Movie Reviews (The Prequel!)

Growing up ultra-religious, one learns some distaste for entertainment. There was no television in my childhood home, and going to movie theatres was strictly taboo (with the exception of Operation Thunderbolt, a movie about the rescue of the Israeli Hostages in Uganda.) Needless to say, I wasn’t exposed to any of the normal media that most people experience, and had to make do with references and images I would pick up from billboards or hear on the bus and subway. I had some catching up to do.

Even post-adolescence and into college, when my world expanded greatly from a secular education, I held this tremendous disdain for entertainment in part out of religious doctrine, in part out of habit, and in part out of just having no time to enjoy it. Wife, kids, job, school, and religious duties eat up a lot of time. I don’t remember sleeping at back in those days. The free time I did have was being used to memorize an infinite amount of data necessary for exams.

At 28 years old, when I finally gave up my last vestige of religious superstition (thank you Darwin!), I was still quite cynical regarding entertainment and found little reason to enjoy anything other than the bizarre or the patently ridiculous (thus my fascination with Japanese Monster flicks.) Being trained in school to garner and gather knowledge was my primary way of relating and even if I did happen to see a movie, my mind was just never into it, and I came away not appreciating the film at all. I was watching images, but not seeing the picture. That was 16 years ago, and as the bulimic bitch with the three-pack-a-day habit says “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Now, I can actually enjoy a good movie. Finding a good movie to enjoy is still another issue altogether.

I still don’t ever seem to be able to remember who stars in a movie, who directs it, or who wrote the soundtrack. I don’t even give a shit. Some people wet themselves with delight when they hear that so-and-so or whatzer-face will be in a movie, and no matter how piss poor the writing, they will always come out of the theatre glowing with orgasmic delight. I don’t get that at all. Especially lately, when you have all these old –ass washed up heroes of cinematic yore making the absolutely worst fucking movies in history. I swear that if I see another fill-in-the-fucking-blanks hack job of a movie, I will kill myself for being either too gullible or just too fucking lazy to get up from my seat and walk out. No amount of marijuana could get me to enjoy another whiny-ass tear-jerking tale of the single mom overcoming adversity, or some other waste of fucking screen-time family that can’t get along without a crisis. Oh. And no more cars chases and people attached to wires. I’ve seen enough of that shit to last me forever. For a car chase to be original, it would have to include myself and two Asian hookers being chased by psychic Shriners through an abandoned synagogue. The rest has been done already way too many times.

I love foreign films that don’t have happy endings. Those are the films that say to you “Life sucks and it’s predictably angst ridden. Try to get laid while you can.” The British films all have the same themes somewhere in the film: unemployment, daddy issues, and homosexuality. French films always have a sexual theme, which is why you have to love the French. No matter how bizarre things get they can always find time for a quickie. French horror flicks, on the other hand, are so tedious that you end up hoping that the director gets hacked to death by a movie-goer obsessed with the slasher/killer before the film is even completed. The French should leave the horror genre to the German’s, because every movie (Das Boat is an exception) the Storm Trooper’s racially superior offspring produce ends up being ‘horror’ anyhow. The British horror flicks are just plain campy, and there is always some wise-ass smoking a pipe and giving out wonderful advice while some closeted homosexual in an ascot is feeling frustrated over his bride to be falling under the monster’s demonic power. Even the presence of Vincent Price couldn’t save those losers. Tea?

The oriental martial arts flicks haven’t improved in 20 years, with still a lot of flying on wires, magical storylines, and really, really bad dialogue. I’ve seen better script writing in amateur-midget porn videos. I’m just glad I don’t speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other Chinese dialect, because God forbid if I find out what they are actually saying, it could be even worse than the fucked up dubbing job that the producer’s retarded nephew managed between packing carry-outs, and I would have to slash my own wrists out of shame for hearing it. No MSG please.

I ceremoniously piss on all vampire movies made after Coppola’s Dracula. End of story. I hope Ann Rice gets kidnapped by some Goth kids and is forced to adapt her dumb-ass blood fetish love stories to nursery rhymes with themes of racial bigotry. The movies “Blade” and “Blade II” with Wes Snipes were pretty good action flicks and I thought the idea was original, but you’d have to fill a theatre with beer and have strippers swimming in it to get me to see either one a second time. There was some lame Czech shit on recently about werewolves and vampires at war. The whole movie was gunfire, greasy Eurohair, and other than the few hot bitches in leather, it was about as cliché as cliché gets. Bite me.

Special effects are bullshit and only impress the small personas that enjoy dildos and silicone implants. So if the “T” series left an indelible mark on your soul, you should have yourself euthanised now before you reproduce. You are just another mindless ferret-brain enthralled by shiny objects and loud noises. I bet you even like car chases. How many pyro-technical light shows is enough? If you want fire and smoke go to a Great White concert.

Mob/gangster movies do not impress me at all. By the end of Godfather III, I was hoping that someone was going to ‘whack’ me out of my misery. Goodfellas and Casino provided Joe Pesci with rare opportunity to dress in own personal wardrobe on set, and at best, those films served as 1st auditions for the cast of the Sopranos. Save me a front row seat at Bada-Bing next to the titties.. Anyone fascinated with lots of hairy-knuckled illiterate Italians mumbling in ooohs and ahhhs should visit Long Island, and stay the fuck off my movie screen. Capish?

Fuck all westerns, and I mean every fucking one of them, except for the Spaghetti western. No one could make movies that bad without INTENDING to do so, and such rare effort deserves mentioning. I don’t even know if they can be called westerns (or movies) at all. Once again the Italians do nothing but annoy me. Thank heavens they can cook, or we’d have to give them back to the Germans. Please lower your arms, we’re not at war.

Believe it or not, there are lots of movies (besides the French films) that I have thoroughly enjoyed, and those movies, both older and newer will get some awesome reviews. Actors, whose cinematic exploits normally bore the living shit out of me, have recently shown me that, once again, my mind can be changed. Both Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe have renewed my faith that idiots CAN, on occasion, make a good film even better.

Stay tuned!