USA

Team America: World Police

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Four stars

Fuck the Arc de Triomph, the sphinx, the eiffel.  Ditto Mount Rushmore, the Louvre, the Panama Canal.  An America with a shit ton of collateral damage.  Let my strings entwine with yours lover.  Let me taste your cock, your cunt, the contours of your perineum.  I’ll puke all night in the alleys of forgotten Nebraska and be gone by dawn.  Theres a lot of splendid stupid here.  Marionettes messed up by house-cats and dogfish.

D, W & M by: Trey Parker; More W: Matt Stone & Pam Brady; More M: Harry Gregson-Williams & Kubat; P by: Bill Pope, A by: Chiodo Bros.; E by: Thomas M. Vogt; w/Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Kristen Miller, Masasa Moyo, Daran Norris, Phil Hendrie, Maurice LaMarche, Elle Russ, etc..98 min, USA, 2004

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3 Women

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Four stars

“I’m trying to reach toward a picture that’s totally emotional, not narrative or intellectual, where an audience walks out and they can’t say anything but what they feel” – Robert Altman

A mechanical witch cackles in the dusty saloon.  The 1st woman spies the 3rd through a fish tank.  Primordial figures etched in secret on the bottom of the swimming pool.  A picture like a puzzle with pieces missing.  Duvall’s dress hem jammed in the car door.  The mojave leers over the balcony.  Nothing here is strictly extraordinary rather realistic life reveals it’s eerie smiling ghoul face.  Altman dreamed the script, the cast, the setting and turned his dreams to cinema.  Proclaimed witch and soothsayer Angeliska assembles some dope-ass stills, behind the scenes photos, & impressions over here on her site.

D & W by: Robert Altman, More W by: Patricia Resnick, P by: Chuck Rosher, E by: Dennis Hill, M by: Gerald Busby, A by: Bodhi Wind, w/Shelly Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule, Robert Fortier, Ruth Nelson, John Cromwell, Sierra Pecheur, Belita Moreno, etc…124 min, USA, 1977

Indepence Day: Resurgence

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Three stars

I liked the elderly boat mensch adopts alotta orphans subplot. I thought Brent Spiner’s husband was Mandy Patinkin the whole movie and was really excited about that. I dug all the cgi destruction and definitely did a couple gettin-pumped, tense, inhalations of breath while I held my fist against my teeth and chin. Saw it in a full theatre. Somebody’s grandpa was sitting next to me and every time the aliens gained ground he said, “That’s not good,” out loud to his wife. It was really fun. Missed Will Smith.

D by: Roland Emmerich; W by: Nicolas Wright, James A. Woods, Dean Devlin & James Vanderbilt; P by: Markus Förderer; E by: Adam Wolfe; M by: Harald Kloser & Thomas Wanker; A by: Derrick Ballard, Jonathan Burdeshaw, Pyrokinesis, Alex Auriol, etc…w/Jeff Goldblum, Brent Spiner, Bill Pullman, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Judd Hirsch, Deobia Oparei, Robert Loggia, Vivica A. Fox, etc..120min, USA, 2016

The Perfect Nanny

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Three stars

Delicious trash!  We lounged in twin beds, a hotel room’s fill of homies and flipped between this glorious garbage and Nick Jr.  Outside San Fran was getting started, inside we nurtured hangovers, took turns taking showers, flipped on our backs giggling and screaming and kicking air.  We goofed, we improved, we pillow fought, we cuddled.  I prayed “get it gurl” as Tracy Nelson shot one liners, clubbed exes, stabbed CEO’s.  Awestricken by harlequin romance dream sequences.  Buy the slow burn buildup of TV transgression.  Oh the soapy, campy, filth of it all!  During commercial breaks we were offered make-up and cleaning products.

D: Robert Malenfant; W: Mark Castaldo, Christine Conradt, Richard Gilbert-Hill, & Victor Shiller; P by: Don E. FauntLeRoy, M by: Richard Bowers, E by: Gregg London & Robert Pergament; w/Tracy Nelson, Bruce Boxleitner, Dana Barron, Scott Terra, Susan Blakely, Katherine Helmond, Darren Gray Ward, Cindy Guyer, etc…90 min, USA, 2000

Finding Dory

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Four stars

All the ocean’s fauna (save one squid) rally behind the eponymous blue tang.  When beset by doubt they ask what she would do, “WWDD?”  Dory herself utilizes this trick, the guiding principle larger than the fish it represents.  Larger than the Christ it recalls, though come to think of it he, too, is symbolized by a fish.  Am I saying Ellen DeGeneres is Jesus?  No I am not.

D & W: Andrew Stanton & Angus MacLane, More W: Victoria Strouse & Bob Peterson, A by: Bert Barry, Don Shank, James W. Brown, Catherine Hicks, Kishan Ramjas, Leo Santos, Sikand Srinivas, Tsung-Yin Hsieh, etc..P: Jeremy Lasky, E: Axel Geddes, M: Thomas Newman w/Ellen DeGeneres,  Ed O’Neill, Albert Brooks, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Kaitlin Olson, Idris Elba, Sigourney Weaver, etc…97 min, USA, 2016

Slime City

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Four stars

Men’s-Rights-activist, young-Republican, Travis-Bickle-wannabe, motherfucker moves to skid row.  Drinks ghost sludge.  Continues to be whiny,self-righteous asshole.  Murders the downtrodden.  Tries to cheat on his girlfriend.  Morphs into pulsating goop monster.  Finally gets his in gleeful gory glory.  It’s a mean-spirited, right-wing, reactionary romp through exploitation splatter in the vein of Street Trash but played a little more straight.  Charmingly “flawed”, offensive, & original.  There’s a cheapo Ingmar Bergman pastiche.  There’s a squirting vagina-dentata chest wound.  I had a lot of fun hating the protagonist, hooting at the politics, and waiting for the DIY gore FX.  I recommend it.

D,W & E by: Greg Lamberson; P: Peter Clark, M: Robert Tomaro, More E: Briton J. Petrucelly, w/Craig Sabin, Mary Hunter, Bunny Levine, T. Clay Dickinson, Dick Beil, T.J. Merrick, Marylin Oran, Dennis Embry, etc…81 min, USA, 1988

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

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Three stars

A winter wind billows down Chicago’s back-alley’s and a man appears.  A teacher of Hamlet, long-haired, handsome; his best friend’s bald.  He courts Greek Cinderella and her large wacky family.  His parents are squares.  That dude from N’sync is in this.  The lyra wails.

D by: Joel Zwick; W by: Nia Vardalos; P by: Jeff Jur; E by: Mia Goldman; M by: Alexander Janko & Chris Wilson, w/Nia Vardalos, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin, John Corbett, Louis Mandylor, Gerry Mendocino, Joey Fatone, 95 min, USA, 2002

  

Teenage Turtles 6: Shadowlands

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Three stars

According to Eckhart Tolle our slavish devotion to the mind robs us of the deep divine stillness of being.  Turtle brothers battle a brain.  Taoist, hormonal, subterranean, CGI New Yorkers in the latest filmic entry of an ip with an awesome/grotesque toy-line from my youth.  Megan Fox symbolically strips onscreen out of old April into new.  Will Arnett does a comedy bit with a wall cable.  There’s a pop punk cover of the 80’s cartoon theme.  Tyler Perry is wonderfully unrestrained here, he never turns into a fly though.  Not even post-credits.

D by: Dave Green, W by: Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec, P by: Lula Carvalho, E by: Bob Ducsay & Jim May, M by: Steve Jablonsky, A by: Ryan Bradley, Oz Gani, Wong Joe, Kai-Hu Lan, etc…thnx Peter Laird, Kevin Eastman, Michael Bay; w/Laura Linney, Tyler Perry, Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Stephen Farrelly, Gary Anthony Williams, Brain Tee, Tony Shalhoub, etc..112 min, USA, 2016

The Babysitter

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Two stars

The thrilling wrongness of being outside peering in.  Men breaking boundaries, burdening budding sexuality.  Men fantasizing about giving Alicia Silverstone a bath.  Soapin’ up her back, oh yeah.  A #yesallwomen picture.  A classical piano score.  If this movie were made today the quarterback in the diner besot by patriarchal temptation would be reading the Robert Coover source material as a sorta meta nod or easter egg rather than Catcher in the Rye, the go-to text of Hollywood for symbolizing white male angst.

D & W: Guy Ferland; P: Rick Bota; E: Jim Prior & Victoria T. Thompson; M: Loek Dikker, thnx Robert Coover & Joel Shumacher, w/Alicia Silverstone, J.T.Walsh, Lee Garlington, George Segal, Lois Chiles, Jeremy London, Nicky Katt, Tuesday Knight, etc…90 min, USA, 1995

Primer

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Four stars

Whiteshirt Redtie shoots some hoops.  Whiteshirt Blacktie orders  the steak.  Whiteshirts Redandblackties cradled in coffins of aluminum, flooded in magnetic fields, await the hour of emergence.  Travel back in time to stop themselves from traveling back in time to stop themselves to stop.  It is quiet in the box where eardrums burst and blood dribbles.  They share a dream of oceans.

 D,W,M & E by: Shane Carruth, P by: Troy Dick, w/Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Carrie Crawford, Anand Upadhyaya, Samantha Thomson, Jay Butler, John Carruth, Chip Carruth, etc…77 min, USA, 2004