INKSTAND

I’ve seen Ed Wood movies before. I knew what to expect, and my expectations were met. Bad writing, bad acting, bad directing, non-existent budget. I’m all for camp. Camp is one of my middle names, and yes, of course, this movie delivers. What surprises me about this movie, what makes this movie stand out from most B movies I am used to, is how unflinchingly progressive it is for it’s time.
With the exception of some surreal sequences, like every scene with Bella Lugosi, the film feels much like an educational film. However, while many films of the time, educational or otherwise, criminalize and demonize subjects such as homosexuality and gender identity, Glen or Glenda serves as the director’s voice saying “This is what it’s like for me.”
The first third of the movie involves the life of Glen, who is a transvestite, and his fiance, as well as a doctor and a police inspector. The inspector is dealing with the suicide of a cross-dresser and the doctor is explaining transvestitism to him, becoming a narrator of sorts, explaining everything very matter-of-factly.
The middle of the film begins to get weird. We see the internal struggle of Glen, who feels he needs to tell his fiance his secret. This struggle seems like a fifteen-minute-long acid trip. A lot of elements of his conflict make sense, like how he can’t save his girl from a fallen tree while dressed as a woman. A lot of the elements are just weird, like women gyrating all over a couch and Lugosi yelling things about big green dragons on your doorstep. Why is this mad scientist talking to us about cross dressers? Yes, there is still that crappy Ed Wood feel to it all.
The last part seems like another case study, adding to the educational film feel. It tells of a man who has had a sex change, how he musty adapt, and how he must continue taking hormones all his life.
If the bizarre subject matter of this film didn’t keep it out of the mainstream, it’s poor production value did. I was not alive in 1953, but I’m guessing this movie delivered a lot of facts in a manner that no other movie did at the time. It is informative, but it’s entertainment value is not much higher than, say, Bride of the Monster or Plan 9. I mean, now that I’ve seen it, and was taken in by it’s straight-forwardness, I doubt I would be entertained by it again.

Ok, I’m not going to go too much into this movie. It sucked. It just really sucked. I usually try to stay real quiet during movies, but about halfway through I joined in Jeremy’s audible dislike of the movie. I think this might call for some bullets.

-Female lead…way too old for a high schooler. Way too hot for a high schooler. Grand total of 1min, 15 seconds of character development (juvie delinquent w/jailbird dad both for GTA. How convenient).
-That kid from Holes (tee hee) is cute and seems to be a good actor, but they just have him yammering on and on the whole movie for what seems to be comic effect. It is distracting and tiresome. And he and the girl are both dirty and sweaty the whole time.
-Bad edits
-Bad dialogue
-Bad directing
-Bad cinematography
-No real conflict is revealed until about 2/3 of the way in
-A GOD AWFUL fake austrailian accent
-Long scenes. There was one where the robots were hiding from the parents in the front yard…it went on for about ten minutes and included a lot of that yammering from both kids, the parents, and the robots. I knew exactly what was going on but the scene was really pretty chaotic and could have been about 2 minutes long. there were lots of scenes like this.
-Not enough Andrew. Too much fake-accent girl. Totally uneccesary sassy black computer genius kid.
-Robots tended to change size inconsistently.
So, yeah, it was crap. Glad I saw it on the big screen, though. The robots did look cool. But they didn’t really use them wizely. For a more in-depth review, check out Andrew’s take on it.

Still not feeling too bloggy, so this’ll be a quickie.
My co-worker Nate really likes this movie for some reason. I hated it. Another co-worker, Nick, just saw it for the first time and described it this way (don’t tell Nate!):
“I could have dreamed this…and it would have been better.”
For me, it didn’t hold my interest enough to even remember the plot. Tom Cruise was never attractive, I don’t know who that chick is*, and Tim Curry looked rad, but that’s about it. If you’ve never seen it, watch the Dark Crystal instead.

*(oh, i just looked her up. she’s the chick from Ferris Bueller…the movie, not the tv show with jennifer aniston that most people think of.)

This British mockumentary follows a wedding magazine’s competition for the most original wedding. It’s done in the style of a Cristopher Guest movie with interviews and candid footage of the characters interacting. The only actor I recognized was the adorable Martin Freeman, “Tim” from the British “The Office” series. He played part of a couple who had a Hollywood Musical themed wedding. Others included a Naturist (nekkid) Wedding and a Tennis Wedding.
I really did like this move, it entertained me throughout. It was not, however, laugh-out-loud, side-achingly funny. It was more of a cute, subtle humor. And because of the accents, I might not have noticed a lot of the jokes if I wasn’t too lazy to turn the captions off on my television.
The weddings at the end were great fun to watch. The naturist one was kind of lame, but you get to see no-no places. The tennis one was just absurd. OF course, the Hollywood Musical was the most fun to watch. The number they did was great, and they sang their vows in a song that got stuck in my head fo a couple of days ( I forgot it now).
What struck me at the end was the relationships all the couples had. It was sort of obvious who was going to win, first of all, but still, each couple genuinley loved each other. The element of super-competitivness in the tennis couple could easily have broken the relationship apart if they didn’t win, but they didn’t and they still had a happy ending. In fact, the DVD has alternate ending where each of the three couples wins, and they all end up happy.
Because the Naturist couple were naked all the time, and lived in a commune or something, there is some mad full frontal in this movie. Boobies and weiners everywhere. Even the wedding planners strip down for the wedding. Speaking of those wedding planners…
The thing that stuck with me most about this movie, and it’s almost unquestionably because I am gay, is the relationship of the wedding planners, seen here:

They are the ones planning all these weddings and claim that no wedding they have ever planned has broken up. They are obviously a couple who live and work together, even hanging a Gilbert and George-inspired portrait of themselves on their office wall. It’s when Freeman’s character has a fight with his fiance’s family and stays with them that you see them in their domesticity. As they read the morning paper and get their coffee, the song “Marriage is For Old Folks” plays. It’s actually a little sad to see these two who plan so many weddings for others but can’t get married themselves. Sometimes I think marriage is archaic and there’s no need for it, and sometimes I feel some people SHOULD get married, and it’s a matter of extending equal rights to everybody. This aspect of the film appealed to the latter.
So, If you are looking for a date movie, with weiners, and can stand british accents, this movie is totally for you.

The first thing I noticed about this movie, other than the the oddly juxtaposed opening credits, was that it had all the melodrama of a kid’s cartoon. The kids are given a few elements of “edge”, like hanging out in a abandoned house, yet are still essentially good and righteous. The men who run the track and who don’t want the main kid to win some qualification race don’t really do anything too evil, but they act like they do all the time. I don’t think this movie did that because it was geared towards children, but because its filmakers were that bad. I think what convinced me that it isn’t geared toward kids is that there was some mild anit-authority violence and profanity. The little sister of the main kid says “shit” a lot.

One fallacy I see in this movie’s logic is how keenly the biker kids are tuned into the community. Their newspaper route has made them heroes of the town, delivering the USA Today in weird, crazy, and time-senstive ways such as in a dog’s mouth, to a fire engine, and to a woman who times him. It is rare in movies, and rarer in real life, that you see characters who know their neighbors with such Archiecomician familiarity.

There was a scene before the last final race that introduced all the racers and who their sponsors were, promoting the racers and, in doing so, thier sponsors. During this final race, other than rewinding a couple of times to see the crowd reaction shots, I mostly zoned out and thought about sex.

MY favorite crowd shot was one of a dude who worked with main kid and didn’t like him. We only know this becasue he says it a bunch of times. Here he is distracting a woman with the fact that he works with this kid in order to steal her pop corn:

Man, this guy does reviews right. Ok, I haven’t seen his other reviews, but this one is not only dead-on, but he backs up all his points and is more than satisfactorily informed of the subject he’s reviewing.
When the review starts, he goes off on foul-mouthed rants that express his distaste for the movie. After this subsides he clearly and knowledgably dissects the Ninja Turtles phenomenon keeping in step with a build-up to third movie. His description of that late 80’s/ early 90’s marketing bonanza is plainly put, so that people who weren’t in the thick of it (like I was) could still follow the progression.
He then spends the bulk of the second video reviewing the actual TMNT3 movie, and does so brilliantly. His take on it was pretty much the one I had, but at the time I didn’t care enough about the franchise anymore to get upset about it (which is odd, because he’s like a year older than me). In fact there is only one tiny flaw i saw in his review: I don’t think they intended that rat to be splinter’s ancestor, but rather intended a lame joke as a transition between scenes.
My favorite line has to be “This movie sucks so much fucking suck that it fucks.” Also, he’s actually reasonably attractive, especially when he’s getting really mad (see end of part2) or drinking Rolling Rock!
I just saw that he reviewed Friday the 13th for the NES. Im gonna watch that now.

Ok, so why am I putting symbols in place of letters? It’s an attempt to fight spam.
This is a sweet, safe movie that was pretty entertaining until the end. It was a total cop out and nothing was explained. so there.

The saddest thing about this movie is that it could have been good.
No, don’t laugh, I’m serious.
IT could have been good for my standards, anyway. No, I wasn’t expecting the in-depth character development that is making the $piderm@n movies all epic and shit, but all the elements were there and the special effects were at least up to industry standards. The thing that pissed me off the most was that, even though I don’t like Nicholas Cage that much, I hated when he was G#o$t R!der even more. I actually like the Johnny Blaze character, but whenever he changed he started with the one-liners. I HATE that! Also it would have been cool to see him move around naturally when his head was on fire, but it was like the stage direction was “Okay, remember…your head and hands are on fire!” As a result every single move is a pose that simply must be stricken.
The actress who plays Roxanne, the love interest, is simply terrible. Where did they find her? she can’t act her way out of…well, anything. She can’t act!
Oh, and everyone kept pointing at things.
The bad guys all wore the same goth-rave reject coats even though they were demons. They looked super retarded. One of them, Blackheart, could have been really cool if not played by the weird kid from American Beauty.
Oh, and anything there was wherever these guys went, including G#o$t R!der, got destroyed. Cars, buildings, light bulbs. All destroyed. I bet GR himself killed a shitload of people!
Any redeeming qualities this movie had were washed away by the script. Any Hollywood cliche you can think of was there. It was shit, plain and simple.
So, like I said I could have been good. But it wasn’t.

This movie had the kind of mixture of adventure, melodrama and lame jokes that could easily be made as a cartoon. That’s probably why I liked it. Well, that and the beer. It’s the story of a pair of senoritas who are out to get revenge against an evil bank guy from New York, evily played by Dwight Yoakam. He’s such a bad ass, he doesn’t seem to care who he kills in order to get that railroad built through the people’s town or whatever.
Steve Zahn must have considered himself quite lucky that the script called for the two girls to constantly be in competition, most heatedly when it came to kissing technique. They pretty much wear his lips off throughout the movie. He plays a science guy hired to solve their robberies but end up helping them. Original.
The script is nothing spectacular and is quite cliched and boring, but my favorite bit of dialogue in the movie is:


steve zahn: No two people have the same fingerprint.
Penelope Cruz: Have you checked everyone in the world?
Steve Zahn: No, but it was proven by science.


I also liked a line from Dwight Yoakam’s character that sounds like a line in a song:


I wouldn’t be suprised
if by the end of this ride
your man was right back
by your side