Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: At the movies
Movie #2
No, this isn’t the funny one. This is the one I’ll watch months from now with a trembling lip. Or at least I would if the video quality weren’t for shit! What is up with that? Is this a YouTube thing?
Tell me what you think. Boring? Amateurish? Purty?
D.
(Note: no, it’s not the Pebble Beach. But it’s our Pebble Beach.)
Your late evening camp
Earlier this evening, Karen was watching A Patch of Blue. She explained the plot to Jake, and when she got to the part about the white blind girl befriending the black guy, I said, “Who, back then, could only be Sidney Poitier.”
Then I thought, hold on, there must have been at least a few other strong black leads back then. But the only man I could recall was Woody Strode. (It’s hard for me to think of others. Poitier’s great, but he really did dominate the field.)
Now, you might not have heard of Woody Strode unless you’ve seen Kubrick’s Spartacus or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Strode had small but memorable parts in both movies: in Spartacus, he engages Kirk Douglas in a fight to the death, while in Once Upon A Time In The West, he plays one of three gunmen sent to kill Harmonica (Charles Bronson) in the film’s stunning opening.
According to the Wiki linked above, Strode was a decathlete and football star before becoming an actor. Of his athletic career,
His world class decathlon capabilities were spearheaded by a fifty foot plus shot put (when the world record was fifty seven feet) and a six-four high jump (world record at time was 6-10). Strode posed for a nude portrait, part of Hubert Stowitts’s acclaimed exhibition of athletic portraits shown at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (although the inclusion of black and Jewish athletes caused the Nazis to close the exhibit).
(You can see a few of those nude paintings, including Strode’s, here.) I couldn’t find a good Strode video clip to share with you, but I did find a campy one. See if you can name his white, male co-star.
Okay, I gotta go see what happens to the dog.
D.
OMFG . . . Watchmen.
I’ve been trying to write one of those dcr-style meta-posts where you construct an entire post out of links to your friends’ blogs. In the course of doing so, I found Invisible Lizard’s review of The Dark Knight, wherein he mentions
I came out of the theater feeling exhausted. Sure, it could be the 152 minute running time, the 20 minutes of previews (Watchmen, yeah!) and the 20 minutes of pre-show ads . . .
Watchmen? Watchmen?
(I’ll try to restrain my trepidation that Zack “300” Snyder is directing, and my disgust that Alan Moore is listed as “uncredited.”)
Looks amazing, doesn’t it?
D.
Hellbore
We saw Hellboy in the theater back in 2004 — pre-blog, so I’ve never reviewed it here. Good movie. While I never felt that Hellboy or his pals were in any real danger, I still cared for them; in particular, the romance between Hellboy and Liz (Selma Blair) engaged me. Hellboy had so many things to make it special: Selma Blair, looking all smoky and goth; Ron Perlman, always a strong stage presence; John Hurt (guess how old he is. No, guess); Nazis awakening Cthulhu; Selma Blair; and Selma Blair. Selma Blair was really good in it, too.
It’s one of those movies we watch over and over again on cable; you know, a film that gets damn near everything right. So of course we were looking forward to Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
My first art film
For my Father’s Day present, I bought myself Pinnacle Studio 12 video editing software. I have great comic designs for my camera/software combo, but I have to learn how to use this stuff first. Here’s my first effort.
I need to learn how to add music, improve the video quality (I probably picked the wrong option somewhere along the way), and do voice-overs. Also, there’s a way to decouple the audio and video tracks — that way, audio from one clip can be used as voice-over for the next. I need to develop some facility with that, too.
Next step: bring my camera into work and start the interviews. This will be good.
D.
Are there any bad sex scenes?
From IFC.com, the people who brought us The 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema, comes The 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema.
I think you can make a good argument that there are no bad sex scenes. Rape doesn’t count because that’s violence, not sex. And the Brown Bunny doesn’t count because it’s not the terminal BJ which makes the movie rotten, it’s everything that precedes it (the whole movie, that is). So: can IFC convince me that bad sex scenes exist?
Let’s focus on the Top Ten. Right away, I have to agree with them. Any sex scene that features Tom Cruise is a total cold shower. Now if it were a gay scene, that I could believe. Next up is Madonna doing Willem Defoe in Body of Evidence. Okay, I’ll grant them that Madonna is a turn-off, too, even a fifteen-years-younger Madonna.
My thesis is going to hell.
#8, Killing Me Softly — how can Heather Graham naked ever be anything but hot? I don’t buy it. Okay, the asphyxiation stuff, not cool. Children might be watching this and they might try it at home. But Heather Graham is still hot.
Same goes for Gong Li (#7, Miami Vice).
Color of Night, #6: okay, I can’t remember this sex scene, and I saw the movie. So that’s saying something. But I’m willing to forgive Jane March just about anything. Have you see The Lover? Woof.
I haven’t seen the strap-on scene in Myra Breckinridge (#5), but they’ve conveniently linked to it on YouTube. Yes, this truly is vile. Not only do you not get to see Raquel Welch naked, you also get dozens of ridiculous cutaways, including, I’m not kidding, an atomic bomb detonation. The one thing that would have made this a perfect storm of inanity would have been a cutaway of the Nuremburg rallies. Yes, as the seventh minute dawned of this well nigh interminable scene, I found myself thinking, “What, no Nazis?”
#4, Ma Mère: okay, pretentiousness and incest are a bad combo. (Speaking of which, why isn’t Spanking the Monkey on their list?) Point IFC.
#3, Irréversible: rape. Blech.
Kyle MacLachlan is entirely too pretty in Showgirls for me to buy him as hetero (#2). That was my problem with Blue Velvet, too. Anyway, I had to register at DailyMotion to watch this video, but it was worth it. While I cannot disagree with IFC’s observation (“Berkley’s in flagrante flailings are so wild, in fact, you’d have to be a seizure fetishist to get off on them”), the actress’s performance brought to mind another icon of aqueous cinema: the opening scene of Jaws.
And what film did IFC save for the #1 spot? You’ll have to check out the story for yourself, but I have only one comment. With all that melted butter, someone should have brought popcorn.
D.
101 movies to AVOID watching before you die
Snarkaliciousness for a dreary Thursday morning — from Crooked Timber, with more contributions from Daily Kos. Excerpt from the comments, just for a taste:
For me the top contender for most morally reprehensible film of the last twenty years has to be Saving Private Ryan, a film that actually got people killed. I left the cinema snarling at its simple minded bellicosity and horrified that it had been so generously reviewed. I am utterly convinced that the film and its attendant TV series really laid the ground culturally for the Bush wars and the general conviction that invading abroad was just a perfect way to emulate the “greatest generationâ€. It amazed me that it was more racist and less humane then propaganda films made during the second world war. A completely unironic paean to killing, mercilessness and the evil of the other. Amazing.
On the other hand Van Helsing needs to be taken seriously as a bad film as it was so wilfully stupid, incoherent, visually messy and loud that it hurt to be in the cinema. The Saint and Snake Eye’s also deserve to be wiped from the page of history. Saving Private Ryan though, that film could convince benevolent aliens not to contact us, even if they were bored.
MY vote for a movie to avoid before you die? The Brown Bunny — something like ninety minutes of excruciatingly angsty pseudo-meaningful but ultimately pointless scenes followed by a sex scene that would garner a 2.00 rating or less on YouPorn.
What’s your vote?
D.
You mean 300 was serious?
What I do to cheer myself up . . . look for YouTube parodies.
This first one is, well, indescribable.
And then there’s 300 vs. Army of Darkness, and best of all, the incomparable Lisa Nova does 300.
Honorable mention to the Invader Zim version.
D.
Chuck Heston’s Greatest Hits
CNN: Charlton Heston dies at 84.
I grew up with Charlton Heston. This latter day John Wayne epitomizes for me a certain type of actor: the hypermasculine lead with a martyr complex, whose on-screen testosteronity was exceeded only by his off-screen right wing looniness. Chuck was the Man . . . well, until Mel Gibson came along. And when Mel gets too old or too shark-jumped to matter anymore, doubtless some other nut will take his place.
But we were talkin’ Chuck. Chuck wasn’t always a Republican darling, a Choice- and Affirmative Action-hating NRA poster boy; according to Wikipedia, he supported Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy and marched with Martin Luther King. He even “called for public support for President Johnson’s Gun Control Act of 1968.” Why the change of heart? The [two] obituaries [that I bothered to read] don’t say.
Let’s have a moment of silence for a man who left us with some memorable Hollywood moments:
The Omega Man, the Last Man on Earth . . . but of course, if you’ve seen the movie, you know he’s the Alpha as well as the Omega.
THE scene from the end of Planet of the Apes. Still, if you’re gonna be stuck on a post-apocalyptic ape-ridden planet, you could do worse than have actress Linda Harrison at your back.
Touch of Evil. With a mustache and enough Man Tan, you too can be Mexican.
Soylent Green: Heston figures it out an hour after the rest of us.
The Moses we know and love.
Rest in peace, Chuck.
D.