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Reviews
Scrubs: My Musical (2007)
The surprises never end with this show
I am not a fan of musicals. Not by a long shot.
Still, this 30 minute musical extravaganza, replete with a veritable cornucopia of clever numbers, each performed without the slightest hint of self-awareness by all the members of the cast, is hard not to watch.
I really was impressed by the effort put into this, especially by folks that are clearly not singers (Dr. Cox, JD, The Todd, Janitor and Kelso). Some of the lyrics are dizzying in their complexity. Dr. Cox's rant number was especially challenging and I have no idea how John C. McGinley pulls it off, but he does, an splendidly so,
I wish this episode had won the 5 Emmy's it was nominated for. It won 2 of them however.
Feast (2005)
Feasting on the Male Mystique
I was looking forward to this film. My brother is a SciFi, horror movie fan and he was excited about it as well. However, as is often the case anymore, I was disappointed in this movie and for several reasons.
Ever since Alien(s), Hollywood has been on a mission, or so it would seem, to promote stories with tough, no-nonsense, ball busting heroines. I guess the days of strong women who are unflinchingly female are gone. Yet, not one to be content with this trend only, Hollywood has taken things one step further by going out of it's way to show men as stupid, weak, cowardly panzies who get wobbly in the knees at the slightest provocation, only to be rescued by said female. This role reversal is so unnecessary, not to mention hard to pull off. Sometimes it works, but only rarely does it.
In order for the female hero angle to work and work well, the female has to be sympathetic. Can we all agree that female heroes are rarely portrayed that way in films today? In all fairness, I suppose this is owing to the difficulty of the task. After all, the woman as hero is such a subtle art, requiring a deft hand. But what does Hollywood know about deftness? Invariably, Hollywood goes over the top in order to sell us the notion of female as hero. This result is rarely pretty and it is the sort of result you get in film whenever you try to defy convention for the sake of defying convention.
In the end the heavy handiness of the director is palpable, and before you know it our female hero is being crammed down our collective throats as though we were being tortured with a hoagie and there is nothing we can do about it. In fact, there is actually a scene in Feast where the female lead actually shoves her arm down a monsters throat. Trust me, I know how the monster felt.
What is really funny is the way in which Hollywood tries to be deft. How, you ask? Simple. Sex!!
You see Hollywood needs some way to remind us that the hero in the movie is female, after all, the fact that she is a woman is the whole point, right? But that is hard to remember when our hero is blowing things up and kicking men in the nuts. So, Hollywood makes sure to leave all the curvy, sexy female body parts in the right places so that the overtly "sexual" element is firmly in tact, but nothing else is left in place that would otherwise help us identify the female lead as a female. Confused so far? Don't feel bad. Role reversal is all about confusion.
You see, Hollywood has no idea what a female hero should be like, so what does it do? Well, it uses the only hero role model that Hollywood has: I refer, of course, to THE MAN.
Hollywood strips todays female heroes of all femininity (sans the unmistakable sexual bits and pieces) and replaces it with male traits, i.e. She walks tough. She talks tough. She carries a big stick or gun (her phallic symbol, no less). She is physically stronger than anyone else in the movie including, in this case, the monsters. She is almost always a martial arts expert and she almost always resorts to beating everybody up, all the while going out of her way to make most of the men in the movie look small, weak, stupid, ball-less and downright despicable.
In trying to create female heroes, Hollywood blunders its way through and ends up sticking with the same formulaic role it is trying to redefine i.e., the traditional male hero lead. Ironically, todays action female hero is still a man for all intents and purposes. Only now he has nice tits, luscious lips, curvey hips and wears Prada. Sigh. Hollywood just cannot seem to get out of its own way or make up it's mind.
Look, I want female heroes. I do. But not the female hero Hollywood envisions. Instead of giving us a female lead who is all woman, exuding all femininity, using those God-given wiles of hers to save the day (a-la Jamie Curtis in Halloween), Hollywood has to "butch" her up, make her eat lightening and crap thunder, gives her a set of balls that would make a bull jealous etc. In trying to redefine the traditional man as hero, the tough, kick-ass female has become cliché. All thanks to Hollywood!
Ultimately, it is this peccadillo that for the most part dooms Feast for me. The director goes out of his way to insult men, demean them, show them as weak and unable to take advantage of their traditionally useful male traits. He then hands those very traits over to the women who, apparently in most movies today, are ostensibly better equipped physically and emotionally handle them. In other words, in movies today women are almost always better at being men than men are. And they are better at being women than men are. Hell, women are just plain better than men.
You might say I am over-analyzing this movie, but I don't think so. Doubt me? Just remember that a male member of the cast gets his member cut off by the heroine. Isn't that special!
That said, as a horror movie it works fairly well. I just think it would have been better if Paris Hilton had been the hero and she beat the monsters by showing them that life is more fun when you are all dressed up like Barbi. Then she could take the monsters on a shopping spree to Saks Fifth Avenue. After all, nothing says fun like Prada!
Snakehead Terror (2004)
Snakehead Is Proof that Garbage Sells
I saw this on SciFi CHannel. It sucks.
On the upside, if Snakehead proves anything it proves three things: 1) An actor will do a movie, no matter how bad it is, as long as you pay him enough. 2) A high powered electric gun in the hands of a woman is a recipe for disaster. 3) and three, if Sci-Fi channel feeds us enough crap for long enough, eventually people will begin to adjust and lower their expectations enough to see that crap as high art.
I wish Sci-Fi would stop insulting us with this garbage and show movies that challenge us to think instead of just sit there with our brains open so Sci-Fi Channel could can use it as a septic tank for flotsam.
I am, however, encourage by an original Scf-Fi channel movie in the works. It is called "Dinocrocasaurusacondachabrafish". It centers on a giant, mutant dinosaur that was found frozen in the Antarctic. A team of leading scientists are able to thaw the giant carcass, only to discover that it is still alive! They soon find themselves in a fight for their lives which they quickly lose. Then, in a freak accident, the dinosaur falls into a pool of toxic waste containing the genetic code of 5 species of freak monsters. The dinosaur mutates even further, and grows to half the size of the planet earth, leaving destruction in its path, as a rogue team of military mercenary/martial arts experts pit their wits and superhuman powers against the giant beast!!
The tagline is : "When nature calls, don't answer!"
I just cannot wait!
The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course (2002)
Only In America
Only in America can a moron like Steve Irwin be a "star".
I long for the days when people like Danny Kaye, Audrey Hepburn and Betty Davis ruled the house. Those people were stars.
Nowadays, someone like Paris Hilton, bimbo that she is, is considered a star for Petes Sake.
So, it should come as no surprise that an idiot like Steve Irwin is considered a "star" in America. It simply takes no talent to be a celebrity anymore. It's all about over the top persona's. If you happen to have one of those, and especially if you have a sex tape floating around on the internet, then somewhere there is a camera looking for you, a contract waiting to be signed and an entourage of groupies waiting to follow you around like dogs in heat. Sheesh!
Thankfully, this movie tanked. There must be a God after all!
Meet Joe Black (1998)
An almost perfect film...and a must see.
I am not one for romantic movies, but Meet Joe Black is a romantic film that brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. Not only does this film tenderly touch on the wonderment and grandeur of first love, but it tackles other such weighty issues as nobility in the face of treachery, grace under pressure, the importance of honor in keeping ones word when to go back on ones word would be far easier and of course the courage of coming to grips with ones own mortality. Ultimately, Meet Joe Black it is a film about what is best in humanity; what it means to be human.
I will not go into the plot of the film, but I do want to address the main review of this film listed above. I think the reviewer is missing the point of the film when he criticizes the writing and the casting of Brad Pitt in the main role.
First of all, the writing was excellent. Second, it was important for the character of Joe Black to be young for the story to work on all levels. Joe Black needed a mentor. Anthony Hopkins could not have mentored someone his own age. Moreover, Joe needed to fall in love for the first time, and it would have been less believable, and perhaps less palatable, for a man of Al Pacino's age to convey the angst of first love with any semblance of innocence. Claire Falani's character needed her suitor (Joe) to be young so that the romance could be seen as fresh and new, and so that the character of Bill Parrish could see Joe Black as a young man falling in love with his daughter. Brad Pitt's performance was elegant and perfect. His youth, contrasted with Hopkins elegance, makes the relationship between the two characters all the more peculiar and interesting to the other characters in the film, who are on the outside looking in.
The ending requires the viewer to fill in a few gaps somewhat, but if you can do that you will be hard pressed to find a more visually stunning and beautifully told story.