LYT's Weblog: August 2006 Archives

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August 31, 2006

Speaking of movies opening this weekend...

Did you know there's a new MIKE JUDGE movie opening tomorrow?

Yes, the director of OFFICE SPACE and creator of both Beavis and Hank Hill has a new movie called IDIOCRACY, opening without the benefit of any trailers or ads, as far as I can tell, and it certainly didn't screen for review.

Does this mean it sucks, huh huh? Recall that OFFICE SPACE didn't do so well theatrically either, review-wise or box office-wise.

I trust Mike Judge based on his track record. The movie opens at the Arclight in Hollywood; check your local listings if you live somewhere else.

Posted by LYT at 2:26 PM | Comments (3)

This Argument Is Not Yet Coherent

Kirby Dick's agitprop documentary THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED opens this week in L.A. It's a worthwhile movie to see, as he examines the double-standards, secrecy, and hypocrisy surrounding the Motion Picture Association of America, which assigns ratings to movies. When he can't get the info he needs, he hires a P.I. to track down the MPAA members.

I agree with him that the board needs objective standards and a more transparent process -- the whole thing is quite arbitrary at times.

But here's what I don't agree with:

Dick, and others on camera, mention that the MPAA was formed as a way of heading off the specter of government censorship ("Don't you folks in Washington worry! We'll regulate ourselves! We promise!"), and then say that government regulation would be better, because it would have to be transparent and accountable.

Sorry, but that just ain't so. Submitted for your consideration: The FCC.

The Federal Communications Commission regulates what you can and cannot hear on network TV and radio, and fines offenders heftily. The main problem with it is that it's primarily reactive in nature. You can't go to the FCC and say, "Hey, what cuts do I need to make for this to be network safe?" They will respond, as the MPAA often does, "We can't tell you that. That would be censorship, and we're not censors."

So you make your best judgment call. But there was an incident a few years ago when a radio station got fined for playing a radio-edit of an Eminem song. This radio version was being played all over the country, but one person complained to one station, and that station got fined.

One of the networks aired SAVING PRIVATE RYAN uncut -- I think it was NBC -- and some local affiliates wouldn't show it. Why? Because they asked the FCC if it was safe to do so without being fiend, and the FCC said, "We can't tell you. We're not censors."

Now factor in that 99% of the complaints the FCC got last year over network TV shows came from right-wing nutjob L. Brent Bozell (who used to advocate nuking Russia) and his "Christian" PTC organization.

Government would be no better than the MPAA. The answer is to fix the MPAA. Mend it, don't end it.

Posted by LYT at 2:04 PM | Comments (2)

The Seipp hits the fan

The American Cinema Foundation is holding a roast of Cathy Seipp on Sunday, September 10th, 4:00pm
at the Figueroa Hotel downtown (easily reachable by subway)

I will be one of the featured roasters. I'm not at liberty to say any more than that.

But there'll be some free food. Admission is free too. Parking is $8, but on Sunday you'd be a fool not to look for free and easy street parking downtown.

RSVP by September 5th to
theadvicegoddess(at)aol(dot)com

Posted by LYT at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

Happy Birthday, times 3

To my mother, my uncle Mike, and my aunt Yvonne. Survivors, one and all.

Posted by LYT at 2:04 AM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2006

Ready, Steady...Go!

There are, as far as I can tell, two basic types of directors who like to star in their own movies.

Type A is the Edward Burns/Zach Braff type, casting themselves as the romantic lead, usually opposite some universally adored beauty like Jennifer Aniston or Natalie Portman. The characters they play may be referred to as dorks, but the idea is that they're really an ideal man, or as close as it gets. Major ego stroking can be at work.

Type B we'll call the Harmony Korine type, who like nothing better than to put themselves in a role that requires making out with gay midgets, getting radical haircuts, running around naked, doing actual drugs on camera, or anything else you'd have trouble asking an actor-for-hire to do. There can be a sort of narcissism to this, too, a kind of "Look at me! I'm craaaaaazy!" thing.

Vincent Gallo is a bit of both types at once. MOTEL, GLIMPSE codirector and BIG WEIRD NORMAL director Zach Passero has now done one of each, though I think he's more naturally a Type A.

Justin Stone is definitely Type B. MOTEL, GLIMPSE, which he codirects with Zach, is the second film in which I've seen him vomiting into a toilet. Both he and Zach also get haircuts and do nude scenes (there are no naked chicks, sadly, although Lindsay Stone does appear in a small bathing suit). Someone actually refers to Justin's character as "getting fat," which is as absurd as when the same is said of Aaron Eckhart in CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN.

For better or worse, MOTEL, GLIMPSE really is like a direct look into Justin's psyche, and Zach's to a lesser extent. But is it any good? I think so.

Justin and Zach play Missouri-raised brothers Ready and Lee. Lee is returning home after going to art school in California. He seems dazed and subdued, and initially I thought maybe Zach was miscast, but there's a very definite reason he is the way he is -- it's almost laughable when it's revealed -- but it works.

Ready has remained a fuck-up. He's the smart guy in a small town with no outlet for his mind, so he spends his days doing yardwork and his nights getting drunk or stoned. He hopes that Lee's renewed presence will help lift him higher to achieve some mutual goals, while everyone else realizes that it's far more likely Ready will drag Lee down.

Just as Lee appears to be finding some genuine redemption via his lovely once-and-possibly-future flame Gwen (Lindsay Stone), Ready gets them involved in a big-money drug deal for a psycho named Stuze (Patric Carroll), whose girlfriend is secretly banging Ready on the side. It's the One Last Deal that can give them the money they need to make a new life, but you know how those One Last Deals tend to go in the movies. Even indie movies.

A brief tangent: The casting of both Stone siblings as unrelated characters is odd, especially with Zach playing Justin's bro. There's a strong Stone family resemblance -- it's as if John Cusack and Jeremy Piven played brothers, and Joan Cusack showed up as the completely unrelated love interest for Piven. You can't fault the performances, but there's just something about the visual.

I do love Lee's line to Gwen, though: "I'm sorry I'm so weird."

Okay, back to plot: act 2 sees Ready and Lee drive out to Los Angeles to make the deal, with things getting stranger and crazier along the way, and sanity rapidly fracturing after they make the very ill-advised decision to try some of their own merchandise, a new designer drug that hasn't even hit the streets yet. Zach's fond of mixing animation with live action, and while he never gets quite as surreal here as in the dream sequence in MASTERS OF HORROR: SICK GIRL, his style definitely comes into play. There are one or two effects early in the story that look like cheap, in-camera effects (slo-mo on digital video is a risky thing), but then many others that are spot on, including a number of dream sequences for Ready. All the motel stuff that gives the movie its name is pitch-perfect -- a li'l Hunter Thompson, a Li'l David Lynch.

I have some minor reservations about the ending -- No specific spoilers here -- but I don't think it's necessary to cut back to what the characters in Missouri are doing. In fact, I think it's detrimental, a bit like if APOCALYPSE NOW had interspersed scenes of Martin Sheen's family back in the U.S. with him escaping Kurtz's camp. I know the screenwriting rule is to show how every character ended up, but once we're plunged into nightmare world we don't wanna be yanked back into the sun. I don't, anyway.

What's most interesting about the movie is how it ends up so totally different from how it starts, and this may be in part due to having different camera operators for different locales. In particular, some of Chris Sivertson's cinematography clearly seems like a warm-up run to THE LOST.

It's funny how our circle of friends sometimes seem to make films on a kind of continuum. It isn't hard to draw a straight line from THE BIG WEIRD NORMAL to MOTEL GLIMPSE to THE LOST to MAY. All different stops along the same highway. I look forward to setting up shop there myself one day.

Justin proves he can carry a movie, which never should have been in any doubt. I don't know exactly how directorial duties were split, though act 1 and act 3 could easily have been different directors. What at first seems like a slow-paced romantic indie a la David Gordon Green gets perilously close to LOST HIGHWAY territory before all is said and done. The pacing does feel slow at times, but the payoff is worth it.

And if you're one of those that hates L.A. and idealizes your hometown, this may be the movie for you, though it also implies that everywhere can be hell and hostile in tis own unique way, and in the end the only decision might be whether you like your own personal torment coming at you in imaginative new ways, or via the same old crappy channels you're used to.

Wherever you are, though, if someone offers you One Last Job, for the love of Christ don't take it, unless you're name's Bruce Willis or something. It's much more fun to just watch Ready and Lee fuck shit up.

Posted by LYT at 11:11 PM | Comments (9)

August 28, 2006

I finally saw LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE today...

It's a pretty decent rip-off of NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION. Same story beats and everything. Not as funny or incisive as the original -- it doesn't really say much about the generation gap, for example -- but way better than any of the lackluster sequels.

And the bit with the car horn that kept going off -- everyone else in the theater seemed to find it hilarious, but I didn't. Probably because I live in a neighborhood where every single car horn appears to have been similarly "afflicted."

P.S. making fun of motivational speakers is getting to be like making fun of Courtney Love. It's very easy, and almost everybody has already thought of every joke you can possibly make. Henry Rollins is funny as a motivational speaker in the upcoming horror flick FEAST, but only because he's Henry Rollins and it's kind of an ironic counterpoint to his real persona. Greg Kinnear would have been just as good in this movie if he'd had a different profession.

Overall verdict: A funny movie, but maybe you should wait for DVD and then rent VACATION instead. A week or so later, when you think you might want to see a sequel, skip EUROPEAN/CHRISTMAS/VEGAS whatever and get SUNSHINE.

Posted by LYT at 7:54 PM | Comments (13)

Early Mornings

They're uncivilized. But that's working for a living for you.

Saturday a.m. I had to get up early because people who promote family movies somehow have convinced themselves that getting critics to set their alarms and drive across town on the weekend will somehow result in better reviews. Don't ask me how the conclusion is reached. This particular family film was a new LASSIE movie.

I know what you're thinking, because everyone responds the same way, so let's all react in unison:

There's a new LASSIE move?

Yes, and it stars Peter O'Toole.

Isn't Peter O'Toole dead?

No. Remember when they tried to give him a lifetime achievement award around the time of TROY and he refused to take it because he wasn't done with achieving stuff yet? That's still the deal.

Saturday I actually did some film work. Believe it or not, I'm getting paid to direct a short movie. It's less than I make for a review, but it's been fun to do it, except at one location that was so imbued with essence of cat that it was toxic to me, and the subsequent Benadryl pill nearly made me pass out but didn't stop the sneezing altogether. Somehow, over time, I've become less sensitive to Benadryl's medical effects but more sensitive to its sedative side-effects.

Anyway, I can't go into detail about the movie yet, but as paid work goes, it's good. More people should pay me to make movies.

Another early morning tomorrow, to see that street basketball movie CROSSOVER. Why it's showing in the a.m., I do not know.

Posted by LYT at 6:07 PM | Comments (4)

Plugging Away

Julia Carpenter writes:

ROYAL GRAFF IS COMING SEPTEMBER 1st-10th!
OPENING RECEPTION SEPT. 1st AT 7PM!

Get ready for a great art show and party!!!

Come out to my solo photography exhibit which features Los Angeles area Graffiti Art & Artists at Sea Level Records in Echo Park (1716 W. Sunset Blvd.)!!! Check out some of the work at www.juliacarpenter.com.

The opening reception on Friday Sept. 1st is shaping up to be a kick-ass night:

DJ SteelyJack will be spinning some old school rap, hip hop, punk and other great music!
Graff Artist Juice & his crew will have some fresh canvases on display!
Free Booze & Snacks!
The party starts at 7pm and will go until ??? (probably around 10 or 11pm)

Posted by LYT at 12:26 PM | Comments (1)

August 26, 2006

i feel like such a sell-out

I've been surfing the net looking at art sites, seeing all kinds of photos of women with bright fake colors in their hair, tattoos, rock-star fashion, and thinking, damn, they're flaunting that style, and I fuckin' gave in and cut my colors out?

That isn't the whole story, obviously. Photos are a moment in time -- who knows if the ladies did stay that way. And my reasons for the haircut are actually more to do with the heat and an upcoming mini-project of creativity than anything else. Whether it attracts more women or not is something I don't care too much about right now. That's how it is when the income is low; thoughts of romance turn to thoughts of employment.

I was at a party Friday night where several people who have active, good love lives said it was bullshit to think hair color hurt my chances. Hmm.

But then I was at a party today where people in "the biz" mentioned they could see me playing military-type roles. They'd never have said that before. Keeping people's perceptions of me from solidifying into any kind of typecasting is one of my main goals in every facet of my life, so this works, maybe.

But I still can't help but feel the freak flag should be flying ever higher.

Posted by LYT at 11:49 PM | Comments (13)

August 25, 2006

quick take on BEERFEST

right here

Posted by LYT at 5:11 AM | Comments (1)

August 24, 2006

Megatron from the upcoming TransFormers movie

What does everybody think?

Me, I'm surprised that so many people are getting all in a tizzy that the movie may not be faithful to a poorly animated cartoon that was designed to sell toys, and like most of its ilk really wasn't that well written, though as kids we dug it because it was about toys.

The toys weren't even all part of the same line in Japan. I just wanna see big robots change into other stuff. If the toy of this guy were made of diecast metal I'd be all over it (it won't be, but even in plastic it could be cool).

Posted by LYT at 4:55 PM | Comments (11)

Quick-take review

THE DOGWALKER. Scroll down the page till you see it.

Oddly enough, I first saw this movie five years ago. It was longer, and had some plot issues, I thought; but the new theatrical cut has fixed everything I had reservations about the first time.

Posted by LYT at 4:35 PM | Comments (1)

August 23, 2006

THE WOODS dvd cover

This must mean it really is coming out, almost three years to the day after it wrapped.

And what a tagline, huh? "Private school. Deadly lessons." Did someone get paid to think that up? I've seen better prototype posters for the movie -- like, ones that actually featured the movie's trademark ax -- and it's a bit weird, if you're gonna use big pictures of the cast to sell the cover, to have the names not correspond to the pictures, or in this case, to hit two out of three...Rachel Nichols is pretty obviously not Bruce Campbell. Good to see Lauren Birkell there, though, as her performance really is key to the movie and her character is effectively the second lead.

Some other sites are reporting that this will NOT be a bare-bones DVD as previously announced...I am waiting to hear confirmation of that from anyone directly involved. As I said before, if the suits have their shit together there are plenty of good extras out there that I've seen that COULD be used, but all involved have to agree to make it happen.

Posted by LYT at 3:32 PM | Comments (10)

August 21, 2006

So...

Is this what everybody wanted?

Posted by LYT at 1:22 AM | Comments (11)

August 19, 2006

Will SNAKES ON A PLANE be Oscar-nominated?

I'm serious.

"Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)" by Cobra Starship is far and away the Best Original Song I've heard in a movie all year.

But more likely one of the Jack Johnson songs from CURIOUS GEORGE will win.

What say you, readers?

Posted by LYT at 10:59 PM | Comments (8)

August 18, 2006

New cities announced for MAD COWGIRL!

Grand Illusion Cinema, Seattle - starts October 6th

Clinton St. Theater, Portland - starts October 6th. This means that those of you who didn't get to the festival -- which means you, S. Goldsmith and N. Rommelmann -- have a chance to make up for it.

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Austin (October - date to be announced soon). K.Ford and A. Bettis, bring out the crowds and help us represent! Hell, maybe I'll even come.

Facets Cinematheque, Chicago (October - date to be announced soon).

No Los Angeles date as yet, but we all want it to happen.

In related news, I've heard that several of my deleted scenes and characters will be making appearances on the DVD extras down the line, including the infamous nun scene and my world-famous Wally George impression. This will be a must-own DVD for any friends and fans of mine.

Posted by LYT at 4:33 PM | Comments (3)

That was quick

For Tim McGarry and others -- the LA Weekly moved fast and posted my short MATERIAL GIRLS review approximately mid-page here.

It'll also appear in next week's print edition.

Posted by LYT at 3:32 PM | Comments (1)

Serpents dans l'avion

As I waited for the 12:15 a.m. screening of SNAKES ON A PLANE, I saw the crowd emerge from the big 9pm premiere. I asked Jeff Wells how it was -- he said it was fun. Good sign -- Jeff generally isn't big on high-concept without emotional substance, so when he does like something silly, it's probably good. Then I saw AICN's Moriarty, who told me it was really, really silly. But fun.

And then I saw TNA wrestlers Samoa Joe and Christian. That was unexpected, but given that SNAKES producer Jeff Katz is a bigger wrestling fan than me (yes, it is possible -- he owns a high-end replica world championship belt with Ric Flair's name on it), it shouldn't have surprised me much.

Our screening got delayed by like 20 minutes, so the theater manager came in and gave us a pep talk. She sounded like Special Ed from "Crank Yankers" -- "Yay! We're going to see Snakes on a Plane! Yay!" -- but I don't think it was intentional.

Some guys in the row behind me brought a balloon pump and were making balloon snakes. Others had composed their own barbershop quartet-like song about the movie, and were singing it. The movie trailers were loudly dismissed: "No snakes, no plane. Fuck this movie!"

And so on to the movie itself. Interesting coincidence that I just wrote about DEVILMAN, because it shares a key characteristic with SNAKES -- inexcusably fake-looking CGI that you have to quickly learn to forgive if you're gonna roll with it. Remember how it looked bad in the trailer, and you figured, "Hell, they've got a few months to fix those CG snakes in post"? Nuh-uh.

Fortunately, there are real snakes in there too, for close-ups. Maybe even some animatronic ones. But as far as CG goes, you'd think there might have been some technological advancement since ANCONDA, a movie that came out back when J-Lo was merely Jennifer Lopez.

It shouldn't be a big issue, though, because if you're looking for realism you are truly in the wrong movie. It opens with surfing, and then this one stereotypical-looking handsome movie star guy is out drinking Red Bull and taking his motorbike off some sweet jumps, when he comes across a crime. Not just any crime, but an exposition-heavy crime. I wasn't taking notes, but the dialogue went something like, "Ha ha, I'm going to kill you now, Assistant District Attorney Tony! You should never have messed with me, because I'm crimelord Eddie Kim! Good thing there are no witnesses!" At which point our hapless witness guy decides to make a break for it by loudly gunning the engine on his bike.

Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) only gets one more scene, where he's doing some martial arts training which ought to pay off later but doesn't. Someone's questioning the logic of the whole snakes-on-a-plane plan and he says, "Do you think I didn't exhaust all others?" Well, uh, like, if you have plants within the ground crew who can sneak anything onboard, you could have just used a bomb, genius crimelord. Then Eddie disappears from the screen, and they talk about him later but he doesn't fight Sam Jackson or anything. It gives him a chance to get more snakes for the next movie.

Then there's the plane, which looks like fake CGI on the outside and cheap, overlit sets on the inside. David Koechner's the pilot, and he plays it like a rowdy buffoon. Julianna Margulies is the stewardess on her one last flight, and then there are a bunch of caricaturish potential victims -- a nervous guy, an asshole English guy, a big-shot rap star and his two bodyguards, a pair of kids, a token gay guy, a lustful couple, a dumb bimbo with an annoying little dog in her purse, and a few more. Fortunately, there are also all kinds of snakes: big ones, small ones, spitters, constrictors, but they're almsot all at least part CG, and they all see the world the same way: green-tinted Snake-O-Vision (yep, there's repeated use of the "snake cam").

Oh yeah: boobs, butts, and wieners get bitten. Huh huh.

David R. Ellis' directing skills aren't as evident here as they were in FINAL DESTINATION 2 (the best film in the FD series), but he has the same sense of humor, and he also has Sam Jackson, who elevates this above the direct-to-DVD level it might otherwise be. His acting is more subtle than some may notice; the build-up to that signature line is just as important as the line itself, and the way he gets just slightly more exasperated every time a new thing goes wrong is very well done. At the same time, Jackson is very much in danger of disappearing completely into caricature, blurring the line in people's minds between himself and the Dave Chappelle impersonation of him, in much the same way that, say Dana Carvey and George Bush Senior are inextricably intertwined in the memories of those who saw both back in the day. I fear that if and when Jackson decides to make an Oscar-bait film again, we'll be unable to see him as anything but the muthafuckin' snakes guy.

That said, why couldn't he have been this much fun in SHAFT? He even romances the white girl here, though he never gets to kiss her.

Big thumbs up also to Kenan Thompson, who takes what could have been an annoyingly stereotypical Ebonics-spouting token hipster, and imbues him with a combination of insecurity and arrogance that sells the dialogue in ways that I can't imagine, say, Nick Cannon doing.

Make no mistake, SNAKES ON A PLANE is basically a Sci-Fi channel movie original with better-than-usual actors and a slightly naughtier sense of humor. It never takes itself seriously, and neither should you. But I've always enjoyed and respected this kind of thing...so much the better that larger audiences seem to get the joke now too.

Punishment for the late night screening = having to get up early to see the first screening of the new Hilary/Haylie Duff movie. Hey, it's a living.

Posted by LYT at 3:16 AM | Comments (10)

August 17, 2006

DEVILMAN - THE MOVIE (Japan, 2004) review

(Note: This movie came out 2 years ago in Japan, and is unlikely to bow theatrically here. The review will contain SPOILERS, but if you're actively looking for this DVD you probably know them already -- we're talking spoilers on the level of "Harvey Dent turns into Two-Face when Batman fails to completely protect him from acid," i.e. stuff a comic fan would most likely already know. Also my DVD was quite glitchy so I missed a few short stretches.)

Most of those of us with at least one foot planted in the world of comic books, toys, and such, have a passing familiarity with Go Nagai's Devilman, a groundbreaking Japanese comic first adapted into anime in the '70s with numerous spin-offs since, including several toy lines, notably an elaborately sculpted line by Fewture Models, which popularized the "Build-A-Figure" concept recently adopted by Toy Biz. Glenn Danzig republished some of the more recent comics a few years back, and rob Zombie has a song about the character. In case you've somehow managed to avoid all this, he's a half-naked demon looking dude with wings sprouting from his head, and Crow-like facial markings that include an ultra-wide slit mouth.

A big-budget movie was inevitable, but not in Hollywood. A uniquely Japanese property deserves a uniquely Japanese treatment, and for better or worse, the final film is exactly that.

Judging by what I've read on the imdb message boards, the film isn't as dark as the original comics (which remain mostly unavailable here), and is cast with actors who aren't right for the roles (mostly Japanese pop stars, it seems). It sounds like this could be the BATMAN AND ROBIN of Japanese comic book movies.

I don't know much beyond the basics of the character -- he's a teenager who can transform into a demonic monster, but he maintains a human heart and protects people from demons -- but taking this movie strictly as its own thing, on its own terms, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It plays like a crossbreed of X-MEN and the campier GODZILLA sequels.

But here's a big upfront warning -- the CGI is not up to contemporary Hollywood standards. The monsters look cool, but they do not look real. You're going to have to accept this if you hope to have fun watching. It's also clear that the story is structured so as to avoid having to use big-budget CG sequences throughout, and much of the movie's second half could really have used more demons.

One could make the case that the not-quite-realistic CGI makes a point -- maybe the demons AREN'T real, but subjective manifestations of hysteria. The story, as it turns out, is really more about people's reactions to the demons than the demons themselves anyway. But such a metaphorical reading, I think, gives the film-makers more credit than they deserve, though it may make for a more interesting interpretation.

DEVILMAN begins with two boys, Akira Fudoh and Ryo Asuka, played here by identical twins (Hisato and Yusuke Izaki), distinguishable by their differing hair colors. Lifelong friends, they are now in high school, where Ryo is largely perceived as a delinquent and a troublemaker, capable of heinous violence if anyone dares harm his best friend Akira, who's more subdued, an orphan starting to have feelings for his adopted sister Miki (Ayana Sakai).

All hell literally starts to break loose when Ryo's father returns from the arctic, having unleashed a host of parasitic lifeforms called demons that need to possess human bodies to become whole. Infected by a giant sperm from Ryo's father's mutating body, Akira becomes Devilman, while Ryo, who had been previously infected, manifests himself as a highly homoerotic shining angel with six wings (fans of the toy line may recognize this manifestation as Satan, sculpted by Fewture with large breasts and a penis, though factory workers in China refused to sculpt the penis and the figure looks just like a plain old female; in the movie, there are no breasts, and Satan Ryo just looks metrosexual...oh, but it's kind of a spoiler to call him Satan, though as I said before, not a spoiler to anyone who knows anything about the character).

It's never clear exactly how Akira retains his human heart while everyone else possessed becomes full-on evil...well, except for this other chick later on, but it isn't explained in her case either. Just roll with it.

So Akira fights demons for a bit, most notably Jinmen, a giant mutant turtle with human souls embedded in his shell, and he gets called out by Selene, a female version of Devilman with bird features and feathery wings, who recognizes the demon spirit in him as that of her ex-lover, Amon. You kind of expect the movie to go somewhere with this, but no, after their first meeting Selene is never seen again. Also, the character is usually depicted topless, but not here, since this is a "PG-12" movie in Japan, which apparently allows for bloody scenes of mass-machine gunnings, heart-ripping, dismemberment, heads, impaled on stakes, and the severing of fingers with garden shears, but no hooters.

Then, about halfway through the movie, it starts turning into a big metaphor for the War on Terror. Governments start rounding up demons, or even anyone accused of being a demon (oddly enough, there should be no confusion, as we're told early on that a telltale sign of a demon is that it can't cry, but the government just totally ignores that knowledge), and throwing them into internment camps and/or killing them. Nations overrun by demons are subjected to nuclear attack. Mob violence rules. And all of it fits into Satan's master plan to make the world friendly for demons again, and this particular Satan seems curiously unopposed by any version of Jesus or God. Things get very dark at the end.

News from America is periodically relayed by an amusingly tongue-tied newscaster played by MMA fighter Bob Sapp, who's like an extra-wide version of a Star Trek Klingon. A sequence "live from Los Angeles" is particularly amusing. And Bob Sapp ultimately grows three heads.

It's an odd blend of camp and darkness -- there's a scene where a little boy goes home to his parents and catches very subtle signals that they've been demon-possessed, which wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie. There are "high schooler with newfound powers" bits straight out of the Spider-Man movies, with that same sense if exhiliration. Then the plot starts turning towards The End of Civilization As We Know It. And the demon battles are still no more real than Man-In-Suit Godzilla wars. So the tone is all over the place.

I would have liked more demon powers being used -- it seems like Akira could have done a better job of saving the world. But it seems like most of the big-budget was used on locations and crowds of extras, so they probably couldn't afford more monster fights. I doubt this is the last we'll see of Devilman onscreen, however.

I recommend it to anyone who likes crazy Japanese monster stuff. I'm not going to recommend it if you know the source material well; sounds like such people aren't enjoying it much. But go in knowing -- and wanting -- what you're going to get, and you might just have fun.

Posted by LYT at 4:51 PM | Comments (2)

Family Bidness

Check out a short documentary on my uncle Mike's restaurant in SW Virginia.

Then be sure to go eat there at some point in your life. You'll thank me.

Posted by LYT at 12:39 AM | Comments (2)

All I DON'T wanna do is zooma-zoom-zoom...

It didn't screen for critics, but just in case you're still on the fence, here's my take on ZOOM:

"Tim Allen, best known to kids as Tim the Toolman and Buzz Lightyear, would seem to be perfectly cast as Jasper in the movie adaptation, simply called Zoom. Except that he isn't. Jasper Jones doesn't appear in the movie at all, and his daughter Summer is not only relegated to the periphery, but is now a glamorous sixteen-year-old, played by 23-year-old bombshell Kate Mara. Allen plays the title character Captain Zoom, who in the book was a three-foot-tall alien with an elephantine proboscis. Here, he's a retired superhero who has lost his powers of super-speed, save in his little finger, which he uses to make fruit smoothies."

whole thing here

Posted by LYT at 12:02 AM | Comments (9)

August 16, 2006

Brief review: THE MATADOR, starring Pierce Brosnan

Mildly amusing character study, with an ending that makes it all worthwhile.

Posted by LYT at 12:52 AM | Comments (3)

August 15, 2006

Kidding Around

I finally saw Todd Solondz' PALINDROMES the other night. I had previously rented it and not gotten around to seieng it, and I remember when it came out, most of the reviews were not good.

I'm not sure what the reviewers were expecting. It's very much a Solondz film, if you like the sort of thing he generally does. It isn't as good as HAPPINESS, but I'm not sure he'll ever do better than that, as none of his films since have had that level of ambition or such a high-caliber level of talent across the board. HAPPINESS made me take note of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Dylan Baker; I can't say the same is true of any of Solondz' other films. Heather Matarazzo got a bit of a boost for a while from WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (my least favorite of Solondz' films, as it's merely painful rather than painfully amusing), but she really never seemed to have that much of a range.

PALINDROMES is divided up into several chapters, and in each chapter, the actress playing the lead character Aviva is different (though some of the actresses reoccur in later segments). It's an audacious move, and one without any precedent I'm familiar with (though there's almost always a precedent for everything if you look hard enough). And it works -- it captures the shifting identity of adolescence, where one day you feel like a glamorous adult, others like a scared child, others still like a grotesquely overweight misfit. From the age of 14 till I was about 21, every year I would think to myself, "Man, last year I didn't know what I was thinking. THIS is the real me."

Aviva is the cousin of WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE's Dawn Wiener, whom we find out early on has killed herself. Aviva, who occasionally goes by the pseudonym of Henrietta, makes it her goal not to be like her cousin, and imagines she'll find happiness as a mother. But when her parents make her get an abortion, she runs away, falling in with a group of kindly pro-life Christians who turn out to have a dark side when it comes to abortion doctors. This isn't CITIZEN RUTH, though, in which Alexander Payne had some fun sending up both sides of the abortion debate. The issue is very much on Aviva's mind, but it's also a real symbol of immaturity in all the characters who deal with it here. The real issue is how we treat our children -- the born again family almost seems to collect the unwanted, while Aviva's ostensibly more "enlightened" parents never take her seriously on the subject, and never deal with it in a respectful manner. And all Aviva wants is a baby as a prop for her own fulfillment, though she needs a responsible parent more. The lullaby on the soundtrack even seems to deliberately call ROSEMARY'S BABY to mind, which of course makes child-rearing seem even more ominous.

I'm not entirely sure what the significance of the title is -- various characters have names that are palindromes (Aviva, Otto, Bob), but even though there's a sense that the movie ends right back where it started, it isn't a symmetrical journey in any sense that I can make out. It ends with a kicker, that's for sure; but one that's earned, rather than the cheap shock value of kicking things off by saying "Oh, you know that girl you cared about in my other movie? She's DEAD!" (This is why so many people hate ALIEN 3, but that at least was a direct sequel; PALINDROMES would work just as well if a faceless character had died -- the story doesn't follow on from WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE in any other meaningful way).

Anyway, a big step up from STORYTELLING, whose two segments never connected for me (and the second segment needed something more). If you respect Solondz and were put off by the reviews, do check this one out.

Posted by LYT at 7:38 PM | Comments (2)

Merchandise sale...

SPREADSHIRT is having a 15% off sale on all items through August 28. Just use the code "summersale06."

This includes not only LYTrules merchandise, but every other Spreadshirt store too, including Pererro and Poperratic. Support us all in one order if you like!

Posted by LYT at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2006

Naked Pursuit dvd review

It comes out this week...

"But what kind of 'makes' this DVD package is an included audio commentary by Luke Y. Thompson & Jess Hlubik. They introduce themselves as 'world famous critics' but I can only guess it was said 'tongue-in-cheek'. Anyway, in their own crude manner the two share some interesting information about the film including some salient points of interpretation of the Japanese version. Unfortunately though, it quickly spirals into a kind of 'Mystery Theater 3000' sarcasm-fest with the two of them mocking the film at every turn (continuity errors, incongruous music interludes etc.) - not that it doesn't deserve mocking! I think it might have faired better had it been kept at a more professional level, but I don't discount this attempt at some decent fun. "

read the full review

as far as the 'world famous' bit goes, I have seen my stuff quoted in inflight magazines on international flights, and Jesse's "Masters of Horror" episode has screened in Europe.

So yeah, world famous. Kinda.

Posted by LYT at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2006

The m'f'in' money shot

Jesse posted this link in comments, but in case you missed it...

CLICK HERE to see Samuel L. Jackson saying THE SIGNATURE LINE in his new movie.

Posted by LYT at 2:24 AM | Comments (2)

August 12, 2006

Fangoria reveals new MAD COWGIRL artwork

This will probably not be the final DVD cover, but it's on the right track, wouldn't you say?

DVD release has been postponed pending more theatrical gigs; stay tuned for more info!

And click the image above for the full Fango story, with more on upcoming releases from Gregory Hatanka's new Cinema Epoch distribution.

Posted by LYT at 7:08 PM | Comments (1)

August 11, 2006

I have had it with the muthafuckin' lack of muthafuckin' reviews!

SOMEONE must have seen SNAKES ON A PLANE by now.

How is it?

Anybody?

EDIT: Okay, my bad. Doesn't open till next week.

Posted by LYT at 3:56 PM | Comments (2)

August 10, 2006

I am still looking for a job

C'mon...anyone?

Posted by LYT at 10:11 PM | Comments (5)

Reviewz

"Helena Bonham Carter is barely forty, and Aaron Eckhart still a couple of years shy, but already they're old enough that, in Conversations With Other Women, totally different twentysomething actors have to portray them in flashbacks. Carter gets the better end of the deal, portrayed in her youth by Brick's femme fatale Nora Zehetner. The lesser-known Erik Eidem looks and sounds nothing like Eckhart, but Zehetner's skill at faking an English accent goes a long way. It is perhaps a plot point that the two characters, billed merely as "Man" and "Woman," are in fact unrecognizable from their youth, but are they really so old that we can't simply throw on some bad wigs and a ton of make-up? The right lighting guy could surely have made it happen. "

Whole thing here

and a quick take here

Posted by LYT at 3:16 AM | Comments (3)

P.S.

I forgot to mention that Stephen Dorff is in WORLD TRADE CENTER.

So the Stephen Dorff rule still applies.

Posted by LYT at 3:13 AM | Comments (1)

August 9, 2006

I Know Why the Cage Burn Stings...

I need to preface any thoughts on WORLD TRADE CENTER with a disclaimer. I know from experience that subject matter and style are inseparable to some people, i.e. if you don't like SCHINDLER'S LIST, some are going to assume that therefore you hate holocaust victims.

I have the utmost respect for officers John McLaughlin and Will Jimeno, and others like them who have held out, trapped under rubble, through various injuries, until help came. I also admire the skills and determination of those who found them.

The issue at hand, however, is whether that inherently makes a movie about them, starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Oliver Stone, worth seeing. Another issue is whether or not it's "too soon" to have a movie about a recent tragedy like 9/11.

Funnily enough, shortly after 9/11, I thought that there probably could be a great heroic movie about it. At the beginning of this year, I did not want to see UNITED 93, about doomed passengers, but very much wanted to see WORLD TRADE CENTER, about heroes who lived. Having seen both, my expectations have utterly flipped. UNITED 93, I thought, was a timely reminder that a war talked about in sweeping terms of good versus evil is actually fought by scared, ordinary people pushed into desperate measures. On the other hand, I think it may well be Too Soon for WTC -- the big, predictably made, star-driven Hollywood movie. You can do that sort of thing with more distant wars like Vietnam, but Hollywoodizing recent memories is not so easy to do, and make it work.

The first part of the movie works, as McLoughlin (Cage) and Jimeno (Michael Pena) run into the collapsing building. But after that, what we're seeing boils down to this: Two guys lie down for an hour and a half, then people come and pick them up.

Again, I'm not belittling the real struggle of the real life guys. I know they weren't actually just lying down for a couple of hours. But the actors are. Drama tends to require proactive protagonists, and these characters don't actually do anything to affect the plot except keep from falling asleep. The one proactive character in the movie is Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon, whom you've seen in a ton of stuff but will remember more clearly now), an office worker who, when he sees the footage on TV, re-enlists in the Marines and heads striaght to New York, where he takes the initiative and finds McLoughlin and Jimeno. We later learn he did two tours in Iraq afterwards. THAT'S the guy I want to see a movie about. However, he's a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, which means that while you can have him as a supporting character, the odds of someone like OIiver Stone making him the hero of his own movie are up there with Mel Gibson directing "The Joe Lieberman Story."

When Karnes walks through the rubble of Ground Zero at night, it doesn't help the film's veracity that it reminds one of Michael Biehn trudging through the TERMINATOR futurescape. Or maybe Ground Zero did look exactly like that -- I wasn't there -- but watching this felt like looking at a movie set. Similarly, the underground stuff reminded me of Universal Studios' Earthquake ride, especially when carefully aimed jets of flame burn through and narrowly miss our trapped twosome. The one trademark Oliver Stone touch is a psychedelic hallucination of Jesus Christ (Steve Chappell) offering bottled water, but apparently Jimeno really had such a vision. (There will always be pain and suffering, there will always be evil in the world...)

I've neglected thus far to mention all the scenes of the wives (Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal) at home worrying, and I wish Stone had neglected them too. Scene like this are always the same in every movie -- there's even a flashback to McLoughlin being a carpenter that could have been inspired by a very similar one in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, for goodness' sakes -- and Bello's neon blue contacts are really quite distracting in that they don't look like a natural human pigment (Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.)

Because Stone can't be subtle, there's also lots of slo-mo and orchestral score to stress how IMPORTANT everything is. Folks like the reviewers at Movieguide who love their entertainment didactic will be very pleased, but I'm not so sure you will be.

Pena's acting is very good, as is Shannon's. With Cage, it's tough to get past the affected accent, but he's pretty good too.

I could do without the movie, though.

Posted by LYT at 3:54 PM | Comments (12)

August 8, 2006

Joe Lieberman beaten, vows to return

"I AM THE SENATE!"

Yep, sanctimonious prick Joe Palpatine Lieberman plans to run as an independent, which is pretty hilarious to those of us who remember him complaining about Nader running a third-party campaign in 2000.

Also hilarious are the complaints that voting out Joe is somehow indicative that the Democratic party is intolerant of dissenting views, given that Joe is about as anti-free speech as they come. He never met a form of potentially offensive entertainment he didn't subsequently try to boycott or ban.

Well, this time he offended the base, and they have effectively boycotted him. Karma's a bitch, Joe.

Posted by LYT at 8:32 PM | Comments (5)

August 7, 2006

Often imitated, never duplicated

My allegedly conservative friend Pete peterson gets crazy with the hair color and the goatee. You be the judge of whether it works for him or not.

Posted by LYT at 5:18 AM | Comments (2)

August 5, 2006

The other other shoe drops.

Despite everything, what's one thing I was able to count on through thick and thin of this year?

If you answered my car, you are dingdingding correct.

So on the night that I have a date out of town, three things go wrong with it at once. On the weekend, of course. With no warning.

Sucks to be me!

[On the other hand, if I had more money, I'd have been in Vegas this weekend. And I've learned from experience that that's one terrible town to break down in]

Posted by LYT at 6:43 PM | Comments (1)

One more...

Movieguide has a big problem with the new cartoon THE BARNYARD:

cows have prominent, goofy-looking udders, and cows not accurately depicted as obnoxious udders occur even on the male cows (in reality there is no such thing as a male cow, a male cow is a bull so movie has created a new trans-gendered bovine, though the word "transgender" is not used and without today's perverted, feminist homosexual movement and other politically correct, Christophobic Neo-Marxists, the word "transgender" would be considered a wrong, irrational use of the English language)

Those Hollywood liberals sure are sneaky with their indoctrination techniques. I too wish the bulls had been depicted with large swinging penises, just so there'd be no confusion.

Posted by LYT at 1:40 PM | Comments (5)

August 4, 2006

Duelling Movieguides

"Be wary of people who play on your emotions, especially if they don't offer solid, easily documentable facts and sound arguments." -- Tom Snyder, Movieguide

"All of this abhorrent content is extremely tiresome and thoroughly evil. Only a hateful moron or a mentally deranged person could create it or appreciate it. Faced with such a work, MOVIEGUIDE® must seriously question the judgment and intelligence of the filmmakers, the actors and the studio executives behind CLERKS II." -- unsigned review of CLERKS II, Movieguide

Also, Movieguide tries to argue that TALLEDEGA NIGHTS is a prejudicial and abhorrent anti-Southern movie, without apparently taking into account that rednecks love to laugh at themselves -- Jeff Foxworthy, the Dukes of Hazzard, the Ernest movies, Larry the Cable Guy, etc. are perennial successes among folks who see echoes of their own foibles in there somewhere.

TALLEDEGA NIGHTS is funny, and I think it'll do very well in the South. We'll see.

Posted by LYT at 5:47 PM | Comments (3)

Doug Jones might be the Silver Surfer

After hearing Guillermo del Toro speak at Comicon, I understood where Harry Knowles' infamous oral sex review of BLADE II came from. It's the sort of thing Guillermo might have written -- the man has a dirty mouth. He describes the movie business as a shit sandwich -- sometime you take bites that are mostly bread, other times less so. But you always get shit.

Guillermo says he has a standing policy that, while he won't hear pitches or accept screenplays due to legal reasons, he will watch any short film he is given, though it may take him some time to do so. He also answers emails, so he says, and announced his publicly: abe_sapien(at)hotmaildotcom.

But here's the crucial detail that everyone was wanting to know -- Doug Jones, who played Abe Sapien in HELLBOY (though the voice of David Hyde-Pierce was overdubbed; del Toro swears it'll be Doug's voice in the just-announced sequel) said that he had no comment on the new FANTASTIC FOUR sequel, and that he was definitely NOT going to be the motion capture model for any greenscreen work on a big-budget movie in the near future. However...

[the following quotes are inexact, but paraphrases from memory]

"Do you like this shirt I have on?" (indicates shiny silver shirt)

Crowd roars approval.

"I had the opportunity to try on a similar outfit recently. And I liked the way it fit"

("And he looked good in it!" added Guillermo)

"But...let's just say they're still waiting for my credit card to go through. Though if I do get to wear it, I promise I will do the outfit justice."

So there you have it. Deal not 100% signed, but you could be seeing him on a surfboard shortly. And by the sound of it, in actual make-up rather than CGI.

Posted by LYT at 4:09 PM | Comments (0)

New ECW inspired T-shirt

Vince McMahon has stopped selling the "EC f'n W" shirt because he thinks it's bad for business (though he's now selling one that says "Vince loves cock"), so I made my own version.

Posted by LYT at 12:02 PM | Comments (2)

Comicon odds and ends

HAPPY FEET looks like the worst fucking movie of the year. The only hope for it is that it's directed by George Miller, who did MAD MAX and BABE, the latter of which I also thought looked fucking horrible in the trailers but turned out to be good.

This movie is a CG cartoon with almost photo-realistic penguins. Elijah Wood voices a boy penguin who can't sing but can tap dance like a madman (motion-capture of tap-dancer Savion Glover, whom you may remember as the star of BAMBOOZLED). Brittany Murphy voices the girl penguin who's the greatest singer ever. So far, so predictable. So why am I afraid?

A couple of reasons. First, it rehashes pop songs like Queen's "Somebody to Love" as sung by the penguins. This is a technique that can occasionally work if done right (MOULIN ROUGE) but most often comes off as lazy (the SHREK movies).

But there's an even bigger problem, and it goes by the name of Robin Williams. Look, the man has skills as an actor, but he also has the annoying tendency to think that everything which comes out of his mouth will automatically be hilarious if he just says it fast enough with a "funny" accent. He plays at least two characters in the clips I saw. One sounds like Napoleon Dynamite's Pedro on Speed, and the other sounds like he's trying to do a Big Dumb Black Guy voice.

(Don't get pissy on me about how all black people don't talk the same way. I know that. I'm talking about the kind of voice you might hear coming out of a fat-lipped cannibal chief in an old black and white Betty Boop cartoon, as approximated by Robin Williams)

Granted, there's an audience for that. Some people thought ROBOTS was a good movie (What''s the point of getting Ewan McGregor to do a VOICE-OVER if you're gonna force him to fake an accent he has no mastery of? "Rrrrraaaadney Capperbaddam!").

But for those of us who aren't into Robin Williams doing dubiously "funny" racial shtick, staying away seems like a plan.

THE TRIPPER may confirm every fear you've ever had about David Arquette. I'd tell you about the footage I saw, except David Arquette actually lost the footage en route to the Comicon panel. He's the director. And yes, in person, he seems friendly, but also like he just might be an idiot.

The premise of the movie, though, is genius. A killer in a Ronald Reagan mask stalks and slashes a bunch of hippies on their way to a concert. Jason Mewes is one of the stars.

One of the actors on the panel was introduced as the actor who plays the killer, though as it happens the identity of the killer in the movie is supposed to be a surprise (they pulled the same thing on VALENTINE a few years back). Arquette asked everybody in the room -- "because we're all friends here, right?" -- not to go typing on the Internet, giving it away (since I haven't mentioned the actor's name, I think I'm still good; it isn't Jason Mewes).

As consolation for not having any footage, Arquette offered free hugs and autographs, which most people took him up on. He might have been drunk.

Posted by LYT at 11:25 AM | Comments (1)

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