Crime and Punishment

Might I recommend, for those looking for ocular entertainment, Mafioso, which is now showing at a number of Laemmle's Theatres in the Southland. I don't know what the occasion is, but the chain is showing a number of old films on the big screen, including Becket (which would be a good watch as well).

I hadn't seen Mafioso before and it wasn't what I expected, but a fair amount of it certainly rang true. A brief synopsis: Sicilian fellow who moved to Milan and become a successful factory manager visits his old hometown, and his family, after an absence of a decade or so, new wife and kids in tow. Northern Italy meets Southern Italy and hilarity ensues. Until the local mafia don has a favor to ask.

More than that, and you've gotta watch the movie, as far as plot goes. But there were a number of key points that I could relate to. Most significantly had to be the omnipresence of food. As the long-missing family arrives, a veritable feast is thrown for them, with the new wife mistaking the appetizers for the whole meal. Everywhere they go in town, someone else forces more food upon them. You can't turn a corner without a canoli or a calzone getting stuffed down your throat.

Visiting the best beloved's family in Cleveland, I felt exactly the same way. Warm, effusive, welcoming...but they put more food in me than an In 'N Out after a twelve year famine. The night of my arrival, even though we got to the house around eleven, I ended up having two sandwiches and I wasn't even hungry. The next morning, Thanksgiving, I had barely slogged through breakfast when they were pulling the pizza out of the oven for lunch. And by the time I got done with lunch it was time to head over to an aunt's, where the first thing she did, after giving me a hug, was cram a piece of some kind of cheesy bread in my mouth. I felt like I was training to be a beach ball.

The best part about it, though, was that the food was unbelievably good. So, too with the food in this movie. Even when they're chowing down on what is supposedly "lamb guts," it looked so savory, I think I might have given it a try.

Mafioso, though, has more than me going for it. It's well shot and I found the score entertaining, if a bit manic at times. I certainly regret not visiting Sicily two years ago when I had the chance, and this movie was in black and white, so you see how convincing it was. Great film, though the endings more serious than one might expect given the light-hearted happenings through most of the film.

MovieTimes: Devils and Such

I just stumbled across this piece of bile that was intended for The Doughty Traveler, but never quite made it. So, I share it with you now. It is, as you might have guessed, a movie review:

This Thanksgiving, I was in Cleveland, enjoying the company of the fiance's family (and getting stuffed with more Italian food than there is dough in a calzone factory). But that's all blah blah blah (not really...it was an amazingly wonderful time and her extended family couldn't have been warmer. The food was incredible, and I love her cousins--they're little kids, so it was probably the clown skills. For the sake of this post, however, blah blah blah will do for ellipsis). The important thing is that I saw the worst movie ever on the plane home.

No, no, I kid you not. The worst movie made by man (or woman or beast or whatever unfertilized zygote masquerading as intelligent life that was behind this shitstorm of a project).

The title of this movie: The Devil Wears Prada.

My title for this movie: A Flaming Piece of Monkey Scat.

My comments at the end of the movie, and I paraphrase loosely: "Did this just happen? Do people make movies like this? Do people watch movies like this? Do I still have an ounce of gray matter in my skull or is it somewhere under the folks back in row 37, having putrified into some kind of maggot-ridden tapioca as a result of the mere ten total minutes I watched of this movie."

I didn't even WATCH the movie and I wanted to cry. I did cry...tears of blood. Like a horned toad...but I'm a human.

You wanna know the plot of this movie? Take a blender, swallow some frozen corn whole; after you pass it, throw in the intestine peelings that they wrap tubes of sausage with, and hit liquify. Smell it and then pour on top of wherever you ended up wretching. That is the plot of this movie.

A million monkeys with a million typewriters couldn't have up with this story. It would have been too smart. It must have been one monkey, born without limbs, fed lead paint chips for a decade, whose only typing occurred when sufficient quantities of drool depressed a key.

Predictability on a scale of 1-10, the higher the score being better: Um, lemme think, I'd give a....0. That's 0 degrees Kelvin, as in Absolute Zero. That's like saying I hated it infinity times, but in negative.

Oh Meryl Streep, you're so tough and yet your life is soooo hawd? Well, then maybe stop pretending you're a cartoon and have a real life (that goes for off the screen as well...what on earth provoked you to audition for this dunghill?). Oh wait, you can't because you're trapped inside the worst movie made by anything with opposable thumbs. Hey, what's happening? Are they speaking in tongues? No, the blather that passes for dialogue is so mindless, I had to mentally translate it into gibberish to prevent me from being driven insane.

It continues, but I won't, lest you think less of me. Don't ever see Devil Prada I Hate Myself or whatever it's called. If you do, you're not my friend.

Movie Times: Seraphim Falls

I refuse to issue a spoiler alert for this movie. Let me put it this way: if you are ever unfortunate enough to be in a theater when this movie is playing, wait for the right moment to club the man with a gun who is forcing you to watch it. If he shoots you, you've lost nothing: the movie would have killed you anyway.

Seraphim Falls is the worst movie I've seen since Babel. It also happens to be the only movie I've seen since Babel, so perhaps a better explanation would be necessary. I have to assume that only intelligent people are reading this (yes, all four of you...three? Maybe?) and as a consequence, I can also assume you will not see this movie, unless you have a perverse interest in feeling your eyeballs try to pop out of your head and run down the aisle. So, I'll give it to you in brief.

Here's the deal...the movie starts out good.

No, I'm not kidding, it actually starts out real darn good. Yeah, and so did Anakin, tell me something I don't know. Seriously, though, this movie looked like a keeper, set in 1860-something, all about a chase of an ex-Union officer (Pierce Brosnan) by some dude (Liam Neeson) who wanted revenge. But let's break it down.

Strengths:
a) It's cryptic. You haven't a clue what the hell is going on, but Pierce Brosnan is being chased by bad guys after getting shot. It's like a realistic Bond movie. For instance, ol' fatso Brosnan tries to shimmy on a log across a raging river (albeit with one arm hurting from a bullet wound), loses balance like a past-his-prime movie star would, and falls in. He goes over the waterfall (not Seraphim Falls, mind you, but the incredibly overt symbolism gets worse later), but survives. How? Well, as any idiot who got shoved off a college high dive can tell you (read: me), falling thirty feet will hurt the soles of your feet...or give you a mean bellyflop, but it won't kill you. So, surprise! Brozzie lives.
b) It masquerades as realistic. I admit, (a) was real long. But the movie is realistic. After the Broz gets soaked, he has to start a fire to avoid hypothermia (snow lies all around in the forest). He accomplishes this while shivering like William Tell's son. Then, he takes off his shirt and digs the bullet out of his arm using his bowie knife. He is not happy about this. Who the hell would be? Instead, he makes noises you haven't heard since you tried to wrestle that greased pig and he kicked you in the gonads. Finally, he sears the wound shut by heating his knife in the fire and taking an iron to the gory flesh. Sweeeeeet. Oh, and he is in pain. Like these guys, after their first major battle.

So, I'm on board. In the extended opening sequence, there's almost no talking (bonus for PB, who still, um, sounds like Bond...in a bad way), a dude gets a knife dropped through his skull, and grown men cry...a lot. So, we're cool.

But then it goes to hell.

The realism of the movie drops faster than a feather in a vacuum (hrm...), and the jump the-, I mean, the "hey, this movie is worse than the movies Elmer Bernstein scored in the 1950s" moment came when Pierce Brosnan escapes Liam Neeson, who is holding a rifle on him, standing five feet away, by simply grunting and running off screen left.

It only gets worse. For hours, they ride along, with Brosnan somehow evading capture and killing people awesomely with his knife (the only bright moments). By the end, though, Anjelica Huston has showed up as some metaphor for something and somehow Brosnan shoots Neeson, but they both survive and walk away into the middle of a desert and disappear.

No, you're not missing anything. It's that retarded. Throw in a highly symbolic Mormon knock-off group, sage old Indian, and you've got yourselves a terrible movie. Throw in Ms. Huston in a garment that attempts to force her aging bosom into her face and you've got yourself a throat-slitter. Just remember to slit the throat of the person next to you first, unless they're incapacitated by how bad this movie is.

The cinema...what hell.