The Toxic Avenger (1985)

What a time capsule of the 80's.

The Toxic Avenger is a cult classic B-movie about a nerdy mop-boy who falls into a vat of toxic waste and become a super-hero. Sort of Swamp Thing meets Darkman meets The Punisher.

This is a classic case of a good idea ruined in execution. Let's break it down.

GOOD: satirizing the fad of health clubs and the preening douchebags they spawned by depicting them as 'roided-out spree killers who humiliate Melvin the mop-boy when they're not mowing down random pedestrians in hit-and-runs. Bonus: the origin of the point system (6 pts for a kid, 6 more if you can hit the seeing eye dog with him).

BAD: so much over-acting and elastic facial expressions that it's impossible not to cringe every time they're on screen.

GOOD: satirizing the rampant drug use of the time by having the drivers of the toxic waste truck stop for a cocaine break, thus providing the catalyst for Melvin's transformation.

BAD: dude pulls out a plastic bag with about a half pound of flour in it and both drivers bury their faces like they're trying to make snow angels with their nostrils. There's no need to belabor a point like that.

GOOD: providing numerous low-level bad guys to highlight the corruption of the city

BAD: more costumed creeps per capita than Gotham City. Not every single henchman needs to look like a reject from KISS.

GOOD: a love interest whose literal blindness to the character's deformities is matched only by her metaphorical blindness to his vigilante justice.

BAD: stealing jokes from Young Frankenstein by having Blind Chick constantly hit Toxie in the nuts with various objects while she smiles obliviously. It was only funny when Gene Hackman did it.

Now I realize that this movie is from Troma Films, home of some of the crappiest movies ever to be intentionally produced. They didn't care about auteurism. They didn't care about plot, pacing, editing, or suspending disbelief. And that's fine. You can still watch Toxic Avenger and not care. But if you're at all interested in making a movie, I would suggest this one just to demonstrate what not to do.

Angel-A (2005)

I love, love, loved this movie. Luc Besson has come a long way toward making a French film for American audiences. I would put this on par with Brotherhood of the Wolf but without the convoluted political subtext.

So this is basically It's A Wonderful Life on crack. Andre is a two-bit schemer who owes money to the wrong people. He has no friends, no family, and no country, being a half-Algerian Frenchman with an American visa. So he decides he's going to jump off a bridge instead of getting whacked by gangsters for not coming up with the cash.

Luck is still not with him, because a mysterious miniskirted bottle-blond Amazon has the same idea and even the same bridge. So he forgoes suicide to rescue her and exhorts her to not waste her life but take up a cause. She chooses him.

He spends much of the movie baffled, bewildered and bewitched by this amoral minx with mile-long legs.

If Jimmy Stewart's guardian angel looked like that I don't think he would have gone home.

Anyway, it's a journey of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and ultimately acceptance of others. But I had you at mile-long legs, didn't I?

Revolver (2005)

  This movie was complete garbage. I don't know what the hell Guy Ritchie was thinking when he came up with this but I'm going to blame Madonna. It's her fault for getting him all spun up in Kabbalah. Religion and directors do not mix. I give you Battlefield Earth.

The plot is so ridiculous and pretentious, it's infuriating. I'm going to go ahead and save you from having to watch it by spoiling the "big reveal". It's all bullshit. The whole thing is like an opium dream of psychobabble. Here's the surface plot:

Jake Green went to prison for seven years. We don't know what he did but it was Ray Liotta's fault. His solitary confinement cell was between a chess master and a master con man. We don't know what they did either. They passed messages to each other through books, which were intercepted by Jake Green. Using them, he discovers the magical "Formula" which can be used to win any game.

I'm going to pause so my eye can stop twitching.

Ok, so his buddies to either side escape and he gets out 2 years later to find out that they're assholes. Duh. They were in prison. They cleaned him out of money so he uses the "Formula" to win a bunch more from casinos so he can get back at Ray Liotta. That would have probably been entertaining to watch, so it's not in the film. Someone just throws out the line that he's now richer than God. Ray Liotta is not pleased and starts hiring goons to kill Jake. Mysteriously, he's saved by two mysterious dudes who are total assholes. One of them smokes cigars and the other plays chess. Foreshadowing! They tell him they are loan sharks and they will help him get back at Ray Liotta but they will have to clean him out of money to do it. FORESHADOWING! Jake agrees because he thinks he's going to die, but he's not really because he hadn't gotten the script for Crank yet. Shit happens that has nothing to do with the revenge part of the film. Ray Liotta gets progressively more angry and more tan. He ends up having a shoot-out with an Asian gang over drugs and money that were stolen by Jake Green's two mysterious asshole loan sharks.

/deep breath

The end of the movie is when Jake goes to Ray Liotta's bedroom in the middle of the night, wakes him up, and apologizes for having caused all the misfortune. The two loan shark assholes reveal that they are the two prison assholes and the three of them ride off into the sunset. THE END.

Here's the actual plot: Jake Green struggles with the manifestation of his ego and the manipulations therein while dealing with a series of Jungian archetypes. His "formula" is to subsume the ego, accept responsibility for it, and thereby win at life.

Total and complete BULLSHIT.

Poolhall Junkies (2002)

   I love men. I love men who do manly things. I love the idea of manly places where men get together to do manly things. Just the idea, though. I don't like actually being in those places because the lighting is invariably bad, the floors are sticky, and they always smell. But the knowledge that these fantastic bastions of testosterone exist somewhere makes me happy.

Poolhalls are one such place. In my head, they're hazy with cigarette smoke filtering lights with green shades over tables and full of the sounds of blues music and the crack of cue balls on the break. mmmm.

Anyway, movie.

Poolhall Junkies is about a pool hustler trying to make good. It's like Rounders but with pool and the raw bravado of Swingers with a touch of Christopher Walken for spice. The plot is pretty standard. Man has innate gift with pool that no one close to him understands, was used by a daddy figure, broke free, and is being dragged back in to save someone weaker that he feels attachment for. There is the obligatory "doubting of skills, taunting by former mentor, and pep talk from the 'guy who's seen it all'." But there's so much raw testosterone on screen, none of that even matters. I maybe wouldn't buy it, even though it does have Ernie Reyes, Jr., but it's definitely worth the rental.

Casino Royale (2006)

  So, this was another Christy exchange. This time it was me trying to improve her. Did you know she has never seen a James Bond movie? Not the latest James Bond, but any James Bond movie. I didn't even know that was possible. I mean, Spike TV runs a marathon of them about once a month. 

Knowing this, when she came up to visit I insisted that we initiate her into the 007 fold. I chose Casino Royale because, as a reboot, it seemed the easiest place to start. No need to drag in the 5 previous Bonds to confuse her.

Turns out, she's a lying whore. She actually had seen it before, just not all of it. The ball-smashing scene, for instance, came as a bit of a shock. Even if you're told about it, watching it is still painful. Overall, she liked it and is open to watching the sequel Quantum of Solace although she felt it had some pacing problems. I have to say that I agree. Parts of that movie, especially the actual poker scenes, are boring as hell.

I'm going to go ahead and include my thoughts about QoS here too, for reasons that will be immanently apparent.

I did not like it as a stand-alone film. I felt it was one of the weakest in the canon. But, watched back to back as a single film, CR/QoS works. That's why it directly follows it in my collection instead of being between Pushing Daisies season 2 and Queen of the Damned. It seemed like more of a LotR series instead of two different films. Which made me wonder how the proposed third one was going to turn out. Would it be a stand-alone, like previous Bonds, or more like The Return of the King and just round out Daniel Craig's involvement?

Thanks to the financial woes of MGM, we may not get to know for quite some time. Last I heard (in July '10), they had stopped all work on production. Then I heard it was back on, then off, and now who the hell knows. But you know I'll be first in line if they ever get that sucker off the ground.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (2009)

This was another installation of The Christy Experiment. You may remember back in June when I offered her the opportunity to have me watch three movies she loved that I would never watch on my own. I liked the idea, if not the movies, so I decided to make it a recurring thing and let her pick a movie once a month. She traded her July pick for two episodes of True Blood. At first I thought it was a sucker's bet but now I'm stuck watching the rest of the season so we know who the real idiot is around here.

Anyway, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was her pick for August. I had read a couple of Tucker Max's blogs and a few excerpts from the book. I thought it was pretty funny stuff, even if the guy is a class-A douchebag. The movie is an account of three friends, one is a lying douche (Tucker), one just got dumped and is suicidally bitter about it (Drew), and one is about to get married (Dan). Tucker sets up a bachelor party at a strip club in another town and they lie to the fiancee about it.

If it sounds familiar, that's because you've seen this exact same scenario before in EVERY bachelor party movie EVER. So you're not there for the story. But you can't root for any of the characters. Dan is boring, Tucker is a spoiled ass, and Drew is a hair's-breadth away from setting himself on fire to end the misery.

If you're a fan of assholes, like you watch My Best Friend's Girl 20 times in a row and still find it funny, you'll probably like this movie. For myself, I was bored.

Indochine (1992)

This is a really pretty movie. It's long (2 and a half hours), but the cinematography is gorgeous. 

Catherine Deneuve plays a wealthy rubber plantation owner who raises her friends' child after they die, in the French province of Indochina before the Communist uprising and the independence of Vietnam. She hooks up with a young Naval officer but they break up (for reasons I didn't fully understand, probably because they involved feelings) and then her now-teenage daughter "falls in love" with the same guy. Awkward! Drama happens and Navy Guy gets shipped off to the ass-end of the country and the daughter decides to say "fuck it all" and runs away to find him.

It's a romantic/epic/political drama and not really the type of movie that I watch often, but it was good. I think. I'll probably have to wait til I work back around to the I's to see if it stands up to a second viewing. I would put it in the same category as Far and Away, so if you liked that one but want some foreign cred, give Indochine a shot.

Salt (2010)

  You know what? I feel bad for this movie. It's not doing so hot in the theaters and that's not it's fault. If it had come out a couple of weeks earlier, say, opposite Knight and Day, I think it would have made a killing. It's just not able to stand up to Inception. It's like having a sibling who's a genius. Nobody cares if you won the science fair because your big sister just invented cold fusion.

Salt has its share of problems, chief of which is the shaky-cam. You know how much I hate that style but it wasn't completely over-used here. Just enough to give a sense of frenetic action. Still, that will keep me from recommending people see it in theater. Wait for the rental, just to avoid any motion sickness.

I'm pretty sure this will go onto my "Buy" list, though. It's a good movie. I read on the interwebs that the part of Evelyn Salt was originally supposed to be Edwin Salt and it was being shopped as a star vehicle for Tom Cruise, amongst others. I tried to keep that in mind as I watched Angelina Jolie and I was not disappointed. I could just have easily seen a dude play that role. They didn't dumb it down or pretty it up just because it happened to star one of the world's most attractive women. (I say one of the world's most because I'm not going to get into that whole Jolie vs. Aniston thing, but for the record: Jolie by a mile.)

No contest.

The Amazing Screw-On Head (2006)

 This is a fun little 20-minute movie by the guy who drew the Hellboy comics. Paul Giamatti plays the titular character, who is exactly as his name implies. He has a manservant named Mr. Groin (voiced by Patton Oswalt) to help him maintain various mechanical bodies in their fight against Emperor Zombie (David Hyde Pierce) and his nefarious plans to take over Lincoln's America.

I had to watch it twice because I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be as funny as it is. It kind of makes me want to run out and find the comics. But I'm a little swamped with other media right at the moment so I think I'll hold off.

I'm not sure what it would retail for. I wouldn't advocate paying full DVD price ($17-$20) for it, since it is only 20 minutes with no special features to speak of but if you can find it as part of a pack or for a reduced price I'd say go for it.