Say Anything (Else)

**If you hear the 1989 cassette cut of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" blaring outside your window, don't call the cops. Find a condom.**

There are few things in this world that make me feel romantic.

1989's "Say Anything" is one of those things I have experienced in my life that accurately, if somewhat ineptly, captures the feeling of falling deeply, and irrevocably, in love. When John Cusack lifts that boombox over his head and makes those nervous facial twitches, I can't help but going week in the knees like Eagles' tackle Jerome McDougle at the prospect of actually playing football.

And to put my statement in context: although I am a sucker for romance films (I cried during "A Walk to Remember" like I hadn't cried since Littlefoot's mother died at the beginning of "The Land Before Time"), I never get involved with romantic subplots. If the badass hero of an action movie is in love with his sexy heroine, I just go along with it without ever actually batting an eyelash. But a pathetic, lovable kickboxer played by John Cusack standing outside my window blaring the top 1000 pop hits of the 1980s one by one from a jimmyrigged cassette player? I would make love to him on the spot, and not just because he's my boyfriend.

But, since I am The Midnight Movie Guy and not The "Sleepless in Seattle" Guy or The "such a pussy, why won't he stop crying in his room every time he hears Coldplay on the radio?" Guy, I might as well point out the aspects of this movie that get me every time.

First, "Say Anything" starts with the great granddaddy of cold opens. It's an ice opening. A liquid nitrogen opening. A breezy day on the north pole of Pluto opening. Starting from the moment the Twentieth Century Fox tag appears, it takes less than 15 seconds for us to go through exactly one establishing shot, two title-overs (the director's name and "Say Anything..."), and a plot-heavy opening line accompanied by someone absently noodling on a guitar. I had to restart the movie THREE TIMES because each time I thought I had missed some sort of exposition, establishing shot, or theme music that would make this opening less frigid. To make it worse, the "beginning" that's supposed to happen after the cold open never actually comes. Instead, we're launched into an incomprehensible mess of cinema verite screenwriting, drunk cinematography, and teenybopper direction which, when put together, could be called "romantic comedy" only by those who have a very forgiving definition thereof. If you're the kind of person who needs to be lulled into suspending your hard-earned disbelief, forget this shit and stick with the slowest film ever made.

And what follows is the mushiest possible romance late-80's realism will allow-- consider, for example the name "Loyd Dobbler." It's as if a group of Hollywood screenwriters locked themselves in a room and brainstormed until they came up with the most awkward combination of sounds in the English language and slammed them together with two capital letters. Cusack delivers his lines with the nervous rush of Dennis Miller with a speech impediment, and comes off simultaneously witless and witty in a way that makes you want to kiss him every time he says "...um," which is far more often than any other actor could pull off.

But by far the most annoying aspect of Say Anything is the screenwriting. The screenwriter uses a trick where each scene begins in the middle of a conversation, and then suddenly cuts off before the end. We never linger or stay to listen, as if the cameraman had such severe attention deficit disorder that he couldn't follow a whole conversation without his head exploding like a David Cronenberg extra. Not only will the scenes suddenly stop, but with them goes the entire soundtrack! If you ever want to hear more than eight measures of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," you better go out and buy the cassette because the sound editor aborts the song mid-lyric like a musical George Tiller.

But for everything bad I could say about the writing or the direction or the music or the cinematography, the last scene could remind even this cold-hearted cynical moviegoer what a good romance should be. I don't care if the rest of the movie feels like a frenetic late-80's music video, When Cusack and Ione Skye sit on the airplane to England together, waiting for the "ding" of the seatbelts sign, suddenly the artfulness of the work shines through in a simple act of symbolic realism. It's like Waiting for Godot except instead of Godot we've got the rest of the 1990s waiting for us, and any artist that could say that could say anything.

I would fly off with John Cusack any day.

(The) Final Destination

**The Warning. This movie may contain way more instances of the definite article than most people would deem appropriate. You are the warned.**

The Final Destination, not to be confused with Final Destination 1, 2, or 3: Electric Boogaloo, is the last (?) of a way too long series of teenagers-versus-fate horror movies. Now, I am the sort of movie watcher who appreciates a good scare. I really do. I once screamed so loud watching Ju-On that if I woke my parents up, which wouldn't be such a big deal if they lived less than 3500 miles away from here. However, the first thing anyone watching The Final Destination should know is that there is a difference between a legitimate scare and objects flying at your face like a Eli Roth version of Spy Kids 3D. The Final Destination fits into the latter category, and suffers greatly for it.

But before I get too deep into the movie's sorry excuse for a premise, let's talk about the definite article "the." The definite article in English is used for many purposes. According to the OED, you can put the definite article before a proper noun, natural phenomenon, ship, building, time, point of the compass, branch of endeavor, field of study, or something well-known or unique. A Final Destination movie does not qualify for any of these things, except possibly the natural phenomenon of me puking my guts out in the 4th stall of the theater's men's room after having to sit through one. The Final Destination is simply "Final Destination 4" uncreatively retitled to attract the people who had scoffed at the first two sequels like Republicans at the prospect of actually reading the healthcare reform bill. I don't know what team of creative geniuses came up with the idea of this inane retitling, but my guess is that it was the same great minds who brought us "2 Fast 2 Furious" and "Bring It On 5: Fight to the Finish."

I wish I could say Final Destination 4 is alone in it's badness or it's gimmicky 3D effects, but that would be a boldfaced lie. Final Destination 3 had a similar gimmick because it's DVD had a choose-your-own-adventure aspect to it where you could decide when main characters met their untimely deaths. Final Destination 2 also had some 3D parts and still managed to suck worse than Final Destination 1, which didn't have anything going for it except an audience of Jagermeister-shooting, extreme-cheetos-eating frat boys who would root for anything that caused people to die, even metaphysical concepts. In fact, the only good Final Destination I can think of is the one where Fox and Falco get to fight with no items and no level hazards, and even that one is annoying after about twenty minutes.

And I wasn't the only person disappointed with this seemingly final Final Destination. Those same frat boys that made this movie franchise famous left the theater with me in a rage that would have made Hitler look like a calm, rational old man. This movie falls short of the line even if you're one of the millions of Americans who have seen more Michael Bay movies than Akira Kurosawa ones and are proud of that fact.

So I'll leave it this way. If you are extremely desperate to watch something in 3D, go out and find a theater that is still playing G-Force. If you can't find one, go rent Spy Kids 3D and put it into your DVD player. Failing that, just stare at a wall cross-eyed until it feels like the imperfections in the paint are popping out at you. Whatever you do, don't waste your cash on this, even for a midnight show. Not recommended.

Inglourious Basterds

**Warning. This review contains spoilers like how Hitler is actually only a cover for his alter-ego, Super-Hitler, who wears a cape while killing Jews.**

When I first saw the intentionally misspelled advertisements for Inglourious Basterds, I thought to myself: “it’s probably better if I don’t know a lot about the movie before I go in.” I had picked up this reflex at some point between Jackie Brown and Death Proof, because at some point I must have subconsciously realized that if I went into a new QT movie expecting it to be as brilliant as the industry-changing Pulp Fiction, I would only be chasing the dragon. Not that T-rad’s films in the interim have been extremely bad, but rather that none have lived up to the expertise he demonstrated in Reservoir Dogs. And at first look, Basterds looked more like Kill Bill than Pulp Fic, so it was easy to believe that this movie would be nothing more than a purile exercise in re-writing World War Two. S I implore you to trust me, right now, when I say: Inglourious Basterds is, possibly, the best movie Quentin Tarantino has ever made.

But there are several quirks you’ll have to sit through in order to get to the glory. Instead spending the next four hundred and fifty words saluting the brilliance of this filmic tour-de-force, I will focus on those quirks that make this film particularly fucked up, anachronistic, pulpy, and otherwise midnight-worthy. And trust me, this movie is all four of those things.

First, this movie is full of fun facts about history. For example, did you know that World War Two ended abruptly in 1945 with Eli Roth machine-gunning Hitler in the face? Or that SS Officers were each issued a pipe the size of Alsace-Lorraine and a drinking boot upon deployment? I can’t believe I missed that in history class.

There are a few great Tarantino-isms, too: T-rad gets such a good performance out of Brad Pitt as a swaggering southern lieutenant, for example, that it almost makes me forget all about Troy, Ocean’s Thirteen, Mr. and Ms. Smith, and all the other crap he’s been in since the turn of the millennium. Also, Tarantino cast Eli Roth as a crazy American Jew who likes smashing people’s heads in with a baseball bat for entertainment, which, if you know anything about Eli Roth, means that he is essentially playing a toned down version of himself. Harvey Keitel makes an appearance as the American general who is only heard over the phone, and there is a moment where Samuel L. Jackson tells the audience in no uncertain terms how to blow up a theater. Honestly, Mr. Jackson, the only time I ever thought about blowing up a movie theater was after watching Lakeview Terrace.

But there is one guy who steals the show. Christoph Waltz pays a Jew hunting SS officer who might just be the biggest douche ever put to film. This character can find Jews with his sense of smell and intimidate people with milk. He’s brilliant, but not just brilliant, Hannibal-Lecter-crossed-with-Sherlock-Holmes-while-making-love-to-Tony-Stark brilliant. Nazi-Spock-on-Methamphetamine brilliant. He is pitch perfect as a villain, and even plays his own comedic relief. Just like McLovin, I could easily stand to watch a two hour movie just about that guy.

But then there is a cameo by Mike Myers.

It is first worth a note that one of the trailers before this movie is Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.

As soon as Mike Myers appears on the screen, even though he’s caked with more prosthetics than Carla Gugino on the set of Watchmen, you will recognize him. I, for one, will never forget the look of that man’s, bushy, Congo-like eyebrows. I kept expecting him to say that the lead actress was “a man baby, yeah!” His scene is mercifully brief and begrudgingly unnecessary, if surprisingly funny for it's incredible... Britishness.

(Austin Powers 4 is in the works, btw.)

For those of you who are counting Tarantino's tricks, there is NO scene shot from the inside of a car's trunk in this movie, but there is a Mexican Standoff. It seems that T-rad has skipped all the phallic imagery and gone straight to the point on this one, for every gun in this Mexican Standoff is pointed directly at various character's testicles. It's a Texican Standoff. I guess QT is making up for Death Proof, which had lots of trunk shots and only one guy getting his balls blown off, which is well below average. Also, this movie has a soundtrack.

When everything is said and done, Inglorious Basterds is well worth your 10 bucks. It's violent, yeah, but it's not Kill Bill and it plays around with the nature of the cinema just enough to rile my inner Andre Bazin. The references will make a film nerd squeal, and the dialogue is perfect, elliptical, comedic and suspenseful all at the same time. The ending is a little hard to swallow, but otherwise this is how theater is supposed to be made. Highly Recommended.

Do I Look Like a Bitch? Inglorious Basterds

**Warning. This blog post contains gratuitous amounts of Samuel L. Jackson. If you are sensitive to Samuel L. Jackson, I suggest you read no further.**

Does the Midnight Movie Guy look like a bitch?

I SAID, does the Midnight Movie Guy look like a BITCH?

Then why'd you try to fuck him like a bitch, Quentin? Yes you did! Yes you did! And Mr. Midnight Movie Guy doesn't like to be fucked by anybody except Mrs. Movie Guy.

You see, there's this passage from Pulp Fiction I got memorized. Jules Winnfield, act 2, scene 17?

"The path of the righteous audience is beset on all sides by the tropes and cinematography of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of Welles and Scorsese shepherds the bored through the theater's darkness, for he is truly the cinema's keeper and the filmer of great movies. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furiously bad reviews those who attempt to poison and destroy my cinema, and you shall know my name is The Midnight Movie Guy, when I lay my vengeance upon thee!"

(bang)

All I'm sayin' is: Inglorious Basterds better be good tonight.

G.I. Joe: The New Low for Cobra

**Warning. This blog may contain spoilers, including the complete script of the movie, transcribed by me, verbatim, while I was sitting in the theater. You are warned.**

It all started with the advertisements.

I first saw the ads for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra when I was sitting in the theater next to a blond girl from Minnesota at the midnight showing of Star Trek drinking Red Bull and vodka from a Nalgene. We were drinking and laughing and chatting with the people sitting around us, all excited for the premiere of a movie we had literally waited months to see. We were ready to make sweet, sweet, five-star review love to anything that came out of that projector, and when the girl smiled at me it was with every tooth in her mouth and several other teeth she had probably borrowed for that express purpose. When the lights finally dimmed, the crowd literally applauded as the first MPAA green-band came into slow focus.

Then, to our collective horror, the preview for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra came on.



The fanboys in front of me froze suddenly in their seats. Their mouths hung agape, their glowing cell phones dangling mid-text from their terrified hands as their minds tried to calculate the monstrosity, the sheer Conradian horror, of the preview rolling before them. Quickly realizing that unless someone did something the whole audience be reduced to proto-comatose husks holding ticket stubs, I roused an impromptu four verse, two part harmony rendition of the unofficial national anthem as we tried to laugh away the agonizing pain of seeing something so traumatizing that it would make a trip to 4chan look like an episode of Wishbone. In less than a minute, the trailer for this film had plunged us all from the heights of elation to the dismal depths at the pop-cultural Heart of Darkness.

This midnight show was different. It was far, far worse.

The night started at about 9 PM when I gathered with several of my close friends and fans at my apartment with bags of dollar-menu hamburgers and cans of hard cider. We purchased tickets and stopped at the local watering hole to harden our fortitude, pounding down several pints of Guiness each as if we were expecting the planet to be destroyed by Vogons.

The theater was about half-sold to twenty-something Portland Community College kids in backwards ball hats and pink popped collars. As I walked in, the manager leaned against the theater entrance and whispered quietly to me: "this movie is about seven years too late." I gave him the thumbs up and gulped down enough nervous spit to fuel The Thompson Elk. When the theater lights finally dimmed, the audience members around me braced themselves as if their theater seats might take off into the sky and toss them back towards the earth as mach two. The two guys next to me cracked soda cans with a ceremonial click-clack as the first green-band played across the screen. I don't often get to say this, but those first two trailers felt like the best two minutes and thirty seconds of my life.

The movie finally came on like The Creature from the Black Lagoon stepping out of the depths-- with a lurking stumble akin to Stephen Sommers upon spotting a box of Krispy Kremes and a new CGI team.

Here's the rundown: the bad guys shoot lazer beams that are basically the Tesla Gun and fly on hovercrafts that are basically the Nebuchadnezzar. The good guys are cardboard cut-outs and I don't mean they lack character development, and they wear super armor which has the singular purpose of making them easier to CGI. The movie rips off every single action movie trope since 1970. Star Wars trench run? Check. Top Gun flip fight? Check. Sword fight over an "energy pit?" Check! Gratuitous mid-scene flashbacks to film-tinted people giving inspirational speeches from the long long ago time? If you're doubting at this point, you better not see this movie.

Did I mention that one of the main fights in this movie is a race to prevent terrorists from blowing up the Eiffel Tower with a beeping silver case and a rocket launcher? Do I need to mention that this sequence is lifted from Team America World Police, almost shot for shot? Team America was a brilliant, hyperbolic parody of the super secret military movie. G.I. Joe stumbles along as if it were some sort of retarded child who didn't get the joke, taking the exact same scene and working through it with a straight face and a million dollar SPFX crew.

The rest of the film is a pure, straight shot of filmic ineptitude. There is a subplot about Snake Eyes, the team's resident ninja with no personality, whose backstory pads the movie for a full five minutes. Why should we care? I don't know. How about the final battle at the secret base under ten stories of ice in Antarctica? Well, let me give you this gem of dialogue: "It's the perfect place to build a base! Nobody will look for it there and it's easily defensible." A base. In Antarctica. *Facepalm.* One of the Wayans is in this movie too, to the annoyance of everyone. The credits came like merciful angels.

We stumbled out of the theater like damaged men, hanging off each other's shoulders with the cold dead eyes of combat vets who had seen things men had never been meant to see. The horror, the CGI'd horror!

This movie sucked, and I mean bad. This movie is challenging even for the advanced movie mocker. Before you brave a screening, have some Dramamine on hand because this one is a stinker.