Quote
Whore Hall of Famer Jim Ferguson
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
Along Came a
Spider is "This
year's best suspense-thriller. Thought provoking suspense at
its best. You won't want it to end."
In Crocodile
Dundee in Los Angeles "he's back and the crocodile man
takes on the LA sharks! Paul hogan has a few lessons for LA bad
guys!"
For Driven:
"Experience the Thrill Ride!"
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Graham Greene - Our
Man in Havana
Hot Snakes - Automatic
Midnight
Slacker It's a terrific look at how much fun
it can be to have no direction, provided there are plenty of
distractions. It's got no plot, but it has plenty of direction
as the camera travels from vignette to vignette, fron ne'er-do-well
to loser to dereamer to schemer. It's gonna make people out of
college wish they were back where there was so much shit to do
it was impossible to be bored.
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©2001 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
The Low Down
and
The Tailor of Panama
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Filthy says:
"Boredom or apathy, take your pick." |
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For those for you hoping to see a Freddy Got Fingered
review, forget it. I'm no psychologist, but it seems to me that
the best thing to do with someone like Tom Green--who tries so
hard to get attention--is to ignore him. Otherwise, he's just
more desperate the next time.
Sometimes I wake up at noon and it's dark outside, snowing
in April, and I don't want to get out of bed. For the first few
minutes, when I can hear Scooter tearing up Mrs. Filthy's fancy
quilted pillow in the living room, I figure the world isn't going
to be any worse off if I just stay in bed. If I don't get up,
some other asshole can un-alphabetize the new Steven Seagal shelf
at First American Video, some other low-wage idiot can rewind
"Chariots of Anal Action" (by the way, porn renters
never are kind enough to rewind). Dipshit Suzanne can threaten
to fire someone else for having alcohol on his breath, and the
neighbor kids can point at someone else's apartment and say "that
weird guy lives there."
On these days, I don't want to be dead and I don't feel depressed.
I'm just bored, and I wish something interesting would happen
to me. I wish that while I lie there in bed, some fucker will
break in and try to rob me, but I'll wrestle the gun away from
him without even getting out of bed and become a town hero. Or,
a car will drive right through my wall and the newspaper will
come and take pictures and quote me saying I was just sleeping
when "Wham!" Anything to break the monotony.
But that shit doesn't happen, and if I fake being sick to
skip again Dipshit Suzanne will can my ass. So, on those days,
I go to work and count off the minutes, waiting for work to be
over so I can go home and drink Schlitz until I lose track of
the minutes, and then pass out and time will pass without me
counting off the minutes. And I hope that the next day is the
day some jackass drives his car into the apartment.
The exceptions are the days I go to the movies. Yes, the movies
usually suck, but even when they do I am still in a theater,
in the dark, and I have paid someone to entertain me. It's the
closest thing I'll ever have to being rich fat cat, one of those
guys who can afford dwarves and strippers all the time. I can
sit back and wait, and if the movie sucks, I can be self-righteously
indignant. I paid those fuckers to take my mind off the clock
for a few hours, and they let me down. It gives me an opportunity
to blame someone else for my miserable, insignificant little
life. And it's easier to get pissed at the jerks in Hollywood
than my dogs, even though I have often tried to pay them to entertain
me. Honestly, as hilarious as it sounds, dogs running around
wearing Mrs. Filthy's knee-hi's and with dollar bills in their
collars is only funny for about a half-hour.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I wandered into the movies
this past Friday looking for entertainment but got my boredom
thrown back at me by a bunch of Limeys. The Low Down is
not really a story, it's what real critics call a "pastiche"
or a "set-piece." Of course, real critics are so fucking
smart they don't need a plot. The Low Down is sort of
the younger brother of Slacker who takes a lot of Zoloft.
Aidan Gillen is Frank, a man in his twenties with a menial
job and a menial existence. He knows it, but has no idea how
to break out of it. He spends his time bouncing aimlessly from
one diversion to the next, always trying to ignore the fact that
he's bored out of his fucking skull. He has a vague plan to move
out of his flat and buy his own place, but he's afraid to do
that. His broker agent is Kate Ashfield, a pretty fucking hot
freckled chick. She might have a fat ass, though (that's not
part of the plot, just my observation). Rather than buy a property,
he starts screwing Ashfield, even though he's not sure that's
such a great idea, either. And so it goes, as he muddles his
way through, keeping silent when faced with an argument until
his one friend, a slacker's slacker, has the balls to tell the
truth about their pointlessness. And just like a smart-mouth
at the Arvada Tavern, he gets the shit kicked out of him. These
people would rather bury the truth than face it because it's
too fucking frightening.
The movie's beauty is how natural it is. You get a very real
sense of ennui from these people, and it's not in what they say,
but what they don't say. When Hollywood attempts to tackle the
confusion of people in their 20s, we end up with Reality Bites,
a movie where every fucking character has to say every three
minutes "Oh, I'm so confused. Look at me, I am totally confused
and in my 20s." But The Low Down gets this point
across without beating us over the head. It's in a character's
eyes, the camera's movement, how he doesn't answer a question
when confronted, or how Gillen kicks a soccer ball around his
bedroom when Ashfield wants sex. It feels natural and lets you
get close enough to these people to feel what they feel. Rather
than root for these people, it's easy to identify and say "that's
how I feel too." But it doesn't make you feel better, just
not so alone.
The acting is excellent. Gillen is so fucking handsome and
charming that I sure as hell won't take Mrs. Filthy to see this.
Yet, he's also almost unlikable because he is so frozen in fear,
and so quick to blow up. His performance is just swell at portraying
the quiet man who keeps it all bottled inside until, sometimes,
he has to just blow his stack. And not in a constructive way.
It's sort of like how I got really pissed at the Arvada Tavern
because they always had peanuts but never Beer Nuts. I didn't
say anything, but you know, it just started to really bug me
and then I started getting really pissed, until the one day I
went in there and they still didn't have the fucking Beer Nuts
so I put my fist through the jukebox. It seemed like a really
smart move at the time, but looking back, it didn't solve the
problem. The Goddamn Tavern still doesn't have Beer Nuts.
But the movie is long. It's maybe 100 minutes, but it feels
like three hours, and the points it has to make could be made
as effectively a lot quicker. The length makes it feel self-indulgent,
like Thraves is really in love with this idea of people in their
20s who don't know what to do. Really, though, he's treading
well-worn ground. He's just doing it better than most. Of course,
if the movie were shorter, that would just have left me more
time to sit at home and wait to get sleepy. Three Fingers
for The Low Down.
I also saw The Tailor of Panama. Geoffrey Rush and
Pierce Brosnan are very good, if both unredeemable, and not in
a fun way. The problem is that I can't help but think of my favorite
Graham Greene novel, Our Man in Havana. Greene's novel
is about a vacuum salesman in Bautista's Cuba who the English
mistake for a spy. They pay him so much money for information
he can't refuse but make up crazy stuff to keep the cash coming.
And his lies eventually cause an international panic. The
Tailor of Panama is about a tailor (Rush) who, when offered
gobs of money, can't resist making up lies for the English government.
His lies, of course, eventually cause an international panic.
The movie is funny in that it shows that spies have to make up
shit now that the Cold War's over. It's not very original, though,
and it's sterile and unconvincing. Ultimately, we're supposed
to root for Rush, but it's hard to because he's a liar and he's
sold out his friends, only to get a spine far too late. Besides,
the whole thing was Greene's idea. Three fingers for this
one too.
Fuck, I wish it was bedtime.
Oh, yeah, the script. A draft is done. Now it's all about
the editing. I need to add more slutty sex scenes and remove
the musical numbers. And no, you can't read it. Not yet.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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