Subtle Bluntness

So thanks to Kiwibox I got to see the best picture of 2008, Slumdog Millionaire.  I don’t know if it’s the best picture, but it definitely is a hellaciously entertaining movie with a timeless plot energized by its location and the obvious directing talents of one of my favorites, Danny Boyle.  Check out my DVD review here.

On a sadder note, this is going to be my last review for Kiwibox.  No, they didn’t fire me or anything.  Effective today, they’re letting all the employees go and are essentially closing up shop.  It’s a shame, especially considering the site had been around in one form or another for like 10 years, but these days nothing is safe.

If you need a great writer/editor, I know one that’s available (for once I’m not talking about me, but my Kiwibox slavedriver Chelsea).  She was a pleasure to work with, didn’t edit my reviews too much, and has a ton of Hollywood contacts, so if you’ve got a struggling entertainment site, she’s your hook-up.

See that up there?  That’s Samuel L. Jackson in a Nazi uniform.  Kind of crazy, isn’t it?

Well, that’s actually one of the most sane things about The Spirit, which I reviewed on Special 2-Disc DVD.  I was eagerly awaiting the movie when I heard it was going to be released, as I wanted to see what Frank Miller could do with real power.  Of course, as more trailers got released, I kind of lost interest because it looked (frankly) bad.  Actually, it looked terrible, and that was my mistake.

Is The Spirit a good movie?  No, not in the sense that Citizen Kane is a good movie.  Is it consistently crazy, visually stunning, and endlessly entertaining?  Hell yes!  In an era where The Dark Knight makes all superhero movies serious, brooding, and hyperviolent, The Spirit is a direct response to that trend.  It’s Frank Miller saying (as he has done with All Star Batman and Robin), “Hey, Christopher Nolan!  It’s okay to smile; it’s a friggin’ comic book!  You can be goofy if you want!”

Sometimes it’s okay to have fun with a movie, especially if it’s based off a kinda goofy comic strip from The Olden Days.  It’s reverent to the look and style of Will Eisner’s original strips, but there’s no doubt it’s Frank Miller’s project all the way.  That alone should help weed out those who can’t embrace the madness.

So people send me DVDs.  I write reviews of them and link to them.  People read them and tell me I suck or that I am awesome.  If they tell me I’m awesome, I know they’re smart and handsome people.  If they tell me I suck, I know that they should probably be issued helmets and drool bibs.

I got to watch and review the Simon Pegg vehicle How To Lose Friends and Alienate People for Kiwibox.  Go check it out.  If you’re one of the five people who’ve seen the movie, lemme know what you thought.  I’ll get the box of drool bibs open, just in case.

I think one of the things I appreciated most about the movie is how anybody who has ever been paid to do something they love could watch it and either remember when they made that big scary decision to stop fucking around and just either sink or swim or hope that one day they’ll get that call up to the big leagues of whateverdom.

I know a guy who moved to California to wait tablesbe a screenwriter.   Do I think he’s crazy for doing it?  Yeah, kind of.  Do I hope he becomes the next Judd Apatow so I can use my connection with him to launch my own series of mediocre horror films of consistently declining quality?  Totally.  Would I be able to do something that gutsy on my own?  No, probably not.

Hell, in the movie Sidney Young (and in real life Toby Young) started a magazine, then dumped that magazine to go write for Sharps (Vanity Fair).  I, uh… started some websites and, when I was at a point where I could either get busy working for myself or dial it back and keep my day job, chose to keep my day job.  It was probably the best decision at the time, given that I was tired of the freelance job that was paying me best and I could see the writing on the wall that it was going to come to an end sooner, rather than later.

If I had held on, could I have used it to get somewhere else?  Probably.  But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.  I want to write, not be a marketing-bot with a personality.

There’s another opportunity (with a profitable website conglomerate that I shant mention) that I missed out on because of my day job.  I would’ve loved to have had that writing and editing, as it is exactly what I want (and what I’m doing for myself and as a freelancer anyway).  Would it still be there now?  That I don’t know.  It was a temporary position for six months and only about 30 hours a week at that; it either could have taken off or I might have been looking for a new job by now.

If I had known then what I know now, I would’ve given up the day job in a heartbeat.  Even this gig, as secure and permanent as it seemed, isn’t terribly secure anymore.  My freelance stuff is getting better and better, and I’m kind of getting the itch to push it and see how far it might take me.  I’ll take six months and 30 hours a week of something with a potential future over a full-time semi-guarantee of something that’s wasting my time, life, and talent.

Well, another weekend has come and gone, and for once, the American public surprised the crap out of me by rejecting the horror of Hanson 2.0 (the Jonas Brothers) at the box office.  That $30-40 million dollar payday their 3-D concert experience was supposed to yield?  Didn’t happen.

Instead, Americans chose to go see Tyler Perry’s Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail again and for the first time, I can actually admit that the shitty black guy in drag movie is the better of the two viewing options.  I’m as amazed as you are.  Then again, the Jonas Brothers make Hanson sound like Iron Maiden.  Mmm-bop!

Speaking of difficulties, I had to review a Lifetime Original Movie turned erotic thriller (they added 5 minutes of toplessness and sex scenes) for Kiwibox, which suggests to me that perhaps New Line either didn’t know who they were sending the movie out to or didn’t care.  Either way, I had to watch it so I’m going to make you read it.  Click here to check out my review of Poison Ivy:  The Secret Society and revel in my thoughts on Drew Barrymore’s shovel-face, Alyssa Milano’s status as a groupie for broken-down pitchers, and the Poison Ivy tradition of getting former child actresses to grow up by getting their shirts off and grinding on C-list actors (in this case Greg “BJ and the Bear” Evigan).  This one has both the anorexic girl with gonorrhea from Degrassi:  The Next Generation and the dark-haired girl from Little Giants getting their respective freak on.

Before anyone asks, I now have official DVD copies of all four Poison Ivy movies.

So that happened.  Tyler Perry’s Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail made $41 million dollars this weekend.  In turn, I jammed a salad fork into the bottom of my foot.

In less unpleasant news, I got to review I Love The 80’s:  The Naked Gun and Choke:  Special Edition for various places.  I love it when people send me DVDs of movies I either love or of film adaptations of books I love that turn out to be better than expected.  It’s like having your cake and getting it free!

Here are some random snippets to whet your appetite for my wordage:

And finally out is…

I truly pity you parents.  Just thinking about this movie makes me want to slam my face in a car door.

Sometimes the Internet causes me great pain.  One of the best things about my new writing gig over at Kiwibox is that whenever people respond, they get these things called Kiwipoints.  They’re like regular points, but green and kind of fuzzy.  Anyway, because people get Kiwipoints to respond to things like my DVD review of Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, I get some response whereas over at Den of Geek I get basically nothing written back to me.  Such is life.

Anyway, I make a throwaway joke about Mr. Madonna also being known to some people as a filmmaker.  One of the responses left was, and I quote “HMMM seems interesting, I didn’t know that Guy was a
filmmaker…i’ll have to check it out!”

Now, I want to cut the kid some slack, because she’s only 17.  That means when Guy Ritchie’s last good movie came out, she was 9 years old.  When he broke onto the scene by winning an MTV movie award, she was 7.  Still, the fact that my joke was actually true kind of gave me a shooting pain behind my eyeball that I can only assume is a massive hemorrhage developing in the logic center of my brain.  Gushing nosebleeds are normal, right?

To make things better, I had to spend this weekend seeing the #3 movie at the box office, the lovely/creepy little stop motion animation masterpiece Coraline.  It’s the best 3-D movie I’ve seen all year.  It’s also the second 3-D movie I’ve seen all year.  If you have an issue paying a little extra to see a movie in 3-D, let me tell you right now it’s worth the extra dollar.  It makes great movies better, and sleazy movies even trashier.

The electricity is back at my house.  I could not be more pleased.  Actually, I guess it’s been on since late Saturday, but last night was the first night it was on without an outage for the whole night.  This is major progress, especially given that we’re supposed to get more snow Tuesday and Wednesday.

Anyway, I figured out a way to adapt to my new gypsy lifestyle.  For one thing, I spend plenty of time huddled around our kerosene heater before the hours of no electricity and the pressing work (I had to review Jackie Chan’s Supercop on DVD) got to me.  I spent one night with friends and two nights with relatives and I’ve never been so relieved to be home.  It’s not that I’m not grateful, but there’s no house like your house, you know?

I had a good time, but I hope that’s the last of my traveling at the moment.  It was nice to reconnect with some college friends and nice to catch up with my cousin and his wife.  I also got to play with some very young boxer puppies (their eyes and ears hadn’t even opened yet), which is always an adorably good time.  It feels so much better to sleep in my own bed, work from my desktop computer and not at the coffee shop, and to be able to not watch the abysmal American Idol because that’s what my cousin’s wife wants to watch.

Seriously, how this show is still on the air is beyond me.  The entire time the show was on (and I wasn’t even in the room for most of it, I snuck off to use their internet and had to listen to it, which is probably worse) I sat there wondering how long it would take me to freeze to death if I went outside and hugged a snow bank.  Seriously, you don’t want to hear someone sing in Spanish, yet you go to Puerto Rico to hold auditions.  This just proves that Simon has been into Paula Abdul’s ‘water glass’ lately.

Thankfully, things can now get back in order.  I have clean socks (I was running out without the power), I got my box office report done after some fear I wouldn’t have juice, and I will never have to watch American Idol again (mostly because I blinded myself with a car window scraper).

Let’s hope I’m not doing this same song and dance over again a day from now.  Otherwise I’m going to throw myself in front of the nearest salt truck.  Anything is better than listening to Randy Jackson, dawg.

Well, I’m just everywhere these days.  You know my other places that I write by now, but perhaps you don’t know the latest place I’m doing DVD reviews at.  It’s called Kiwibox, and it’s like a social networking/magazine thing.  The magazine part is what I’m mostly there for.

Either way, they get DVDs in for reviewing purposes, and after cashing in some more of my connections, I’ll be doing the occasional DVD review over there.  For example, I’ve got two reviews that went up today on wildly different subjects.  One of them is a movie from one of the most popular anime in the world, Naruto the Movie 3:  Guardians of the Crystal Kingdom.

The other is also wildly popular, but it’s something that’s passed the test of time.  It’s the original version of the remake I’ve already panned:  The Day the Earth Stood Still.  That’s right, it’s a 2 disc special edition of the 1951 classic, and it’s a really good one with lots of special features for sci-fi dorks like me.

Anyway, go check it out.  As usual, I’ll promote all the stuff I do over there here, so you can click through and eyeball it, but there’s a lot of other great content from people not me.  I don’t think it’ll be as often as I post at Den of Geek, but you can never tell with me.  So long as they keep making with the DVDs to review, I’ll stay busy.  Of course, I’ve been busy this whole time, but you get the point.

Rich and I did the SportsBastards podcast tonight.  I don’t know why, but we seem to have a better, sharper show when there’s a third person involved.  There was no StatGirl tonight, sadly, so it was just us, and the thing seemed to ramble a bit.  Kind of like the blog, but worse, because there’s two people rambling.  Something about the third person focuses us both, I think (well, focuses me anyway).  It makes it easier for someone to interrupt the other when they ramble on too long, and prevents the interrupter from joining in on the rambling.

That’s one of the reasons why I feel like my writing is a bit sharper than my podcasting, but also less fun.  Take, for example, my review of Comedy Central’s newest South Park cash-in, The Cult of Cartman.  I love getting free stuff, but sometimes it’s really hard to write about these things, especially when it’s just a money suck and there’s no interesting new commentary or any special features (which is awful considering how many of the shows already have DVD commentaries just waiting to be recycled).

The box is going to look great on my DVD shelf, so at least there’s that.

Author’s note:  This NaBloPoMo is harder than it looks.  Whew!

Come along with me, brothers and sisters, for the maiden voyage of the Cinematic Titanic. That would be the new project from Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson, “Dr. F” Trace Beaulieu, TV’s Frank Conniff, “Mrs. F” Mary Jo Pehl, and J. Elvis Weinstein. Huzzah!

In spite of my moderately critical review, I’m incredibly glad they’re all back, and I laughed a great deal while watching the new release. It’s got its weak points, and you can tell most of the gang hasn’t riffed in a long-ass time (unlike the Rifftrax/Film Crew gang), but the point is they’re back and they’re going to be around for a little while longer, or until Joel burns out again. Five people is a bit much, but it’s completely worth purchasing.

Now that I’ve said all that, you’ve got no reason to click on the review link. Not that you would have before. I know I’m catering to a niche audience of 30 people when I talk about MST3k, but it’s my niche, damn it! And they’re my people!