flick you off

Last night I got kinda sad. How sad? I was eating bacon bits and gummi bears. I wouldn't wait til I was done with the salty before I'd reach for the sweet. It was kinda funny that the gummi bears had actual fruit juice but the bacon bits contained absolutely no bacon, but not funny enough not to be kinda sad (and fairly gross). I decided to do something productive-ish, so now I'm a movie reviewer. Here's a month's worth of thrift store finds, mellow time on friend's couches, outdoor screenings, and Five Dollar Tuesdays.

Bamboozled - When I was seeing Nikole, she was still engaged, so I could never come over to her house. Unfortunately, this meant that I never got to meet her snake. Fortunately, it also meant that she left a lot of shit over at my place. The stuff she never got back was Frankenhooker, Bamboozled, and a Disrobe cd. Nikole recommended Bamboozled as an outrageous comedy and I really can't tell why. Maybe she had a different experience than I did because she's black and maybe because she'd never seen the ending sober. Once again, Spike Lee wants nothing more than to stir the pot of collective guilt and bum everyone out. This movie put some serious rain clouds over my head on a day when I really didn't need em.

Nikole: I lost your copy a couple apartments ago. You can have this one. Basaraba has Frankenhooker. He won't give it up without a fight.

Corpse Bride - The dead are more alive than the living, especially moreso than Dickensian England's social grabbing upper crusts.Tim Burton makes a good movie. Visually stunning, et cetera. Worse than Big Fish, better than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It feels kinda phoned in though, for something that took a decade to create.

By the by, the musical number at the doorway to the underground is amazing, and as good as anything from A Nightmare Before ChristmasWith Danny Elfman as Mister Bonejangles!

Death Race 2000 - Post apocalyptic future. All the way in the future year of 2000 AD.David Carradine (as Mr. Frankenstein) versus Sylvester Stallone (as Joe Faturbo)versus a sexy, good-natured Nazi versus a freedom fighting grandma named Thomasina Paine. You know that game that you play when you're driving where an old person is walking in front of your car and someone yells "200 points!" and then you murder them and get 200 points? Someone built a movie around it. It's even better than it sounds, if such a thing were possible.

Featuring The Real Don Steele as the news reporter!

Eating Raoul- When I was ten, I suffered from insomnia. Maybe suffer is a bad term. I rather enjoyed insomnia. The movies and cartoons I watched in the middle of the night laid the foundation for a lot of the weirdness to follow, and this was one of em. When I remarked to my father, some thirteen years ago, that I saw Eating Raoul the night before, he was shocked. After seeing it now, so am I. How were they ever able to censor this enough for TV? The whole thing is sex, murder and eventually, canibalism. In1982, California was overrun by swingers, who are pretty much drug addled rape zombies. After a series of mishaps that lead to a murder,a prudish couple from Redondo Beach puts out an ad as dominatrices to raise enough money to start a restaurant. Their plan is to murderthe swingers who answer their ad- and who will miss them?- without ever getting kinky.

Featuring The Real Don Steele as the swinger party host!

Fire and Ice - Ralph Bakshi makes a movie for the Heavy Metal Magazine/Dungeons andDragons set. It's actually a lot like one of the shorts from the Heavy Metalmovie: "Den" starring John Candy, only there's less sex and it's about forty times longer.

Forbidden Zone - This is the best movie ever. Everything is animated or made of cardboard and it stars The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and Tattoo, the midget from Fantasy Island. Everybody humps in this movie, and nearly everyone is Jewish. The devil sings Cab Calloway, the princess never puts a top on, men of sixty play twelve-year olds and less than half of the cast are actual actors.

Foxfire - When Jenny Lewis came out with Rabbit Fur Coat, I demanded to see her tits. In Foxfire, she's the only one that keeps her top on. Apparently, because she's suppsed to be the "fat" one. If she continues to be a public figure/indie darling I'm going to get totally creepy about her. Meg White creepy. Isaw this one when I was fourteen, and all the best films were about teenage lesbians or white gangbangers. Angelina Jolie as James Dean, heroin, homemade tattoos, and a soundtrack by Babes in Toyland and Kristine Hersch make me feel 1995 wonderful.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 - It's aNightmare on Elm Street movie, I must be at Breanna's house! Freddie Krueger is the bastard son of a hundred criminal mental patients and a raped nun. You want backstory? Eat that shit up!

Pirates of the Caribbean 2: The Something of the Something's Something - Why do I like this? Why doesn't anyone else? Who's wrong here? Johnny Depp made the unique decision to flesh out the character of Jack Sparrow by going really flaming gay. No one expected it. No one in the studio liked it. It worked like gangbusters. I figured thathis affectations would be less efficacious because, this time, the writers knew what he would be doing and would overdo it. It felt natural though, and there were squid monsters, and barnacle monsters, and a hot Voodoo priestess with a platinum grill! I totally like this against my better judgment.

Rebel Without a Cause - James Dean is much less James Dean than I always thought. In this movie he's a whiny, rich kid who wants nothing more than his parents to be forthright with him. His best friend is the kind of loner that shoots dogs, and I'm not sure if they mean it to be as funny as it turns out. When Cybil Shephard does talk radio interviews, she tells a story about how Natalie Woods' rank pussy turned Elvis off of cunnilingus for years. In this movie she's a mature sixteen year old who doesn't have much trouble getting over her boyfriend's death. In retrospect, take all of your classics off their pedestals, because they're pretty meh today. Except of course Forbidden Zone, which is the best movie ever.

Yellow Submarine - I like the Beatles, but don't need to hear any of these songs for a while. This movie would be better as a mashup. I think I'm going to try it with Os Mutantes, or maybe Tupac. I miss smoking pot. See also: Pink Floyd's the Wall.

The Young Ones - This BBC sitcom has magic powers. When I watch it alone, it feels like brilliant, subversive, sillytelevision, but when I try to show it to people it turns into a cheesy, dated sitcom filled with broad archetypes where everybody's always yelling. Then they lose respect for me. I need someone who likes this show already to watch it with me, so I stop looking foolish.

[currently listening to "Rabbit Fur Coat" by Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins]