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Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 22:27:52 EST
From: KenKnows@aol.com
Subject: Re: [MV] Payback
In a message dated 2/6/99 10:56:56 PM Pacific Standard Time, judgewd writes:
<< Saw a fantastic movie today, Payback. It is great! >>
- - - - snip - - -
<<Highly recommended. better than most of the movies I saw last year! >>
Question for anyone who saw Payback: What comments do you have about Lucy Liu
and her role in Payback? I have not seen Payback yet, but I am a big fan of
her work on Ally McBeal.
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Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 23:34:35 -0600
From: torq@mo.net
Subject: Re: [MV] Payback
At 10:27 PM 2/8/99 EST, KenKnows@aol.com wrote:
>Question for anyone who saw Payback: What comments do you have about Lucy Liu
>and her role in Payback? I have not seen Payback yet, but I am a big fan of
>her work on Ally McBeal.
i've seen payback, and it actually didnt occur to me until you just
reminded me that that was the ally mcbeal woman in payback.
anyway, she has a very amusing role. her character has a number of funny
scenes - especially when mel is about to beat his ex-buddy up, but instead
lets lucy "work."
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Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 10:46:03 -0500 (EST)
From: maillist@moviejuice.com
Subject: [MV] MovieJuice! - PAYBACK - Ellie May Confidential
PAYBACK - ELLIE MAY CONFIDENTIAL
by Mark Ramsey
http://www.moviejuice.com
February 9, 1999
If you drop into the theater in time for the previews, you may catch what has to be the strangest commercial ever. A marine is wielding a mighty sword and slaying this huge fire-breathing animated creature.
What?? Marines do that? The few, the brave, the proud - they're defending us against demonic cartoons! What's in their rations, Scooby Snacks? Do they ride in jeeps or "Mystery Machines"? Now that the Commies are down for the count and the Iraqis are desert out-foxed, the new enemy, it seems, is a Sun workstation and the creators of Spawn! Are our few good men packin' Gameboys instead of rifles nowadays? Do these guys get pictures from the battlefield or animation cels, limited edition and framed? Who's their military strategist, Sun Tzu or Chuck Jones? According to General Cat in the Hat: "I do not like armed conflict, ma'am. I do not like green eggs and ham."
What do you get when you combine the talents of the guy who co-wrote LA Confidential and the auteur of Braveheart? Proof that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, that's what.
Payback should be called Moneyback. I'd like to go back in time two hours, if it's all the same to you. The only thing keeping this flick in the theaters and off the USA channel is Mark Harmon's busy schedule.
Here's a movie that's set not on Earth, but on some planet with a permanent blue tint. I'm talkin' blue! I haven't seen so many folks with cadaverous flesh tone since the last meeting of the Kate Moss exhaustion club. It's like Nightmare of the Living Dead without the brains. If we had a red and white movie, this triple-feature could open on July 4. I got the blues, all right. Visualize an R-rated version of the Smurfs and you get the picture.
Speaking of Smurfs, did you know that Blue Mel is short? I'm talkin' really short. Something tells me Blue Mel's romantic costar Blue Maria Bello must be just tall enough to represent the lollipop guild. There are lots of phone books on a Mel set, and they ain't used for callin', if you know what I mean.
Blue Mel Gibson stars as Blue Mel Eastwood, starring as "Porter." Porter est mui macho. You know this because he smokes like Winona Ryder, dresses in black leather, and walks to the beat of a groovy soundtrack. Either he's cool, or he's shopping for a distribution deal at Sundance. Porter knows the mean streets like the back of his tiny little hand.
Blue Mel (or, as the French call him, petit Mel bleu) speaks in such a gravelly-voiced low register narration, the theater kinda shakes and trembles. Is this some Dolby Sensurround effect or the audience is stampeding to the exit? Who can tell? Is his voice so low because his vocal chords are close to sea level?
"Old habits die hard," intones Papa Smurf Mel. "If you don't kick them, they kick you." Yes, friends, it's the John Huston translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Blue Mel takes us on a tour of the seedy underside of life in Blueville. Drug addicts, crooks, and callgirls. If Disney World had a Taxicab Confession-land, this would be it. Payback is full of S&M and misogyny - perfect for the whole family. Baddies whacking each other left and right. Blue bloods all over the place. Mucho macho meals in a hi-chair.
Blue Kris Kristofferson, who hasn't seen an eyebrow since the Titanic saw sunlight, plays Mr. Big. He's the head of "the Outfit." But don't be fooled - this outfit's from J.C. Penney! Blue Mel Bronson takes on Mr. Big to get his money back. Rather than visit customer service, he kidnaps the guy's son. So Mr. Big sends out Blue Lee Marvin Coburn to break Blue Mel's itty bitty toes. The lesson: Don't expect quality service unless you're shopping Nordstrom.
Take it from me, after you drop your green on this blue, you'll be seeing red.
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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Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 22:19:37 -0600
From: Wendy Scherer <wscherer@home.com>
Subject: [MV] oscars
Thought you all might be interested in the LA Times Oscar site.
http://www.latimes.com/oscars
They have a photo gallery of the nominees, discussion groups, trailers
of nominated movies/actors/actresses, links to movie reviews, critics'
picks, Oscar's Trivia and an Oscar's timeline highlighting special
moments in Oscar history. And, of course, a guessing contest.
They'll also have coverage of all the awards night activities with
celebrity interviews and polls that agree or disagree with the selection
of winners and online discussion areas.
Wendy
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Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 10:00:49 -0700 (MST)
From: Scott Renshaw <renshaw@inconnect.com>
Subject: [MV] REVIEW: MY FAVORITE MARTIAN
MY FAVORITE MARTIAN
(Disney)
Starring: Christopher Lloyd, Jeff Daniels, Elizabeth Hurley, Daryl
Hannah, Wallace Shawn, Christine Ebersole, Michael Lerner, Ray Walston.
Screenplay: Sherri Stoner & Deanna Oliver.
Producers: Robert Shapiro & Jerry Leider and Mark Toberoff.
Director: Donald Petrie.
MPAA Rating: PG (profanity, adult humor)
Running Time: 93 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Suggestive references to "balls" and "nuts." To breasts. To giving
"the finger." To getting into someone's pants. To catching one's
genitalia in one's zipper. To contraception. To virginity. Two
references to urination. A flatulence gag. A couple of belches. And a
toilet's-eye-view of a fat guy's rear end as he bemoans eating that last
burrito.
Welcome, friends, to the Wonderful World of Disney.
In MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, we discover that there is intelligent life in
our solar system, and that absolutely none of it was involved in making
this film. Continuing its impressive string of stupid and vulgar live
action films, Disney this time recycles the 1960s television series which
starred Bill Bixby and Ray Walston. Jeff Daniels stars here as Tim
O'Hara, a somewhat socially inept television news producer; Christopher
Lloyd is a Martian who crash-lands and poses as Tim's Uncle Martin while
trying to repair his ship. Along the way there are plenty of crazy
misunderstandings and near-discoveries, including the suspicion by Tim's
faithful camerawoman Lizzie (Daryl Hannah) that he has the hots for her,
and the attempt by ambitious reporter Brace Channing (Elizabeth Hurley) to
break the story of a close encounter.
Not surprisingly, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN essentially consists of a
series of scenes which present the opportunity to show off special
effects. Martin is able to appear in human form through the use of a
special gum, which also has unique effects on humans. He has a sentient,
wise-cracking spacesuit called Zoot (uncredited voice by "Seinfeld's"
Wayne Knight) which does kooky things like pitching woo to a dress. He
uses a "molecular condenser" to shrink objects like his space ship and
Tim's Plymouth (don't even bother with scientific curiosities like why a
"molecular condenser" also changes the weight of the object). When
Martin gets upset, his body parts fall off. And viewers who enjoy that
sort of thing -- and don't have trouble with the ridiculous notion of
Daryl Hannah as a wallflower -- will giggle blithely along.
Trouble is, most of those will be kids. Yes, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN
sports a PG rating, which clearly states that "some material may not be
suitable for children," but let's get serious here. Disney has turned the
company name into a license to print money for "family entertainment,"
which used to mean something a parent wouldn't be embarrassed to take a
kid to see. Take a look at that list in the first paragraph above and you
decide. This is filmmaking not for children, but for idiots of all ages,
pandering with a sense of impunity because they haven't exactly gone broke
in the last couple of years by doing so. In a late scene, when Tim is
admonished that humans should do something "about the oceans...and
afternoon talk shows," the hypocrisy of this film holding _anything_ up to
ridicule for its stupidity or offensiveness nearly burst a large vein in
my forehead. How sad to see appealing comic performers like Lloyd
(regurgitating bits from BACK TO THE FUTURE) and Wallace Shawn (as nasty
government scientist Dr. Elliot Coleye...e. coli, get it?) floundering in
a mess like this. How much sadder still that people will pay to see it.
There are maybe two harmless visual gags that work in MY FAVORITE
MARTIAN, and perhaps that many examples of real wit in the script. I
liked the fact that Martin's molecular condenser makes a sound remarkably
similar to R2-D2 when he's shot by the Jawas in STAR WARS; the absurd
parallel to E.T.'s revival also made me chuckle. Mostly I sat in stony,
angry silence as this aggressively brainless film dribbled towards a
sequel-ready conclusion, tallying up the ways it treated viewers like
pre-schoolers who laugh hysterically when they shout "doody-head" at each
other. Remember that list next time you trust Disney's name to mean
anything but mass-market infantilism.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Martian chronic ills: 1.
