Kingdom Hospital: Anteaters on Parade

What a muddled mess of a miniseries. Though this thing has many failings, the worst among them is that the folks who made it never seem to make up their minds about what they’re making. Is it a medical drama? A medical sitcom? A Stephen King novel? A collection of Stephen King short stories? Something else entirely? It never really settles down.

In a way that’s understandable. Everything it tries to be has been successful in the past. People like fried chicken. People like mustard. People like chocolate pudding. So why wouldn’t people go for fried chicken mustard chocolate pudding?

But there are forces at work here other than pure mass marketing. In particular, I have to wonder if the doctor drama series elements aren’t somehow connected to a bit of ER envy, King’s attempt to match the success of fellow Overpaid Authors Club member Michael Crichton. On the other hand, maybe they just didn’t have enough material to get 15 hours out of any one kind of show, so they mashed it all together to stretch it out a bit. Actually more than a bit, now that it’s mentioned.

In any event, it doesn’t work. For example, at one point a decapitated corpse wanders the hospital halls in search of its head. So that’s horror. Its head is missing because of a prank doctors were trying to play on each other. So that’s the doctor show element. But as the search continues, the soundtrack starts blaring the Basement Jaxx. If the corpse had a head, I’m sure it would be rolling its eyes at this point. Goodness knows I was.

But the whole chicken mustard pudding thing isn’t the series’ sole failing. Many of the elements fail entirely on their own merit or lack of same. In particular, the villainous Dr. Stegman is one of the most ineptly-crafted characters King ever came up with. Though Bruce Davison does a craftsmanlike job in the role, he isn’t given anything to work with. This guy is just nothing but wrong. No redeeming characteristics at all. As a surgeon he’s incompetent at best. As an official at the hospital he’s an overbearing jerk. As a person he’s a greedy, inconsiderate asshole.

The real failing of the character’s role in the drama is that he’s the constant butt of everything. He’s handed small defeats throughout the entire series, and then the penultimate episode is devoted almost entirely to dumping on the guy. He’s a louse, but bullying him is a piss-poor excuse for either justice or entertainment.

Many other elements are similarly weak. Along the way we’re “treated” to a magical couple with Down Syndrome, a dumb rework of the Gospels, and King’s god-awful Red Sox Nation inability to let go of the Buckner thing from ‘86. And of course yet again we’re all given cause to rue the day when the author was run over by that freakin’ van. I can’t help but wonder if a “not the damn van thing again” factor wasn’t somehow connected to the loss of more than five million viewers between the premiere and episode two.

To be sure, it’s isn’t 100 percent lame. I started out disliking Antubis, the bizarre anteater-like monster that haunts the halls of the hospital. But his cranky attitude and mouth-snout full of needle-sharp teeth eventually won me over. Some other points were similarly amusing in one way or another. But nothing made up for the general crappiness. Even on film, King’s name has been associated with much better work.

Review – The Blues Brothers

I saw this movie during its original theatrical release, and at the time I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. Of course I was in my early teens back then. Upon recent re-viewing, the scenes that stood out were almost exclusively the performances by actual musicians rather than John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. The Cab Calloway fantasy performance of “Minnie the Moocher” is a high point in director John Landis’s career, and the Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles sequences are also excellent. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the picture is silly, SNL-worthy screwball comedy (especially the self-parodying car chases). I still enjoyed watching it, but 30 years ago I probably would have given it a higher rating. Mildly amusing

Review – Monsignor

The creators of this picture must have pinned a copy of the Ten Commandments to the wall and then set about the task of finding ways for the lead character to break every one of them. A priest (Christopher Reeve) serving as an Army chaplain guns down a squad of German soldiers. As if in reward, he’s assigned to the Vatican, where he concocts a scheme to raise money for the church by stealing cigarettes and selling them on the black market. By the time the movie finally grinds to a halt two hours later, he’s done everything from arranging shady deals on the Sabbath to having sex with a nun (Genevieve Bujold). Honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t trot an ass into the plot at some point just so he could covet it. Though the picture appears in parts to aspire to Godfather status, all it really achieves is to make sinning appear remarkably dull. See if desperate

Review – Killer’s Kiss

This is Stanley Kubrick’s first feature-length narrative effort, though at just barely over an hour it just barely meets my review qualifications. It’s a latter-day noir tale of a washed-up boxer who gets caught up in a deadly romance with a taxi dancer trying to ditch her obsessive boss. I was impressed by the quality of the lighting and composition. Clearly Kubrick possessed great technical genius even early in his career. His sense of dialogue, character and pace must have developed a bit later, however. Overall this strangely reminded me of Barry Lyndon, as both movies are showcases of film-making quality but suffer from weak stories. At least this one wasn’t quite as dull and of course nowhere near as long. Mildly amusing

Review – Dirigible

This was a huge movie back in 1931. Frank Capra directs (though don’t expect the usual brand of Capra-corn from him here). Fay Wray plays the female lead. Jack Holt and Ralph Graves round out the cast. The studio spent a ton of money on it, and it was a popular picture when it first came out. And yet nearly eight decades later, I honestly had never heard of it until I randomly decided to record it from TCM. A big part of the picture’s obscurity is that it isn’t particularly good. Two rival pilots – a hot shot Air Corps plane jockey and a more subdued Navy blimp commander – are both in love with the same woman. She’s married to the flashy one, and she loves him passionately. But he’s always off on one dangerous mission or another, and his rival is always there, always dependable. So when hubby crashes at the South Pole and Mr. Blimp goes after him, she’s double out of luck. Some of the effects are fun, but the script borders on ridiculous even by the standards of the time. And don’t even get me started on how much fun it wasn’t to watch the ice-bound plane crew struggle to survive. I’m not sorry I watched it, but I wouldn’t sit through it again. Mildly amusing

Review – The Cape Town Affair

This spy movie is nearly boring enough to actually be about real spies. A pickpocket (James Brolin) accidentally mires himself in a plot to smuggle microfilm to the Soviets when he steals the film from the purse of an unsuspecting mule (Jacqueline Bisset). On the plus side, it was shot in the mid 60s, giving it an authentic Cold War feel. On the other hand, the plot is a stale parade of twists and turns through a South Africa apparently completely devoid of racial problems. Other than Bisset’s innocent character, none of the dramatis personae were likable enough to care about, which made it hard to invest much emotion in whether they lived or died. Though I enjoyed the look and feel, overall I thought it was a lackluster production of a weak script. Mildly amusing

Review – They Met in the Dark

This picture aspires to be both a spy movie and a romantic comedy, though it ends up doing an effective job as neither of the two. The story begins with the court-martial of a Navy officer (James Mason, who sports a dude-shave-it-off beard that fortunately does disappear after the first few minutes). After he’s convicted of spying for the Nazis, he sets out to prove his innocence and uncover the real culprits. His search somehow keeps bringing him into contact with a young woman (Joyce Howard) who’s initially convinced that he’s a murderer, though the absence of a body makes it hard to interest the police in investigating the crime. He keeps winning her over only to have circumstances renew her doubts about him, an annoying “comedy of errors” element that gets repeated many times after it has lost all entertainment value. Toward the end we get some cool code-breaking stuff, but for the most part this is too fluffy and dumb to work as a spy picture and too spy-intensive to work as a romance. Mildly amusing

Review – Counter-Attack

Though this isn’t the strangest movie ever made about the Soviets in World War Two, it still isn’t exactly your average everyday war picture. A Russian commando and a female resistance fighter end up trapped under the wreckage of a factory with seven German prisoners. Stuck with nothing better to do, they start playing tense psychological games with each other. Who among the Germans is secretly an officer? Whose side will dig them out and learn the other’s secrets? Only time will tell. Mildly amusing

Review – I Know Who Killed Me

So is torture porn okay if Lindsay Lohan plays the victim? Maybe not if it had been the whole movie, but fortunately the screaming-and-mutilation scenes in this one are relatively brief. The bulk of the picture is devoted to the strange tale of Audrey, a suburban princess (Lohan) kidnapped by a sadistic killer. She escapes his clutches minus an arm and a leg, but the weird part is that now she’s convinced that she’s actually a teenage stripper named Dakota. As she awkwardly adapts to her “new” surroundings, she tries to unravel the mystery of how she got away from her tormentor and why she now believes she’s someone else. The solution to the riddle is revealed early enough in the picture that the audience can at least hope that nothing that dumb will actually turn out to be the answer. Overall this picture reminded me of The Hottie and the Nottie in that it was reviled by critics and audiences alike despite not being all that much worse than most other movies in the sub-genre. See if desperate

Review – The Snake Pit

This picture has one of the most non-linear plots I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood production. The effect is disorienting, which of course is perfect for the story of a woman (Olivia de Havilland) stuck in an insane asylum. She actually is mentally ill, so the story told largely from her perspective is a bewildering, nonsensical alternation between breakthroughs and setbacks. Even the ending can be described as semi-happy at best. This is one of the few good movies that cry out for a remake resetting the drama in contemporary context. Worth seeing

My eight favorite comedies

Appreciation of movies – like any other art – is subjective. What one person likes, another might not care for. That’s one big reason why I try to list movies in terms of “my eight favorite” rather than “the eight best.” The latter description suggests that some cultural arbiter can objectively evaluate quality. The former merely says “this is what I like.”

Still, most genres have at least some objective standards. The quality of a Western, for example, can be judged according to adherence – or lack of same – to certain expected conventions. Is it set in the West? Does it have cowboys? Does it have horses? Does it have at least one gunfight? And so on.

Not so with comedies. The only standard here is both simple and elusive: is it funny? Does the movie make you laugh? And because senses of humor vary widely from person to person, it’s pretty much impossible to come up with a list of “eight favorites” about which any two people would be likely to agree. Goodness knows even the small staff of 8sails doesn’t absolutely agree about every one of the movies on this list.

Although all our “eight favorite” lists are matters of personal taste, with comedies it’s even more so. For example, some obvious comedy classics aren’t included. A few – such as Dr. Strangelove – aren’t on this list because they’re already lauded on our eight all-time favorites list. Others – such as the Marx Brothers’ better work – aren’t here simply because even as great as they are, the eight movies here made me laugh harder.

But even “laugh volume” isn’t the standard. For example, none of the Three Stooges pictures made the list even though they’re a great guilty pleasure. That’s in part because none of the trio’s feature-length work is worth a damn and in part because it’s embarrassing to have to admit to being a Three Stooges fan.

These eight, on the other hand, are all easy to defend as great moments in the fine art of humor.

 

Modern Times – Without question the list had to include a Charlie Chaplin movie. However, it could just as easily have been The Gold Rush or even The Great Dictator (which, as pedantic as it is, is still better than most other comedies by at least double). And to be sure, as a silent movie produced well after the advent of sound technology, Modern Times is a bit of a cheat. But the picture is absolutely packed with some of Chaplin’s best material. Even if the whole rest of the movie had sucked, the feeding machine sequence alone would have been enough to put this picture on the list.

Pass the Ammo – This parody of televangelism could easily have come and gone as quickly as the Jim Bakker scandal it satirizes. But the writing is just too good to let it slip so easily into obscurity. The humor is absurd, sometimes even raunchy. The production values are a little sit-comish, but every time the picture appears to be in danger of slipping into a rut a brilliant twist in the plot or a fine moment from the cast – particularly Tim Curry as Rev. Ray – saves the day.

Idiocracy – Like Network, it’s only a matter of time before this picture ceases to be broad farce and transforms into docudrama. Mike Judge writes and directs, Luke Wilson stars, and this movie probably would have gotten a bigger release if it hadn’t been such an open, vicious attack on consumer culture and the worship of stupidity. It’s chilling stuff if you think about it. Fortunately, you don’t have to think about it too much. Just enjoy the ride.

Hollywood Shuffle – I’d love this movie even if I hadn’t laughed at a single joke. I admire Robert Townsend and his cast of volunteers for having the guts to employ “guerilla” film-making tactics in order to get this thing made. But in addition to being an important moment in indie film production, it’s also a funny movie. The blunt satire of racism in the movie industry – sadly not much less prevalent today than it was back in the 1980s when this picture was made – is simultaneously entertaining and thought-provoking.

Life of Brian – If you’re going to do a satire, why not aim high? Few comedy ensembles other than Monty Python would ever be able to combine the guts to go after the Gospels with the wit to actually pull it off. It helps to be accustomed to the group’s other work, but even non-fans will still appreciate the sometimes-less-than-gentle mockery of some of the more absurd elements of religious belief.

This is Spinal Tap – The group of actors, writers and other talent loosely centered around Christopher Guest has produced several hysterical movies over the years (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) as well as a few duds (A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration). But this is the one that got the ball rolling. Usually I shy away from movies in which all the comedy is based on things going wrong for the protagonists, but here it works quite well.

Used Cars – The last two pictures on the list are trash wallows, so if you’re looking for brilliant turns of the phrase or intellectual allusions to great literature, seek elsewhere. But if you can appreciate them at their own level, they’ll reward your patience. This one’s the goofy tale of rival used car lots trying to outdo each other, with the poorer lot resorting to some so-bizarre-they’re-hilarious tactics to draw customers and make sales.

Shakes the Clown – In this movie Bobcat Goldthwait posits a strange notion: the world of clowns exists as an alternate-reality parallel to society as a whole. Though the overall plot is mostly just silly, it has some genuinely astounding moments. Some are Goldthwait’s usual ohmygod-did-he-just-say-that? humor, but others are more subtle. You’ve gotta be in the mood for a picture like this, but if the itch strikes you then this is a great way to scratch it.

Review – The Hurt Locker

The first act of this movie is a little like playing with a Jack-in-the-box with a broken music maker. You turn the crank, but without “Pop Goes the Weasel” to tell you when it’s going to pop, the game turns into a delightfully nerve-wrecking experience. Watching members of an ordinance disposal team do their jobs with IEDs in Iraq is a lot like that. The picture establishes early on that just because someone’s a big star with a recognizable face doesn’t make him immune from being blown up, which creates an anyone-can-die-at-any-time feeling that works quite well given the subject at hand. Unfortunately, after the first two or three bomb defusings the picture suddenly turns into a parade of implausible plot twists and cheap war movie clichés. I know they couldn’t very well have made an entire picture out of nothing but defusing scenes, but what they did with the rest of the picture didn’t come close to living up to the good parts. Mildly amusing

Review - Fast Times at Ridgemont High

This is the ultimate picture for playing Early 80s Teen Movie Cliché Bingo. Mark off a grid and write every early 80s teen movie cliché you can think of in the squares. Hit the big ones, such as “pre-AIDS promiscuity” and “what-were-they-thinking fashion choices.” But don’t be afraid to add obscure stuff as well, such as “the scent of mimeograph paper.” For bonus squares, toss in negatives such as “nobody makes a cell phone call the whole time.” Because yes boys and girls, there was a time before cell phones. If you’re on a tour of 80s movies, this year in the lives of kids in the LA ‘burbs is a must-see. It establishes many of the genre conventions that still show up like clockwork in teen movies. It also includes a stellar cast of 80s faces, particularly a young Sean Penn as the quintessential surfer moron. Mildly amusing

Review – Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

Once again the title ought properly to begin with “Lara Croft,” but as I did the first one wrong and I’m too lazy to change it, I’m doing this one wrong as well just to be consistent. I don’t know why after sitting through all the Indiana Jones movies and other productions of similar ilk (not least of which the first Croft movie) that now all of a sudden the destruction of priceless archeological sites and artifacts bothers me, but it does. Fortunately, trashing the past is a relatively small portion of this picture. Unfortunately, the bulk of the production is given over to videogame-esque gunfights and supernatural nonsense so ridiculous that the first one looks like a documentary in comparison. The result is a soulless waste of an action movie. See if desperate

Review – Sniper’s Ridge

I made the mistake of watching this picture right after Deliverance, and by the end of the double feature I nearly died from testosterone poisoning. This movie is about soldiers in the Korean War struggling with issues of bravery and masculinity. The key figure is a corporal who’s the only competent member of a front line unit. Because the rest of the men would die without him, his captain won’t let him rotate out. After he tries to desert, he gets sent on a hazardous patrol that the men consider unnecessary in light of an upcoming ceasefire but the captain wants in order to redeem the company’s honor. Multiple discussions of duty and manliness ensue. Mildly amusing

Review – Twonky

I could have sworn this was literally an overblown episode of The Twilight Zone, but what little I could find out about it online indicated that it was a stand-alone movie. Well, it plays like an overblown Twilight Zone episode anyway, especially the preachy script and terrible production values. Hans Conried plays a hapless professor whose wife goes off to visit relatives, leaving him with a new TV for company. Unfortunately the idiot box turns out to be no mere television set. It’s a Twonky, a robot from the future that makes no end of trouble for everyone in the picture, especially our hero. The tale is a ham-handed allegory about the evils of modern technology, and the whole show is peppered with some of the most witless gags ever committed to film (or whatever this mess was shot on). See if desperate

Review – Deliverance

Suffering from testosterone deficit? You won’t be after this. Four guys from the city take a canoe trip way out in the sticks, and they soon find themselves pitted against insane hillbillies. If you’re going to watch this at all you need to watch it uncut, because the edited-for-TV print slices a lot out of the scene where two inbred backwoods psychos rape Ned Beatty. If nothing else, this clash between civilization and “man in a state of nature” should be required viewing in any class about masculinity in the movies. Mildly amusing

Review – Experiment Alcatraz

I watched this because it was part of TCM’s marathon of movie about “The Rock,” but honestly it could have been Experiment Hutchinson Correctional Facility and still turned out to be the same picture. During an experiment in which convicts are exposed to radiation, one guy goes nuts and stabs another to death with a pair of scissors. The treatments are blamed and the experiment shut down, but one of the doctors is still convinced that the radiation wasn’t actually at fault. His investigation uncovers more to the apparently random killing than initially meets the eye. Looking back 50 years later, the “radiation is actually our friend” conclusion is bizarre. Mildly amusing

Review – Seven Miles to Alcatraz

Does this movie have enough junk in it? Two convicts convinced that the Japanese are going to bomb Alcatraz stage a desperate escape. The crate they float away on carries them out to a lighthouse, where they stumble upon and ultimately foil a plot by Nazi spies to slip secret information to a U-boat lurking offshore. Pointless bickering ensues. The bad script, bad acting and bewildering story stamp this as a classic B-movie effort from the early 1940s. Mildly amusing

Review – Sahara (1943)

This is a war movie from those strange days of World War Two when America’s hatred of fascism prompted ultra-capitalist Hollywood to allow communists to openly express their political beliefs in major motion pictures. Humphrey Bogart stars as a tank commander who picks up a rag-tag bunch of Allied troops fleeing the Germans in North Africa. This ad hoc unit becomes a melting pot of different nationalities, races and social classes all united in the struggle against the enemy. The guys even pick up a couple of prisoners, an Italian soldier who personifies the humanity of the common man forced into battle and a Luftwaffe pilot who turns out to be the epitome of Nazi evil. The gang holes up in an abandoned building next to a mostly-dry well in the middle of nowhere, where they’re eventually besieged by a column of German infantry. This years-ahead-of-its-time exercise in multiculturalism is the work of Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson, who wrote the screenplay based on a story that in turn was based on part of a Soviet production. Worth seeing

Review – The Invisible Man

Though greatly overshadowed by director James Whale’s other horror masterpieces (namely Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein), this one’s worth a look. Of course one of its major failings is that the good stuff is front-loaded. The scene in which Claude Rains removes his bandages and reveals nothing underneath is one of the great moments in horror cinema (not to mention an incredible special effects triumph at the time). But it happens in the first 15 minutes of the movie, and nothing after that packs the same punch. The story is a loose adaptation of a novel by H.G. Wells, here turned into the tale of a scientist gone mad with the power conferred by his invisibility formula. I loved this movie as a kid – I even went as the title character for Halloween one year – and even now its charm endures. Worth seeing

Eight movies to put you out of the mood for sex

V-Day is upon us. Once again humanity’s most beautiful emotion is turned into a baited fishhook by the manufacturers and vendors of candy, cards, flowers, jewelry, lingerie and other romance-related commodities. Once again those of us who prefer actual relationships with our significant others – or even no relationship with a significant other at all – are reminded that the social norm is to care for someone only when instructed to do so by the corporate calendar.

And along with the shelves full of pink teddy bears and boxes of cards full of inappropriate sentiments to be distributed at elementary schools throughout the land, we also get a flood of “romantic movie” recommendations. Typically such menus are populated with “chick flicks,” pictures such as What Women Want that give beer-swilling louts an hour and a half to demonstrate that their commitments to their romantic partners are so great that they’re actually willing to endure something that isn’t about killing or football. With the implicit understanding, of course, that this tremendous sacrifice will be rewarded with sex.

Rage, rage against the rose-tinting of the light.

In honor of Anti-Valentines Day, I commend to your attention the following movies. Some are direct attacks on the notion of store-bought love. Others are attempts to commodify sexuality that go terribly, horribly wrong. But all eight of them have one thing in common: if you’re in the mood for sex, they’ll put a rapid stop to it. These pictures are to affectionate arousal what Niagara Falls is to a campfire. By the time you’ve devoted an evening to one or two of these, you’ll be genuinely grateful that you didn’t internalize the “holiday spirit,” give in and put out.

Enjoy!

 

The Stepford Wives – The first three or four entries on the list are active attacks on sex. In Rosemary’s Baby Ira Levin warns women that if they trust their husbands too much they’ll end up turned over to Satan as breeding stock. This Levin outing goes even farther: if you trust your husband too much, he’ll replace you with a robot that looks just like you. Who wants to sleep with someone when the actual sleeping part of the night’s activities involves keeping one eye open?

The Dark Secret of Harvest Home – This is the Stepford shoe placed on the other foot. The women of Harvest Home use the simple male impulse to “get some” to connive a dark ritual that ends badly for the “lucky” guy. This might be a praying mantis’s idea of a romantic evening, but it doesn’t do much for most human men.

Pink Flamingoes – “Thank goodness I was born Catholic,” director John Waters once wrote. “For me, sex will always be dirty.” He’s exploited that sentiment in almost every movie he ever made, but in Pink Flamingoes he transforms anti-sex into a fine art. I think my favorite moment in this cavalcade of sarcastic perversion is the three-way between a man, a woman and a chicken (four way if you count the voyeur watching the encounter). Or maybe it’s the flashing competition between the guy with the wiener tied to his wiener and the mid-process trans woman. Or maybe it’s the … well, you get the idea.

Even if the movie hadn’t contained a single bit of bizarre sex, it still would have poured cold water on a romantic evening. Who wants to “make whoopee” after watching the Singing Asshole or Edith Massey eating eggs? Sadly, Waters tried this trick again much later in his career to much smaller effect. A Dirty Shame does a similar job of parading perversions across the screen, but it’s not as funny and nowhere near as ground-breaking. Indeed, the whole picture seems to be more about messing with the studio by making an NC-17 movie when his contract called for an R than about actually entertaining his faithful fans. Still, if you’re looking for a date-stopper, it’ll do the trick.

Eyes Wide Shut – Because Stanley Kubrick is one of my all-time favorite directors, I’d sincerely like to believe that this “sexy” movie turns out “anti-sexy” because he deliberately intended it to do so. The picture supplies some evidence in support of this theory. The sex is emotionless, monotonous and mechanical. It employs the visual conventions of the erotic cinema (particularly the European branch thereof), but it’s like watching clock parts move, not like watching human beings enjoying one another.

Truth be told, however, Kubrick rarely did a good job of directing women. With the exception of Lolita, none of his movies feature strong female characters with whom the audience can identify. Indeed, one of the major shortcomings of The Shining is the dreadful mishandling of Shelly Duvall’s role. Watch the altercations between the director and the actress in the making-of documentary on the DVD and you’ll get some idea about why things went as badly as they did.

If the story calls for active misogyny (A Clockwork Orange) or simple indifference to half the human race (Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, or even 2001), then Kubrick has no trouble at all. But erotic drama? Never going to happen. And in fact it doesn’t. Most of what you need to know about the nonsexiness of this picture is already included in the review. The only thing I’d add here is that stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have no on-screen “chemistry” at all despite the fact that they were married at the time.

The Reader – One of the lessons art students learn from drawing models is that nudity by itself isn’t all that exciting. Sure, there’s a little thrill to it the first time. But it wears off fast, especially given the need to concentrate on the task at hand. While the mundane nature of the human form is an asset to artists trying to practice their skills, it’s a drawback to the film-maker trying to create something sexually stimulating.

The Reader is a perfect case in point. Kate Winslett is an attractive woman. Her physical appeal easily shines through the plain-Jane makeup she wears in this picture. But by the umpteenth time she peels off, it’s no sexier than an artist’s bowl of fruit or verdant landscape. “Let’s get dressed and get on with the story” isn’t really how you want your date to go.

Further, imagine the gender roles reversed. If the illiterate former concentration camp guard had been an older man having sex with a teenage girl, audiences would most likely have found it a lot harder to swallow.

Lolita remake – On the other hand, maybe we are expected to be turned on by a relationship between a middle-aged man and an adolescent girl. To be sure, neither of the film versions of Nabokov’s novel features an actress the age of Lolita in the book. But if you tried to make a sex movie out of a man getting it on with a ten year old, you’d stand a fair chance of joining Roman Polanski in exile.

However, at least Kubrick had enough wit to understand the book. Humbert isn’t a “good guy.” His sexual craving for a child is no more heroic than Raskolnikov’s decision to kill his landlady. But boy is that ever not how Adrian Lyne saw things. Judging by what he did to Nabokov, his version of Crime and Punishment would have turned out something like Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween.

What he serves up in this picture is a clear celebration of pedophilia. It’s fetishism worthy of Glen or Glenda? shot with the panache of a Victoria’s Secret commercial. If your idea of a date is the sort of thing that could end up on Dateline, then you’re in the right place. However, most folks should find this a bit of a turn-off.

Stealing Beauty – This picture suffers from a lot of the same faults as the last one. To be fair, it’s at least an attempt to show a teenage girl trying to work through the normal awkwardness and confusion of adolescence. But she has to “come of age” in the middle of a relentless stew of soft-focus sexuality. The result is somewhat like going out with a guy who’s focused exclusively on one thing and hasn’t the tact to even pretend that he cares about you otherwise. The picture seems to say “Are we going to do it now okay how about now are you in the mood for it yet will you be soon c’mon I haven’t got all night let’s get down to it baby let’s do it now okay how about now how about now?” If a tiny dog trying to mate with your leg is your idea of romance, then perhaps this desperate mess is in fact for you.

And though this may be purely a matter of personal taste, I didn’t care for the Italian countryside setting either. To me it was like taking a date to the Olive Garden. The feeling wasn’t “I’ve carefully chosen something I think you’ll like ” as much as it was “Do you like the food baby this place is great huh chicks dig the Olive Garden okay are you almost done with dinner are we going to go back to your place and do it now how about now how about now?”

Crash – Like Waters, most of David Cronenberg’s work is just about as anti-sexy as you can get. But unlike Waters, Cronenberg actually seems to think his stuff is hot. He’s taken an extraordinary range of attractive women – from porn stars to pop singers – and produced sex scenes that are far too little “ooh” and far too much “ew.”

Though he’s done plenty of movies with plenty of icky sex – Videodrome and Dead Ringers come immediately to mind – Crash is basically nothing but fetishistic creepiness. Cronenberg starts with a novel by outsider erotica maven J.G. Ballard and runs with it, serving up just about as many just-plain-wrong ways that sex can be associated with car accidents. It’s a stylishly-designed rubber raincoat. But it’s a rubber raincoat nonetheless.

Review – Anne Frank Remembered

No matter how many times I hear this story in no matter how many different retellings, I always find myself foolishly hoping that this time around the Franks won’t get caught, or perhaps that they’ll all survive the camps just a little bit longer and make it to liberation so they can be reunited in the end. This documentary distinguishes itself with interviews with people who knew the Franks – especially Anne – before or during the Holocaust. It also features quite an array of photos of the family, the kind of thing I just assumed had mostly been torched in the war. Worth seeing

Review – The Shout

This has the look and feel of a Peter Weir movie (though it was actually directed by Jerzy Skolimowski), which is to say that it’s either “cerebral” or “boring” depending on your perspective. The production’s main plot concerns an experimental musician (John Hurt) and his wife (Susannah York) who take in a man (Alan Bates) who claims to be homeless and starving. As the couple gets to know him better, they learn that he’s spent some time with the Aborigines of Australia learning their magic. His big trick is what lends the movie its title: a scream that kills sheep and knocks out his host. It’s a concept with potential, and it does supply a good shock or two. But then it turns into a parade of pasty, Brit sex as Bates’s character seduces York’s. My favorite part of the picture was the bracket, in which Bates and a young Tim Curry keep score during a cricket match played at an insane asylum. Mildly amusing

Review – Autopsy

One nice thing about a lot of torture porn is that it tends to lead off with a woman bound on an operating table (or similar other contrivance) screaming her lungs out. When a movie opens with something like that, it’s easy to just hit the delete button before wasting any more time on it. But when the slicing and dicing doesn’t get underway until a half an hour in, well, by that point one has already made a time commitment to it and might as well stick through to the end. Besides, this particular specimen partially acquitted itself by including some vaguely entertaining gore. The plot is some forgettable nonsense about a group of 20-somethings who have a car accident in the middle of nowhere and end up in the hospital from hillbilly hell. Robert Patrick does a passable job as a mad scientist draining the precious bodily fluids of his victims in order to keep his terminally-ill wife alive. This story line was better in The Corpse Vanishes more than half a century before this stinker was made, and that isn’t even a particularly high hurdle to leap. See if desperate

Review – Conspirator

This could have been a better story than it was. British Maj. Michael Curragh (Robert Taylor) falls in love with American-abroad Melinda Greyton (Elizabeth Taylor, no relation). This starts the movie off on the wrong foot because the budding romance dominates the first 20 minutes of the picture, and the age difference between the two actors (she was 16 at the time, though at least her character is 18) is frankly off-putting. The guy has a callous streak – he shows no pity for a rabbit horribly injured during a hunt despite the obvious distress of his fiancée and his nephew – but otherwise it’s a garden-variety romance. However, once they’re married it’s revealed that the new husband is harboring a dark secret: he’s actually a Soviet agent. After his wife uncovers his nasty secret, both their relationship and the plot go downhill fast. This turns out to be one of those productions that sets the audience up for some clever twist or unexpected deviation from the obvious course of events, a redeeming event that never occurs. Mildly amusing

Review – Mata Hari

Here’s proof – as if it were required for some reason – that Hollywood sensationalized the sexual sides of stories even back in its so-called “golden age.” The story of the world’s most famous female spy could have been full of nuanced characters and intriguing plot twists. But all one learns about the title character is that she was a spy who slept with army officers, got caught and got shot. Greta Garbo’s performance is particularly disappointing. Though she was a talented actress, the only function she’s given here is to look beautiful in a series of ridiculous outfits (which at least she does). See if desperate

Review – Superstition

Oh, if only those crabby 18th century townspeople had ever learned their lesson: if you drown/burn/otherwise dispose of a witch, she’s just going to come back in the 1980s and start killing again. In this production the ol’ girl is set loose when the new pastor in charge of the local “murder house” removes an antique cross from a nearby pond. The production values here are slightly better than they would have been today simply because 30 years ago film-makers actually had to use film. Unfortunately the script and acting are completely on par with the jerk-with-a-video-camera school of visual storytelling. See if desperate

Pants on your head

I was going to ignore this whole thing. I really tried to.

On January 13 General Larry Platt, a respected civil rights activist with the demeanor of a homeless street performer capped off American Idol with a spirited performance of a self-composed piece entitled “Pants on the Ground.” The routine was a welcome bit of levity at the end of one of the worst Idol kick-offs in the show’s history, not to mention an apt criticism of one of the most obnoxious fashion trends in recent memory.

But in the grand style of American media, things went on from there. Brett Favre (current star of at least one TV ad for jeans) and his teammates sang the song on video in the locker room. Jimmy Fallon did a parody version. Someone with a voice filter and a still photo of the Chipmunks did a squeaky version on Youtube. Platt showed up on the red carpet at the Grammys and did a reprise.

This has to be one of the proudest moments for jeans manufacturers since they used the Peace Corps to convince white people in the ‘burbs that dungarees weren’t just for bikers anymore. Look all you fashion mavens of the lower classes! The TV is mocking you for wearing baggy pants. Time to rush off to the store and buy clothes that actually fit.

What can this masterpiece of marketing synergy do for an encore? Fast forward a couple of years. American Idol 2012 now features none of the original cast of judges. Simon Cowell has given way to Robot Simon Cowell, a box that sits on the table next to a Coke cup and dispenses random insults when its button is pushed. Randy Jackson has been replaced by CGI Scooby Doo.

The final contestant of the first show is … well, honestly it could be anyone from another local hero to a Wayans brother desperate for money. The person’s identity is irrelevant, because his entire head is obscured by an upside-down pair of pants. With no introduction, he bursts into song:

Pants on your head
Pants on your head
Lookin’ mighty cool
With your pants on your head
Can’t see where you walk
Unzip them to talk
Lookin’ mighty cool
Got your pants on your head.

In the days that follow, the quarterback for the Chiefs plays an entire game with pants on his head (hey, how much worse could it be?). Seth Myers writes a skit for SNL in which Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union with pants on his head. Alvin and the Chipmunks IV: Pants on Your Head.

Jeans sales double. Truth, justice and the American Way prevail once again.

Review – Bomb It

This documentary about graffiti artists does a couple of things right. First, it employs an international perspective, exploring the similarities and differences between artists in the States, Japan, South Africa and elsewhere. Second, parts of the movie show the painters at work. Indeed, the extra footage on the DVD of three murals coming into being is actually more interesting than the movie itself. That’s at least in part because when they start interviewing these folks many of them turn out to be as tedious as their art is interesting. We get plenty of the usual reminiscing about days gone by, a lot of “I remember painting this” and “I almost got my ass kicked doing that.” And of course the ever popular “I invented graffiti,” a claim that simultaneously assumes that anyone can truly be said to have invented a fundamental human impulse and that the interview subject was present the first time someone tried it, which would of course make the artist several thousand years old. Beyond the usual pitfalls, however, this is a reasonably comprehensive and competent production. Mildly amusing

Review – Assassins

This picture is directed by Richard Donner and stars onetime-action-movie-king Sylvester Stallone. So I’m not quite sure why it had to turn out so deadly dull. At least part of the problem is Stallone’s usual lack of affection for dialogue. Normally that’s not a big problem in a movie about manly men who kill people for a living. But at least a little human element would have been a nice addition to this story. Sly plays an aging hit man looking for one final job to round out his career. Enter a young, obnoxious rival played by a young, obnoxious Antonio Banderas. A few twists and turns later, and our hero is trying to save a computer hacker (Julianne Moore) from just about everyone else in the movie. The only thing that kept my attention at all was a near constant worry that something bad was going to happen to the cat that Moore’s character insisted on dragging with her everywhere she went. And the only success the picture managed to achieve is that the poor creature actually made it all the way to the end. See if desperate

Review – Mission to Moscow

This is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. Actually, the movie itself isn’t all that odd. It’s a fairly standard World War Two era propaganda picture. The astounding thing is that it’s about how great Stalin’s Soviet Union was. Of course they’re working an agenda here, as the U.S. government needed public support for the anti-Hitler alliance with a country that everyone had been told – not without justification – was a totalitarian regime. The picture tells the story of Ambassador Joseph E. Davies (Walter Huston) and his efforts to drum up support for American-Soviet alliances. In retrospect a lot of the story is stupid, such as the scene in which Davies tells Stalin directly, “I believe, sir, that history will record you as a great builder for the benefit of mankind.” Still, given the political climate of the time, perhaps some of the lies and other foolishness can be understood if not excused. Mildly amusing

Review – The Hottie and the Nottie

Though this is plenty terrible, it wasn’t quite the travesty of the cinema arts that some critics made it out to be. The perpetually talentless Paris Hilton stars as a beautiful, unobtainable woman who won’t date the homely, talentless protagonist unless and until he can find true love for her homely, talentless best friend. Overall the picture was a witless parade of date movie clichés that failed to leave much of an impression one way or another. See if desperate

Review – Race to Witch Mountain

Though I expect 21st century kids will prefer this version to the original, unfortunately that’s an apt demonstration of what’s wrong with the way the 21st century is raising kids. The script in this one is more sophisticated, and the special effects are a million times better. The alien kids’ adult helper is The Rock rather than the Green Acres guy. On the other hand, the story has been robbed of any sense of nuance. The kids know that they’re aliens from the start, so there’s no sense of mystery to the tale. And the simple charm of Disney in the 70s has been replaced by what in comparison seems to be a great deal of violence, maybe a bit much for a kids’ movie even by current standards. Overall the trade-offs aren’t worth it. See if desperate

Review – Legion

Mark 5:1-20 – the story of Christ exorcising a demon(s) named Legion – is fascinating, potentially even scary. And yet the actual story has been largely ignored both by religious folk making movies out of the Gospels and by horror picture producers exploiting the name for some cheap thrills. This movie is no exception. Though the scary scenes and the action sequences are reasonably effective, they represent only a small percentage of the overall running time. The rest is devoted mostly to comic book pseudo-theology as the last scraps of humanity struggle to figure out why they’re suddenly surrounded by demons and – with the aid of an archangel – try to find a way out of their predicament. Locating most of the action in a diner in the middle of nowhere gives the production the distinct odor of Maximum Overdrive only with more demoniacs and fewer trucks. Mildly amusing

Review – Phantasm 2

Needed way more balls. The deadly flying spheres are the high point of every movie in this set, and here they’re used extremely sparingly until the end. The rest of the story is the usual mish-mash about the Tall Man and his miniature Black Sabbath sidekicks stealing corpses from graveyards, trashing small towns and moving on, our heroes on his trail the whole time. Some of the eeriness is actually eerie, but the rest of it is only entertaining in a “that dude has a shotgun with four barrels” sort of way. See if desperate

Review – Escape from Alcatraz

The last time I was in San Francisco I took an evening tour of the title location. So for me a lot of the amusement value of this filmed-on-the-spot production was of the hey-I-remember-that variety. Tourism aside, this is a reasonably well made story of the last and most famous escape from The Rock. Of course the general assumption about this trio (led in the picture by Clint Eastwood) is that they drowned in the bay, but at least they made it off the island. The story of desperate men figuring out how to get out of their cells and over the wall is entertaining stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Cutthroat Island

I have to admit that I’d seen this before – many years ago – and thus knew what I was getting before I started. My intent was to deliberately change the TV channel to a program bad enough to drive me from the room and supply a little annoying, motivational background noise while I washed some dishes. For that purpose it was particularly well suited. Actually watching it, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. This picture exists primarily to allow Geena Davis and then-husband-and-alleged-director Renny Harlin to work together. Thus it struck me as particularly odd that Harlin manages to film his wife from all her worst angles and consistently use the takes in which she does the flattest job of delivering her lines (though in his defense, for all I know that could have been all the takes). And for some reason Matthew Modine squanders his I-worked-with-Stanley-Kubrick cred on this crud, the actor’s equivalent of training as a cordon bleu chef and then getting a job at Burger King. Even Frank Langella is worse than usual. Overall this is the biggest catastrophe of a pirate movie I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. Wish I’d skipped it