Retro Review: Super High Me and The X-Files: I Want to Believe

 (editor's note: The Cap'n realized there was a series of Blogorium posts from 2008 that never made the transition from our old stomping grounds to the new one. As a result, it seemed like a good idea to share some other reviews that had been otherwise "lost" over the past four years).


Last night, I watched two movies:

    X-Files: I Want to Believe and Super High Me.

    Guess which one was surprisingly engaging and changed the way I perceived someone?

    If you guessed Super High Me, you're correct. As the title would suggest, the documentary is a parody of Super Size Me, wherein comedian Doug Benson (The Marijuana-Logues, VH1's pick something) finds out what the effects of smoking weed all day for thirty days straight are.

    This one joke premise actually gets expanded a little bit since Benson, a noted pot-enthusiast, has to stop smoking pot for 30 days in order to accurately judge a month of doing nothing but getting high. I was always kind of lukewarm towards Benson, because it seemed like he always had the obvious joke on Best Week Ever or I Love the (fill in the blank), but it does turn out that he just works better blue.

   During the 30 days of not smoking pot, Benson also becomes surprisingly lucid and more observational in his stand up (which he continues doing all 60 days), even if he doesn't notice it. It's actually quite interesting watching him go from stoned to sober to stoned again. I wouldn't call it regression when he hits the end of no pot, but there's a definite shift in his material.

    The rest of Super High Me is devoted to learning more about California's medicinal marijuana program. Benson meets people who run the dispensaries, the cameras are present when the DEA raids in the middle of the night, and he jokes with other comedians about getting high. As far as the "effects" go, there's not a radical difference in his medical tests, psychological profile, or psychic ability (you heard me), althoug his sperm count goes wayyyy up.

    Recommended as a renter if you like Doug Benson, are a stoner, or like stand up peppered with frequent drug use. Not recommended if you thought Super Size Me was a life changing experience.


--

    The most damning thing I can say about X-Files: I Want to Believe is that it's disappointing. After all these years, the best Chris Carter could come up with was a third rate episode of CSI featuring Mulder, Scully, and Billy Connoly playing a pedophile priest.

    Oh, excuse me - a possibly psychic pedophile priest. That, along with a ridiculous twist involving organ transplants and two headed dogs are what qualify this sub-par episode disguised as a movie as being "paranormal". What it really means are endless (and pointless) arguments between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson about "the darkness" and "believing".

    Everything about the film is perfunctory, from the camerawork to the lackluster score and the grasping at straws way the film both tries to ignore the series but throw in as many "hey remember this" bits. For example, in the span of 60 seconds, we see Mulder a) walk to his "I Want to Believe" poster, b) eat sunflower seeds, c) a picture of his sister, d) the camera pan up to see the pencils in the ceiling, even though it doesn't make sense in the house they live in. Oh, and the basketball, just in case. All they were missing was an "X" on the window.

    There's a George W. Bush joke that's so behind the times that it wouldn't have been funny in 2004, let alone 2008. Why they dragged Mitch Pileggi in for such a pointless and unnecessary cameo is beyond me. He's literally only in the film because fans would've rioted otherwise, because there's no other reason for his totally wasted screentime.

    Frankly, everything about X-Files: I Want to Believe is a waste. It's nowhere as horrendous as the series finale; it's just unnecessary. The worst sin the movie could have commited was to exist for no good reason, but that's exactly what happened. If for some bizarre reason Chris Carter gets a shot at one more movie, they'd better make it a damn sight more compelling. Even die hards can only take so much abuse; ask George Lucas.

Happy Friday the 13th!

   

Blogorium Review: Your Highness

  Sucks is a strong word. It's the kind of word that describes a movie that you loathe, that you actively hate beyond the point you'd forget other movies. Roger Ebert devoted an entire book to it, based on his disgust for Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, when he told Rob Schneider that "your movie sucks." There are very few movies for which I have so much venom for that I'd say they sucked. To no one's surprise, Your Highness doesn't really suck.

 (It's okay, you read that right.)

  Your Highness is one of those movies that people sure think sucks. It'll probably win some Razzies if it's an easy enough target, and it was one of two black eyes for David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls): he took it hard for the first film and then was summarily dismissed for (presumably) ripping off Adventures in Babysitting with The Sitter. I wouldn't know, because I didn't see it. In my defense, I'd just watched Adventures in Babysitting two weeks prior. It seemed redundant. But I did see Your Highness.

 Before we jump into the review proper, it's probably important to mention that I'm not exactly a devotee of the "sword and sorcery" films that Your Highness is paying homage to (or making fun of). I've never seen Krull or The Barbarian and the Sorceress or the dozen of other movies that dominated the "Sci-Fi / Fantasy" section of Video Bar. I saw the covers and shrugged. Eventually I saw (and enjoyed) Conan the Barbarian, but Your Highness is paying tribute to a cinematic subgenre I'm not that versed on. Take that for what it's worth.

 Thadeous (Danny McBride) and Fabious (James Franco) are the sons of King Tallious (Charles Dance) in the kingdom of... well, I'm sure they mentioned it somewhere. Fabious is always on quests and Thadeous is at home picking on Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), his squire or slave or something. When Fabious brings home Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), a prisoner of the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux), to be his bride, the sorcerer doesn't take it lying down. He captures Belladonna and Fabious, Thadeous, Courtney, Julie (Toby Jones) and brave knights head out to rescue her. With the help of the mysterious warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman), they race to find the Unicorn Blade and slay the wizard before the moons eclipse and Leezar's "Fuckening" begins.

 Your Highness is a film of unmitigated vulgarity. To what end, I'm not sure - profanity seems to exist for the sake of punctuating sentences. There's also some marijuana-based comedy, but nowhere to the degree of Green's Pineapple Express, which I would think people would make a connection to based on Franco and McBride. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what's supposed to be funny in Your Highness, which is unmistakably a comedy. If the mere image of Danny McBride in a suit of armor falling down stairs is the kind of thing that tickles your funnybone, get ready for yuks! There's also a pot smoking puppet that molested Fabious as a child and requires our heroes to, well, give him a "hand" before continuing on their quest. The best joke is an arguably clever bit of misdirection involving Thadeous' punishment for violating the Queen of the Dwarf People.

 I get that there might be some audience out there for people who want to see a minotaur sodomize Courtney before Danny McBride chops its johnson off and wears it around his neck. It's not a large audience, apparently, but I get that McBride and Ben Best (The Foot Fist Way) wrote this in the way a thirteen year old watching this film would re-enact it with his buddies. It's a hard R movie on a large scale (or it looks it, anyway - at 49 million I guess that's pretty moderate) that didn't seem to find its target market. I'm not saying that there isn't one; I'm just not sure how many hardcore Krull fans wanted to see a movie where the evil wizard promises to defeat Fabious with "magic, motherfucker" (actual line).

 So I get why there's so much animosity towards Your Highness. I don't see how it's the worst movie of last year, or even close to it, but the movie never "clicks." That said, I didn't really HATE Your Highness. It's not a "good" movie, but it's not unwatchable. I have no idea who thought this would be funny (well, my pet theory is the people who made it) but it's sporadically funny, there are some decent action scenes, and the relentless profanity can catch you off guard and induce a chuckle. It's also extremely violent at points, which works in its favor. I'm not saying you SHOULD watch Your Highness, even if you are, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, but if it was on Showtime one afternoon and you were, shall we say, stoned out of your gourd, it's not going to kill your buzz. The cast is clearly having fun (especially Justin Theroux) and the stupid is kind of infectious after you give up trying to figure out why this movie exists.

Cranpire Movies Presents: Bong of the Dead

 Normally, I wouldn't watch a movie called Bong of the Dead. The title really tells you everything you need to know about the film, and I'm positive I can find ten more movies with little to no effort that will be more enjoyable. Then again, I said the same thing about ThanksKilling, and I was dead wrong. Since friend of the Blogorium Cranpire has transplanted himself to a commune, he can't watch movies like Bong of the Dead, which he normally would.

 If I needed to know why not to watch Evil Bong or One Eyed Monster or Mega Shark vs. Crocoppotamus, I could ask him. But now he's gone, so somebody needs to carry on the tradition. Why it was me, I'll never be quite sure, but here we are. I just watched Bong of the Dead. Yeah, I really did. It's the first of what will be a regular series of "Cranpire Movies," which honestly is the same thing as "So You Won't Have To" for most of you. Sorry Cranpire, but it's true.

 Meteors fall to Earth, turning humans into flesh eating zombies. After six months, most of the cities are deserted, so stoners Edwin (Mark Wynn) and Tommy (Jy Harris) have all the time in the world to get high and act like idiots. One day, Edwin discovers he can use zombie brains to make a super powerful strain of weed, but when he runs out, they decide to head into the "danger zone" to collect more zombie fertilizer. Along the way they meet Leah (Simone Bailly), a loner living in her family's gas station / bar, who grudgingly helps them fix their broken down car. But trouble is ever lurking from the zombies, include Alex Montgomery Dickens III (Barry Nerling), a talking member of the undead creating his own army to wipe out the living...

 Bong of the Dead is so busy borrowing from better movies that one has to wonder why this turned out as badly as it did. The movie is, at bare minimum, a combination of Pineapple Express and Zombieland with just a pinch of Blood Car to make things interesting. Or it should - the concept of using dehydrated zombie brains mixed with water to create a super weed fertilizer is introduced and promptly forgotten until nearly an hour into the film, and when it comes back, it's more for a "hey guys, we know we set this up and then turned into a 'road' picture, so we're going to at least acknowledge you aren't as high as we are" fait accompli. But like nearly everything else in Bong of the Dead, that too is forgotten to move on to the "big" showdown.

 The editing is lousy, which undermines the occasionally impressive cinematography, and the over-use of digital effects to mask budget shortcomings doesn't help. Then again, I could overlook the trappings of a low-budget zombie movie if I cared about Edwin, Tommy, or Leah. Two obnoxious stoners and a stock "badass babe" character can't carry the long stretches of bad jokes, punctuated by moments of "drama" that grind the film to a halt.

 Not having zombies in the movie after the opening (a semi-clever prologue featuring a guy who looks like Hulk Hogan and his wife turn into zombies and eat each other) for nearly thirty minutes wasn't an issue for me. It's nice to see a zombie movie made on the cheap that doesn't rely on the zombies to carry the film. Then again, when it means spending time with Tommy and Edwin, which includes no less than two "we're high and doing stupid stuff half naked" montages, Bong of the Dead tested my patience.

 The zombie boss wasn't interesting enough to sustain this chicanery, neither was Leah (who is, admittedly, resourceful before those morons show up), and the movie dragged along until suddenly we needed gratudity, a joke about a Chinese zombie using chopsticks to eat brains, and an appropriation of Dead Alive's lawnmower-as-weapon. The ending doesn't really make much sense, except for a "you can see it coming a mile away" ripoff of Shaun of the Dead (appropriate, since it also rips off the beginning of Shaun of the Dead). Thankfully, there's a mid-credits sequence that recycles a concept from Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis, in case you hadn't seen that winner. If you want to say it's "homage" be my guest, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

 I guess I was supposed to be grossed out or offended or something when the pregnant zombie gives birth to a zombie baby and another zombie picks it up and eats it, but by that point in the film such a cheap stunt is too little, too late. Bong of the Dead takes far too long to deliver any of the exploitation its title sequence implies is coming, and instead leaves audiences with a (no pun intended) half-baked experience. Flashes of good ideas come and go, but in the end I was left with three characters I didn't give a shit about, a story that could at best be described as "meandering," and some scattered gore that deserves to be in a better movie. I can't even say that this is a "Cranpire" kind of movie because I think he'd turn it off and take a cigarette break before watching Swamp Shark. And to be honest with you, I wouldn't blame him.

Retro Review: The Big Lebowski

 It's true, gang - the Cap'n has never reviewed The Big Lebowski in any incarnation of the Blogorium. I mention it all of the time, and have talked about seeing the film and its impact on teenage Cap'n (seven years of trouble!), but it's never had a proper review here. Since the film arrives on Blu-Ray today, it seems only fair that I finally assess the movie that went from being the Coen brother's follow-up to Fargo into a genuine cult phenomenon in its own right.

 Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) is better known as The Dude, a free spirit bumming around in Los Angeles circa 1991. The Dude likes to smoke a little pot, drink White Russians, and bowl with league partners Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Donny Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi). Their only concern is advancing during round robin tournaments until two thugs (Phillip Moon and Mark Pellegrino) break into The Dude's apartment and pee on his rug. They work for Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara), and Lebowski's wife Bunny (Tara Reid) owes Treehorn money. The only problem for The Dude is that he's not married. Bunny is married to Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) - the "Big Lebowski" from the title - and when The Dude tries to replace his rug, he's drawn into a kidnapping plot involving nihilists (Peter Stormare, Flea, Torsten Voges, and Aimee Mann), rival private detectives (Jon Polito), Lebowski's daughter Maude (Julianne Moore) and missing toes. Can The Dude abide all of this?

 Die-hard Lebowski fans already know I left two key components out of the film: The Stranger (Sam Elliot), and Jesus (John Turturro). I also didn't mention Saddam Hussein, the Busby Berkeley-inspired dream sequences, Lebowski's butler Brandt (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), Smokey (Jimmie Dale Gilmore), Walter's show dog, Maude's friend Knox Harrington (David Thewlis), Autobahn, Logjammin', Larry Sellers (Jesse Flanagan), The Dude's landlord Marty (Jack Kehler) or his performance art. Or half a dozen other memorable moments from The Big Lebowski.

 I also haven't covered how imminently quotable The Big Lebowski is, from "8 year olds, Dude" to "that, and a pair of testicles" to "shut the fuck up, Donny" or  "this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass" or "you are entering a world of pain" to "you don't fuck with the Jesus man!" I'm sure I left out your favorite quote, but that's okay. The Big Lebowski has something for everyone - it's a distillation of Raymond Chandler concepts dropped into a laid back comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen. The funny thing is that The Big Lebowski wasn't always The Big Lebowski.

 The first time I saw The Big Lebowski, it was nearly as an afterthought - I had seen the trailer, which gives you no idea whatsoever the movie was about:



 See what I mean? The spots running on television didn't exactly inspire confidence, either:



 Critical responses were mixed, from the amiable but slightly dismissive Roger Ebert to conflicted pans from Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Todd McCarthy. The general impression I had as The Big Lebowski made it to theatres was "well, it's no 'Fargo'" and foolishly I waited. It took a good friend of mine to talk me into seeing The Big Lebowski ("you MUST see this movie") as it was winding down a run at the $1.50 theatre. In 1998, it wasn't the movie it is now; The Big Lebowski was a film seem by a small audience of devoted fans who went gaga for the off-kilter tone and loopy characters. The Dude was a hero to many, and over the next ten years, the cult grew.

 So too did the film's reputation - on VHS and DVD, The Big Lebowski became the film to share with friends, the great part movie. Before long there were Lebowski Fests, and eventually it wasn't odd to see t-shirts, bumper stickers, and posters devoted to The Dude. Hell, I have a "The Dude Abides" bumper magnet that's slowly fading from legibility on my car, and if you've seen any of the "photo" posts I do from time to time, you know I love to use that picture of Jeff Bridges dressed as The Dude while wearing his Tron helmet. I am unabashedly a fan of The Big Lebowski, but have never felt like a part of the Lebowski "cult" - I just loved the movie and so did everybody I knew. It never occurred to me to think of Lebowski like people regard The Rocky Horror Picture show, but that is kind of what happened. It's almost inconceivable now that people didn't want to see The Big Lebowski, so I'm glad that's flipped almost all the way around.

Geek Tuesday... for some reason.

 New release Tuesdays are usually a grab bag of fun new titles, back catalog releases / upgrades, and every now and then a out-of-left-field cult curveball. For a film geek, it's fun to scour "new release" lists to see what's coming out, so I can only imagine heads were exploding (Scanners style) this past Tuesday. Three extremely "geek friendly" DVDs / Blu-Rays dropped, each of which had a mixed reaction and not amazing box office numbers along for the ride. I've seen two of them, but not the other one (yet): Paul, Your Highness, and Super.


 If you haven't been following the Blogorium for long (and the Cap'n welcomes new arrivals), each film comes from a particular pedigree of nerd fandom: Paul is the "two geeks pick up an alien in the desert" film written by and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), is directed by Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland), and also features Jason Bateman (Arrested Development), Sigourney Weaver (Alien), Seth Rogen (Pineapple Express), Jo Lo Truglio (The State), Kristen Wiig, and Bill Hader (both SNL). The film begins at the San Diego Comic Con and is packed with references to other geeky alien movies. I generally enjoyed Paul, but the film doesn't really pick up until Wiig's arrival in the film, mostly because Paul isn't so much of a character as he is Seth Rogen before she enters the narrative.


 Your Highness is David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, George Washington)'s much anticipated follow-up to Pineapple Express, the film that moved Green from "indie filmmaker" to "mainstream sellout" in some eyes, but to many of us was a logical preamble to Eastbound and Down. Your Highness re-teamed Green with Danny McBride and James Franco along with Natalie Portman (Leon: The Professional), Justin Theroux (Mulholland Dr), Zooey Deschanel (500 Days of Summer), and was an ode to the sword and sorcery fantasy genre that was omnipresent in the 1980s. I must admit that other than Conan the Barbarian, I was never that into the whole movement, and only one website really seemed very excited about Your Highness when the film actually came out, so I skipped out on it. It's not highly regarded by critics or audiences, and when I couldn't make a $1.50 Theatre showing, it seemed best to let the film slide. I will give it a shot some time soon, because I do trust the creative team.



 Super splits critics right down the middle: James Gunn (who wrote Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake and directed the amazing Slither) took a very Troma-esque approach to the "super hero in the real world" subgenre (see: Kick-Ass, Defendor, Special, Paper Man, and a few others I'm forgetting), starring Rainn Wilson (The Office), Ellen Page (Juno), Kevin Bacon (Hollow Man), Michael Rooker (Slither), Nathan Fillion (Serenity) and very briefly, Linda Cardellini (Freaks and Geeks). It's a twisted, at times extremely violent and crude film, and as many people hate it as love it. I have the feeling that some of that comes from the influence of Lloyd Kaufman's Troma Films, where Gunn cut his teeth - there are parts of Super that feel like they've been directly lifted from The Toxic Avenger, and if Troma team releases aren't your thing, Super might not be either. However, if you even liked Slither, you should check out Super.

 It was odd to see all of them coming out on the same day, draining the wallets of geeks who can't be bothered to sit in a movie theatre anymore, because they share roughly the same history: lots of buzz preceding their release, mixed reviews, and moderate to tepid audience attendance. I don't know about Your Highness, but Super and Paul will probably have a long life on video because they appeal to the shut-in's and cast-out's that do, well, what I'm doing right now. Gee, I wonder if I have Paul and Super sitting on the table across the room? Maybe, but what are they sitting under? Bet you won't guess that one!

 (Hint: It's not Your Highness.)

  It is fair to point out that despite their lack of box office busting prowess, none of the discs appear to be bare-bones. This may be a sign that studios are aware that the geek demographic is willing to pay a little bit more for a high quality, high definition experience as long as the movie is packed to the gills with bonus content (Universal is very good at this, and while Paul isn't as loaded as, say, Scott Pilgrim with extra features, it's a better lineup than say, Paramount's True Grit Blu-Ray).

 Why all three on the same day? I don't really know, but maybe we ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe it's an opportunity to kick back with some friends, some brewskis, and enjoy a laid back August weekend.




Hollow Man is what you guys think of when you hear "Kevin Bacon", right? Or maybe Death Sentence? Oh, and Michael Rooker has been in a lot more than just Slither, but Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer ate up too much space and I'm sure as hell not going to use Mallrats.

Retro Review: The Crow

 I've mentioned every now and then in Retro Reviews about films that grow with you, films that you develop a relationship with over time. Some films change because of the way you see them at a particular point in life, and as you mature or experience life differently, so too does the way that film affect you. I use Dazed and Confused as a key example, because what appeals to me about Richard Linklater's film shifted over eighteen years: when I was in high school, it seemed like the ideal alternative to the boring, suburban existence the young Cap'n felt "trapped" in. I didn't appreciate that the characters felt very much the same way, because the free spirit duo of Wooderson and Slater seemed so much cooler. I wanted that experience and didn't have it like Mitch did. Over time, I came to sympathize with other characters, to the universal experience that Linklater tapped into of adolescence, and I adamantly defend Dazed and Confused from people who dismiss the film as just a "drug movie."

 It's appropriate that I bring up Dazed and Confused (instead of Blade Runner or Apocalypse Now or Citizen Kane, films that have a similar growing curve) because it was one of two VHS tapes I ended up with halfway into my freshmen year of high school. The other tape was just as important to the young Cap'n, for very different reasons, and because I loaned it to someone who I never saw again, many years passed between watching The Crow for the first, second, third, and fourth times and when I finally watched it again for the first time on DVD. They will always be linked for me because they had very distinct trajectories - Dazed and Confused I grew with; The Crow I grew out of.

  (for those of you who haven't seen it): Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) and Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas) live in an apartment building where some hooligans are stirring up trouble. Their complaints bring about a personal visit from T-Bird (David Patrick Kelley), Skank (Angel David), Tin Tin (Lawrence Mason) and Funboy (Michael Massee), who break into their apartment, rape and murder Shelly, shoot Eric, and throw him out of the window. But it turns out that sometimes when a terrible event occurs, the crow who carries souls to the other side will bring that soul back to make the wrong things right (paraphrased from the film). Eric comes back as an invincible killing machine and takes the thugs on one by one, raising the ire of their boss, Big Top (Michael Wincott), and his witch girlfriend Myca (Bai Ling). With the help of Police Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson) and young girl Sarah (Rochelle Davis), can Eric right the wrongs before Big Top discovers the key to his immortality?

 A very quick recap: as I mentioned in my Army of Darkness Retro Review, I wasn't allowed to see The Crow because of the "rape" part of "they raped and murdered Eric Draven's girlfriend before they shot him." When it came out on video, I watched it with my Dad, who didn't really like the movie but gave me the "ok" to rent it again if I wanted to. So while hanging out with some ne'er do-wells (one of whom was, appropriately, very much like Dazed's Slater), we went to a nearby Carbonated Video and rented Dazed and Confused and The Crow. We watched them both, howled with laughter and brooded with teenage angst, and I went home the next morning. The mistake I made was not taking the tapes with me, because the guy whose house I was at never took them back.

 The video store called us, I tried in vain to get him to return them or give them to me, and it took the better part of two months to finally wrestle the tapes away from his pot-hazed person. The clerk at the store took pity on me (and my very irritated mother) and instead of charging us the justifiably high late fees, she offered to let us buy them as "previously viewed" for $9.99 apiece. Deal. Now I had Dazed and Confused AND The Crow on VHS! Lucky me! Later on, I loaned The Crow to a kid I rode the bus with in middle school because he asked my brother if he could borrow it.

 I never saw or heard from that kid again (but I remember your name, buddy!), and The Crow receded into memory. I had the J. O'Barr graphic novel, which I would tote around school and read (although I was secretly disappointed it was different from the movie - oh, how we change...) but I don't know that I watched it again in its entirety for years. Instead, I fixated on Brandon Lee's accidental death, even printing out an article about it from microfilm in the school library (I am not making this up. To be fair, I was comparably obsessed with Kurt Cobain's suicide for roughly the same period of time). I also had a black light version of the poster. I wore a long black trench coat, listened to The Crow soundtrack (and a LOT of grunge and mope-core), and had long hair.Yeah, I was Hot Topic before Hot Topic existed.  Sigh... to be fifteen in the mid-nineties.

 When the two-disc "special edition" DVD came out, I remember I hurried out to buy it for the deleted scenes and any hint of making of's or commentaries about this enigma of a film. I'd already seen Alex Proyas' next film, Dark City which I loved (and still do, for different reasons), and I think slept through half of The Crow: City of Angels before forcing myself to finish it. It's awful. After devouring the underwhelming extras, which totally avoided talking about what anyone is interested in the film for (the adaptation or the tragedy), I decided it was time to watch The Crow again.

 Almost immediately I wished I had let the memory remain: it's not just the cliched narration with all the subtlety of a Cliff's Notes, or the "oh, we're so EEEEEEVVVVILLLLLL" bad guys, or the fact that as charismatic as Brandon Lee was, even he couldn't sell the lines "Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children. Do you understand? Morphine is bad for you. Your daughter is out there on the streets waiting for you."The only thing that didn't make me cringe was Ernie Hudson's line "well, at least he didn't do that walking against the wind shit, I hate that" and Draven's Jesus joke. The shotgun full of wedding rings? The knife fight? Bai Ling? Yikes. Even Blogorium favorite Michael Wincott doesn't walk out without stinking.

 Since The Crow is now pressing forward with a remake (or re-adaptation, if you will) starring Bradley Cooper (Limitless, The Hangover) in the title role, it feels appropriate to revisit the film, but I still have trouble getting far into the movie. I don't feel one way or the other about it being remade, because I've moved so far away from the angst that connected me to O'Barr's graphic novel and Proyas' film. I was embarrassed that I embraced such a brooding, ridiculous film that frequently borders on parodic, a film that in retrospect is fitting of such terrible sequels as City of Angels, Salvation, and Wicked Prayer.

 What's funny is that this clarity reminds me of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book (and movie) that seems to be universally loathed by female friends of mine, but that I loved. It perfectly captures the mentality of a fifteen year old boy, one who feels the whole world is out to get him and wants to lash out in any way he can. Harry Potter would read The Crow in Order of the Phoenix and love it. It offers isolation, rage, feelings of being wronged, and the violence to retaliate towards those who wronged you. It's perfect for that age, and if you haven't been a fifteen year old boy, I can see why Order of the Phoenix might rub you the wrong way. I can also totally understand why I was attracted to (and grew away from) The Crow, and I don't know if I want or need to go back any more. Sometimes you grow with the movie. Sometimes you grow apart. The Crow and I grew apart. We're not angry at each other or anything, it's just a mutual "yeah, that didn't really pan out, did it?" It happens.

Retro Review: Dude, Where's My Car?

  I've seen Dude, Where's My Car? once. That's it. Every time I see Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott together on television, I change the channel. I have no desire to ever watch Dude, Where's My Car again, no matter how many people of the marijuana-friendly persuasion suggest that I give it another chance. The story of how I came to loathe Dude, Where's My Car? is not a new one in the Blogorium, but perhaps this will be the complete story that allows me to put it to bed.

  At the time that Dude, Where's My Car? opened (December of 2000), I had already left the movie theatre I worked at and was working for a shipping company (if it helps, it's the competitor to the one Tom Hanks works for in Cast Away), and it was routinely kicking my ass five days a week after the relatively cushy projectionist job I was used to*. During the week, I really didn't want to do much of anything before going into work at 9 and after leaving at 3 a.m. However, I still had an "in" with the assistant managers at the old movie theatre, and this is where the Cranpire enters the story.

 I bring him up because he's not going to care much, and he's central to why I went to said movie theatre before work one night to see a movie I didn't want to see. Cranpire wanted to see Dude, Where's My Car?, and he doggedly pursued talking me into going with him so that he didn't see it alone. Why? I'm not sure. Odds are he can fill in that detail in the comments, but I went along with him (in his car, and that's important), got us in for free, and we plopped down in the auditorium to watch two stoners who lose their car and repeat lines ad nauseum.

 There were two other people in the auditorium: a pair of giggling teenage girls who thought Kutcher was "totally cute" or something like that. Really, they just giggled a lot - in fact, they giggled at everything in the movie, which probably would have driven the Cranpire to make some horribly offensive comment, had he ever heard them giggling. But he didn't, because Cranpire fell asleep.

 Memory tends to work in funny ways, so it retroactively makes sense this would happen - he subsequently slept through The Man Who Wasn't There and... something else. There were three movies that he went out to the theatre for and simply nodded off, but to me Dude, Where's My Car? was the most infamous.

 He may have made it through the trailers, he may not; it's hard to say because I didn't notice he'd nodded off until I was trying to salvage my disinterest in Danny Leiner and Phillip Stark's lame alien abduction / implied pot head comedy. I don't even remember IF there were jokes about getting high because as the inanity piled up, so too did my rage level at being talked into coming to see a movie I didn't want to see with someone who wasn't even awake to watch it. Worse still, I couldn't leave the auditorium with the giggling girls and the sleeping Cranpire because he drove and he drove a manual, which I couldn't drive. I was stuck there, trying to find any way to make a movie I already didn't like bearable before going to work and getting the hell beaten out of me.

 The kicker is that as the ending credits started rolling, like clockwork, Cranpire woke up. He missed the entire movie but had the impeccable timing to wake up just as the narrative itself was over and done with. Needless to say, I broke my usual rule of staying through the credits (a holdover from film classes in college) and he dropped me off at home so I could head to work.

 I've had no desire to watch the film since, and as the years pass, I remember less and less about the film. There was something about giant alien women and necklaces that grow their girlfriends' breasts, but what really sticks is the repeating of lines over and over again. "What does mine say?" "Dude. What does mine say?" "Sweet, what does MINE SAY?!" etc. As I understand it, Cranpire saw the film again sometime later with some other friends, and they loved it. It has been posited to me that I, in fact, saw the film with friends in Greensboro when I know that could not be the case. I saw Dude, Where's My Car? once. That's it, and that's what it's going to be. I give a lot of movies second (and third and fourth) chances, but not this one. It's not up for revisiting any time soon, and probably never.





 * Yes, this may sound contradictory to a prior Adventure in Projectioneering, but believe me when I say that as busy as I was juggling sixteen screens, it was nothing compared to five hours of non-stop boxes hurling into a truck from Monday to Friday. I wrecked both of my ankles, my left knee, and my back during the year-and-a-half I worked at said shipping company.

Retro Review: Dazed and Confused

(personal disclaimer from the Cap'n: I first saw Dazed and Confused in high school, and owned a used VHS copy because a friend of mine - a dubious gentleman to say the least - forgot to return the rental copy for months thanks to, shall we say, chemical influences. I have, over the ensuing decade plus [nearly decadeS] watched the film at least once a year, for reasons that will be clearer on the other end of this retro review.)

It would be easy (and a little cheap) to dismiss Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused as "just another stoner movie." The argument for that missive is there, and on a surface level (particularly from its marketing by Universal), readily available for pointing out: the psychedelic artwork on the poster, the half-there smiley face accompanying the art, the ubiquitous nature of its "groovy" soundtrack in the early 90s, or the fact that most of the characters in Dazed are at least casual drug users.

When Dazed and Confused arrived on home video in early 1994, marijuana enthusiasts in high school and college around the U.S. embraced the character of Slater, a half-cognizant advocate of all things hemp, as their spokesperson. With Cheech and Chong before them and Half Baked, How High, and Pineapple Express to follow, it's no wonder that people who haven't seen the film simply assume Dazed and Confused is one long pot joke, and the fully baked audience that continues to embrace this "one note" reading of the film doesn't help. My question, however, is what do they make of the rest of Dazed and Confused, when getting high isn't a central plot point - you know, most of the movie?

The truth is that Linklater's film is written off because of surface level readings by people who might be shocked to discover that Dazed and Confused is also about rites of passage, conformity, and the universal feeling that anything has to be better than right here and right now. That teenage malaise accounts for the backbone of the picture, and Dazed and Confused has more in common with Lucas' American Graffiti than it does Still Smokin'.

Dazed and Confused takes place in one day - May 28th, 1976* - the last day of school at Robert E. Lee High School (home of the Fighting Rebels) and focuses on a cross section of rising seniors, introduced in an efficient montage: we meet the stoners, the jocks, the womanizers, the nerds, and the "mean girls" to borrow a phrase from a later film. Each shot introduces some kind of business that pays off later in the film (pay attention to the tarp in Pink's truck). Linklater introduces us to so many characters during the film that to introduce them all (many of whom are actors that would be famous after the film) would triple the length of this review. For the purposes of keeping it short, allow me to focus on Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), Sabrina Davis (Christin Hinojosa), and Jodi Kramer (Michelle Burke).

"Pink" and Jodi represent the rising seniors as Lee High School, and Mitch and Sabrina the rising freshmen from a nearby middle school. As is tradition in the Austin of Linklater's Dazed, rising seniors "haze" the incoming freshmen: boys are giving a "lick" with home-made paddles, and girls are given an elaborate, humiliating series of tasks, including pacifiers, food condiments, car washes, and forced "proposals" to the student spectators nearby. The leaders of each hazing are perhaps a little overzealous: Benny O'Donnell (Cole Hauser) and Darla Marks (Parker Posey) relish the opportunity to belittle as they were, while the rest of the seniors play along but seem to feel ambivalent about the situation.

If "Pink" is our entry point into senior life, Mitch is the alternative: the kid who would be nobody save for a request by his sister to "go easy on him." As the surrogate for Linklater, the younger Kramer gets more of the story devoted to him than Sabrina, although they follow similar rites of passage through the film: both are "taken in" by their older counterpart, and join in for an evening of joy-riding, partying, and gentle ribbing as the "new kid." When Mitch - a pitcher for the local youth league - falls under Floyd's protection, he becomes a de facto member of the gang, although his presence allows for additional "tests" including buying beer, smashing mailboxes, and coded drug talk ("Are you cool man?").

Floyd, on the other hand, has his own test to pass: the football team is forcing players to sign a waiver promising a drug and alcohol free season next year, and "Pink" disagrees on principle. Rather than play the simple "rebellious" card, Linklater gives Floyd a series of arguments for and against signing the pledge (which just doesn't seem to go away): on the one hand, it's equated to "Neo-McCarthy-ism" and conformity, but the other players question his loyalty to the team and to them by refusing solidarity and embracing the easy-going perks of being a sports star. That Floyd doesn't come to a conclusion by the end of the film regarding his future as quarterback allows Linklater to avoid easy answers to less clear-cut problems.

Much of Dazed and Confused takes place between the collapse of one party and the forming of another at a nearby Moon Tower. Here the film most resembles a 70s take on the 1960s of American Graffiti, following different sets of intersecting groups as they drive from one place to another, restlessly looking for something "exciting" to do in their "boring" home town. This is, I suspect, where Dazed and Confused resonates with most audiences beyond a simple "drug" theme: the idea that even these kids, who seem so much cooler than we ever hoped to be at that age, feel confined in their environment. Drugs are an escape, a leisurely way of dealing with teenage angst, but most of them at one point or another in the film opine that the decade / location / social circle they are locked in as lacking somehow.

In a line often assumed to just be a cheap joke, Cynthia Dunn (Marissa Ribisi) says "Maybe the 80s will be like radical or something. I figure we'll be in our 20s and it cant' get worse," after referring to the 50s as a drag, the 60s as a major cultural movements, and the 70s "obviously" being a disappointment. It's easy to look at the line now and say "oh, ha ha, the 80s were so lame" but Cynthia's statement is a counterpoint to an earlier when she, Tony (Anthony Rapp) and Mike (Adam Goldberg) are discussing their stilted lifestyle and she says "if we are all gonna die anyway shouldn't we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I'd like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor insignificant preamble to something else." The two statements, taken in total, underline the teenage attitude: on the one hand, everything sucks and will for the time being, but that's all the more cause to live it up, to escape. Things don't end so well for Mike when he decides to seize his moment with greaser Clint Bruno (Nicky Katt), but the attempt is more admirable than retreating into a drug induced haze.

Dazed and Confused is structured like Linklater's debut, Slacker, but with a more coherent narrative through line. He still wanders from character to character, sometimes with what appears to be no reason, but for the most part all of the major characters - and a few of the minor ones - have an arc in the film. Ironically, the two characters without any discernible "beginning, middle, and end" are its two most iconic: Rory Cochrane's Ron Slater and Matthew McConaughey's David Wooderson**. Both exist in different forms of arrested development: Slater is a perpetual "weed casualty," espousing on the relative merits of marijuana and generally regarded as harmless by his friends. Wooderson is a perpetual man-child, the type of guy who graduated years ago but who still hangs out with the high school students because he feels cool. Oh, and because of the most quoted line of a very quotable film: "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age."

Appropriately, while most of the characters learn something or grow in some way, Dazed and Confused doesn't necessarily end, per se. Mitch and Sabrina go home, a little wiser to what's coming; Darla makes a drunken ass of herself; Mike picks the wrong fight; "Pink," Simone (Joey Lauren Adams), and Slater hop in Wooderson's muscle car and hit the highway to buy Aerosmith tickets. Their future is unclear, as are many at that age. Where Dazed and Confused actually resonates isn't in the frequent, mostly inconsequential joint and bong hits, but on another level, one its detractors can't or won't consider - it's easier to "just say 'No'."



* Appropriately, Linklater's setting provides for audiences - theoretically, the youngest you can be to see an "R" rated film is seventeen - characters the same age they are when viewing, a ploy that only increased during the film's successful secondary run in home video.
** It's tempting to add Ben Affleck's Fred O'Bannion to the list: his one note character - a senior who deliberately failed in order to continue hazing rising freshmen - doesn't learn or mature much throughout Dazed and Confused, but O'Bannion does play a role in the narrative through-line of Mitch's friends, and his comeuppance is the bridge from the "bar" sequence to the "Moon Tower" party.