Peter
Travers of Rolling Stone
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
Bridget Jones's
Diary is "A-List
all the way! Even men will laugh; they also might learn something!"
Wanna bet, Peter?
With a Friend
Like Harry is "One
of the most deliciously witty and wicked thrillers in ages! You're
in for a treat!"
Blow "will knock your eyes out!"
(Oh, shit I hope he isn't serious, that sunds painful) and "It
scorches the screen with a bravado all its own." This is
as opposed to those movie's still coasting on a Troll in Central
Park's bravado.
Someone Like
You is "A
funny, tart romance!" Peter is also quoted separately adding
"Ashley Judd shines. Hugh Jackman is funny and touching.
A distinct pleasure! Sweet magic!"
The Tailor of
Panama is "Hypnotic...
playing a villain becomes Brasnan. Geoffrey Rush gives a note-perfect
performance."
Seriously, does
Travers have some software that just sticks clichés together
for him? Hypnotic, magic, knock your eyes out?
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David Halberstam - Summer
of 49
Major
League Baseball
King
Kong vs. Godzilla
Maybe it's not for everyone, but I don't want to know anyone
who doesn't love to see King Kong wrestle an otopus and then
get drunk, watch Japanese people in black-face pretending they
are black natives, and finally see Godzilla and King Kong duke
it out in the ocean. A fucking masterpiec, half-dubbed and half
not.
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©2001 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
Josie and the Suckysucks
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Filthy says:
"A bigger insult to women than Charlie Sheen." |
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Ask the assholes who made Josie and the Pussycats why
they made it and I bet you'll feel like you stuck your head up
against the ass of a Texas Longhorn because the bullshit's gonna
flow hot and gooey. They'll say something about it being fun,
or great role models for girls, or other crap that just isn't
true. The real reason it was made is because co-directors Harry
Elfont and Deborah Kaplan are soulless, blindly ambitious cocksucking
bastards with their dicks in the peanut butter.
Hollywood ran out of new ideas about four years ago, and now
they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for old material to
retread. Is there anyone who has more than a vaguely fond memory
of the original cartoon and comic book? Just because something
is old doesn't mean it's a classic. In fact, the original Josie
and her little friends were an annoying, half-baked attempt to
exploit the popularity of Scooby Doo. They never even
achieved the quality of Scoob's dreadful Scrappy Doo years.
But in Hollywood, where executives are empty shells waiting
for MTV-programmed teenagers to tell them what to do, Josie is
a commodity. The right hipsters told the imagination-free grassfuckers
in charge that stupid girls with guitars were hot, and Josie
and the Pussycats was dug out of the trash heap. Only after
Hollywood decided to make this movie did Elfont and Kaplan bother
coming up with a story. And they did the bare minimum, the cinematic
equivalent of responding to a homework assignment to write a
five page book report by delivering one that is exactly five
pages long thanks to a large font and the liberal use of "very"
and "really." Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps this movie
is the culmination of Elfont's and Kaplan's lifelong dreams,
but I hope not. I would like to think they aren't retarded, lonely
shut-ins.
You guys know me and know I love people and want to think
the best of them. So I believe Elfont and Kaplan are just two
more L.A. ass-sucks more concerned with their fucking careers
than the millions of people they dump this shit on. Right now,
Elfont and Kaplan are sitting in their cushy homes, far more
worried about how it does at the box office than whether anyone
liked it. Fuck them.
Josie and the Pussycats are three dim girls who dream
of being rock stars, not really for the music so much as the
wealth and trappings. A sleazy record label signs them to a major
deal, they become stars, then discover that their music is being
loaded with subliminal messages to trick teenagers into buying
crap. What will they do? How will they stop this? Will they be
able to stop it while still wearing their designer clothes, and
holding all those products so the brand name prominently displayed?
I'm sure a lot will be made about how crass the product placement
is in this flaming bag of shit. It is ridiculous, but you see,
that's the way people in Hollywood are. They're fucking hypocrites
who will complain about others doing exactly what they do. They
will urge the rest of us to Free Tibet or Free Leonard Peltier
or stop commercialism or cure AIDS, al the while thinking that
all they need to do is mention it and they're activists.
At first, I thought the obnoxious product placement was a
joke, making fun of product placement by pushing it to the limits.
But then, the product placement becomes so tiresomely omnipresent
that it isn't funny. If it is a joke, Elfont and Kaplan are only
guilty of being so fucking lame they couldn't drop a joke when
it wasn't funny anymore. They're sort of like the fat, lonely
kid in school who makes you laugh once and then spends the rest
of the year desperately reminding you of that in hopes that you'll
come to his birthday party and stop making fun of him behind
his back. More likely, though, the product placement is not a
joke, and it's as funny as laughing at a kid acting retarded,
only to find out the kid really is retarded.
But the product placement isn't the most unbearable part of
the movie. The part that pissed me off is that these boring,
moronic broads are supposed to be some sort of heros. Really,
this is a porno with stupidity instead of fucking. Both porn
and this movie objectify women, but at least porn dialog is better,
and the action is more believable.
The Pussycats are women who talk a lot of shit about loving
rock and believing in their music, but they sell out to the first
guy (who hasn't heard their music) who promises them stardom.
These are girls who love Carson Daly and refer to themselves
as "punk rockers" when any self-respecting punk would
let that be said with action, not by having to tell people. They
are not even as interesting as the dopey self-proclaimed punk
rock teens who smoke cigarettes in Hoskinson Park, because at
least those girls talk about their venereal diseases.
I mean, the Pussycats are women so clueless and idiotic that
their actions do more to reinforce stereotypes of dingy women
than my boss Dipshit Suzanne does when she buys more Precious
Moments shit at Hallmark. These girls are insults to women, hated
by the people who created them, but conveniently stupid enough
to fit right into this oh-so-easy lowest-common-denominator crapfest.
Hell, my retard cousin Larry showed more smarts than these boneheads
when he pooped his pants at the Country Buffet last week.
Add to this that Rachel Leigh Cook and Tara Reid are ugly dogs.
Cook is just a short, broad-faced toad, and Reid is so dumb she
can't even play a dumb character. Rosario Dawson is sort of hot-looking,
though, and she definitely has the best tits of the bunch. Not
that this movie would show tits. You see, Hollywood thinks that
it's a positive portrayal of a woman, no matter how insulting,
so long as they don't show skin. I say, give me a fucking genius
who loves to show her tits.
Josie and the Pussycats doesn't think its audience
will be smart enough to figure out anything. Every plot point
is spelled out, slowly, clearly and several times. Alan Cummings
and Parker Posey are so loud, screechy and over-the-top as villains
that they become unlikable not as characters but as actors. Do
they have no sense of self-respect? Can't they tell they're being
asked to act like jackasses? (Cook, Reid and Dawson probably
can't because I get the impression they are as dumb as the movie
suggests.) Had Cummings and Parker been given something clever
to do or some dialog that wasn't a fat ham-sandwich of "bad
guy" clichés, it might have been bearable. In Josie,
however, they're not as subtle or expressive as the Wicked Witch
in the Denver Puppet Theater's production of Hansel and Gretel.
Finally, the movie is chock-a-block with montages. These are
the cheapest, most-overused and laziest devices in the movies.
It's Elfont and Kaplan screaming "Look how much fun this
is! Maybe you can't feel it, but look, this is really fun!"
And the montages keep saying it until you suspect Elfont and
Kaplan are trying to convince themselves, not us.
One finger for Josie and the Pussycats. When will Hollywood
learn that volume and antics don't make up for a lack of imagination?
A pile of shit is still a pile of shit, no matter how quickly
it's paced.
Oh, regarding my script "a Hell of a Lot Better than
Tomcats." I am on page 70. It's gonna take an extra week
to finish. It's already better than Tomcats but it's not
done. I got sick and that slowed me down. Plus, the baseball
season started.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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