Politics can wear a person down. The endless push and pull, the lack of continual progress, and the realization that most of our leaders are in it for themselves and their paymasters, is enough to make even the most impassioned observers develop hard hearts. I look at the state of the capital today, and I have a difficult time mustering either enthusiasm or outrage. Politics is what it is. We, the people, are the sucker at the poker table. But, unlike in real life, we cannot just get up and leave. We are trapped here. Continue reading “No Winners”
Month: June 2014
Shitty Movie Sundays: Pompeii
What a putrid mess. The trailer for Pompeii, Paul W.S. Anderson’s CGI shit-fest from earlier this year, promised viewers an exploding mountain. It never promised to be a faithful retelling of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that destroyed the city of the title. But that’s all well and good. Paul W.S. Anderson does not do anything but spectacle. In the trailer, Vesuvius blows up and that’s what I paid to see. What I didn’t pay to see was a low-rent Titanic rip-off that made me wait 66 whole minutes for the good stuff. And that wait is a problem. Pompeii only runs about an hour and a half. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for the disaster portion of this disaster movie. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Pompeii”
Shitty Movie Ideas: John Waters’ Batman
I watched and reviewed Batman & Robin recently for Arnold Schwarzenegger month, and it was a bit of a revelation. I know why that film failed. It wasn’t because there were nipples on the batsuit and every set piece looked like a costume ball. It wasn’t even the puns or the shitty acting that was at fault. Nope, it was because director Joel Schumacher had a vision, but he only went partway towards seeing that vision fulfilled. After having watched that movie again, I can see that Schumacher was trying to recreate the aesthetic of the drag queen review for mass audiences. But mass audiences don’t want to see that. And they really didn’t want to see a half-assed version of it. Schumacher wasn’t even the right guy to direct a film like that. If you’re going to go gay, go all the way. In fact, gay is not enough. Gay is not deviant. I want deviant. I want to see a Batman movie made by the auteur of deviant lifestyles himself...John Waters. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Ideas: John Waters’ Batman”