Subject: [MV] MovieJuice! - EYES WIDE SHUT - Full Frontal Metal Jacket
Date: 17 Jul 1999 22:07:04 -0400 (EDT)
VISIT THE (BOGUS) DREAMWORKS HOME PAGE!
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EYES WIDE SHUT - FULL FRONTAL METAL JACKET
by Mark Ramsey
http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/eyeswideshut.htm
July 17, 1999
If being a famous director is incentive enough for big, big stars to take off their clothes and screw, then hand me a camera, a crew, and Winona Ryder's phone number, because that's the life for me!
Eyes Wide Shut, the latest from eccentric expatriate Stanley Kubrick, is a movie so ripe for parody, the Criterion Special Edition DVD should include a version with a laugh track.
Tragically, Stanley died just after completing this film (a savvy marketing move - are you listening, Geena Davis?). A legendary career and not even one movie with a Saturday Night Live alum! How can it be!?
Anytime somebody describes a movie as a "masterpiece" and its director as a "genius," look out. Bring your fake IQ scores, kids, not to mention your MENSA card and your "I-love-NPR-because-it's-informative-yet-whimsical" bumper sticker. No wonder Hector Elizondo was wandering down the aisle passing out Ginko Biloba. This here's "Eyes Wide and Non-Commercial." No Carrot-top guest-spots as far as the wide eyes can see, baby.
The great thing about this flick is that it's shot in New York - or at least the New York part of London. Look, there's Brooklyn/Whales, where the diner waitress speaks the Queen's English! Look, there are the streets of the city, pretty much deserted, even though this city seems to contain just one block. Look, it's a coffeehouse in the Greenwich Village of Bath which spices up the Christmas season with a little Mozart Requiem. Cheery! Where are all the authentic New Yorkers, anyway, in temporary holding cells at Ellis Island?
Tom and Nicole go to a party where Nicole meets Hungary's cheesiest elder male formalwear model. This guy attempts to seduce her like he's seducing a Lincoln Continental into a parking spot in a commercial on the Golf Channel.
You see, there's trouble in paradise: Nicole keeps having these fantasies - Nothing sexual, mind you, just something about a 4 million year old black monolith and a monkey fondling a bone and ejaculating it into the air, where it becomes a very long spaceship.
She dreams about "the old in-and-out" with other guys. So Tom hits the pavement of Brooklyn/Whitby, asks questions, and flashes his doctor ID which somehow induces all the Brit-Yorkers to tell him everything he wants to know. Just like Jack Klugman in Quincy!
This business is so tiring, Tom needs to find sex. In New Liverpool? With that megawatt smile? Not a chance!
In search of action, Tom taxis off to New Dover's ritziest sex, fetish, and costume ball. It's a masquerade affair at a secret mansion hidden in the Connecticut suburbs of London. Hey, if the Metropolitan Museum sponsored a sex party, this is what it would be like, but with more mummies and no ambiguous hors d'oeuvres.
Lots of dudes standing around in cloaks and masks with naked chicks in ridiculous headgear. Nice look, ladies. Just add a free buffet and master of ceremonies Wayne Newton and you'll find me at my lucky machine in the casino, bubba!
What kind of British sex party is this? Is this a Hammer film? Is Peter Cushing about to rip off his mask and run a stake through Christopher Lee?
"Who are you?" asks a masked Tom. "It doesn't matter who I am. You are in great danger," replies a masked but otherwise stark naked model. "Luke, I am your father," pipes in James Earl Jones, playing the role of subservient Sith sex slave "Qui-Jerk Yank."
Tom strolls through the house to find room after room of extras from Amadeus doing the nasty, most of the grinding blocked by digitally inserted onlookers to assure an "R"-rating. Cool! Can you make it look like the orgy is steaming through the North Atlantic, headed for an iceberg?
Hear that sound? It's Mike Myers' mind working on the ludicrous costume orgy sequence for the next Austin Powers movie. Dr. Evil: "Can you toss me a boner, people? What do I pay you for? Cripes!"
Pained by guilt and an unfamiliar itch in the genital region, Tom wanders the dark streets of London-York followed by a suspicious Donald Pleasence who must be lost searching for that knife-wielding Michael Myers.
You know Donald's appearance is suspicious not only because he died years ago, but also because of the suspiciously emphatic piano strokes - "ping ping ping PING PING BAM BAM BAM BBBAAAMMM."
And that's just one note!
This sheet music fits on the back of Stanley's weekly receipts from Dominos Pizza! No wonder the closing theme sung by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey seemed so out of place.
Believe me, the hard part here is keeping your eyes wide OPEN. By my clock, this flick runs damn near three hours. Will the credits roll before 2001? Will this theater ever open the pod doors?
Now I love Tom and Nicole, but there are gobs of ponderous silences and trickle-slow dialogue delivery. Spit out the words, gang! Get to the point! What's with the Metamucil pacing? I can feel osteoporosis coming on! You guys may have had two years to spend on this, but I've got a life, thank you very much.
Sorry, cine-asses, three hours of Kubrick is redrum. REDRUM, I tell you!
Copyright 1999 Mark Ramsey. All rights reserved. NO PORTION MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.
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DONÆT FORGET TO VISIT MOVIEJUICE.COM!
Hey, kids, don't forget to visit the MovieJuice! Site at http://www.moviejuice.com. The pictures are half the fun (and sometimes more than half the laughs)!
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The Blair Witch Project achieves the unimaginable.
No, not terrifying moviegoers on a shoestring. I'm talking about ridding the world of some excess film students! Evidently, if film students go missing and leave behind only their footage, nobody notices for three years. And when they finally do, forget the missing kids, let's edit the footage!
Yes, it seems film students are to the Blair Witch what donuts are to Homer Simpson: "Mmmmm...Film Students....!"
Might I suggest a formal "Semester in the Black Hills Forest," starting with, say, the NYU Film School (simply because it's so far East, no one from California's likely to miss it).
The Blair Witch Project is the Real World episode I've always wished for. Get drunk, get laid, get profound, get naked, and get lost.
The crowd for this flick was unusually hip and dysfunctional, including lots of Goth Tim Burton wannabes. Before the lights went down, some chick in front of me was asking her friend: "Is this a documentary?" "Is this real?" Listen, ma'am, am I the only one who watches Inside Fucking Edition! Do your homework, for God's sake.
So The Blair Witch Project traces the doomed journey of three young celluloid hero adventurers who get lost in the woods searching for the legendary Blair Witch. It seems the Witch allegedly murdered some kids a few years back and haunts the woods still.
Along the way, our ill-fated heroes hear scary sounds in the middle of the night and wake to ornamental rock decorations and tastefully bound twigs. Is this the Black Hills Japanese Garden? Were there any Buddha statues nearby? Are they camping in Martha Stewart's big backyard? After all, no one's ever seen Martha and the Blair Witch in the same place at once, unless you're on her payroll.
I don't know how scared I am, but I definitely have fresh new ideas for rustic centerpieces. Any doilies? Are there any damn doilies?
Am I the only one who's burned out on movies by filmmakers about filmmaking? Sometimes the world of the young filmmaker is so excessively self-referential, he or she forgets the only folks who give a damn about a life in film are those making one or those too chicken to. Either way, most folks are left out, obsessed instead with Entertainment Tonight's sensitive handling of the intellectual subtext of Eyes Wide Shut: "Tom and Nicole - Nude! See their asses first, exclusively on ET!"
Shoestring or not, this movie works. And I, for one, resent the way the media is handicapping this flick with constant references to its microscopic budget, as if to imply that more would be better and expectations should rise and fall with the cost of a movie. Bull.
Stuff is scary because it's strange, unfamiliar, surprising, and unseen. Even Spielberg admits that Jaws worked because the shark didn't. When it comes to fright flicks, less is definitely more.
Picture the big studio remake of The Blair Witch Project:
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"From the creators of ID4 and Godzilla, comes a new experience in terror, merchandising, and licensing: The Blair Witch Project 2 a.k.a., BW2.
"Starring as the team of three young filmmakers: Mel Gibson, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Catherine Zeta-Jones. And as the Blair Witch, the fully computer animated voice, physical manifestations, and Tom Cruise fixation of Rosie O'Donnell.
"Chill to the sight of rocks and twigs assembling themselves into clever camp-like crafts through the magic of CGI! Watch as scary trees magically come to life, scamper toward our hero's' tent, and wrap their leaves and branches around the kids in an effort to strangle them to death! You'll hardly believe the terror, if you find any!
"Enter Paul Newman as Freddie Prinze's grandfather. Paul's the only one with the secret to destroying the Blair Witch, not to mention the secret to a tasty Caesar salad.
"Thus leading to the climactic face-off in a forest clearing, where Paul calls on the forces of nature to swell up in an enormous maelstrom of special effects to suck up the Witch back to the demon-world from whence she came.
"UNTIL she can return for the inevitable sequel, where she's bound, gagged and transported to a major metropolitan area to be exhibited as a sideshow attraction. Shockingly, she escapes, wreaks havoc, and climbs the Empire State building, where - in the nick of time - Will Smith bravely buzzes an F-16 around her head and blasts her to smithereens with a sidewinder missile, but only after he accidentally takes out half the city.
"The End?????"
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I repeat: Less is more.
Unfortunately, rocks and twigs haven't really frightened me ever since I came to terms with my inner camper.
And nobody uttered a scream in the theater where I saw this flick. To be honest, this movie is less scary than it is about people who are scared. All the time. Scared and screaming "What the fuck is that?!" for the most part.
But...
Without giving anything away, I will tell you that the closing five minutes of this movie are more creepy, shudder-inducing, and terrifying than anything to come out of the big studios in years. Very simple, very primal, very scary.
Entertainment Weekly liked this flick, but bitched that you don't know how the kids disappear at the end. No shit, Time Warner Sherlocks! You're not supposed to! And the movie wouldn't be as good if you did!
The final minutes make The Blair Witch Project a must-see. I can't get it out of my head.
Keep
the lights
on.
Copyright 1999 Mark Ramsey. All rights reserved. NO PORTION MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.
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VISIT THE (BOGUS) DREAMWORKS HOME PAGE!
http://www.moviejuice.com/dreamworks/home.htm
********************
DONÆT FORGET TO VISIT MOVIEJUICE.COM!
Hey, kids, don't forget to visit the MovieJuice! Site at http://www.moviejuice.com. The pictures are half the fun (and sometimes more than half the laughs)!
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Subject: [MV] MovieJuice! - THE HAUNTING - Scrappy Doo
Date: 23 Jul 1999 10:22:45 -0400 (EDT)
THE HAUNTING - SCRAPPY DOO
by Mark Ramsey
http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/haunting.htm
July 24, 1999
What's that at the top of the stairs?
It's a life-size painting of the creepy guy who built this crazy haunted house. And I swear DreamWorks is re-purposing props, because it's also a publicity still of Anthony Hopkins in Amistad. Tony, you see, is now a ghost, and he tears up the house like James Caan at the Playboy mansion.
The Haunting is based on a book by Shirley Jackson who, by the way, did time in the same high school I did - but about a hundred years earlier. In this flick, Shirley's "Hill House" is more like "Hill Tiny Nation-State."
The vertigo-inducing camera swoops up, down, over and around the house, lovingly caressing and worshipping its curves so excessively, I wondered if the house was jockeying for a cover shot on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Welcome to "Rebecca Romijn-Stamos House" also known as the "House of Style," where the good housekeeping seal comes slathered with SPF 30.
What's with this crazy house? So loud are its groans and moans, I suspect there's a showing of Wild Wild West somewhere in the south wing.
When the doorways arch into angry eyeballs, it's clear this house has some settling to do. Unfortunately it's the movie that does all the settling.
Granted, it's hard to complain about any movie that paints Catherine Zeta-Jones as a predatory bisexual (especially if that means fingerpaints). My white flag's waving just thinking about it! She's a jet-set brat and The Haunting is her vehicle - and as such, it needs to be driven fast and hard, baby.
Everywhere you look, the house contains tons of wood and stone carvings of kids and animals suggesting either a bas-relief petting zoo, or a digital menagerie designed to come alive through the magic of CGI. What's your bet?
The Haunting argues that ghosts are clumsy beasts who keep getting stuck in the drapery and the bedding. Well, it beats using a Dust-Vac. When the ghosts lay on a pillow, it reminds me of that commercial with the talking toilet paper roll. One slight step removed from Casper, this flick's got all the fanatical realism of The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Where are the Scooby snacks, in the Mystery Machine?
So now we've seen ghostly faces in sheets and curtains, ghostly faces in the sand (The Mummy), and - in the case of Walter Matthau - just plain ghostly faces. Why, isn't Poltergeist - the TV Series just another name for 60 Minutes? Does 60 Minutes describe how long the cast has left?
Catherine and the wonderful Lili Taylor join Liam Neeson in an "old" house that looks like the Carpenters' Union only finished building it yesterday - just in time for Liam to start chewing up the scenery.
Liam, you see, is conducting a study on fear. If it had been a study on ego, they could have saved the expensive set and shot the whole picture in Katzenberg's Beemer.
Not long after pissing off the ceiling, Lili adopts a hippie-chick countenance as if to say, "Everything's all right. I'll be back in Indies soon." "It's about family," she was regrettably paid to say. On the plus side, Lili, you can now afford cooler digs in Park City. Just don't forget to chant a dozen Hail Mary's before breakfast.
Supplementing the overqualified cast is that one spice too many, the Jar Jar Binks of horror, Owen Wilson. "Me-Sa Frightened!" Owen's the blonde, cheeseball, archetypical surfer-dude and the featured non-star in the picture. He's so "Shaggy," Casey Kasem should have dubbed his rad dialogue. This guy puts the "Endless" in Endless Summer. Grab a longboard, Owen, because your long role is boring me.
The best part of this flick is the housekeeper, whose comic cameo is inspired. Then it's on to predictably ridiculous and gratuitous special effects, notably including Liam Neeson's performance and Catherine Zeta-Jones' underwear.
The Haunting is directed by Jan De Bont. Jan must be exorcising his middle-child demons, what with Cindy younger and Marsha older. Who would have thought that the man behind Speed 2 and Twister would sacrifice story on the altar of special effects. Not me!
The Haunting, says Jan, is "a really smart, character-driven film that is truly terrifying." Uh...no, no, and no. I think the air pressure's building under that snug black wig, Jan.
The producers of this flick are rooted in the horror genre. Their daddies produced classic B-grade fright flicks. That should tell you two things: First, bad taste is in the genes. Second, Hollywood incest explains the large number of pinheads in the film community. Picture Tod Browning's Freaks with tans, treadmills, and trainers. No wonder Scott Rudin can light a cigar with his feet.
Is The Haunting scary like Blair Witch? Absolutely not. Is it funny like Ghostbusters? Not particularly. In spirit (so to speak), it has the special effects aspirations of The Mummy, but without the groovy story line. This is, after all, just a house. You'd think Liam and Co. would just go outside!
God knows I wish I had.
Copyright 1999 Mark Ramsey. All rights reserved. NO PORTION MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.
********************
VISIT THE (BOGUS) DREAMWORKS HOME PAGE!
http://www.moviejuice.com/dreamworks/home.htm
********************
DONÆT FORGET TO VISIT MOVIEJUICE.COM!
Hey, kids, don't forget to visit the MovieJuice! Site at http://www.moviejuice.com. The pictures are half the fun (and sometimes more than half the laughs)!
********************
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS LIST:
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL! Just go to http://www.moviejuice.com and follow the directions at the bottom of the left hand side. It's very easy. NOTE: YOUR NAME CANNOT BE REMOVED FROM THE LIST UNLESS YOU UNSUBSCRIBE USING THE EMAIL ADDRESS YOU REGISTERED WITH). And don't write me lots of mean-spirited crap. I won't read it.
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I think it is a very interesting topic even if some of you see here an outburst. I can say that movies are not in question and I'll prove it like this ; In France we got the same movies and some of our directors made controversial movies like Nikita or The Professional (BESSON), and we never had, fortunately, a tragedy comparable with Colorado. I think that is a question of upbringing. In your country, it is so easy to get a weapon that anyone who wants one can find it even young persons. Remember, they killed (Colorado) with guns and not with knives !! I think that weapons is a problem that your government should erase as quick as possible.
USA is the most powerful "media" in the world and I am afraid that Colorado gives idea to some mad guys in here.
Finally, don't think I am lecturing you 'cause I am French, it may happens soon in France and it would be as tragic as in Colorado.
Till next time,
Take care of yourself and eachother,
Patrick
>I thought we were talking about movies. This is a hot topic that could
>affect all movie lovers. It seems that its a perfect topic for discussion.
>This list has always been a forum for discussions that go beyond simply
>describing our favorite flicks. That is unless things have changed.
