Sara Edwards
of NBC-Boston
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
In All the Pretty
Horses "Matt Damon delivers the best performance of
his career. Oscar should shine on him!"
Miss Congeniality
is "My
Fair Lady meets Lethal Weapon!"
About The Grinch:
"Even a Grinch knows this one is good!"
In 102 Dalmations
"Glen Close is a marvel and will surely earn a Golden
Globe nomination."
Holy
shit, what self-respecting critic refers to the worthless golden
Globes?
|
©2000 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
|
|
This week:
Traffic
|
Filthy says:
"I go to the movies to ignore sermons, not get them." |
 |
Time
to vote - The Reader's Choice Survey is now open!
I've got a question for you guys: Does anyone know about something
called Tantric Sex? I read about it and they say people can have
sex for like twelve hours straight and have orgasms the way monkeys
have bananas, but I can't find any information about how it works.
I doubt the shit is true because even Lacey Titts lasted only
eight hours in Gang-bang 2000, and she's world famous
for the endurance of her privates. Still, I am curious.
Mrs. Filthy isn't. She says she doesn't have time for marathon
sex after working all day and picking up after me. So maybe I'm
not interested in Tantric Sex so much as Tantric Masturbation.
I can think of worse way to spend my days than with twelve-hour
jackoff sessions. As it is, I'm shot five minutes after waking
up and then spend half the day in a self-loathing stupor. If
you know anything about Tantric Pud-pulling, e-mail me.
Tantra has nothing to do with Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's
latest flick that is getting a lot of hype. I'm not really
sure why. It's a frequently good movie, eventually sinking under
too much preaching and too many government statistics. What's
that? We can't win the drug war? Stop the presses!
Traffic weaves four stories about the trafficking of
drugs between the U.S. and Mexico. Benicio del Toro is a moral
man weary of working for the "entrepeneurial" Mexican
police. Pregnant and formerly-hot Catherine Zeta Jones is the
wife of a rich-fuck drug importer (Steven Bauer he looks
a hell of a lot like Anthony Robbins) whose fucking sick yuppie
La Jolla life is disrupted when her husband is arrested. The
wonderful Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle are two DEA agents protecting
ratfink Miguel Ferrer, who tattled on Jones's husband, Steven
Bauer. Michael Douglas (skanky old husband and impregnator of
the formerly hot Ms. Jones) is the newly-appointed U.S. drug
czar and he naively thinks he can win the war even while his
own daughter sinks into a heroin haze.
Del Toro learns that his Mexican boss is joining forces with
Douglas to stop the Tijuana drug cartel, but his boss isn't doing
it to win the war. He's doing it to help another cartel he's
in the pocket of. In the U.S., the Tijuana drugs go through Ferrer,
who works for Bauer, and Guzman and Cheadle try to keep him from
getting killed before he can testify. Jones goes from being completely
unaware of her husband's business to ruthlessly running it in
an effort to maintain her swank-uluxe lifestyle. To save her
husband, she schemes to have Ferrer killed.
Soderbergh is a fucking master, no doubt about it. Early in
2000 he got Julia Roberts into slutty push-up bras. Now, he manipulates
Steven Gaghan's script like they were two double-Ds and pushes
them up almost as attractively. This is his movie.
He keeps things moving nicely for two-and-a-half hours. He
distinguishes each story, both in tone and photography, so you
never wonder which story you're in or where you are. Best of
all, he doesn't fall into Hollywood's typical trap of neatly
wrapping up the stories with a bow. While they intersect, there
is no urgency to get the characters all in one place where they
hug and congratulate each other, and there is not one solution
to fit all.
Soderbergh also does an amazing job of humanizing some of
the stories. Del Toro is fucking great. He fills out the worn-out
police officer who has to rediscover his self-respect, and he
shows us a much more human Mexican than Hollywood usually sees
them as, which is as the people who missed a spot on their BMWs
at the car wash.
Guzman is one of my favorite character actors. He's funny
and angry, and he smartly reels off his lines. He and Cheadle
work well together in the most interesting, human and suspenseful
storyline, the best of the bunch. Ferrer is a great actor, too,
always more than eager to act like a dick. He's a modern-day
deadpan Jack Webb, talking fast, furious and always certain that
he's right.
The movie gets shitty, though, whenever Douglas is on screen.
This is partly because he's sucks ass because he's so wound-up
and one-note. Mostly, though, it's because his story is the only
one that isn't human. Whenever he's acting as the drug czar,
we see a bunch of talking heads spouting facts and figures. Orrin
Hatch and a bunch of fucking politicians I don't want to pay
to see show up to plug their drug agendas. And James Brolin -
his wife broad eats all the Vienna Sausages at the Filthy Awards
every year - plays the exiting drug czar. The drug czar story
is so obviously a setup, it's a phony and easy way to beat the
point home. And the only people who will disagree with Soderbergh
are the same people that won't listen anyway. Well, fuck, why
should they since they came to be entertained, not lectured?
Douglas's home life is equally weak. His daughter, despite
being a straight A student in some fancy-ass school, is a drug
addict who likes smoking heroin more than a drag-queen nympho
likes smoking dick. It's all SO IRONIC that it goes beyond
believable and enters the world of forced. It's a cheap device,
obvious and bludgeoned beyond any point of subtlety. It gets
worse when we see Douglas swilling scotch and waters, only to
have the irony of that explained to us too. Jesus, Soderbergh,
we're not all that stupid.
In his effort to differentiate the stories, Soderbergh uses
blue filters for the East Coast scenes, a dirty yellow filter
that looks like someone pissed all over Mexico, and there is
almost no filter for the sunny California shots. It works well
to show us where we are early in the story, but Soderbergh uses
them all the way through and it grows annoying and gimmicky.
He could have let up a bit once we got the idea, maybe let a
little color into Mexico and a little less blue into D.C.
Three Fingers for Traffic, probably as good
a movie as we'll ever get about drug trafficking. It's a hell
of a lot better than Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke, but
also a lot more preachy and with less nudity.
And
don't forget to vote - The Reader's Choice Survey is now open!
Want
to tell Filthy something?
|