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Date: Thu, 14 Oct 99 14:26:42 -0700
From: "David F. Nolan" <DFN@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: [MV] "US" AND "FIGHT CLUB" TO SLUG IT OUT THIS WEEKEND
"US" AND "FIGHT CLUB" TO SLUG IT OUT THIS WEEKEND
This week's two big openers couldn't be more different. THE STORY
OF US (R) stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple whose
15-year marriage is coming apart. Aimed primarily at women, but
with some crossover appeal, "US" has received mostly favorable
advance notices.
FIGHT CLUB R) is a much darker, starker movie that's already
generated considerable controversy for its depictions of brutal
one-on-one violence. Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena
Bonham-Carter star.
Also opening Friday: THE OMEGA CODE, a thriller about code hidden in
the Torah and the Bible which may hold the key to millennial events.
Not much advance word on this one.
To tell the world what you think about these movies -- or any other
current movie -- log onto the RATE A FLICK page at FlickPicks:
http://www.flickpicks.com
When you submit comments, please sign your name (at least your
first name) and give your age -- e.g. "Jim, 37". This will help other
movie fans determine which movies are most likely to appeal to
them.
FlickPicks - http://www.flickpicks.com
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Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 18:13:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: maillist@moviejuice.com
Subject: [MV] MovieJuice! - THE STORY OF US - When Hairless Met Sally
THE STORY OF US û When Hairless Met Sally
by Mark Ramsey
<a href="http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/storyofus.htm">Click here for the full review!</a>
http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/storyofus.htm
October 15, 1999
And I thought I'd seen everything.
Imagine my surprise when the lights go down and the trailer for Tom Hanks in The Green Mile unspools - backwards and upside down. Yikes!
Naturally, the projectionist was too busy honing his high school A/V skills and crafting clever hand shadows to notice anything askew for three solid minutes! Hey, don't they teach this kind of thing in projectionist trade school, right after the class called "Remedial Focusing Strategies: Fixing Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear" and before "Volume Management: They Call them 'Talkies' for a Reason"?
Let me tell you, there were more audience belly laughs in those three trailer minutes than in all SNL-spawned Molly Shannon movies combined! Plus, there's something about seeing a guy on death row walk backwards away from death row that saps the moment's dramatic gravity, if you ask me. How very New Wave! When does ELIM NEERG EHT open, anyway? emit yadiloh?
Things straightened out just in time for The Story of Us.
Wow, this is one downer of a romantic comedy! Granted, there's tons of funny stuff here, but those spoonfuls of sugar force down a hell of a lot of medicine!
All-pro Bruce Willis celebrates his first post-Demi production by outfitting his scalp with partial head-tarp #47A. Why settle? Well, #67C was on deck, blow-dried and ready, but it flipped agents to UTA when negotiations went limp and the ends split over a conditioning clause. At least #47A covers Bruce's medula oblongata - that's the part of his brain responsible for all theme restaurant investments and blues performances. Keep that part in the shade or else! It's eyeballing Mariel Hemingway futures!
Co-star Michelle Pfeiffer looks Pfabulous, but her movie-marriage to Bruce is anything but. We're talking show-marriage, Bill-and-Hillary-style. For a hundred minutes our heroes are either at each other's throats, nostrils flaring, or ignoring each other's presence in stone-cold solemnity. Whew! I need a hit of Zoloft!
All that until the remarkably abrupt and infamously Capra-esque ending, made possible in no small part by the presence of executive producer Frank Capra III! Fortunately, Bruce finds Zuzu's petals just in time to realize that all those years of marriage to Demi were just a Pottersville gin-joint nightmare.
Soundtrack, schmoundtrack. Eric Clapton strums and hums through vast portions of this movie like a relentless, inescapable El Torito mariachi band, Tears in Heaven-style. It's all-Eric-all-the-time. Is this music or a Turkish Prison torture strategy? Eric's the troubadour of the tattered, classic rocky marriage, and he's trying to break my will - someone hide his guitar picks!
"Everything that's important in the world is in this bed right now," purrs Bruce when Michelle and the kids join him. Everything, that is, except Pamela Anderson Lee, who would provide two of everything and life-raft protection in the event of a sudden natural disaster - just in case anything "natural" ever happens her way.
Much of Bruce's trouble is due to his close friendship to comedian Paul Reiser. Bruce's life may be going to hell, but thanks to Paul at least each dreadful minute with Michelle costs him only 5 cents off-peak after 7pm and all weekend long.
Script-wise, this baby's well-crafted from the very opening frames. No surprise that The Story of Us is co-produced and co-written by Alan Zwiebel, the comedy God responsible for one of the funniest shows nobody's seen, "It's Garry Shandling's Show." I worship the ground his pedicurist crawls on; I eat the dust swept by his illegal alien domestic.
The Story of Us is not a story for all of us, just the grown-up married ones living difficult together-lives and hoping for that hasty epilogue where good sense - and a well-written soliloquy - always makes endings happy.
Copyright 1999 Mark Ramsey. All rights reserved. NO PORTION MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.
********************
AND DONÆT FORGET ABOUT ôFIGHT CLUBö
<a href="http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/fightclub.htm">Click here for the full review!</a>
http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/fightclub.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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Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 14:36:53 +0100
From: Pat Evans <jpevans@dtn.ntl.com>
Subject: [MV] test message
nothing received this week
Pat Evans
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Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 13:54:40 -0700
From: "Movieman" <movieman@netcom.ca>
Subject: [MV] Fight Club review
This is a very difficult movie - to watch, to think about and to review.
This movie is about losing the shell of who you are because that shell was
created by today's society of materialism and advertising - and to be who
you really are. Their method of doing this is to fight - supposedly it
brings out their base instincts. This is my only problem with the film as I
find it difficult to agree with that statement and therefore cannot 'root'
for anyone on screen. This is not a fault of the film however, as this was
intentional - it just made it more difficult to enjoy for me. There are
many amazing scenes and the cinematography has established director Fincher
as the grungiest and moodiest filmaker of our time (after Alien 3, Seven and
The Game). It is hard to recommend anyone to watch this movie in the same
way that it is hard to recommend Bad Lieutenant to anyone. There will be
many discussions after viewing this movie and I like movies that do this
though a major topic of discussion will often be the moral responsibility of
cinema. E-mail me if you have seen it and have an opinion on the matter.
My rating is 78% for giving me something very different - but something I
probably will not want to see again!
Let's go out to the lobby and have ourselves a snack....
American Beauty 95% (though not for everyone - dark and difficult at times)
Best Laid Plans 86%
The Sixth Sense 86% (If you've only seen this one once...then you haven't
seen it twice)
Stir of Echoes 79%
Fight Club 78% (not for the squeamish)
Movieman
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 20:17:22 EDT
From: SWObitwo@aol.com
Subject: Re: [MV] Fight Club review
this is a good flick, every 2 seconds in this movie, you go <double take>
Whoa!
Peace Out
C\SSgt Pete Frye
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Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 08:39:22 -0700
From: Jim Sweeney <jsweeney@chrystal.com>
Subject: [MV] RE: Movie mailing lists
Well, my favorite is the one I run, although it's specifically for San Diego
<a href="http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/theinsider.htm">Click here for the full review!</a>
http://www.moviejuice.com/1999/theinsider.htm
October 21, 1999
If you smoke I feel sorry for you.
Not because the evil tobacco companies have snared your unholy souls and are slowly fouling your lungs with every puff, but because actuarial tables among smokers indicate you're not likely to live long enough to see the end of The Insider. Then again, who will?
Longer than a king size Winston and way slower burning, The Insider was covered on 60 Minutes in half an hour. Just panning Al Pacino's nose takes longer than that!
I'm talkin' nearly three hours of whistle-blowing! What if the butter on my popcorn goes rancid? Will I be able to tell the difference?
Join perennially cranky and self-righteous mad-man Pacino as he champions the cause of good so nobly, he should be wearing tights and a big red cape. He's the King of the Round Table and all the Knights are wearing black Armani with pink shades.
Al's face is a tempest of battling wrinkles. Picture cheeks, chin, and nose colliding like continental plates slip-sliding over his hot-headed molten mantle and jamming against each other violently in ridges, faults, and trenches. Al's sneeze registers on the Richter scale.
It's Intensity-Man! Beware the heat-vision from his dark and droopy eyes! I-Man comes from a planet where excess caffeine and really bad New York drivers spike blood pressure so high it spurts out your ears the way semi-digested Caesar salad spurts out Lara Flynn Boyle's mouth.
Al is 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, best known for the famous Minutes segment "Opera Singers - Who Gives a Shit?", and who, thanks to this whole nasty tobacco episode, gave up news to produce the TV show "Two Guys and a Girl." That's the show being repackaged for the Discovery channel and re-titled "Two Retards and a Forensic Pathologist." It's a synaptically-challenged dig for signs of comedy!
The Insider is one of the big buzz flicks of the fall for reasons I can't fathom. It's 60 Minutes writ large and long. So the tobacco company scientist blows the lid off the fact that tobacco kills and (duh) the tobacco companies know it. Al gets mad. CBS chickens out on the story so they don't get sued. Al gets madder. Then CBS runs the story. Al gets so mad his facial plates are venting liquid magma. Finally, Al leaves on principle, which is what I was tempted to do by the end of hour two.
Let's face it, until the tobacco companies hire a phalanx of armed gunmen to snuff whistle-blowers, how scared can we really be for this scientist guy? The most frightening thing he faces is a suspiciously curious golfer and a clumsy stranger who leaves footprints in his garden. Hey, at least Blair Witch had twigs and piles of rocks!
Meanwhile, and most horrifying of all, that annoying Aretha Franklin-voiced Pepsi kid, Hallie Eisenberg, somehow finagled the role of the scientist guy's daughter, despite the fact that Ed Bradley looks more like her daddy than she does.
Who would have guessed that CBS would have the world's hottest corporate counsel!? Now I know the "R" in Edward R. Murrow stands for "GRRRRRrrrrr!" Snoop-star and former Jennifer Tilly movie-mate Gina Gershon unsettles every brief in the house and triggers more than a few birthday suits. You don't need a litigator to stroke the foreman in this court, boys. Is this Black Rock or Blue Balls?
Christopher Plummer plays Mike Wallace as if Mike had spent his formative years sipping tea with a nanny named Tiggy. Did somebody replace the ticking clock with the Sound of Music? Did John Barrymore just join the 60 Minutes cast?
Fearing the impact of bean-spilling, Mike says "I don't plan to spend the end of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio." Look, Mike, at your age you're lucky "60 Minutes" doesn't describe the maximum interval between peeing. If he's "wandering in the wilderness," chances are he doesn't know where to or where from.
Lots of folks at CBS say this flick stretches the truth tighter than Jennifer Lopez's mysteriously and suddenly taut butt. Even the movie's promotional propaganda acknowledges "certain events depicted in this film have been fictionalized for dramatic effect," which is another way of saying, "whatever Pacino wants, Pacino gets."
Is Mike Wallace really a petty, arrogant ass? Are Al Pacino's facial wrinkles really independently remote-controlled by a crew of technicians from Jim Henson's muppet shop?
That, and Andy Rooney, tonight on 60 Minutes.
Copyright 1999 Mark Ramsey. All rights reserved. NO PORTION MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.
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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Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 08:01:00 -0700
From: ("David M Hoptman") <David.Hoptman@wellpoint.com>
