See? Still alive.

One symptom of that tendency is that lately I’ve been reviewing the movie Grindhouse at the drop of a hat, despite the fact that I have never seen the movie Grindhouse. Nobody has asked me what I thought of it, or if I saw it, or if I wanted to see it. I just hear the word, and off I go. It has touched something deep inside me; it’s like when a ham sandwich makes you throw up, and then for two years you can’t even look at a ham sandwich again.

I have seen every movie Quentin Tarantino ever made (I saw Four Rooms) and have more-or-less accidentally seen almost all of Robert Rodriguez’s ouevre. We put Kill Bill on our wedding gift registry. But I took one look at this thing and on an immediate, primal level, something in my brain instantly went, “Ugh, no. No! Absolutely not.”

Maybe that midwestern conservatism I’ve always been warned about is starting to kick in, but after Kill Bill and Carla Gugino in Sin City, maybe I’ve just officially reached my quota for how many women I can watch these two men graphically mutilate. You had me at “machine gun leg,” by which I mean you had me buying tickets for that Ninja Turtle movie.

I’ve recently been told it’s not that bad within the context of the movie. “The machine gun leg makes sense in the context of the bubbling genitalia” is not what they should put on the poster to draw in the skeptics.

Plus… how long is it going to be before these guys make a second film? A retro pastiche of style-over-substance moments that pay tribute to bad movies I never saw in theaters that closed before I was born 1,000 miles away, featuring appalling scenes of violence (usually against women) punctuating long, apropos-of-nothing stretches of pop culture-referencing dialogue and featuring one of the director’s favorite faded stars from a bygone era. I understand the working title was Every Quentin Tarantino Movie Ever.

You know what was interesting about grindhouse movies?: they didn’t cost $70 million. There are film students right now with grand epics in their heads, fresh, unique visions, forced to slum it on hand-me-down DV because it’s all they have access to, and then they turn on their televisions just in time to hear Quentin on a talk show going, “Yeah, it’s great! We added scratches to the film; reels are missing; we really spared no expense to make it look like shit.” Magnificent. You’re the next Orson Welles.

Snakes on a Plane, a movie that is being regarded as essentially an internet-driven film with a devoted online fanbase, was the top movie in America this weekend. If you look at the wire stories reporting this fact, however, what you will see again and again is that the movie (and the following emphasis is mine, based on what I know was in the writer’s heart, even though he totally would have emphasized it himself if he was allowed to) “technically debuted as the No. 1 movie, but with a modest opening weekend.” In other words, the web movie didn’t really make that much money. It only technically counts as the #1 movie, in the sense that it made more money than any other movie in the country. So, sure, says the AP, if you want to get all “dictionary definition” on the actual meaning of the words “#1 movie,” then yeah, I guess it counts. But its total take wasn’t that impressive, other than in the sense that it was larger than everything else. Don’t you start thinking you run things, you web nerds. With your “blogs” and your “memes.”

These same articles also pause and clear their throats before making a point of mentioning that the movie’s box office totals as reported by the studio included the money made on the Thursday sneak preview screenings, subliminally suggesting that this was a sneaky, deceptive way to puff up the numbers. If memory serves, the studio got this sneaky idea from every other summer box office total ever reported by every studio in the history of film.

Again, I may be reading too much into it… but no, I’m not, I’m exactly right about this. The Old Media reporting on Snakes on a Plane’s box office take is just another cousin to such insightful analysis and objective reporting as “MySpace Rapes Your Children,” “videogames caused Columbine,” and “These news bloggers aren’t legitimate; they just sit at home writing ‘news’ in their underwear without doing any of the hard things we do, like writing the exact stories our government sources tell us, suckling the teat of our corporate overlords, and making many, many, many mistakes.” The idea that online communities might have any relevance or value, the notion that the media gatekeepers might not run the entire world at the moment, is still making puddles ‘neath many a pant leg.

Speaking of scary: the movie itself is not a surprise. On the right day, it could be your favorite movie of all time, that day being October 10, 1987.

The teachings of Jesus Christ outlasted the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Enlightenment, and the War on Christmas. They will probably, probably survive Tom Hanks. Even Tom Hanks armed with an Akiva Goldsman script.

Everybody settle down.

Although I do agree that Dan Brown is in league with Satan, he’s more of a contractor than a partner.

On Spidey, his duds, and his him-ness:

New costumes come and go in comics. When New Coke came out and then quickly went away, conspiracy theorists following the cola wars posited that they screwed with the classic just long enough to get people talking again; that’s what you’re seeing with Spidey’s pajamas. Hell, when I was an avid reader in the eighties, he looked like this:

And I loved it.

The new look is indicative of the problems Todd asked about, though. See… Spider-Man is interesting when his life is like it was in the movies. He has these weird, interesting powers and fights for the little guy, but doing so basically ruins his normal life. That is the essence of the “Spider-Man” story in a nutshell. He’s racing against the clock, stopping Doctor Doom from blowing up New York or whatever, but by performing this act of great heroism he’s standing up his girlfriend and forgetting to get Aunt May’s heart medicine before the pharmacy closes. He saves the lives of everyone in town, and as a result everyone in town thinks Peter Parker is a dick. Not to mention that his grades are slipping, he has to drop out of grad school, he has no time to get any kind of decent job… he has an awesome, phenomenal gift that is ruining everything.

Plus, the newspaper and all the other superheroes think he’s a creepy weirdo. That’s just the icing on the cake.

But lately in the comics, all of his problems have been eliminated. They invited him to join the Avengers, so he’s not an outsider anymore. In fact, he lives in the Avengers HQ– a penthouse in Manhattan? Spider-Man??– with his model wife and aunt, who by the way knows his secret identity now. (One extremely annoying thing the movies and comics have in common: in both, Spider-Man has started taking his mask off anytime somebody looks at him and says hi, like some kind of super flasher.) Iron Man put him on his payroll, so he’s making money now. And Iron Man made him that crazy-ass suit, which is armored and has all these gadgets in it.

In short, Spider-Man is a sellout b****. And I’m torn, because if that character were a real person and were really given those opportunities, the choices he’s made would be exactly right and consistent… but I wouldn’t give a s*** about his stories anymore. Like, who wants to hang out with a guy whose only complaint is how the butler keeps losing his socks? That’s not an interesting man, body stocking or no body stocking.

That’s another reason I’m looking forward to this Civil War story. Everything that has happened to the character is redeemable if Iron Man says, “I’m your boss, and I say show John Ashcroft your real face,” and Spider-Man replies, “Oh my God, I’m a sellout b****! Time to face this incredibly difficult personal problem with punching and running.”

It turns out that the Mona Lisa is not smiling. She is laughing. She is laughing at you for buying this stupid f***ing book.

Unbearable. Chapter 20, and they’re still standing in the goddamn Louvre men’s room talking? About symbology? Symbology employed by a man who, while bleeding to death in chapter one, used his own corpse to make a piece of performance art more well planned out in the last ten minutes of his life than some surprise parties?

And nobody in the book can ever say anything.

normal book: “I’m fleeing the Louvre as a fugitive!” he said.

Da Vinci Code: “I’m fleeing the Louvre as a fugitive, and this is an actual line from the book!” Robert Langdon verbed floridly adverbly adverbly, like Harrison Ford would.

They said the book was plagiarized, but they didn’t mention it was plagiarized from Mad Libs, he ejaculated ruggedly, his harris tweed rustling wistfully.

Ugh. Ugh! America: you’re all crazy. A friend of mine recently asked,

Why is it that when someone enjoys a movie that I don’t, I immediately feel angry, upset, as though the world is completely upside down?

I am on that wavelength. It’s not that I dislike the book; it makes me angry that people like it. Gah– it’s– gahhh.

Short review: The nighttime sniffling- sneezing- coughing- aching- stuffy head- fever- so you can no longer rest soda.

Why don’t I ever just listen? There’s a restaurant in Lafayette Square called Soda Fountain Square; everyone I know who’s eaten there says “it’s not great, so don’t even waste your time”; I can now think of no other restaurant.

The quiet gave me an opportunity to put the last shovel of dirt on my Netflix queue’s coffin with the viewing of Project Greenlight: Disc 2. The Project Greenlight discs were, above all others, the discs that I would see at the top of my list and urgently move to the bottom again, saying, “Whew! That was close. They almost sent those movies to my house.” (The other notable offender was Angels in America, suggesting that something about HBO says “Homework, But Obligatory” to me.)

I liked the first season of Project Greenlight back when I had HBO, but reality television has irredeemably soured since then. I actually watched the first season of Survivor in its entirety; I’d have people over and order Chinese and have immediate phone calls from my dishing mother as the credits were rolling. They suckered me, and why not? The appeal couldn’t have been plainer to me. In Survivor, we had drama doing things that scripted drama would not do, would not be allowed to do. A show in which the villain is a manipulative homosexual who walks around naked and makes everyone uncomfortable? Who would write it? Who would air it? What show over which writers and executives have any control would write off the cute girls midseason and hang onto the idiot truck driver and homophobic old man for the finale? Why wouldn’t you watch that when it was all still new?

The ending, that’s why. You like unconventional? How’s this for something a writer wouldn’t do: that obnoxious bastard wins! That was a satisfying sixteen weeks well spent, eh? No comeuppance or catharsis, and everything we learned is bad; won’t get that outta T. G. I. F.! Bad about human nature, bad about television, bad about how easy it is to screw with you after all. Join us back here in six weeks, when we begin season two by kicking and kicking you right in the babymakers. Wait, where are you going?

After that, everybody wanted a piece of that pie, and within two years I’m watching people eat dead roaches in prime time. I try to steer clear of the proverbial water cooler entirely now.

I always did have a soft spot in my heart for Project Greenlight, though. If you weren’t an HBO subscriber or were otherwise occupied with living your life, Project Greenlight was a contest put on by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company with Miramax. Writers and directors would submit samples of their work, Ben, Matt & Co. would pick their favorites, and the lucky winners were given an office, a crew, and a million of Miramax’s dollars to make their movie.

You have never seen these movies. I watched the show, and I’ve never seen them. One of them has been on a shelf next to my television for two years.

The reason I’ve never seen the movies is the same reason I watched the show, namely that the show very effectively communicates what a disastrous nightmare the moviemaking experience was. You’re right there with the filmmakers from page to premiere, and like them by the end you just want the stupid movie to get finished and get out of your life forever.

What I realized last night as I listened to the writer complain that she didn’t recognize her story and watched the producer look at the first-time directors as if he might soon be hiding their parts in the crawlspace of his house is that the Project Greenlight rules are almost entirely responsible for the headaches that plague them. They’re ostensibly giving these filmmakers their “shot,” but in a way they end up doing exactly the opposite. They give them a million free dollars, yes, but because they’re first timers the studio keeps them on a ridiculously tight leash to keep them from mucking it up and losing Harvey Weinstein’s money. As a result, they have all the limitations of the studio system and the constraints of independent filmmaking. They have almost no money and they have to complete production in a matter of weeks, having neither the resources to do anything nor the time to learn how to do it. You would think that, given the opportunity to control the variables, they would try to go for the ideal experience, but instead they went for the “real” filmmaking experience. Surprisingly, the movies produced by this alchemy fail even more spectacularly than they were set up to.

But the TV show is great.

—

This new Google looks okay. They haven’t gone off the rails yet, he said as the Flash ad for King Kong jumped off of Yahoo at him unbidden for the third time today. (At least it doesn’t roar, I guess.) I actually find myself much more troubled bythe guy’s idea of a good test search; hasn’t he read that the government’s been sniffing around Google’s search data? Somebody trying to get a visit?

(In certain circles, circles living in the basements of their parents for far longer than is advisable, the graphic novel “V for Vendetta” is considered one of the classics of Western literature. It is embarrassing to be in those circles and not have read the book, but then it is embarrassing to be in those circles. Having the comic book guys look down on you only feels bad until you take a second to think about what’s happening. To said guys, though, the author Alan Moore is like the four-color Steinbeck, which makes it all the more amazing that adaptations of his work always end up like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His deal with Satan is very carefully worded and covers the printed media only. Read that fine print, kids!)

After I saw the movie, I generally liked it, although they changed a straightforward, well-articulated fascism-vs.-anarchy plot into a watery Bushbash meanies-vs.-”Freedom” thing that comes across a little “Sex Pistols covered by Avril Lavigne.” I would also like to reiterate that, if I ever become a fascist dictator, the first thing I will outlaw is slow motion photography. (Ooh, Bullet Time. Many’s the time I watched action movies before the freaking Matrix and thought, “This action is exciting enough, I guess, but it could be slower.“) The more I think about the movie, the more I realize what a bad idea it is to do so.

You may be two sentences away from me ruining this movie. Certainly in a “Spoiler Alert” way, and maybe in a larger sense, depending on whether I understood what I was watching.

This occurred to me this evening: in the movie, the big ol’ exploding chip on V’s shoulder is caused by the fact that the fascist government threw him in a concentration camp and experimented on him and others to devise a lethal virus (and its cure) for biological warfare.

Later, detectives on V’s case are told a story about a conspiracy. Apparently, the fascist government got voted into power by exploiting the fear that was created when everyone got sick with the new virus, which the fascists had unleashed after creating it themselves.

Creating it at the concentration camp. Which they didn’t have until after they were voted into power.

If I am remembering the movie correctly, that may be the biggest plot hole in any movie I have ever seen or heard about. So… you could always go see it for that.

I am going to see the new Pink Panther tonight. It is going to be great, because I will not pay. Years from now, I will be saying, “I had a great time not paying at that movie.”

This picture will make me laugh every time I see it because looking at it makes me imagine its taking. Photographers’ assistants taking all the Muppet Babies out of their crates and arranging them on Steve Martin while he sits patient and still, making mildly embarrassed jokes. Steve Martin sitting there for an hour making those faces. “Let’s try some with Fozzie over your shoulder. Great, great. Now read the book to Fozzie. Theeere you go.”

Look at his eyes; what are they saying to the viewer?

Unfortunately, five months late, I have nothing really original or well-remembered to contribute. Fortunately, since this is Self Amusement Theater, I can go ahead and jot down some stuff anyway.

I generally liked the movie. DVD will tell the true tale, of course; any opinion of the movie formed alongside the horde of the fanniest fans is going to come out a shade too rosy by half. You can hardly give an eyes-wide-open review of a movie you saw at 2:00 a.m. on a school night surrounded by guys dressed up as the Power Droid. (There will always be a special place in my heart for the guys so immersed in the fantasy that they dress up as characters, but not immersed enough to dress as one of the good characters. It’s like they want to escape their humdrum lives for a galaxy far, far away, but they don’t have the self-confidence to imagine anything but another humdrum life waiting for them out there on Planet Dirt. I’ll always be pulling for you, Guy Who Could Have Been Boba Fett But Chose Walrus Man.)

Even without the cheering Halloween party in the theater, even without the two guys having the prolonged, all-business, attention-ravenous lightsaber duel in the front rows before the show, I would have thought Revenge of the Sith was the best of the prequels, which is admittedly the equivalent of winning the gold medal in Olympic Speed-Walking. Better than Return of the Jedi? I’m not trying to make any trouble. I only know that I went home satisfied in 2005, and that in 1983 I went home with a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on which I can now recognize as unmet expectations. (I had many years to become familiar with that feeling later.)

Perhaps because it went out of its way to tie everything up with a neat red and black bow, however, the movie ended up underlining fundamental issues that have always been there. After the original, the Star Wars movies just don’t work if Vader is Luke’s father.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid watching Star Wars I always imagined that Darth Vader was “born” and led his stormtroopers on a brutal quest, using his Jedi insider knowledge to hunt down and personally dispatch his former colleagues. It was a cool, bad-ass, epic thing in my imagination. On the screen, it happened in an afternoon by remote control.

But it had to happen that fast. Once paternity enters the picture, Vader’s on the clock. He’s locked into a timeline. Luke is 15-20 years old, so Vader has to be charming/”fully functional” enough to make a baby with somebody, turn into the quintessential, picture-next-to-the-word-in-the-dictionary Evil, and eradicate the Religious Left from the face of the universe so that by the time his kid’s a teenager, the eradication has to have happened a very long time ago. Vader has to multitask.

This is the kind of s*** that happens when you write the story backwards.

Remember how the Jedi were treated in Star Wars? Han Solo acted like he’d never heard of ‘em before. That officer who made fun of Vader on the Death Star behaved as if the whole idea of super-powered Jedi knights (which during his lifetime had once been the government’s entire peacekeeping force) was ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. Wouldn’t that be a lot like me never having heard of the Reagan administration, or believing audiocassettes were an old wives’ tale?

At one point, Peter Cushing says of Ben Kenobi, “Surely he must be dead by now.” Why would that be reasonable to assume if he’d been a vital Jedi when they’d last seen him several years earlier? And boy, those last 15-20 years were pretty hard on ol’ Obi-Wan, there. That’s a pretty short trip from Ewan MacGregor to Alec Guinness. I guess years on the lam in the desert, watching over the son of Space Hitler from a discreet distance to make sure he doesn’t start Force-choking kids on the playground, really wear a brother down. (Not to mention staying in the closet about being Public Enemy #2, spending every day of your life with nothing to do but think about having unleashed Space Hitler on the universe, dreaming about overthrowing the government with no one to help you but a Muppet in a bog.) It’s sort of like how President Clinton looked like Elvis F. Kennedy in 1992, but by 2000 looked like he had been repeatedly struck by lightning.

I’ve had plenty of years to watch and think about these movies, but it was only after seeing the last one that I finally got it. I’ve realized that everything you need to understand the evolution of these films can be found in the life of George Lucas himself.

Lucas is Star Wars, Rough Draft:

The original Star Wars was made by a kid, one of a band of rebellious kids working against the studio system in the seventies, as a scrappy more-or-less independent film. The movie was about a scrappy band of kids who didn’t have a whole lot of money or resources– there was one princess on a trust fund, but the rest of them were basically blue collar– fighting the evil imperialist System and its lockstep oppression of freedom and creativity. Everything in the System was gray and uniform and corporate, right, but the rebels weren’t about that. Sure, they did things on the cheap, but they made do and did things their way. And the System was being run by Vader, this old stuffed shirt who had turned his back on the ideals that got him his power in the first place, man. But the rebels had had it with the System; they were gonna fly right in there and blow the System to smithereens. They were gonna blast the System right where it was weakest: in the heart. Take that, System! Take that, Dad!

Then, as the story progresses… Lucas gets his own company, starts to get a little gray in his neck-beard… and sure, Vader is running the System with an iron fist, but you have to understand: there is good in him. He doesn’t want to be a part of the System; it’s just too late for him to do anything about it now. But maybe, even within the System, there’s still a chance for him to take everything that’s wrong with the System and throw it down a bottomless pit or something. He’s made some wrong moves, but you know, in the end he’s basically a good guy.

Actually, now that we’re on the subject, what about Vader? Did you ever stop to think about how such a basically good guy ends up a part of the System? Have you ever thought about how hard it was for him? Forget the rebel kids and all their overzealous idealism. There’ll be time for rebel kids in some later installment. In the meantime… look. You have to understand, Vader was only trying to do good work. Trying so hard. All he wanted was a little recognition and respect for his vision… but noooo. Those artsy-fartsy philosophers in their gigantic ivory tower wouldn’t let him in, would they? They wouldn’t let him be on their precious Council; they were just so afraid of all his talents. And the bureaucrats, oh my God, the f***ing bureaucrats. You have to go through fifteen people to get anything decided, and half of them don’t even speak your language; they speak in subtitles through some damn snout thing. Vader just realized that the only way he was ever going to be able to do good work is if he grabbed the power of the System for himself and made everyone do it his way, correctly, efficiently, with computers. And if that meant replacing a dozen cheap Jedi knights in ponchos with thousands of digital clones and slaughtering some little padawans’ childhoods, well, it’s tragic but Vader had the best of intentions. Nobody can fault Vader there.

(Imagine how this might have turned out if I could actually remember the movie. If I’d written a review when it was actually timely? Way shorter.)

For the most part, though, I simply found the book to be sour, unpleasant, and best left behind me. No matter how much you’re enthralled by the larger story, it’s hard to be engaged by a book when the main character hates being in it and can’t stand to see anyone else enjoying it either. (“Everyone at Hogwarts was laughing and sharing their ice cream cones, but how could Harry laugh? After all that had happened to him, the most popular boy in the world who was right about everything all along, how could poor Harry ever smile again? All he could think about was turning their ice cream cones into pus-filled boils. He went up to the Gryffindor dorm and put on a Cure record while his enchanted Morrisey poster moped on the wall.”)

Compared to that, book six was almost great. It got a little wobbly in the end, though.

Not because of the death. I couldn’t care less, probably because I’ve heard a bit too much about phoenixes (phoenices?) in this series where he’s concerned. Feathers of them, Orders of them… anyway, even if that character’s death does stick he was always a cipher, all enigmatic and taciturn in a way that does me no good as a reader. And we know Yoda has to die for Luke to face Vader. I hope Joseph Campbell is getting royalties.

No, the thing that gets under my skin is the Snape thing again. I’ve calmed down with time and convinced myself the series could still end in a way that satisfies me, but during the first read-through I was so annoyed I almost renounced the series.

Professor Snape is my favorite character in the Harry Potter series. To understand why, one must appreciate some overlooked but fundamental truths about Our Hero. Because, look, here’s the thing: Harry Potter is a cheater. Harry Potter is a total, unrepentant liar. Harry Potter’s dad was a total a-hole. Harry and Ron never pass up a chance to copy someone else’s homework or make Hermione write their papers for them. Harry will literally steal the teacher’s edition of the textbook, disguise it, lie about having it, and then stash it someplace he’s not supposed to know about, and expect everyone to be okay with that. Harry Potter will make himself invisible and hide in your room to listen to your private conversation. Harry Potter will steal your car, and he will crash it. Harry Potter will never even try to compensate you. Harry Potter is a sociopath.

Harry Potter will kiss a dementor before he ever follows a rule. He will break that curfew. He will go wander the grounds in the dark. He will march right into that Forbidden Forest with a pic-a-nic basket, how d’ya like them apples? Unhappy with the current school administration, he will train teenagers to form a small insurgent army and break into a government building to steal classified documents. What the f*** does he care? He’s Harry Potter.

Above all this, however, Harry Potter will make his mind up about you in about twenty seconds, and 85% of the time he will decide you are a pinhead. After that, buddy, God have mercy on your soul, because Harry Potter is watching you on his stolen spy map. Soundproof your keyhole; he is out there in the hall, possibly disguised as one of your friends who he has clubbed unconscious and stashed in a bathroom (it’s okay! He’s Harry Potter!) and he is going to get you. And if he’s a student in your class, well, hope ya like smartass remarks undermining you and constant attempts to get you fired. Never does he say, “Maybe it’s for the best the adults won’t tell me what’s going on,” or “maybe I should leave this to someone with more than 18 months of training.” Pinheads! All of them!

He never learns anything, in class or out, and he never pays for it because he was always Right All Along. God is literally on his side. J.K. Rowling likes him a lot more than I do, so the universe keeps rewarding Harry and his friends for everything they do wrong.

The more suspicion points to Snape, the more I silently pray that this once, this one very important time, Harry gets served.

“Boy,” Harry said, “that seven-year grudge turned out to be an irrational waste of everyone’s time. I wish I could do that differently. I owe a lot of people apologies.”

Though it has been pointed out to me that the hero is often my least favorite character (SEE ALSO: Vampire Slayer, Buffy the) I did not always harbor this grudge. Harry and the gang were 11 years old once. When you’re eleven, sure, you’re new to the world of responsibility and in over your head and not the clearest thinker. When a twelve year old steals a car because he’s going to be late for school, it’s alarming stupidity but you can at least see how it happened. I mean, they were making him live under the stairs six months ago. He’s got some things to figure out.

But once you get to be 16, 17, maybe you don’t aim the curse at Draco without even knowing what it does. Maybe you stick to the cute “lift him up by the ankle” one, or learn three words of Latin. “That sounds like it might mean ‘cut forever.’ I’d better turn his pants into flowers or something instead.”

I am still Dumbledore’s man to the end, in a readership sense, because Harry only became a complete douchebag gradually, and now I’m genuinely enthralled by what’s happening in his world despite the fact that it’s his world. Yes, I do wish Hermione and Neville and Luna would just freeze him and take over the book, but I also keep looking forward to the day he has an epiphany, learns from his Hogwarts experience, settles down and starts treating me right. I also have The Phantom Menace on DVD. I have it coming.

“We have to inject the nanites into the building’s brain to save Chicago!” Shut up.

The 2004 Oscar nominations came out today, and I took a moment upon seeing them to wonder, “Was 2004 so lackluster that it became necessary to nominate Jamie Foxx twice? Did Paul Giamatti poison somebody’s dog?” This in turn prompted me to whip up my long-delayed list of the movies I saw in 2004. I found I was in a much less comfortable position to criticize the Oscar choices when it became clear how few of them I have yet seen. (I hope Closer wins some stuff so they bring it back to a couple of theaters for another weekend.) This year’s 41 movies seemed pretty lackluster until I re-examined my 2002 list, which only had 45 movies on it. So apparently, my typical year consists of me seeing almost as many movies as there are weekends and still thinking I missed everything. (How I could have possibly seen almost a movie a week this year, by the way, defies the laws of time and space. There’s just no way.) More for me than for you, here is 2004’s list.

genuinely liked

• Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
• Control Room
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Fahrenheit 9/11
• Garden State
• Incredibles, The
• Jersey Girl
• Kill Bill: Vol. 2
• Ladykillers, The
• Manchurian Candidate, The
• Mean Girls
• Spider-Man 2
• Super Size Me
• Trekkies 2

not half bad, actually

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Hellboy
• Motorcycle Diaries, The
• Ocean’s Twelve
• Ray
• Shaun of the Dead
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Terminal, The
• Village, The

eh.

• 13 Going On 30
• 50 First Dates
• Bourne Supremacy, The
• Collateral
• Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
• Grudge, The
• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The
• Napoleon Dynamite
• Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
• Spartan
• Starsky & Hutch

i love my girlfriend

• Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
• National Treasure
• Phantom of the Opera, The
• Shrek 2
• Welcome to Mooseport

dishonorable mention: jesus christ!

• Worst Movie of the Christ

“That’s not acting; that’s staring.”
-Holly, 24

“Hey, that wasn’t in the book!”
-Peter Jackson

“I cannot accurately review this movie, having given up profanity for Lent.”
-Jimski, 28

Mel Gibson is a carny.

I was really looking forward to this movie, too. I’ve been waiting for this one to come out since they were talking about releasing it without subtitles and letting the acting and imagery speak for themselves. Back when it was called Revenge of the Passion, I was checking the “Coming Soon” sites to see if a studio would actually release it. “Ooh! This kind of flick doesn’t come along every day. How often do you get to see someone put his entire heart and soul into crafting an uncompromised vision of the thing that’s most important to him in the world? In Aramaic? And it’s about my favorite Messiah to boot. Save me a seat!” I have often griped about movie phenomena like Lord of the Rings, which fans declared to be the most magnificent epic ever made – indeed, declared themselves fans – six months before the movie was even finished, let alone shown. Well, that could have been me this time. Rarely am I so poised to enjoy a moviegoing experience; I all but walked into the screening with a “Welcome” sign on my jeans and laid down spread-eagled in front of the screen. What a letdown.

I was ready for the violence. The ending of the movie had been ruined for me a little in advance. It’s not the violence that bothered me (although, don’t get me wrong, the movie is pornography. What exactly is the NC-17 for? I’d like to make this movie again, substituting Lou Ferrigno or a puppy dog for Jesus, just to see if I could even click my stopwatch before the MPAA banned it from every theater in the country. But I digress; the gore was actually the thing about the movie I disliked the least. At least the gore had a point.) The Passion is like a somehow-sillier version of Titanic, where twenty people are playing a version of Billy Zane’s half-note, moustache-twirling, damsel-railroad-track-tying villain, and all twenty of the people are William Shatner. (There’s even an equivalent to Titanic’s painful, groan-inducing “some nobody called Picasso” sequence in which Jesus invents the table. Laugh all you want; I didn’t make it up.) The writer-director wants you to feel every moment and action palpably, and then he apparently instructs everyone to act so bizarrely that only face paint and miming would make it more over the top. Between the dialogue and the delivery, it’s like watching dinner theater written by a high school student. (Any temptation to say, “But the dialogue was from the Bible!” transcends wishful thinking.)

“I don’t know exactly what they’re saying,” I often thought, “but I know no one would ever say it like that.” It’s like… like…

My God, I have had an epiphany.

Pro wrestling. It’s exactly like watching pro wrestling. That absolutely hits the nail on the head, or inaccurately through the palm as the case may be.

There’s scene with the Sanhedrin trying Jesus when a couple of Jewish leaders protest that Jesus’ whole trial is a travesty. When they say this, Caiaphas and their peers and presumed equals morph into Moe the Stooge, shouting, “Get outta here, you!” and girlfight-slapping them out the door like they were transients who wandered onto the set.

And Gibson adds a character! He loves the Gospel so much he changes it, putting the Devil into the story as a character with dialogue. Dressed like an extra from Dune. Occasionally, Gibson has the Devil walk silently through crowd scenes smirking. This is to help you figure out who the bad guys and good guys are in the story of Christ. He also has snakes and maggots occasionally crawl out of the Devil’s orifices. This is so you will know that the Devil is evil. My favorite scene in the entire movie features the Devil. Jesus has just died, and at the moment of his death – and I swear that this is true – they cut to Hell, where the Devil is on his knees going, “Nooooooooo!” Mel Gibson seems to think I have suffered a head injury of some kind.

Speaking of violence, it only bothers me because it’s bad. I don’t mean extreme-bad, I mean poor-bad. The “filmmaker” is fetishistic about torturing his Messiah in a way that primarily makes me want to avoid sitting next to him on the bus while also having the exact opposite of its intended effect. Jesus is being scourged, and hunks of his skin are flapping in the wind, and then the soldiers say, “Switch weapons!” and they tag out at the ring, and then they scourge him some more, and just when it looks like he can’t possibly take any more they shout, “Okay, now turn him over and do the front!” Meanwhile, though, they have to wade through the blood in fishing boots and all I’m thinking is, “I don’t care if he could turn butter into margarine, he’d never stand up again if he lost that much blood, Mel.”

Worse still, it’s like The Book of John: Special Edition. Gibson invents about half a dozen never-before-seen hypothetical ways to hurt Jesus that weren’t in the original. If one of the Roman officers had said to his underlings, “Does this cross look sturdy to you? We’d better jump up and down on him for a minute or two, just to make sure,” it would have been completely consistent with the storytelling up to that point. Between that and the sound effects (they’re nailing him up! SQUISH! SPLORCH!) I was stifling laughter by the end of the movie.

Because unfortunately, all the extra, kinky Jesus hurting does is draw your attention to all the wrong things. There’s a scene where they’re trying to get the second nail to line up with a hole in the cross – and what Target bookshelf purchaser among us hasn’t had this problem? – but Jesus’ arms just aren’t long enough. So, being practical men, they just dislocate one of ‘em (with a nice loud crispity-crunchity Butterfinger crunch on the soundtrack). But ten minutes later, he’s up on the cross with so much slack that his hands are up over his head like he was atop Golgotha trying to start the wave or break into a chorus of “YMCA.”

These are not the things you notice when you’re watching a good movie.

Also – and I’m repeating myself – slow motion should be against the law.

And I haven’t even gotten to the part where the centurion pierces his side, and it’s like he has a lawn sprinkler living inside him. (The centurion is played by Uma Thurman in a track suit.) Or the way that, much like modern cartoon villains, ancient civilizations apparently liked to laugh uproariously for no reason when horrible things were happening. Crucifixion was, the film posits, the ancient equivalent of America’s Funniest Home Videos or Fox reality programming. I did not so much want to help Jesus as I wanted to approach a Roman and ask, “Exactly what about this makes you laugh? I find your reaction wildly inconsistent with human behavior” as fast as I could before they stoned me to death or something.

And Judas. . . ! His first appearance, when they throw his bag of silver to him from across the room and it spills at his feet (in slow motion) was the first time in the film when I said, “Ohhhh we’ve got trouble!” Sure enough, every scene he’s in is infused with ham-handed hand-wringing and completely inappropriate surreal imagery. When Andrew Lloyd Webber does better with a character than you do, it’s time to hang it up.

I think the entire spirit and content of the film can be summed up by the Crow Scene. As you may remember from Sunday school, one of the thieves being crucified along with Jesus mocks him for not just getting down off the cross. As soon as he does this in the film, a huge black crow lands on his cross and starts eating his face off, stabbing his eye out with its beak. When this happened, I thought, That’s the entire movie in a nutshell.

I realize that I may come across as somewhat irreverent, but nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, I have strong, very deeply held beliefs that I now have to re-explain to people because of this irredeemable piece of excrement. Every Christian in America is going to see it. (My girlfriend was delighted to hear a representative of my faith say on the radio, “Even non-Catholics will be able to understand it!” “Gee Jim,” she said to me, “I hope I’m able to follow the story of Christ even though I’m… Lutheran.”) The brilliance of this geek show’s marketing campaign is that it is designed to make Christians feel like they’re sinning if they don’t want to see the movie.

“I heard it’s really bad.”

“What’s the matter? Do you hate Jesus?”

“I like him more than you do; you’re the one who beat the #### out of him.”

(Not saying the profanity is easy. Not thinking it constantly is turning out to be much harder.)

The ironic thing (I think; I’m not even sure anymore; thanks for nothing, Alanis) is that the whole mess ends up achieving its goal in the most roundabout way possible. I found myself thinking about the crucifixion in ways I hadn’t considered, but primarily because my mind was wandering away from the tedium on the screen. “Yeah…. you know, they arrested Jesus at night, but they didn’t crucify him until midday the next day. So that whole night and morning, he was just sitting there waiting for it to be over. Much like I am now.” As my girlfriend later remarked, “It makes me want to go to church again immediately, just to better erase it from my memory.” Amen, sister. Amen.

II: when jesus donned the leather cassock, i almost lost it

Reactions to my review of The Passion have been beyond my grandest delusions. E-mails and phone calls the like of which I haven’t seen since I declared war on The Matrix back in aught three. In fact, Raukodraug’s Matrix comparison in the comments section (does anybody but me read those? I hope so) still makes me laugh out loud; I thought the last shot in the movie was one of the funniest because it reminded me so much of the last shot from The Matrix. For some reason, Jesus leaving the tomb was so reminiscent to me of Keanu leaving the phone booth, all that was missing was the Rage Against the Machine. They pan away from his burial shroud as it’s doing an Obi-Wan, and there he is, kind of going, “Yeah, that’s right,” and then as he struts out they pan down to his hand and the CGI hole through it…! I did not know what to say, so I chose to say “BOOOOOOO.” Much to my girlfriend’s consternation. Our rowmates were not septugenarians you wanted to run afoul of.

I know, I know there were shreds of silver lining in the movie. As I sat there, desperately trying to clutch onto a sliver of the positive experience I was eagerly planning to have when I went to this K of C S & M, there were one or two moments when I feebly thought, “There! That would be out of place in the worst movie ever. I would admit seeing a movie with that scene in it.” But when I try to focus on them, all I can think about is the tidal wave of hooey they were adrift in.

I didn’t even mention the Bridge Scene. Judas is being hounded by the Devil and Gollum and Jar Jar and Linda Blair (you may remember this scene from the Gospel According to No One) and so he’s hiding out in the dark. Meanwhile, Jesus is being led from Gethsemane in chains and repeatedly kicked in the bum bum. After one ill-placed kick too many, Jesus topples off of a bridge, but the guards are still holding his chains and so nnnng there he is painfully dangling like a hastily-hung chandelier off the side of the bridge railing. As luck would have it, like the Chili Peppers before him, Judas is under that very bridge, because really, where else would he be hiding in this movie? And Jesus, who appears nonplussed by having just been made into a sacramental pinata, shoots Judas a doleful stare as if to say, “And after all those times I drove you to the airport. After all those times I helped you move,” and Judas replies, “GAHHHH!” A thought came to me that was very reminiscent of when the Titanic was sinking and Leo Dicaprio was handcuffed to a pipe below deck: was the actual story not interesting enough? Was it not going to hold my attention without the addition of this Young Indiana Jones malarkey? Does the 15 minutes of lashing him with a mace not work without the bridge dangling? And as for the Judas component, well, I believe that ground is well-trod in the previous post.

Another regrettable choice which I am too bored to belabor: the portrayal of Barabbas as a slobbering snaggletoothed imbecile. I was taught that Barabbas was an insurgent, making the whole thing just a wee smidge more complicated. I got the point – the crowd would rather release an evil rapist John Belushi than Jesus! Ooh, that crowd makes me so mad! – but can there be no vestige of subtlety anywhere? You’re already portraying Pilate as a contemplative high school guidance counselor; does Barabbas actually have to be cross-eyed with flies buzzing around him like Pigpen? “Who do you choose, people of Israel? Jesus of Nazareth, or Mungo of the Drool People?”

All of this reminded me of another comic auteur who decided to make a Holocaust comedy, only this time with the benefit of historical hindsight. That man was, of course, poet/genius/friend to children Jerry Lewis, and that movie was The Day the Clown Cried. I could write ten pages on the amazing hubris, boneheadedness, and insensitivity that went into making this movie. Unfortunately, I have not seen it. No one has. It has never been shown to anyone, because it is (according to rare eyewitness accounts) one of the worst movies ever made. It is, after all, a 2 1/2 hour movie starring Jerry Lewis as a clown who leads children to the gas chambers at Auschwitz like some kind of rapist Pied Piper. Are you laughing yet?

Take a minute with the mental image. Now that you know about it, you’d kill to see the last ten minutes of it, wouldn’t you? Well, I can’t help you. Lewis has it locked in his office, and I doubt even his death will bring it into the light of day. Have a look at that article linked above, though; you’ll doubt your senses.

For some reason — possibly because I write lists of people who suck all the time, and nobody pays me to put them on the cover of a magazine — I got cranky enough to write my first grown-up, non-student-paper letter to the editor.

Yes. WMD, most divisive election of my lifetime, and this is the thing I write a letter about. I know.

To ensure that it sees print somewhere, and to avoid letting anything go to waste, the letter is immortalized below. Or, given the way this site often treats old material, mortalized. Following the logic by which I post it, expect future posts to include my recent grocery lists and third grade English papers.

(n.b.: Having bought and paid for many a Paul McCartney solo album in my reckless youth, I feel the need to vehemently defend myself and say I’d have written the letter below even if it had been a picture of Jimmy Buffett on the cover of the RFT making a face like Lenny from Of Mice and Men.)

RFT:

Oh, come on!

“Rock’s Ten Least Wanted”? That’s the best you can do this week?

What has happened to you, RFT? Your cover story could have been some syndicated fish wrapping from anywhere in the country. It had nothing to do with St. Louis; it had nothing to do with St. Louis County; it had nothing to do with any of the issues that are affecting any grown-up outside of Vintage Vinyl. None of the artists mentioned in the piece are even playing in Missouri this week. At least the cover story from a few weeks ago about Ron Jeremy and Becky the Queen of Carpet was about something that actually happened.

The filler would have gone down a lot easier if it had at least had something to say other than, “I read a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that would be fun to steal.” I mean, “The Beatles were an overrated boy band”? Ooh! Take that, 1965! “Go fuck yourself, Paul McCartney”? That’s all you’ve got? Exactly who on the editorial staff owed Mike Seely money, and is there any way I can help with a loan before I have to read his devastating follow-up series, “Smashmouth Isn’t Very Good”?

There simply has to be something else going on. Here, I’ll get you started: it’s never too early in the semester for Larry Biondi to have started his annual screwing over of the SLU community, and if you dig for three seconds I’m sure there are some wacky hijinks afoot on the school board. It’s not too late to avoid becoming a completely generic sell-out. You can do it!

As fate would have it, the selection for last night’s monthly movie night at a friend’s home was Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Between bouts of comedic British full-frontal nudity, it was announced by my girlfriend to everyone in the room that I – an otherwise good person – had really, really disliked The Passion a lot. When pressed, however, I was happy to report I no longer remembered why.

That’s why I keep this site.

In honor of its release on disc, I am taking a minute to repost both parts of my crowd-pleasing, entirely-too-angry Passion review. Enjoy it, and then feel bad.

Going to the movies also gives me opportunity to pay someone to make me watch commercials, often several times. Last week, in the middle of the usual barrage, I saw for the third time something I have been meaning to tell you all about for weeks. In recent years, I’ve been getting out of the whole “ironic detachment” thing, eschewing the Batman movie with the neon and the Bat nipples that I know is awful as I hand the man my $8, and instead trying to go and like things that, you know, I like. But recently — without seeking it out, you understand, just going about my daily business — I encountered an upcoming release so bad that it actually comes around to the other side, that might be some kind of perfect divine miracle of awful.

Hyperbole aside, I’ve been placing calls to the Vatican for the better part of the week.

The movie is called Taxi, and it stars Jimmy Fallon — wait! wait! hear me out! — and Academy Award nominee Queen Latifah. Jimmy Fallon is an undercover NYC detective who plays by his own set of rules. He’s the kind of no-nonsense renegade cop whose superiors are always chasing behind him saying, “One more and you’re outta here!” Officer Fallon is a good cop, I gather from the montage of quick cuts, but a terrible driver. He’s always crashing into things while chasing perps and the like. Eventually, his commander, who is apparently a sexy 24-year-old woman somehow, tells him he has too many points on his license and takes away his ability to drive legally. I’m sure there are parts not included in the trailer explaining why he still gets to fight crime, but can’t drive, but doesn’t get partnered with someone who can, in fact, drive. All I know is, Detective Fallon is fighting crime on foot when there’s a robbery across town. What’s he supposed to do? Just let those scumbags walk the street? Let other, more conscientious officers drive defensively into action without him? So he commandeers a cab. Its driver? The sassiest Academy Award nominee to ever appear in a movie where Victoria’s Secret models are the bank robbers.

Oh! Victoria’s Secret models play a gang of professional bank robbers.

It’s going to be huge. Catwoman huge.

You really… I wish I could convey… the gifts of the English language have fled from me like a Latifah-driven cab with hydraulics and a retractable spoiler. I have never, and I am being utterly sincere, never seen anything like it in my life. I am convinced that, whatever the movie may be, the trailer is one of the most brilliantly crafted pranks in American history. I have been watching Saturday Night Live since I was in grade school, and they have never come close to a parody this good. Seeing it will improve the quality of your life. Go now. Go and watch the trailer for Taxi, this gift from outside of space and time. It gives birth to joy. Pay special attention to the voiceover narration. (“Officer Washburn… is having a bad day.”)

As I look back on the year and struggle desperately to remember what I did with it, one of the easiest ways for me to measure how much time has passed is by looking at a list of the movies that I saw. I find this is also a good way to gauge how the year went, since moviegoing has typically been such a huge part of my social life over the years. The movies are like some kind of electromagnetic force shaping everything around them. How often I went, whether I saw the movie alone on a Sunday afternoon or on a Friday with friends, where I ate that night… I have an above-average command of those facts and their implications, but the movies themselves are the organizer and the trigger.

So what have I learned looking back at the movies of 2003?… Before I looked at the list, I’d have told you that I spent all year getting dragged to crap, but I see now that that’s not true. Now I see that I actually just got dragged to two or three of the worst movies I’ve ever seen and then never went to the movies again. Like a lab rat shocked too many times by the pellet dispenser. As a result, there were a number of my friends who I didn’t see a whole lot of as the days grew shorter. On the plus side, when I look at the feculent dreck I did not end up seeing that I was sure would somehow snare me (Cat in the Hat was a close call) it looks like I put my foot down and trusted my own judgement a lot more this year.

The fact that I ended up seeing over 50 movies does not mean that I actually saw a movie a week, which would not have been unusual in years past. All it really means is that I met a girl who shares her Netflix with me.

I missed out on as many good movies as I saw this year. That’s a symptom of spending much of the year looking for work and feeling guilty about spending money while not feeling that guilty about sneaking into School of Rock. (et al.) It’s also a symptom of a group of friends who sneak the art films on quiet, reflective Tuesdays alone while clamoring to take everyone with them to see goddamn Underworld the very moment it comes out. But I have no one to blame but myself; 2003 as represented by movies was a year when the highs were okay, the lows were absolutely infuriating, and what could have been an excellent year was not taken full advantage of by me.

And now, the most important part of 12/31: the lists. I compiled these the way I do a lot of other things; I looked at the big picture, picked at the stuff I didn’t like, and whatever was left was determined to be okay. The lesser of two weevils, if you will. Therefore, I can with only a little shame present

1 the lukewarm de facto top 15 of the year
Alien: Director’s Cut
Bend It Like Beckham
Comedian
Elf
Finding Nemo
Gigantic
Kill Bill
Lost in La Mancha
Lost in Translation
Master and Commander
Pirates of the Caribbean
Rivers and tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time
School of Rock
Winged Migration
X2: X-Men United

1 i’m not sorry… i guess i could have been reading
25th Hour
28 Days Later
Bad Santa
Better Luck Tomorrow
Bruce Almighty
The Dancer Upstairs
Daredevil
Haunted Mansion
Hulk
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Mystic River
Phone Booth
Seabiscuit

1 got bored, left
Anger Management

1 pissed that i missed
American Splendor, Bubba Ho-Tep, Divine Intervention, Elephant, Ghosts of the Abyss, Intolerable Cruelty, A Mighty Wind, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Out of Time, Party Monster, Robin Hood, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Shattered Glass, Station Agent, Thirteen

1 pissed that i saw
Confidence, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Terminator 3, F***ing Matrix Reloaded

1 goddammit.
The Medallion, Underworld

1 are you sure that was this year?
Bend it Like Beckham, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Down With Love, Head of State, Identity, Old School

1 there’s still time! there’s still time!
Big Fish, Cold Mountain, House of Sand and Fog

1 rentals, actually
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, In the Bedroom, The Ladykillers, Kandahar, The Majestic, Max, The Ring, Russian Ark, Starwoids, Uncle Saddam

1 the shady oak award for longest viewing time per movie
A Simple Plan, rented in October, watched in three-minute intervals, and returned yesterday

1 thank sweet god, no: the neo awards for pointless bullets dodged by a filmgoer
2 Fast 2 Furious
Bad Boys II
Charlie’s Angels 2
Legally Blonde 2
Tomb Raider 2
Matrix 3: The Sleepmaker
American Wedding
Dreamcatcher
The Core
Gigli
Swimming Pool
Timeline
Cat in the Hat
Last Samurai

Number of movies seen: 51
Number of good/OK/painless movies: 35

Number of movies in top 10 that were actually several decades old: 1
Ratio of good movies missed to good movies seen: 1:1
Number of people I blame for this who are not me: >3
Number of discs on Netflix list as of 12/31/03: 139
Number viewed in 2003: 10
At current rate, Netflix list will be completed: May 2011

I would really, really, really like to take the time to do an exhaustive entry in which I review 2003 in a somewhat introspective and not-monosyllabic fashion. That time is not now, but hopefully in a couple of days.