Newcomer Sandie Newton from CBS 11 in Texas:
Hey Whore, how's
the whoring? According to this week's Quote Whore:
In Lucky Numbers
"Travolta is absolutely irresistible."
In Remember
the Titans "Denzel Washington delivers another powerhouse
performance."
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©2000 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
The Legend of Bagger
Vance and Charlie's
Angels
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Bagger Vance duffs ass. |
Your assignment, Angels, is to
give Filthy a boner. |
It's a double feature this week, kids. Why? Because your pal
Filthy still doesn't have a fucking job and I got a little scared
about the pissing blood thing so I stopped drinking the beer.
All I have to do all day is chase my dogs with a wheelbarrow.
Since it's been raining, I can't even chase the damn dogs. So,
I'm stuck paying for one movie and sneaking into a bunch. This
week, the theme is Angels. Angels on the golf course,
and angels who I wish would rub their tits all over me.
Do you like those big, glossy coffee table books about golf?
You know, the ones that have big pictures of lawns and sandtraps
and shit? Can you sit for hours staring at one of those? If so,
you'll love The Legend of Bagger Vance, because it's the
closest Hollywood has come to recreating the feeling of sitting
on your ass looking at pictures of golf courses. One year from
now, a Bagger Vance DVD will be the perfect gift for that
boring jerk whose only characteristic is his moronic passion
for golf. You know, that boring asshole at work who "loves
golf" and refers to his wife as a "golf widow,"
and who loves those fucking coffee table books, golf joke books
and golf on TV.
I was bored to fucking tears. Bagger Vance is the story
of golf hero. Rannulph Junuh played by Matt Damon, who goes to
World War I, sees his fellow soldiers get ripped to shit, then
returns to Georgia and hits the bottle. A drippy southern belle
played by Charlize Theron was his old lover, and now she's trying
to save her father's world-class golf course by staging a tournament
of the greatest golfers. For some reason, Junuh is dug up, ten
years since his last golf game. He's drunk and has "lost
his swing." That is, until Will Smith's Bagger Vance comes
along. He's a Steppin' Fetchit angel who appears from thin air,
gives Damon a bunch of new-agey bullshit advice that would never
work in real life, then vanishes. Damon is losing the tournament
until he falls for the new age shit. Guess what happens. Damon
comes back from twelve strokes down! What a fucking surprise.
What sinks this story is that there is no tension, no drama,
no character growth. It's all extremely serious and I think it's
supposed to be an "important" (meaning Academy Award)
movie, but the story's too lame and simplistic to give a fuck's
hootenanny for. The people are cutesy southern caricatures who
can't just say "yes" or "no." They always
say "You make me melt like butter on a hot muffin"
and "He was whupped more than a possum in a sack" and
"Her tits sag like two sacks of wet cornmeal" (okay,
that last one's not in the movie, but you get the idea). It's
shit people who love browsing in Hallmark card shops will find
charming, but it's nothing people really say, or do, or think.
Damon is a drunk when we first meet him. We're supposed to
believe he's drowned the last ten years in heavy booze. Yet,
when the golf tournament begins, he's suddenly a casual drinker
who has no trouble with the bottle. Smith's Bagger is
a corny angel, all full of "aw, shucks" smiles and
that horseshit clichés like "see the field"
and "a man's grip on his club is like his grip on the world."
How the fuck does that shit make someone hit a ball straight?
How does Vance make a boozehound into a champ in like three days
just by saying corny crap?
There is not a single moment of tension with Smith, and he's
never more developed than a magic angel in a Disney movie starring
Steve Guttenberg. Damon and Theron are supposed to have a past,
ten years ago, but neither has aged in that time. And whatever
was wrong between them is resolved with almost no conflict. Just,
presto-changeo! Makeout session.
Similarly, Damon's war-scarred hero is cured by four rounds
of golf, just because a dopey angel was jabbering at him. It's
all too pat. Redford tries to set up big problems, but he's too
in love with putts to spend any time making their resolutions
believable.
I guess director Robert Redford wanted to get more shots of
the golf course in. Good God, more than half of this movie is
pictures of the Goddamn golf course. At least it has more personality
than Theron. Sweet-Jesus-out-poaching, is she a bad actress.
Her southern accent is phonier than Candy Bottoms' tits, and
her face registers almost a complete blank. Is she pretty? Maybe,
but there's so little going on, and so little charisma, that
she's like a black hole on the screen.
Two Fingers for Bagger Vance, a deadly serious
movie with nothing between it's ears about a boring hobby and
angels who care about it.
Charlie's Angels, on the other hand, is a flick that
mostly doesn't take itself seriously, and that's the best thing
about it. The flick sets out to entertain, not meditate or be
fucking profound or preachy. It's so insistent about being stupid
that I felt dumber just for having enjoyed it. That's okay, though,
because I feel pretty fucking dumb most of the time anyway. And,
I didn't feel as dumb after seeing this as I did the time I ran
over my leg with the lawnmower, just because I was curious.
Had Robert Redford made Charlie's Angels it would have
ended up a ponderous contemplation on Charlie and the angel who
carries his golf bag. In the hands of Director McG (stupid name
there, fella), it's tits and ass, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle. Hooray
for jiggle!
Just like in the tits and ass TV show, Charlie is an unseen
millionaire who sends three chicks out to fight crime with the
help of his assistant Bosley (Bill Murray). Drew Barrymore (not
too hot), Cameron Diaz (hot) and Lucy Liu (sort of hot) are the
Angels. They are hired by a computer programmer to see if a rival
stole his software, and they are sucked into a world of double-agents
and murder.
The movie's best when it's just plain stupid, like when Murray
dresses up like a tacky millionaire and escorts the Angels to
a fancy party. Some of the action sequences are pretty damn good,
too, like a Formula race car chase on surface streets and Liu
avoiding a hailstorm of bullets by clinging to the ceiling of
an Airstream trailer. The girls manage to look pretty hot most
of the time, frequently having to change skimpy costumes. And,
Drew Barrymore is naked for about one second, in the background.
This, I'm sure, will increase sales of the DVD to horny teenagers
who know how to pause the frame. The movie's pace is fast, and
at 90 minutes or so, it's the right length.
There are a few good gags, like that these high-tech girls
still use that stupid white box to communication with Charlie.
Crispin Glover's turn as a hair-fetishing villain who seems really
pissed off is a fine return to Glover's creepy form. And I doubt
I could get sick of Lucy Liu flipping that nice black hair in
slow-motion.
The movie gets real sucky, though, when Tom Greene is on screen.
I guess he's Barrymore's boyfriend, so he gets to be in the movie.
But he's whiny and about as funny as a dose of the Clap (which
is about as funny as having your eyeballs scratched out with
paperclips). Aren't his fifteen minutes up yet? Murray isn't
given nearly enough to do. He has a few funny moments, like when
he tells a bird what a squirrel told him, but overall, the barrage
of writers don't give him enough to do.
And romance is like an anchor that drags the whole thing to
a halt. As shallow as the story is, it bothers to make a passing
effort at giving the girls love lives. They sucked. They're stilted,
slow and corny. What's supposed to be funny, like Diaz at the
Soul Train show, ends up overlong and does nothing to drive the
plot. It's just a bad Saturday Night Live sketch.
The plot is even less there than the Angels clothes. Personally,
I would have voted for them to drop both plot and undies and
have the girls kiss each other the whole time. As it is, though,
the plot is a tiresome little double-twist about software. Yeah,
software is real exciting shit.
The movie's way too expensive. The makers made a real effort
to give us a big-budget blockbuster, when all we needed was the
chicks in bikinis and a lot of silly running around. The problem
with the explosions and helicopters is that it detracts from
the girls. It turns their story into a plain old action movie.
More cheese and skin, next time. Oh yeah, and don't just say
the girls are brilliant, make 'em that way. So smart that a plot
this lame would be solved in ten minutes.
Finally, am I the only person bored to death by these phony
martial arts scene where people fly through the air? Jesus, is
it the only way the thieves in Hollywood can think to spice up
a fight scene? "Let's steal that Matrix shit! The kids sure
seemed to like it." Hell, McG even throws in a bullet in
slow motion, just to make sure we know he's stealing.
Three Fingers for Charlie's Angels. That's one finger
for each of you ladies. Just tell me where you want me to stick
them.
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