I think what I'll do is, I'll blow through a few movies from my collection, limiting my thoughts on each to one sentence. The movies in question are ones that I honestly don't think I have anything more to say. This is just a bit of Collection Project house-keeping, really.
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Overnight (d. Mark Brian Smith and Tony Montana) - Pure, glorious schadenfreude..
Not Another Teen Movie (d. Joel Gallen) - I...I swear to God, I remember this thing being funny...it's not, though..
Three Amigos (d. John Landis) - Three Amigos, on the other hand, is a friggin' hoot, and God damn anyone who says otherwise.
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Turistas (d. John Stockwell) - This is basically the same experience as any number of other professionally made modern horror films, though I will note that the moral ambiguity of the villain -- his slaughtering of American tourists is motivated by the absence of good organs for donation to needy South American patients -- is pretty badly and cynically undercut by making him a cold-hearted racist.
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Big Bad Wolf (d. Lance W. Dreesen) - I'd be curious to know if any of you guys have seen this thing, because it's fucking terrible.
Whenever I'm feeling down I think about OVERNIGHT and the glorious fall of Troy Duffy. Normally I don't take pleasure in other people's pain...but Duffy is the exception to the rule. I can't believe they're making a third BOONDOCK SAINTS...
ReplyDeleteNot if I have anything to say about it!!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, is there anything we can do to stop that from happening?
Let's email him and remind him that he IS the next Quentin Tarantino...and let's see if that kind of asinine comparison can have the same effect it did the first go-round. At least it would be ten more year until he could scrape money together to make the third one.
ReplyDeleteA quick search on Wikipedia shows that the second film indeed made a profit. I'm assuming he'll keep making them as long as idiot frat boys/pseudo-Bostonian Irish go out and see it.
Oh, Duffy never stopped believing that. It's that goddamn cult that grew around the first awful movie. That kept his raging ego alive for well over a decade. And now he's been unleashed again, like Godzilla, except not at all cool or amusing or entertaining.
ReplyDeleteA funny story: my senior year in high school I worked at Blockbuster Video, this was 1999, and we had "exclusive" rights to the film. I remember we had a whole "bay" (video store speak for "rack of movies") of BOONDOCK SAINTS, and I remember thinking: what the hell are we doing with over 100 copies of a straight to video rental?
ReplyDeleteWell, kudos (I guess) to BBV for having the foresight to load up on copies of a movie that was going to have a huge cult following. However, I remember having to deal with all kinds of employees and co-workers who would rave about the film and go on and on about how brilliant and funny it was.
I took it home to watch, and I just remember being sad that so many people had been duped. Well, since it was 1999, perhaps the greatest single year in film history, I made it my mission to be just as zealous about some of my favorite movies from that year like: BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, THE LIMEY, MAGNOLIA, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, eXistenZ, BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. THE INSIDER, and THREE KINGS.
Needless to say I made a lot of enemies with customers and with my co-workers because of my recommendations (I can't tell you how many times someone would say: "You liked that!") . But I'll always have fond memories of those time and trying to convince the people in my small town to actually watch good movies. We had an employee picks section in the story and I always remember just how different mine always looked from the rest of the employees.
Anyway, whenever I think about BOONDOCK SAINTS it makes me think about that year when BOONDOCK mania swept through my small town...later I would go onto college and still hear people talking about the movie, and wearing BOONDOCK SAINTS t-shirts to boot! Yikes!
lol @ that Turistas review
ReplyDeleteKevin - I never worked in a video store, so I never really had that experience, but I remember being in my now-gone local Hollywood Video, and one of the staff was there, off-duty, renting movies with her boyfriend. BROKEN FLOWERS had just come out a couple weeks before, and we were both near that shelf, and she said "Don't rent that! It's terrible!" I told her that I'd loved it, and I think she just shook her head.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I did used to work at a bookstore, and we had staff picks there. One of my picks was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's CANCER WARD. While it was up, I think it sold three copies, around Christmas time, which is pretty good, when you think about it.
Jordan - Thanks!
I need to see OVERNIGHT-- it's always sounded great. Duffy's story reminds me of the AMONGST FRIENDS chapter in John Pierson's book on indie cinema of the 80s and 90s-- he has a lot of funny anecdotes about what idiot Rob Weiss was.
ReplyDeleteBut...NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, Bill? As someone who saw SCARY MOVIE 2 in the theater, I'm ashamed of you. (:
I know, but...I remember seeing it and thinking it was pretty funny. And then years later I bought it for, like, three bucks, brought it home, watched it, and barely laughed. So I don't know.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of boobs in it, though.
I remember some funny stuff from TEEN MOVIE: the "plain" girl who is miraculously transformed into a beauty when someone thinks to remove her glasses; Chris Evans sporting the whipped cream bikini from VARSITY BLUES; a BRING IT ON parody in which the Nice GIrl, emerging soaking wet from a swim at a packed pool party, gets a hilariously redundant drink thrown at her by the Mean Girl, and flees the party, sobbing in absurdly illogical humiliation; and an elaborately choreographed poo joke which I remember as being hilarious, but the details of which I can't remember.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the water-in-the-face gag was funny. My problem with the ugly duckling transformation is that that aspect of the films TEEN MOVIE was spoofing had already been relentlessly mocked by the general public by that point, and the movie added nothing to it. We'd all said it already.
ReplyDeleteI did like how, when Chris Evans saw the "plain" girl for the first time, he almost threw up.
Bill, yep, that's the only bit I think of when I think of NJATM.
ReplyDeleteAs for book/videostore experiences with the unwashed masses... ugh. I worked in a used bookstore my first couple years of college, and fully half if not more of our sales were dusty old Harlequin & historical romances and their ilk, bought/traded in by the shopping-bagful. I was all like, Do you mind, I'm tryin' to read 'Naked Lunch' here, I don't got time to help you find no damn Kathleen Woodiwiss!!!