RIP Leslie Nielsen

My favorite bit from the first Naked Gun movie is an exchange between Nielsen and Priscilla Presley. I couldn't find a clip, so here's a sound clip:

Tragic Blimp Accident

I love language

I like words when they're strung together in a pleasing way. Here are some fun words strung together in a pleasing way, read in a pleasing way, by Stephen Fry:



And here are some filthy words strung together in a pleasing way, courtesy of the fine movie "In the Loop":



Fuckity-bye!!

No, NO, NOOOOOO!!!!!

My brain works in strange ways. Probably I'm not as unique as I think, but here's how it goes. Things just kinda rattle around in there. I hear something and it goes in and sometimes it kinda stays there, and then when I think I'm not thinking about it, suddenly I have questions about it.

So, I read that Ms. Goop (Gwyneth Paltrow) was going to be guesting on Glee and singing Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You" song. Major Ick right away. And of course she can't actually sing the song as is so they changed it to Forget You. Videogum had a link to the song on youtube and I clicked it and watched, Oh, 10 seconds, shuddered, and stopped watching. And then I read somewhere else that the radio edit of the song was "Forget You" so at least the editing wasn't out of nowhere.

Like, you know, when they air a movie on television and have to edit it, and they make the actors say something else to put over the oh-so-naughty words? And suddenly "I have had it with these mother-fucking snakes on this mother-fucking plane!" becomes "I Have Had It With These Monkey-Fightin' Snakes On This Monday-To-Friday Plane!" Jesus Christ. I so fucking hate radio and TV edits.

So this whole forget you thing was rattling around in my brain, and then today I'm on the internet and I suddenly think "Forget You! Radio edit!! Must go to youtube and find this shit!!" And yes, that came out of nowhere. I mean, there was probably some reason, I read something that made me of think of Cee-Lo or Glee or something, and suddenly my brain reacts. So, yeah, I went to youtube and listened to the radio edit. And yeah, it was annoying. Really fucking annoying.

Here's why: the fun of the song is in the profanity. It's the juxtaposition of a light, airy pop song with the words Fuck You as the chorus. Without the fuck you, it's just a light airy pop song with no soul. The two other things I really noticed was that at some point he sings "Ain't that some shit" which became "Ain't that some shhhh...." LAME. And then there's the background bit I really love, "I ain't sayin' she's a gold digga...just thought you should know, nigga." Which they left in, but there's a subtle fading on the "nigga" so if you didn't know it was supposed to be there, you wouldn't notice anything missing. Which just seems like stoopid annoying political correctness shit to me.

And then after listening to that and being annoyed, I went back to my important game of Snood and suddenly my brain said, "ooh, you didn't listen to the whole Goop version, what did they do with all of that??" and I had to pause the Snoods and go listen to the whole Goop thing. Which, if I'd just listened, I might have been fine, but just seeing Ms. Whitebread Pretentious Goop singing that song, oh, my soul died a little. And yeah, they did the whole "shhhhh" instead of shit and they just completely dropped the "nigga" so it sounds like bad rhyming.

I'm a vulgar person. I love profanity. Mind you, I think it has its place and some people use it too much. If you use it too much, it becomes watered down and meaningless. Kind of like how if your parents never swore, but then they suddenly did, you knew they were pissed and you better listen to them. I have listened to comics who just said fuck after every word and after a while, it's like, come one dude. The fucks should enhance, they shouldn't always be the joke, it's just lazy. But when it's done right, it can be awesome. "Forget You" just takes all the sting out of the song and I do Not like it. In my world, Samuel Jackson would have said Fuck You to the people who told him to recite alternate clean lines, but in the real world, that's just what they do. It's incredibly common.

So I dunno. I guess that episode of Glee is this week and maybe in context, it'll seem less annoying. Then again, maybe I won't watch it and I can stop being such a judgmental bitch. Ha!!!!!!! I LIKE being a judgmental bitch. I truly do.

RIP: Dexter

I guess I never put Dexter On Notice. I just gradually got bored with the show and now have no interest in catching up. It's too bad, cuz Julia Stiles is on there right now and I LUV HUH. And I will truly miss Ms. Debra Morgan's filthy fucking mouth. Apparently last week she said "Shit a brick and then fuck me with it!" I bow down, Ms. Morgan. A really low deep bow to the Master.

What I won't miss? Quinn. LaGuerta. Angel!! I loved LaGuerta at one point, yeah, she was a complete bitch, but at least she had personality. And Angel was quite adorable for a while. But the two together? Major buzzkill.

So, goodbye Dexter. I just hope someone alerts me if Michael C. Hall decides to get nekkid or something.

Dexter, to Deb: "Just how much coffee have you been drinking?"
Deb: "A metric fuckton."

I love Louis C.K.

And I also love Ricky Gervais. If I'm feeling down, I can find a clip of Ricky laughing that full-body laugh of his and I just feel better.

Anyway, this was my favorite vignette from the first season of Louie.



And the kicker:

Halloween movies

Okay. A week later and I still haven't done a post on the movies I watched last weekend on Halloween. So this is just a big trash dump of the movies I watched and some brief thoughts. Maybe I'll do better reviews another day when I have time.

Pieces: A sort of slasher flick from 1982. REALLY BAD. But, absolutely hilarious. A young kid chops up his mom and then 20 or so years later (I forget) he starts chopping up women on a campus and taking different body parts. It's utterly ridiculous but I laughed so hard, it was totally worth the watch. If I ever put together a weekly bad movie watching night this would be on this list. I gave it 2 stars, cuz duh, it was terrible, but the experience I'd rate 4 1/2 stars. It's like Troll 2. You can't give it 5 stars, it's awful, but the experience of watching it? Awesome.

In the Mouth of Madness: John Carpenter movie from 1994. Surprisingly good. Really awesome premise. Basically, this popular horror writer discovers that the setting of one of his novels has turned into a real place. I think maybe the premise was more awesome than the execution, but I still quite enjoyed it.

Creepshow: I saw this one when I was younger, but maybe I was too young to get it. I enjoyed it much better the second time. Anything with Adrienne Barbeau being a drunken harpy is just too damn awesome not to like.

Body Double: Okay, not a horror movie, but I was committed to watching a bunch of movies on Netflix Instant Watch, and this one was expiring in a few days, so I watched it. BIG mistake. All of the big twists were telegraphed way too early. Maybe it's just cuz I've seen so many movies now that are like it, but nothing surprised me. I think if I hadn't figured it all out so early, I might have enjoyed it, but still. The ending made me want to throw something at the computer, so I gave it 1 star. ICK.

Ghost Ship: Surprisingly decent. I'd wanted to see this one when I saw previews for it (Nurse Hathaway + Gabriel Bryne? WIN) but then the reviews trashed it so I never did. But it wasn't too bad. Horror movies can never seem to STOP doing a twisty surprise ending even when it's not needed, so I was disappointed in the ending, but oh well. And it wasn't a twist ending, it was just, oh she thought the bad dude was dead and he wasn't. Lame. Sometimes that's scary, like when Hannibal Lecter calls up at the end of Silence of the Lambs, and sometimes it's just lame. But this movie is worth seeing if just for the opening. Truly awesome. Not particularly scary, though. And really, the material was kinda beneath the lovely Julianna Margulies, but still. She is truly awesome. Oh, and Karl Urban is in it and HOTNESS abounds.

Dolls: Another good one. All I have to say is, Watch this one!! It's really good and features a little girl who didn't make me want to smack her! It's really important when a child is the main character in a movie that they not be terrible (think The Sixth Sense vs. The Phantom Menace). This little girl was definitely not of Haley Joel Osment's stature, but she was pretty okay. Watch it!! And watch it again!!

Scarecrows: Dudes hijack a money plane or something and then end up hiding out in the woods where scary scarecrows come to life. Very creepy. But ultimately, kinda meh. I don't think I'd watch it again. There was a final girl and she was quite annoying. Disappointing.

Antichrist: Okay. Not exactly a horror movie, at least not in the horror genre. This is the Lars Von Trier movie with Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainesburg. I was a bit traumatized after this movie. Even though it wasn't technically a horror movie, it had been in my instant queue for a long time and I really wanted to see it. And it turned out to be the only movie I watched that day. After it I just couldn't face another horror movie. I can't say I enjoyed it. I can't exactly say I liked it. But it was a really good movie. If you've ever seen The Piano Teacher, directed by Michael Haneke, it kind of leaves you with that feeling. Really good and really well done, but, damn, you need a break afterward. Put it in the pile with Leaving Las Vegas and Requiem for a Dream, also really well-done good movies that I NEVER need to see again.

Pop Culture Education: Big Trouble in Little China

Sometimes I'll be reading mah blogs and a bunch of different people will mention a movie or TV show that I've never seen, and I'll decide it's time I rectified that. Sometimes this turns out well, sometimes not. Typically the movie/TV show will be something from the '80's that the people discussing it saw when they were kids and now they're looking back at it with nostalgia. Without that lens of "oh, I LOVED that movie when I was 13!!" these can sometimes look fairly lame to someone not in the know.

The Goonies and Monster Squad are good examples. I watched The Goonies a few months back, and it was okay, worth watching and all, but I didn't love it. I doubt I'd watch it again. Monster Squad I didn't even get halfway through, it was so stoopid. BUT. If I'd seen it when it came out, I might have liked it. Also: The Warriors. I had to netflix that one cuz it was being mentioned so often, but damn, was it bad. Mostly dudes just running/walking places. It was worth seeing so I'd get the references to it, but otherwise, a big waste of time.

Anyhoo: I recently netflixed Big Trouble in Little China. Not sure why I didn't see this one back in the day (1986), but I probably would've liked it then. And I liked it now. It was a big silly movie with Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall. I'd watch it again. My only complaint is that the music never seemed to stop and it was really annoying. But Kurt Russell is one of my faves and he was pretty funny in this without being over the top about it. Plus, damn, he was fine. Still is, but...damn. He wasn't my type back in 1986, but he definitely is now.



I mean. Look at those arms! How can you not love that?? Anyway, sometimes Pop Culture Education is painful (The Warriors) and sometimes it isn't. And this was one of those non-painful times.

Eastbound and Down

I wanted to do a monster post on how wonderfully profane Eastbound and Down is. How almost like poetry really well-crafted crudity can be. But dammit, I'm just too fucking lazy right now. So, here's my favorite clip so far in this show. Enjoy.

The Collector (2009)

The Collector is a movie that some of the horror blogs were abuzz about last year, and I'd been wanting to see it, so when I saw it was playing On Demand, I decided to give it a go. And um, I gave it about 45 minutes. Movies like this are so subjective that it's hard to explain my feelings on this particular one. But I'll try.

The Collector is a fairly simple movie. A guy in serious need of money decides to steal a gem from this house he'd been working on. When he goes in, he gradually realizes that the family, who was supposed to be gone on vacation, are actually still in the house, being tortured by a crazy dude who's rigged the whole house with nasty traps.

That's it. Dude tries to save the people in the house without falling into any of the traps. It's a fairly bloody, violent movie, graphic violence, yadayada. I suppose the accepted phrase lately is "torture porn." I think the term came about in response to movies like Hostel and the Saw franchise. And I have to say, I actually liked Hostel. Saw, not so much. But the problem with Saw wasn't the violence, although it was pretty gross, but rather the stoopid-ass twist ending.

The only way I can begin to get my head around the difference between my reaction to The Collector, versus my reaction to Hostel or something like Wolf Creek, is to talk about how you feel when you watch a movie. How you feel about what might or might not be intended. Hostel is a movie that people bag on quite a lot, but in the end, it was telling a story. It didn't feel like the plot was there to hang some gruesome violence onto. There was a story to tell and the violence was there to flesh it out.

Another way to think of it is to think of slasher movies that work and those that don't. Halloween was a movie about the Boogeyman. He happened to kill people, but the movie was meant to scare the bejeebus outta you. Slashers that don't work usually don't work because they feel like someone decided they wanted to off a bunch of teenagers in interesting ways so they wrote some good kills and then pasted some stoopid teenagers into it.

The Collector felt more like the latter. It didn't feel like it was telling a story. And the more I think about it, I don't even know if that's true. All I really know is that the movie was icky. Icky in a way that Hostel wasn't. Even Wolf Creek wasn't. It was nasty and mean-spirited. And I'm not some prude who can't handle nasty and mean-spirited. I just didn't like this brand of it.

And that's still completely inadequate and doesn't really explain why I could watch Hostel and enjoy it but this one squicked me out. And I've been sitting on this review for way too long and I need to just post it. But it's something to revisit in the future.