Ryan McFarland

Tonight we watched the first two episodes of season one of Speed Racer. I’ve watched this season a few times but it is a good way to be able to have some brain candy that you’re sure to turn off after a while. Spridle just gets too annoying. I have seasons one through three and just added four and five to my wish list on Amazon.

One of the trivia questions from last week’s bar trivia game was “Which of the following rated X movies won an Oscar?” Our team got it wrong but we decided to add the movie to our list of movies to watch. Midnight Cowboy was made in 1969 and received the X rating for the portrayal of sex (and perhaps drugs for the time). In 1971 the rating was changed to R but it won 3 Oscars in 1970. It stars Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Voight’s character, Joe Buck, moves from Texas to New York City thinking he can make a living as a male prostitute. He doesn’t. Along the way he ends up with Hoffman’s character, Rizzo. It is a pretty decent movie considering many older films don’t hold my attention well. It doesn’t glorify drug use (which is one of my most hated features of many modern movies). I will not ruin it other than to say i don’t think that bacon is in the movie at all and the ending is fairly nondescript.

Cena and i wasted 88 minutes of our lives. We watch some bad movies - intentionally. But Land of the Minotaur (A.K.A. The Devil’s Men) is worse than a typical B movie. There were not any memorable lines or silly scenes to recount. The only valuable part of the movie was that Peter Cushing was in it. He plays the “Baron” - the main antagonist. He looked familiar to me but it wasn’t until i saw a picture on IMDB of him from the movie Star Wars that i realized who he was. Turns out he was considered for the role of Obi-Wan. He has been a staple actor for horror movies for generations. He has played Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Van Helsing, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Dr. Who, Dr. Frankenstein, and many other roles with important sounding titles. Seriously, there wasn’t a thing in the movie worth watching. I can’t think of a time that i really even laughed at the movie.

I used to browse YouTube often. It has just become so overrun with juvenile comments. Every now and then i see something worth sharing though. Zack Kim does some incredible things with a couple of guitars. He plays classical and other songs in a very unique way. Also look at this piece by Lasse Gjertsen he doesn’t know how to read music or play a musical instrument.

Somehow in our thrift store shopping i found Escape From DS-3. This movie takes place in the year 2045 but came out in 1981 so you know that it is going to be good. Anne Spielberg, Steven Spielberg’s sister, produced this movie. A few years later she followed up by co-writing Big (yes, the one with Tom Hanks) and she even was nominated for an Oscar for it. But let’s focus on this less celebrated piece of her history.

The DS in DS-3 stands for Detention Satellite. The main character, Andrew Lavette (played by Jackson Bostwick), is of course falsely accused and then convicted of a crime he did not commit. Instead of the death sentence he gets life in prison. Space prison that is. Space prison with legalized drugs and bi-weekly female robot mime conjugal visitors. I won’t ruin this movie for you on the off chance that you actually find it to watch. It has cheap effects (the detention satellite), lousy costumes (why did every sci-fi program from Star Trek to Battlestar Gallactica have such awful uniforms?), and poor dialog. Fortunately Bubba Smith is a co-star. Bubba was Officer Hightower in the Police Academy movies. I guess he played football a bit too. Bubba was the only minority in the movie which when compared with this snippet from a BBC article about US prisons forecasts an increase in white collar crime.

A report from the US Justice Department also estimated 12 per cent of black men in their 20s and early 30s were in jail last year.

Just 1.6 per cent of white males in the same age group were locked up.

Bubba was in DS-3 to serve time for murder and the other three inmates covered in the movie were white and were either falsely incarcerated or convicted of white-collar crimes. Despite this observation i don’t think the movie was trying to make any social commentary. I can’t figure out what the movie was trying to get across. I guess the one thing i learned was that even if you produce an awful sci-fi movie you can still be nominated for an Oscar later.

I have decided to pit two movies against each other for my movie reviews. We watch such a variety of films comparing odd combinations seems like a fun way to look at them. Last night we watched 2005’s The Brothers Grimm and the night before was Xanadu from 1980. Let’s put them head to head and see which movie is victorious.

Cast - Grimm has Heath Ledger, Matt Damon, Peter Stormare (Dancer in the Dark and Armageddon), Monica Bellucci (i recognized as Persephone from Matrix Revolutions and apparently was in Passion of the Christ [mental note to add that to the list]), Jonathan Pryce (Pirates of the Caribbean), and another actor from the Pirates movies - the guy with the strange eyes - Mackenzie Crook. Xanadu had Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly, and Michael Beck. The only fair fight would be pitting Monica against Olivia. Olivia wore frumpy clothing and almost always had her ankles covered - perhaps to hide her cankles. Monica wore a flowing queen’s dress but it - uh - revealed cleavage. Grimm wins.

Soundtrack - Since Xanadu was a musical the win is a cakewalk. It’s been two days and the title track is still in my head.

Director - Xanadu was directed by Robert Greenwald. Doesn’t ring a bell does it? In 2004 he directed Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. If Robert was fighting against almost any other director he might have a chance. Sadly, The Brothers Grimm was directed by Terry Gilliam. Terry also directed Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Meaning of Life, and Time Bandits. Terry was the only American in the Monty Python crew. He did all the animations for the television show and the movies. Uh, we have a first round knockout here. Grimm wins.

Rollerskating - There is no rollerskating in The Brothers Grimm. There seem to be hundreds of roller skaters in Xanadu. I think about one third of the film had someone on skates somewhere in a frame. Win: Xanadu.

Bacon - No, not your typical 7 ways to Kevin Bacon - that’s far too easy with movies using the internet as a reference. We’re talking about real bacon and the winner is The Brothers Grimm. Since the movie has loose ties to Grimm tales the connection it has is to a real Grimm story - that of Clever Hans.

“Good day, Gretel.”
“Good day, Hans. Are you bringing something good?”
“Bringing nothing. Want something.”
Gretel gives Hans a piece of bacon.
“Good-bye, Gretel.”

It was a close match but with Monica’s cleavage, the close connection to bacon, and Gilliam’s omnipotence The Brother’s Grimm wins.

We’ve been watching a lot of movies worthy of reviews lately. I had to get to this one before details became fuzzy - although i don’t know how i could ever forget David Hasselhoff (as himself) flushing his poo on an airplane and the resulting falling frozen turd giving a woman a concussion resulting in sexual deviancy. The director of Hairspray brings us A Dirty Shame featuring Johnny Knoxville, Tracey Ullman and Selma Blair (with a pair of ginormous breasts). The film is irreverent (you probably gathered that much), does not have a sensible plot, and does not have enough car chases, explosions or bacon to be in my list of favorite movies. But it was kind of surreal and if taken as a piece of comedy meant to be irreverent and have a nonsensical plot then it just might be enjoyable. Do not watch this with the kids around or with your mom in the room.

We have been watching a lot of movies and tv on dvd lately. We watched season 3 of Nip Tuck and season two of Lost. Cena bought them new on Amazon where she got a $30 coupon for applying for a credit card and then the credit card gave her a $30 discount off of her first purchase so we practically got to watch those for free. But then she turned around and sold them on Amazon. Paid to watch tv? We were not paid to watch any of the rest of the things we have lately though. I got “Rupert Murdock - war on journalism” via peerflix and it was humorous, eye-opening, and disgusting. Cena got “Mirror Mask” from netflix. That was some nice cinematography. We bought Rambo III at a box store in Anchorage for under $5. It was remarkably timely. John Rambo works with some Afghan freedom fighters on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to rescue his mentor from Russian occupants. The same border we suspect Osama is hiding on. The same freedom fighters that later became Al Queda. For the winner of a 1989 Razzie Award and a Guinness World Record holder (most violent movie in history) this movie actually had a quote by Rambo’s mentor during his interrogation about the people of Afghanistan that holds especially true. Sadly, I can not find the quote online. We watched “Killer Shrews” a 1959 black and white movie we found on VHS in a thrift store. It was great. I don’t want to ruin it for you but the giant shrews were dogs with shaggy rugs thrown over them and the hero was Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane from the Dukes of Hazzard series.

Have some dvds that you own but don’t watch any more and don’t think are worth much? Try joining Peerflix. You list movies you have and movies you want and for each one you send to someone else you earn a few points worth trading to get movies from other people. I just listed perhaps 20 movies and now have to mail out 6 dvds. You print out two pages, fold up an envelope out of them and place just the disc inside. Put a single stamp on and it is ready to go. Thanks for getting me to join Kevin!

If you couldn’t quite get enough of Napoleon Dynamite then you should listen to the radio ads and watch the tv spots he and Pedro made for the Utah State fair. They pretty much are the coolest ads ever made by a person.