before the "Behind the Scenes of a Jungle Epic" docs were in vogue 'cause, man, we're certain this would be one helluva making-of. That Billy Friedkin, he is a class-A nutjob, and any time you trek to them lands that time forgot you know there's a catastrophe or two in the works. Sorcerer isn't nearly as bad as its reputation, but it's strictly cable-tv fare. I mean, really, a '70s thriller with Roy Scheider?!?! How come Turner hasn't already shoved this down our throats? This flick should start at five after the hour at least once a week. Probably hasn't since it's the only picture about highly volatile explosives with zero suspense.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

Now this is more like it. Another Korean classic from our favorite Korean director. Sympathy is good ol' violent O. Henry digitally enhanced color fun that goes a little something like:

Deaf-mute tries some back alley surgery to save his sister but when he wakes up naked, bleeding, and without the organ he needs to save her, it's time for Plan B. A tragic black/bleak comedy of errors ensues as he innocently kidnaps a cute little girl, and executive dad tries to find the folks that nabbed his flesh and blood. (Let it be known that while the Highland Cinema hates American children, we think those foreign kids are so darn adorable! And such good actors!) Don't let my witticisms fool you, this ain't one of those haha funny or funny haha pictures, it's chock full o' pathos, platelets, and pain. But that irony is too much to ignore. There's fights, there's tears, there's groans.

And not one but two scenes of a retarded Asian duder throwing rocks in a river.

I'd like to say more, but this guy did it for me. I'll leave you with: Tartan Asia Extreme has been good to us so far, let's hope they keep it that way.

The Piano Teacher

Let's call this the return of In My Skin. The Piano Teacher started as a tale of sexual repression and ended as a tale of a sado-maso fantasy gone awry. I didn't dig it at all which came as a bit of a surprise since "Cannes accolades" plus "disturbing" equal serious Highland Cinema interest. Still had me a-wincin' during such uncomfortable scenes as the discarded tissue bouquet and the razor blade nick, but the whole thing felt cold, distant, and way too emotionless to be entertaining or engrossing. I think that was the point. The emotionless part, not the boring part. Still didn't do much.

You'll be glad to know that I felt quite the studious one pulling out my long-neglected copy of Bonds of Love once the end credits started rolling. Many Hegelian Freudisms to be found in this flick and many self-inflicted pats on the back for recognizing them!

The Last Detail

More Jack, more Towne, more...Quaid?!?! Yes, Randy "the Helper's just fine by itself" Quaid was really on fire during the early '70s: Oscar nods and Golden Globe nominations for two completely different flicks! Who knew?

For the first reel or so The Last Detail insisted on playing us this John Philip Souza marchin' band score, and that bleating, blaring drummer boy mess had us thinking a college bowl kickoff was around the corner. It drove us crazy and came real close to ruining the entire tone of this flick, but fortunately we held on 'cause right around the thirty or forty minute mark we got this great extended alcohol sequence, a sequence so great and true to life it renewed our faith in both Hal Ashby and humanity in general. Big Jack, Quaid, and that other guy in their hotel room, knee-deep in Olympias, bobbing and weaving as they tell stories that don't go anywhere and talk shit to one another. It's the kind of thing that really took us back. All the way to last week! Jack's character has to ruin the whole thing right at the end when he gets all mean and tries to fight a bro. That had us relatin' to stuff too, but not a good times kinda way. Oh well.

I'll be frank with ya and tell you guys that I enjoyed this more than Chinatown. A better movie? Of course not, but The Last Detail really came through right at the end when you realize all those scenes about Greyhound washroom brawls, hometown sidetrips, and chanting cults amounted to something greater than themselves. End credits roll and you understood everything you just watched. Good stuff. Not a true classic, but worth a view. Dig it!

Chinatown

Roman Polanski! Robert Evans! Jack Nicholson! Faye Dunaway!

Whoa, Robert Townsend?!?!

Oh no, wait a minute....Robert Towne. Okay...well....still good!

Too bad they squandered the talents of the uber-cool James Hong. Not even his best movie with "China" in the title.

Benchwarmers

Dude, this was fucking dumb. I know you heard me laughing aloud, but still....this was really goddamn stupid.

But have you guys seen Happiness? No? It's an uncomfortable one full of mucho sadness, pain, and, uh, stickiness, but there's this opening five minutes where Jon Lovitz gets dumped just as he's about to give his special lady this engraved silver ashtray thingy and it's just fucking amazing. No joke, that shit is way close to Alec-Baldwin-in-Glengarry-Glen-Ross amazing, and certainly better than Ben-Affleck-playing-Alec-Baldwin-in-Glengarry-Glen-Ross-in-Boiler-Room amazing. You'd never know it, but underneath those sandwich ads and "that's the ticket!" catchphrases the Lovitz is a real deal actor.

In Benchwarmers he drives the Batmobile and has a robot butler.

See, I told you. Fucking dumb.

Videodrome

We fucking dig David Cronenberg around here. And what's not to like? You can't tell me you're not dying to see Debbie Harry's nipples, James Woods make out with a tv screen, or a ridiculously cool stomach vagina that'll gape for Betamax cartridges and make a guy's hand explode.

We're calling Videodrome Big Dave's signature release 'cause even if it ain't his most effective or his best, it's a perfect meld of his '70s-era horror glop and current-era identity politics: technology/representations of reality dictate YOU and your perception of actual reality.

And then some dude's innards make a gurgling, bubbling, chunky mess on the floor.

Keep in mind the "New Flesh" reiterations and "neural floodgates" dialogue are almost too clumsy to be forgiven and the heavy-handedness of the Cathode Ray Mission is too much like Rocky IV-esque binary moralizing. Fortunately the rest of the thing is a well-realized Our Media, Ourselves treatise that combines all the essential elements of the Cronenberg Secrets of the Ooze trifecta: icy cold machinery, engorged sex organs, and ever-changing existence. The makings of a typically fantastic Crones experience!

We're unconditionally telling you to see this 'cause even though it's a kick-ass picture, it's more importantly a kick-ass example of the Highland Cinema as Joe Bob Briggs, PhD. Just as Night of the Living Dead's graphic zombifications recreated the horror industry, "Videodrome"'s sexual snuff clips recreate Max Renn.

Check out this Commodore 64 trailer which is nothing like the movie.

Futurama

It's time for the Highland Cinema to nerd it up a little bit and profess our love for Futurama. Television's shining (half-)hour? You bet. Sixty years of TV and I don't think it's ever gotten better than this. Too bad it's just like Fox to getcha into some show and then change the airtimes all around till you don't know which end is up. Faster than you can say "Herman's Head" your show's gone the way of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer and you're stuck watching this.

I guess it's still better than when Fox had us watching this.

So every now and again when Final Jeopardy's over and we're sitting here waiting for the new set of reels to show up at the front door, we fire up the lobby VCR and pop in some Futurama. Maybe we should get a life, but we think these SLP recorded tapes are worth their weight in gold. The Cinema can't be zombies, beat-downs, and forced erudition all the time, but it'll be a cold day in hell before we take five from being all about references. And Futurama? References in spades, my friends, in spades.

Alright, enough of that. Time to get back to business. We allowed ourselves one television post and this is it, so don't get your hopes up for some Parker Lewis musings.

(Damn! That idea's not half bad. Oh well.)

Irreversible

Irreversible is even more disturbing and depraved than I Stand Alone, and way more fucking genius. This thing is another one to put at the top of your "must NOT see" list thanks to an opening sequence of basement bondage club glimpses, hateful dialogues, and brutal face annihilation at the hands of a fire extinguisher's blunt end. This is some serious shit, shit that gets all the more serious a few sequences later when Gaspar Noe subjects us to ten nearly-impossible-to-endure minutes involving Monica Belluci that make me realize I misplaced my Straw Dogs reference in that last post. If you don't already know, you don't want to.

Irreversible is nothing if not shocking, disorienting, and...necessarily cinematic! I sincerely don't think I'll ever see anything as nauseatingly perfect as this picture's opening thirty minutes -- a thirty minutes filled with barely-contained judgment-lapsed blind rage, barely-lit sexual deviance, horrific violence, and swirling, swooping, upside-down, falling-down drunk camera work. Amazing, moreso considering the eventual development and the plain-stated poignancy of the relationship between characters Alex, Marcus, and also-ran former boyfriend Pierre. You'll ask yourself if you're even watching the same movie. Staggering.

And still not for you.

I Stand Alone

I've sat here for over a week trying to come up with a decent write-up for this picture; it's proven to be a difficult task the likes of which few have seen. I Stand Alone is rage and hostility, misogyny and racism, narration and Genealogy of Morals. I don't even know what to say about the thing except that it most definitely isn't for you. Alienated like Taxi Driver and graphic like Bad Lieutenant, only more fucking real. This guy isn't a mass murderer just yet, but by the end of this one you know he's only inches away. Filmmaker Gaspar Noe treats us to a bleak and desolate character study and gives us a final fifteen minutes that are initially blunt and violent and then disturbingly insinuating, all the more so considering the "protagonist"'s sense of his own liberation through this impending actualization of his desires. Whoa, and not "whoa" in the Love Object sense. Don't ask.

In spite of it all, I Stand Alone is a real movie. It's steeped in venomous inner monologues and peppered with blunt force trauma, but within it all is a shocking tale of morality, justice, and probably early 1980s Franco-politics. Noe is a force to be reckoned with, a director who'll out-Straw Dogs Abel Ferrara and still have you reaching for your upper-division philosophy notes. He's already thesis-fodder, but once he has a body of work longer than two features and some shorts, he'll really be a iconoclastic grad student magnet.

But it's still not for you.

Mean Streets

Marty's "for all intents and purposes" debut gets a CRAP. Waffle Factor=3 for acting talents of Harvey Keitel and Bobby DeNiro, who prove to have been swell actors even before they were stars.

Maybe we should've seen Scorsese's other noteworthy sorta debut instead. At least that one had Barbara Hershey.

And Bernie Casey!

Y'know we really should've just watched this. Better guitar solos!

In My Skin

Youngish corporate woman slices her leg up real bad at a party, doesn't feel a thing, and then feels compelled toward cutting. Whatever. I was mistakenly under the impression that this would be really good and it wasn't even passably good. Plods along like a movie that means something, but never told us why she liked to prick herself with steak knives or made us empathize with her addiction. Esther's inability to feel pain requires her to create a visual and corporeal representation, maybe? Maybe not. Sicinski momentarily compared it to American Psycho in terms of the desensitizing nature of corporate politics. That's intriguing, but when left to the film itself it's not something of which I was entirely convinced.

Oh well. Someday I'll forget all about this one and it won't make a difference whatsoever. During the last ten to fifteen minutes In My Skin was a tad shocking and graphic, but the rest wasn't too bad...although I'll admit we're a rather poor yardstick for that kind of thing.

If we were willing to dish out extra points it'd be for the fact Marina de Van wrote, directed, and starred. That's pretty cool!

GWAR -- lots o' stuff

Good friend and proud owner of the Nekromantik series Anti-Michael made a guest appearance at the Cinema a few days ago, and you know when something like that happens you'll be ankle-deep in Keystone Light cans and Skulhedface box covers faster than you can say "remember that time...?"

Yes, we do love the Gwar around here, especially this week when these intergalactic space monsters hit us with a brand new record. Over the years the Cinema's library has amassed a collection of Gwar releases the likes of which you will seldom see, a collection of videos that really don't make that much sense even to us and we've seen 'em way too many times. What they do offer is plenty of off-color jokes, foam rubber, power chords, and low-budget Chroma-Key. Gwar takes on their early 90s obscenity lawsuit in Phallus in Wonderland (nominated for a Grammy!) and some tale about selling out and maybe censorship (again) in Skulhedface. For our money, we like the War Party tour flick the best since it works the best as background fodder and was a gift that came directly from the Slave Pit.

We'd love to tell you more, but you know that you'll be a-watchin' at least one of these when you step through our doors. Until then...