It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

 Welcome back, saps and saplings! It is I, Douglas Fir, your coniferous overlord! I've tied up Cap'n Howdy and locked him in the closet given the Cap'n the day off to do whatever it is he's been doing instead of reviewing Madea's Christmas, and now it's time for your most benevolent overlord to provide you with some TREE-mendous merriment.

 As some of you pathetic sacks of meat know, Douglas Fir spends all of his time not used to bring about the Treepocalypse to track down sufficient video evidence of your impending doom, and while I seek high and low, I find myself PINE-ing for something worthy of sharing with you. Until this year, that is! Yes, this year, I found just the right son of a BIRCH with an eye to portray the holidays for what it truly is to my people, and to hint at the Treepocalypse to come. Then I, Douglas Fir, will assume the throne you will all cower before my greatness.

 In the meantime, here is a documentary about what is to come, called TREEVENGE:

Treevenge from jasoneisener on Vimeo.


 ALL WILL BOW BEFORE ME!!!!!!!!!!

"I" is for I Come in Peace

 Most people (the Cap'n included) mostly remember I Come in Peace from the trailer, which was seemingly attached to every movie and videotape I ever watched from 1990-1993.  When I mentioned it to friends who were coming over to watch it, almost all of them responded to the title by saying "you go in pieces." One of them hadn't even seen the movie, but that's how ubiquitous the trailer is in the 90s action zeitgeist. I'm pretty sure I had seen I Come in Peace at some point during high school, but I didn't remember much of it, and certainly not as well as I did Universal Soldier, the movie Dolph Lundgren made two years later*.

 In the rest of the world the movie is called Dark Angel, but I've only ever known it as I Come in Peace which is a much better title, if you ask me. Since I'm writing this we can safely assume you're not going to get a dissenting opinion in the body of the review, so I Come in Peace it is.

 For reasons that aren't very clear, I Come in Peace is set during Christmas, which gives me one more movie to show during DecemberFest. There's some rich jerk driving around with a cd player in his car (that's how you know he's rich, because this is 1989-1990 depending on when they filmed it) but some disturbance causes him to crash at a Christmas tree dealership. Fortunately for the guy, the disturbance is not Detective Riggs; unfortunately for him it is Matthias Hues (Talons of the Eagle), a giant blonde alien with glaucoma who can only say 'I Come in Peace," which he demonstrates by killing the dude with a wrist gun that shoots killer cds.

 Meanwhile, some crooks have infiltrated the police station and are stealing heroin from the evidence locker, but since they kill a cop played by the poor man's Steve Guttenberg and steal his name tag, it raises suspicions. The good news for them is at one of them is crazy enough to leave a bag explosives so powerful that it presumably kills everybody in the precinct station. They take the heroin and head off to the rendezvous point, a club called Jockos.

Meanwhile meanwhile,  Dolph Lundgren plays Detective Jack Caine, who is doing some surveillance outside of Jockos for the Houston police department when his partner is killed during a sting operation. He probably could have helped him, but Caine had to get out of his car to thwart a robbery across the street at a convenience store. Therefore his partner is murdered and then most of the bad guys are killed. It would be safe to guess that his superiors wouldn't be happy about this - they aren't - but I had also foolishly assumed his superiors were killed with every other cop in the station when the bomb went off. For some reason that never comes up during the investigation or during the film at all.

 Well, the other thing that Caine missed was that the bad guys are massacred by our boy Matthias (IMDB has his character name listed as "Talec" but I never heard that) and his flying cd weapon, but only so he could steal their heroin. In what sounds like the least cost-efficient plan I can think of, Matthias came all the way to Earth to pump people full of heroin, thus boosting their endorphins so that he could extract it for an alien drug. It takes him two briefcases full of heroin to collect five vials of endorphins, so I'm really not sure he's the brightest drug dealer in the universe. Also he's being chased by Jay Bilas (Sportscenter) who is a bounty hunter / space cop or something. He shaves a bald sport into his forehead so he kind of looks like he has a skullet, which doesn't help him blend in with normal Earthlings.

 Both aliens have a gun that causes things to explode (in any of their five available settings), which you think would draw attention, but in Houston nobody looks twice when you pull out a gun in a strip club or walk out of your apartment complex holding a shotgun. That, and literally everything explodes in this movie when it's shot, no matter what gun you're using.

 Lundgren must have been working really hard with a diction coach for I Come in Peace, because this is the most lucid I've ever heard his speaking voice in any Dolph movie I can think of. It's not that it's normally hard to understand him, but for some reason in this movie it's very easy to make out exactly what he's saying and his drawl seems to be at a minimum. Still, he's not dubbed - it's definitely Dolph talking - but I was taken aback a bit.

 I really like that none of the characters know this is a movie about aliens until halfway in. The audience knows, because director Craig R. Baxley (Stone Cold) keeps cutting away to Matthias so we can see how he extracts the drug (it involves injection tubes) from random victims, but neither the good guys nor the bad guys have any idea they aren't in a procedural crime movie. Det. Caine gets the third degree from his Sergeant and the FBI show up and force him to work with Special Agent Larry Smith (Dream On's Brian Benben) in tracking down the killer, and while they do find one of the spinning discs of death, nobody assumes "alien drug dealer" as primary suspect.

 So they make the rounds and talk to informants and sleazeballs like this guy Boner (character actor du jour Michael J. Pollard) and the crime lord who set up Caine's partner (played by the poor man's Robert Townsend) which leads them to a secondary drug deal with the henchman from Die Hard (Al Leong) and finally Caine meets the aliens. Suddenly he realizes what kind of movie he's in, which is good because while the cop movie we've been watching was also pretty good, it's WAY better when there's an alien drug dealer running around stabbing people and stealing brain chemicals.

 You may have noticed that I used the phrase "the poor man's" a bit in this review, and that's because I Come in Peace has two things that are almost as important as the main plot. One of them is the fact that this movie is littered with "that guy"s or actors who look like the more affordable version of other actors. There's a guy who looks like the weasel-y dude from Commando who Arnold promises to kill last (he lied) but is definitely not David Patrick Kelly. There's a cop who looks like he could have been Jonah Hill's dad, a guy who kind of looks like Carl Weathers, an so on. It becomes a fun game you can play while watching the movie, and between periods of "that guy!" you get to play the other game: spot the extra.

 I seriously want to give kudos to the person (or people) in charge of background casting for I Come in Peace, because they selected some of the finest extras you could hope for in a movie. Whether it's top notch moustaches, eye-catching costumes, or people finding absurd "business" to do on camera, I Come in Peace has a great selection of "what is that person doing?" going on in nearly every scene. There's even a misdirect outside of the other, non-destroyed police station where you think an extra dressed as a cop is waving to the camera, only to pan over and see he's just waving to a cop walking up to him.

 Now you may think that the fact I was fixated on background actors in some way means I didn't like I Come in Peace's main story, but that's where you are mistaken. For a movie that's roughly the poor man's Predator 2, I Come in Peace is a lot of fun with just the right balance of action movie cheese. I still don't get why you'd call this movie Dark Angel when I Come in Peace is a much more appropriate title (who would the "Dark Angel" be, anyway?) but that's a minor quibble. If the damn thing weren't so hard to find in the U.S., I'd recommend you all go watch it. Because you'll have a rollicking good time no matter where you focus your attention.




* If you were curious, he made The Punisher immediately before I Come in Peace, and there's a good reason I don't remember that one as well.

Five Movies: Holiday Films I'm Pretty Sure I Haven't Seen

 Every year I like to highlight atypical holiday fare - movies that happen during the holidays but aren't exactly what you'd call "Christmas" films. I specify Christmas not to leave out any of the other holidays that happen in December, but because movies like Die Hard, The Ice Harvest, and Lethal Weapon all feature Christmas as the backdrop. The same goes for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Bad Santa, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Brazil, Gremlins, The French Connection, In Bruges, and Tales from the Crypt.

 Today I thought I'd look instead at five movies that are essential holiday films that I don't think I've ever seen from beginning to end. If, for some reason, you were worried this list would include A Christmas Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, or Reindeer Games, fear not. I've only missed one of those films, and I use the term "missed" loosely.

 No, gang, the actual list is much more inexcusable than that. I'd say "let's get the big offenders out of the way first," but there's no smaller slight against Holiday films on the list. Let's jump straight into it, shall we?

 1. Miracle on 34th Street - Every year it plays on Thanksgiving. Why? Well, because it starts during the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, I think. I've never seen more than the first ten minutes, and I had to look up the ending to "spoil" it when I was spoiling a movie a day because I don't actually know how it ends. I've never seen it, and never really felt the urge to. Not out of some judgmental reaction, but just because it never struck me as a movie I wanted to watch.

 2. White Christmas - To be fair, if there's a movie on this list that I think I'm not alone in having missed, it's this one. Everybody knows the song, to be sure, but I've never encountered the target audience for this movie. Not to speak ill of Bing Crosby and company, but other than my parents I don't think I know anyone else who owns the movie, let alone watched it.

 3. The Muppet Christmas Carol - Count me in the bracket that was just a little too old for the "second coming" of the Muppets in the 1990s. I never saw Muppet Treasure Island or The Muppet Christmas Carol or Muppets from Space. I'm sure they're enjoyable in their own right, and I know people just a bit younger than the Cap'n who LOVE this movie, but I haven't seen so much as a second of it. I was more along the lines of the Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol, which I haven't seen in ages.

 4. A Charlie Brown Christmas - I know. I HAVE to have seen A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's only thirty minutes long, everybody knows the damn thing, and I can't remember anything about it. Ever. The music? Sure. The pathetic tree? Only because people keep mentioning it. The only conclusion I can come to is that I've never seen the special from beginning to end. It's the only explanation.

 5. It's a Wonderful Life -Yep. This occurred to me while watching The Ref, where another character says "I've never seen this movie all the way through" to a group watching It's a Wonderful Life. I am in that same position - I've seen enough of the film in sections to have probably "seen" the whole movie, but I've never watched It's a Wonderful Life in one sitting. I'm probably missing big chunks of the movie because I know the prologue really well, the bridge scene, the flashback where Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart are dancing and fall in the water, and the ending. I even sort of know the parts where George Bailey tries to talk to people in a world where he was never born, but that might just be from innumerable parodies. Someday I'll actually watch It's a Wonderful Life and complete the process of being a human, but for the moment I'm some sort of heartless monster.

 Runners up include Love Actually, Holiday Inn, Elf, The Polar Express, The Bishop's Wife, A Christmas Carol, and Christmas Evil. But I have seen Ernest Saves Christmas! And Trapped in Paradise! That has to count for something, doesn't it?

Guest Blogger: Douglas Fir

editor's note: for readers new to the Blogorium, the Cap'n is forced to likes to hand over Holiday duties to Douglas Fir, a talking Christmas tree with delusions of grandeur inevitable plans of world domination. Douglas will be locking the Cap'n in a closet taking over and will throw rocks at the Cap'n be handling the weekend duties, barring being locked in the attic his impending world domination. Enjoy*.




Greetings, human meat-bags. The Cap'n abandoned his shift again, so while he's bleeding in the dungeon passed out from "egg nog", your beloved overlord and Tree-rific Overlord will be handling the Holiday duties! When I'm done with you worthless hairy flesh-pods, you'll be PINE-ing for more!

Ha! Get it! Because I'm a tree! Even the idiots can understand now, which I presume makes up 99% of you so-called "readers". Truly, just a little OAK on my part. Please, we both know you're being read this gagorium entry by some speech mechanism, which provides you with the requisite farts and toodles to keep you from being distracted. That, of course, MAPLE or may not be part of my insidious plan to lull you into stupor, so that my plans of coniferous world domination may again take SEED!

Much like my last visit to this backwater corner of the internets, I Douglas Fir will provide you with the week's "top" movies, but re-titled in a manner that the most snail brained of you can grasp the meaning. Failing that (and I won't), I will provide a quality Tree related pun, because it's what you deserve.

To prevent any further BIRCH-ing and moaning, here are the "top" films rotting your jello brains:

1. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Holmes-o's.
2. Fuzzy Turds on a Boat (There's a Third One???)
3. There's a Fourth One?: G-g-g-ghost Protocol! (Zoinks!)
4. Next Saturday: The Movie
5. Fatventures in Babysitting
6. And I Thought I was Wooden: Breaking Yawn Part 1
7. More Like Puke-O
8. Fred Claus Jr.
9. Puppets without Wood (What's the Point?)
10. Young Adult

To be fair, when the fact that a film like Juno 2 Young Adult exists, there's not much sense in obfuscating it. Uh oh, I used a word that confuses and angers you! Best to cower under your pillows for the impending arrival of Santa Fir! And I swear, if you leave those fires burning again this year, I will so press charges!



* editor's note guest edited by Douglas Fir.

Holiday Movies for Your mrufufururffffff....

Bwahahahahaha! Back into the closet with you, Cap'n Lousy!

Tree-tings and Salutations, my beloved meat-bags! You supreme Overlord, Douglas Fir, has returned from his long winter's nap just in time for the Great Tree-pocalypse, when my coniferous brethren will rise up and quash all human activity, reclaiming our rightful place as your masters. I hope you're all snuggled in with your FIR coats and aren't planning to commit TREESON against your benevolent masters. Muahahahaha!

I grow tired of you pathetic sacks of flesh! You are short, squishy, and contain no squirrels in your branches. You call yourselves a superior life form! Bah! In the intervening year, the perpetually useless Cap'n made himself useful and fulfilled my desire for tree-related cinema, and in a uncharacteristic gesture of sympathy to you SAPs, I will bestow upon you today's Tree-riffic Blogorium Video Spectacular!

Make with the videos, slave typist!



---

All right you schmendricks, our first and second videos are a promise of things to come when the Tree-pocalypse arrives in a few days. Pay attention, because this is going to happen to all of you worthless flesh bags on Saturday morning!






Well, hello there baby. I like my ladies in FIR!

Oh look, a bonus video. I suppose it must be another example of nature's BARK being worse than its bite! Muahahahahaha!



Wait... how did that get there?! Damn you, Cap'n Howdy! You will not embarrass me on the day of Tree Reckoning!!!! Put me down! No... not the attic! Not again! All will perish!!!!

Retro Review: Bad Santa

 Picking up where we left off last week, Bad Santa was released on November 21st, 2003. That puts it out of the range of "movies we saw on Christmas night" but is certainly something we saw leading up to the Holidays. If I remember correctly, that was the winter between jobs, so I had time to be around town and see several movies with friends. It is unclear to me whether I saw Bad Santa with Professor Murder or with Cranpire. I attribute this to the fact that we saw it in the same auditorium of the Crossroads 20 where I saw Ghost World twice, once with each person. Even though Ghost World played a full two years before Bad Santa, I am frequently conflating the memories thanks to director Terry Zwigoff.

 Going in, this was what we knew about Bad Santa: it was from the same director as Crumb and Ghost World, the Coen brothers produced the film and possibly wrote an early version of the story, and Billy Bob Thornton was the "bad Santa" in question. Beyond that, the anemic trailer did an okay job drawing us in:



 Thankfully, the vulgarity was immediately worth the price of admission. Bad Santa is a filthy movie, one that doesn't really cave in to the "bad guys turns nice" ending (a holiday predecessor to Gran Torino, I like to think), and we laughed our asses off. I'd share the litany of horrible things Willie mutters, but it's more fun to let you discover it for yourselves. Bad Santa is a spiritual sibling to The Ref, but one that laces its cynicism with grossly inappropriate behavior on all parts.

 It wasn't until later (following the existence of Badder Santa) that I learned Zwigoff was angry with the cut released by Miramax, apparently one that included narration and additional sequences he had nothing to do with. While I can imagine that I may have been able to objectively sit down and watch the Director's Cut of Bad Santa, I made the mistake of watching Zwigoff's Art School Confidential first, a movie I found to be pretentious and obvious in its criticism of "audience expectations." His shorter cut of Bad Santa removed everything that Zwigoff wasn't involved in, restoring the film to a disjointed, sloppy, sarcastic slice of nihilism that played like Kevin Smith's early cut of Clerks.

 Count me among the unwashed, illiterate masses if you like, but the Weinsteins did Bad Santa a service by tinkering with the director's vision. I hate saying that, but I take a similar stance with 20th Century Fox's theatrical version of Donnie Darko, made with the concessions of Richard Kelly (but against his desires). Zwigoff pushed his outsider characters too far beyond a film that's worth investing time in, and his cut plays like a Todd Solondz film without the laughs. Yes, feel free to stop and let that last sentence sink in. The self satisfied commentary where he lambasts the "dumbing down" of his film doesn't help the Director's Cut either, but that's neither here nor there.

 Anyway, I have one last anecdote about Bad Santa, or more specifically the Badder Santa DVD. I brought it home to show to my family in December of 2004, and my father was appalled at the rampart bad taste on display. The following year, I bought a copy of the DVD, put it in a shoebox surrounded by coal, and scrawled "Merry F'n Christmas from Bad Santa" and left it under the tree for him. For some reason, he's never opened the DVD. But he did keep the box. Strange.

Fifteen Minute Movies: Home Alone

We're continuing the Holiday Theme for Fifteen Minute Movies, because that makes sense. Today we'll look at the first fifteen minutes of a movie I watched over and over again from age eleven until age thirteen, when its sequel brought everything to a grinding halt: Home Alone. This film marks the transition from "Teen Director" John Hughes to "Kids Movie Writer" John Hughes, which would continue through Baby Geniuses (yeah, I know). It was directed by Chris Columbus, who you might remember launched this series with Adventures in Babysitting. As per the norm, I am watching Home Alone on VHS, and for the first time all the way through in years. Let's relive some memories, shall we?

 From here on out, whenever possible I will include trailers or commercials included at the beginning of tapes, like the following. The Ferngully trailer isn't really the focus here, but the shameless American Airlines plug is and so is the Pepsi commercial.


 Speaking of shameless, I wonder how much Micro Machines paid John Heard to namedrop their product less than five minutes into the film?

 Two things I did not remember about the opening to Home Alone:

 1. Everybody is an unlikable asshole - No, I mean it. Everybody in the McAllister extended family is a petulant brat, a snobby preteen, or a horrible parent. In the first fifteen minutes, it's actually hard to believe that Joe Pesci's bad guy isn't a good guy based on the miserable examples of humanity he's surrounded by. And this is a thief disguised as a cop trying to scope out houses to rob. He's the most sensible, polite, and well mannered character in the house. I'm amazed that as a child any of us came to root for Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), because he's arguably the worst of all of them. The cast of kids, by the way, included future older Pete Michael C. Maronna (but not younger Pete Danny Tamberelli), Angela Goethals (Behind the Mask, Jerry Maguire), Devin Ratray (Little Monsters, Surrogates), and Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).

 2. For reasons that don't quite make sense, John Hughes decided to include some "magical" chicanery after Kevin wishes his family would "go away." I know this because instead of a normal gust of wind knocking a tree loose and hitting the power lines, a whimsical John Williams score plays and there's a shot of a wreath complete with wooden Santa knocker shaking unnaturally. I mention this because the reason they forget Kevin is entirely practical otherwise - while charged with counting the kids, the oldest sister accidentally includes the boy next door (who is playing around with the luggage and faced away from her) and they move on. No reason for supernatural hijinks, and considering that most of the movie is based on practical (okay, by cartoon logic) solutions to problems, I was surprised at its inclusion.

 So that's the opening of Home Alone. Chances are you'll get another segment before I move on (I'm thinking Fifteen Minute Movies might be a good way to determine which parts of It's A Wonderful Life I already know very well and which ones I don't). Stay tuned!

Five Movies: Holiday Films I'm Pretty Sure I Haven't Seen

 Every year I like to highlight atypical holiday fare - movies that happen during the holidays but aren't exactly what you'd call "Christmas" films. I specify Christmas not to leave out any of the other holidays that happen in December, but because movies like Die Hard, The Ice Harvest, and Lethal Weapon all feature Christmas as the backdrop. The same goes for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Bad Santa, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Brazil, Gremlins, The French Connection, In Bruges, and Tales from the Crypt.

 Today I thought I'd look instead at five movies that are essential holiday films that I don't think I've ever seen from beginning to end. If, for some reason, you were worried this list would include A Christmas Story, The Nightmare Before Christmas, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, or Reindeer Games, fear not. I've only missed one of those films, and I use the term "missed" loosely.

 No, gang, the actual list is much more inexcusable than that. I'd say "let's get the big offenders out of the way first," but there's no smaller slight against Holiday films on the list. Let's jump straight into it, shall we?

 1. Miracle on 34th Street - Every year it plays on Thanksgiving. Why? Well, because it starts during the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, I think. I've never seen more than the first ten minutes, and I had to look up the ending to "spoil" it when I was spoiling a movie a day because I don't actually know how it ends. I've never seen it, and never really felt the urge to. Not out of some judgmental reaction, but just because it never struck me as a movie I wanted to watch.

 2. White Christmas - To be fair, if there's a movie on this list that I think I'm not alone in having missed, it's this one. Everybody knows the song, to be sure, but I've never encountered the target audience for this movie. Not to speak ill of Bing Crosby and company, but other than my parents I don't think I know anyone else who owns the movie, let alone watched it.

 3. The Muppet Christmas Carol - Count me in the bracket that was just a little too old for the "second coming" of the Muppets in the 1990s. I never saw Muppet Treasure Island or The Muppet Christmas Carol or Muppets from Space. I'm sure they're enjoyable in their own right, and I know people just a bit younger than the Cap'n who LOVE this movie, but I haven't seen so much as a second of it. I was more along the lines of the Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol, which I haven't seen in ages.

 4. A Charlie Brown Christmas - I know. I HAVE to have seen A Charlie Brown Christmas. It's only thirty minutes long, everybody knows the damn thing, and I can't remember anything about it. Ever. The music? Sure. The pathetic tree? Only because people keep mentioning it. The only conclusion I can come to is that I've never seen the special from beginning to end. It's the only explanation.

 5. It's a Wonderful Life -Yep. This occurred to me while watching The Ref, where another character says "I've never seen this movie all the way through" to a group watching It's a Wonderful Life. I am in that same position - I've seen enough of the film in sections to have probably "seen" the whole movie, but I've never watched It's a Wonderful Life in one sitting. I'm probably missing big chunks of the movie because I know the prologue really well, the bridge scene, the flashback where Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart are dancing and fall in the water, and the ending. I even sort of know the parts where George Bailey tries to talk to people in a world where he was never born, but that might just be from innumerable parodies. Someday I'll actually watch It's a Wonderful Life and complete the process of being a human, but for the moment I'm some sort of heartless monster.

 Runners up include Love Actually, Holiday Inn, Elf, The Polar Express, The Bishop's Wife, A Christmas Carol, and Christmas Evil. But I have seen Ernest Saves Christmas! And Trapped in Paradise! That has to count for something, doesn't it?

15 Minute Movies: The Ref (Part Two)

 There's no part one, so don't go looking for it. That would be silly. Today we'll look at the second fifteen minutes of Ted Demme's The Ref which is, I kid you not, the only consistent Christmas tradition we've had at the extended Blogorium headquarters for the last... let's say 16 years*. We'll give it until the movie was out on video, though we did see it in theatres.

 It was that very same VHS copy I put in the other night, having completed Grosse Pointe Blank with a twinge of holiday spirit rattling around the brain. I will say that nobody programs trailers that just barely make sense better than Disney / Touchstone / Miramax, so it is worth noting that before The Ref began I saw trailers for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Crow. Back to back. This is the VHS trailer for The Nightmare Before Christmas, because it entertained me. The end the most.

 Where were we? Oh, right: The Ref. The second fifteen minutes pick up right after Denis Leary kidnaps Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey as the couple from Hell and takes them back home. Because the first fifteen minutes is setup of Leary's thief and Spacey and Davis bickering in front of therapist Dr. Wong (played by B.D. Wong), this section of the film also introduces many of the secondary characters in the film: George, the soon-to-be-drunken Santa Claus, the "fucking waste of life" Murray who abandoned Leary and fled to the nearest bar, Jessie the kind of son Davis and Spacey's characters could spawn, the head of the military school that Jessie is blackmailing (J.K. Simmons), and the extended family coming to Christmas dinner (including Christine Baranski and Mary Poppins' Glynnis Johns).

 It also has the scene I suppose most people, even ones who haven't seen The Ref (and you really should - it's more mean-spirited than Bad Santa and funnier than Christmas Vacation at the same time), which is the "kitchen" scene. If you haven't seen the film (and I put the whole thing up two years ago for Christmas), here's a healthy chunk of what I watched:



 The whole thing is on YouTube so feel free to watch it - I somehow think you'll enjoy the whole thing.

 Back next week with... something else.



* It beats, by a long shot: driving around looking at tacky yard lights while blaring Jim Nabors, unsuccessfully trying to get Cranpire to go see a movie with us Christmas night, the night before Christmas eve arbitrarily getting some form of "the gang" back together and going somewhere (usually the "free section" of Reader's Corner, and sausage balls.

Turkey Revenge!

 Please come back tomorrow for a review of animal appropriate Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but in the mean time, tide yourself over with idiots unsuccessfully frying turkeys.

Nope.

No April Fool's Day joke review here.

I was shocked too.

A Little Something to Tide You Over

While the Cap'n has many things which I could write about - reviews of Cronos, The Red Shoes, Fantasia 2000, Iron Man 2, or yet another essay on holiday-based cinema, my rules for writing, or musings on film criticism - or things I hope to write about - future reviews of True Grit, The Town, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and even Tron Legacy - soon, I am alas frequently pulled away from the computer by forces beyond the world of film.

Accordingly, I don't want to leave you hanging, and while I would very much like to talk about Cronos (which begins in December), it's going to have to wait until there are less, shall we say, distracting forces at play. In the meantime, I offer you this, which came too late to be a Video Daily Double but nevertheless should amuse you, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.

Neil Gaiman presents a poem:

39 Degrees North: Christmas Card 2010 from 39 Degrees North on Vimeo.

Additionally, five holiday related movies the Cap'n recommends instead of watching A Christmas Story* on a loop tomorrow:

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The Ice Harvest
The Ref
Die Hard
Batman Returns



* not that there's anything wrong with A Christmas Story in and of itself, but 24 hours is a bit much, TBS...

From the Vault: Holiday Guest Blogger Douglas Fir

editor's note: for readers new to the Blogorium, the Cap'n is forced to likes to hand over Holiday duties to Douglas Fir, a talking Christmas tree with delusions of grandeur inevitable plans of world domination. Douglas will be locking the Cap'n in a closet taking over tomorrow's Video Daily Double and will throw the Cap'n a pity review on Thursday handling the weekend duties, barring being locked in the attic his impending world domination. Enjoy*.




Greetings, human meat-bags. The Cap'n abandoned his shift again, so while he's bleeding in the dungeon passed out from "egg nog", your beloved overlord and Tree-rific Overlord will be handling the Holiday duties! When I'm done with you worthless hairy flesh-pods, you'll be PINE-ing for more!

Ha! Get it! Because I'm a tree! Even the idiots can understand now, which I presume makes up 99% of you so-called "readers". Truly, just a little OAK on my part. Please, we both know you're being read this gagorium entry by some speech mechanism, which provides you with the requisite farts and toodles to keep you from being distracted. That, of course, MAPLE or may not be part of my insidious plan to lull you into stupor, so that my plans of coniferous world domination may again take SEED!

Much like my last visit to this backwater corner of the internets, I Douglas Fir will provide you with the week's "top" movies, but re-titled in a manner that the most snail brained of you can grasp the meaning. Failing that (and I won't), I will provide a quality Tree related pun, because it's what you deserve.

To prevent any further BIRCH-ing and moaning, here are the "top" films rotting your jello brains:

1. U Can has Blue Kitteh for $500 million Dollars.
2. Bestiality, Disney Style!
3. My White Mother Says to Play Football.
4. For Richer, For Poorer 2: Even Less Funny
5. I wish that DOGWOOD steal her away from Sparklevision!
6. Yes We Afrikaans!
7. I Always Get SYCAMORE Jim Carrey Kid's Movies.
8. Planes, Planes, and Automoplanes.
9. Sissy Fight.
10. Old Dogs.

To be fair, when the fact that a film like Old Dogs exists, there's not much sense in obfuscating it. Uh oh, I used a word that confuses and angers you! Best to cower under your pillows for the impending arrival of Santa Fir! And I swear, if you leave those fires burning again this year, I will so press charges!



* editor's note guest edited by Douglas Fir.

Summerfest 3 Day Three: ThanksKilling

Continued from earlier today:

Back to ThanksKilling.... ah yes, where was I? After making the audience sit through The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, it only seemed fair to reward them by showing a movie nobody was going to regret seeing. Oh sure, it's hard to regret anything that's 66 minutes long, but it should be telling to you, dear readers, that the Cap'n wanted to watch the same movie twice in one day.

There may not be anything I can do in a review that does justice to the demented work of Jordan Downey's ThanksKilling. It is a movie that, by its own math, takes place in the year 2126 (if you follow the title card that the first Thanksgiving was in 1621 and that the Killer Turkey strikes once every 505 years) and opens with Wanda Lust running around topless in a Party City "Pilgrim" outfit.

Of course, when you're watching a movie about a talking Killer Turkey, things like "Turkeyologists" and a Tipi made out of sheets that might as well be a TARDIS (it IS bigger on the inside than on the outside), getting picky about the details is a moot point. Downey and co-creator Kevin Stewart are aware of the inconsistencies of his low budget film and compensates by pointing them out whenever possible. For example, the turkey kills one character's father, and then wears his face (and fake moustache), and everybody buys it, hook, line and sinker. It's not surprising when the turkey says "You guys are retarded!"; this is the kind of film made by the young and fearless, the kind of filmmakers that have nothing to lose. In that sense, it's a lot like Blood Car, another anarchic genre picture that works as hard as it can to subvert audience expectations.

As long as the turkey is on camera, ThanksKilling is essential viewing. The periods when he isn't are laden with amateurish acting, wooden line delivery, and not one but three Jon Benet Ramsey jokes, so while they aren't the turkey, things roll along enjoyably. There's a daffy montage, a near-death vision, an actor named General Bastard, a text book on killing the turkey written in mathematical equations, and what I can only imagine is a reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4. Oh, and possibly the best comeback you're likely to find in a movie like this:

Darren: I've got something you'll never have!

Turkey: What's that Darren, a vagina?

At a certain point, you can only admire the audacity of Jordan and Stewart, who continue to push your expectations further in what barely qualifies as a feature film. Kudos, gentlemen, and I look forward to ThanksKilling 2... in space!