Movies

I have stopped reviewing every single movie I see, because I got tired of thinking about how I was going to describe a movie while I was watching it. I just want to watch them sometimes. I still watch one or two movies every day but a lot of it is fairly unremarkable, or for sociological research. When I do a write-up it is because I find something exceptionally unusual.

When I read about Passion Play (2011) I knew I had to see it. It was so poorly received on its film festival debut that they despaired of distribution and went direct to video. The few reviews I read were pretty harsh, calling it a "sub-lynchean fantasy." Those reviewers were just showing their ignorance because in fact it is a sub-jodorowskian fantasy. Mickey Rourke is a jazz trumpeter who incurs the wrath of a gangster (Bill Murray) and is taken out to the desert to be killed. He is mysteriously rescued by a band of white-clad indians and walks all night until he finds a carnival in the middle of nowhere, where he meets and falls in love with a winged woman. Then lots of other stuff happens. I can see why people who have to see a lot of movies might not like this, but it has a quality I really enjoy in a movie - it makes a break from reality early on and stays away from it for the whole movie. That's a common feature in all the movies I am writing up today, along with the fact that they were all flops. When Passion Play winds down to its punchline, laughable but in a kindly happy way, it explains everything about why the movie is so crazy and weird, which I suppose could make a lot of people angry, but I thought it was okay. I'm not recommending it, but I kind of liked it. It's mystically good/bad in the same way as Jodorowsky's lesser works, kind of half-assedly impressive. The one thing completely unbelievable about it is Mickey Rourke's facelift. Bad choice.

Since I was determined to go on a flop binge I figured I should see Gigli (2003), another one I had been wanting to see for a long time Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are mismatched gangsters who have to babysit the kidnapped autistic brother of a local district attorney. Utterly ridiculous premise, carried out with complete sincerity, and I honestly don't know why people dislike it so much. It dragged a few things out a bit long, but I really kind of liked it. Not a whole lot, but it was entertaining, funny and interesting, and had ideas you don't normally see in a movie. I guess it was too weird for most people.

Catwoman (2004), on the other hand, deserves all the bad stuff ever said about it. It's terrible. What's worse it suffers from an especially bad case of Editing Room Syndrome in that every time things get a bit active or exciting, they try to "amp it up" by making five jump cuts a second, like waving their hands in front of your face so you can't see what's happening. It is significant that no one person wants to take credit for the editing, instead hiding behind assistant editor titles. Cowards.

All About Steve (2009) is a picaresque absurdity in which Sandra Bullock portrays a creator of crossword puzzles who believes she has been invited by her failed blind date, a news cameraman, to follow him around the country. Her character is a total assburger who drives everybody crazy by constantly babbling unnecessary information at them, but Bullock does an amazing job of being a complete she-dork who is accidentally cute and sexy. Nothing about it makes sense or is reasonable in any way, and it gets so stupid and ridiculous that it's kind of fun. Might make a good double feature with Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

No flop-fest would be complete without Hudson Hawk (1991). Understand that I am 100% gay for Bruce Willis in a completely non-sexual way. I will watch pretty near anything that he is in but I like him better in non-comedies. This one here is a comedy that he co-wrote the story on. He plays a cat burglar who is forced by insane super-criminals to steal the fragments of the alchemical crystal of Leonardo da Vinci from the Vatican and other places. If that was the genuine Vatican City postal subway they were filming in, that was really impressive. I was amazed at how much money they must have spent on this painfully pretentious idiocy. It put me in mind of the self-congratulatory smarminess of the Rat Pack - Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. in particular, with lots of mugging and leaden wisecracks. I admit the "falling out the back of an ambulance on a gurney" sequence had me going, but most of the rest of it was just a chore to endure. I just wanted to kick the guy. If you really wanted to be mean to someone you would pair this up with Bill Cosby's Leonard Part 6.

So there you go. Back to watching anything that has Mantan Moreland in it (except Charlie Chan).

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Good news! There seems to be no limit to the possibilities of the SUNDAY WEBCOMIC concept. Even though last week's choice was brainmeltingly transcendent, there are still people out there who think they are so darn funny they should draw a comic and put it on the World Wide Web for everyone to enjoy. Just to show you how true that is, try these THREE grand choices:

• Can't draw or write jokes? No problem, as Energy Brain Comics proves!
• Even if you can draw in a highly acceptable "funny cartoon" style, jokes are still kind of hard to write so just get a concept and repeat it indefinitely. Tony Destructo is a guy who encounters things that are popular and that people know or talk about, and he DESTROYS them! That's the humor of it, the destroying.
• Providing more evidence that jokes and humor can be replaced by having a character say "a line," or simply becoming angry and violent, Taco Tails also helps out by providing an explanation of the action at the bottom. That's so you know what is going on.

SUNDAY WEBCOMICS may occasionally slow down but it will never run out.

portland craigslist crank

portland craigslist > clackamas co > for sale / wanted > books & magazines

Communist Hitler Like Government

The united states government has went back in time back to communist poor quality of life like Hitler wanted. Control freak fucks you should be beat like your parents probably used to do to you fucked up government fucks as kids. What were you gov stupid fucks adopted or something? FBI CIA COP PIG all the same.

portland craigslist crank

portland craigslist > clackamas co > for sale / wanted > books & magazines

FBI cowards that brought about the end (cowards)

It really sucks I just bought a phone and cant even post on craigslist because these fucking FBI/CIA coward fucks are fucking up my tech devices. They are the set up lolita website coward fucks that brought about the end in the first place. Lolita bbs, nu, portal, top list. "who told you that you were naked" was said by who dumb fuck fbi fucks terrorists whoever you are that is fucking with my life my free time and my serenity I want to kill you fucks but your suck cowards and professional murderers that no one can get to you to execute you coward fucks like need be done. I do not like you fucking with me and i want to kill you really bad you coward fucks. Your worse than terrorists whoever you are. I hope to God someone kills you soon.

• Location: cowards
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Can this be the end of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC? Just last week I thought SUNDAY WEBCOMIC was entering a bold new phase of life - then I found the best of 25 years of miss j and the am. Go look at it right now. I looked at the drawing of Bretea the Yukon Chicken and said wow. I started clicking PREVIOUS and kept saying wow. I went back to FIRST and said oh my god, then went to the top of the page and started clicking RANDOM, and gave up trying to express the maelstrom of emotion crushing my brain. Go on, go and look at it. Finally I came upon the page entitled "me," and said what the hell???? There is quite a story here, and "the best of 25 years of miss j and the am" is just the tip of the iceberg, an iceberg composed of over a quarter century of relentless production and self-publication by the greatest transgender cartoonist of the Yukon.

If the best of 25 years of miss j and the am isn't enough for you, take a look at the women I draw. Or the artist's newer digitally sourced comic series, jennfer's show. Or this vast scanned archive of Miss J and the Am, an impossibly clunky interface and an impossibly vast body of work and I do mean that both ways. Or watch the video, 27 years of miss j and catch astonishing glimpses of the artist Jennfer A Jay herself.

I don't know how I can ever follow this, the greatest SUNDAY WEBCOMIC ever, probably the greatest there will ever be.

ADDENDUM: Here is yet another archive of work - jenffersshow 5. You can also join the Facebook group i love jenffer's show and miss j and the am by jenffer a jay.

ADDENDUM 2: Here are reviews and reactions by other webcomic creators.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC archive

Early in 2011 I had the genius idea of beginning a weekly Facebook feature on the most remarkable webcomic I could find. I will be continuing the tradition here, beginning with this archive post.

The daddy of 'em all - STRIPY SIX. The most important quality Stripy Six has is sincerity. This is what drives a person to create, and to transcend their limitations.

Feb. 13, Haien Heights.

"My webcomic pick for the day. I like how the pages are so gigantic it takes forever to load. In later episodes a lot of the creative burden is eased by having panels of nothing but dialog balloons in different colors to indicate different speakers."

Feb. 20, the first inkling of an official WEBCOMIC SUNDAY - Buck the Comic.

"Sunday is webcomic day. This is my pick for the week. What I like is how it has this big disclaimer page about how potentially offensive it is, and the comics are just gags that mostly rely on you recognizing the name of a celebrity, or having seen some commercial on TV."

Feb. 27, Carpe Diem. I admit I hadn't really hit the pure formula for the SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.

"I usually share webcomics which are just horrifically executed. I am sharing this one because it is so well drawn - and it is about gay musclemen with animal heads. I don't mind seeing musclemen making out (in fact I kind of like that) or weeping over their mother's graves, but when they have animal heads it just creeps me the hell out."

March 6, WEBCOMIC SUNDAY truly begins with Butt Flap Comics.

"It's webcomic Sunday. This doesn't seem so bad at first but if you keep reading they really start to get to you. Look for the 'vintage guest comics' by another artist."

March 13 - a watershed moment, the first full capitalization of the words SUNDAY and WEBCOMICS, immortalized along with A Cannonade of Hogwash.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS TIME! You have to read all 260 of these. I know this guy is trying to be 'ironic' but I don't think he's quite making it."

March 20 - Effy.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS time! Today's comic puts the Eff in WTF. The good news is... there are only three pages of it!" As of this writing there are considerably more than three pages, but they have not lost their power to amaze.

March 27 - The Adventures of Kanira Baxter.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMICS TIME!!! What makes this 3DCG scifi comic a real standout is not how sorta weird it looks, or how many many pages there are and there really are a lot, but how difficult it is to find a page on which anything is happening other than people talking and talking and talking and talking."

April 3 - Chronic Misadventures.

"It's SUNDAY WEBCOMIC TIME!!! Produced up to three times a week for over four years, resulting in hundreds of pages, this comic developed a stylistic formality which reached perfection as it petered out in one last strip. Gaze upon it in wonder, then start tracking back toward the beginning."

April 10 - The Tales of a Gay Asian.

"It's the low point of anyone's week - SUNDAY WEBCOMIC TIME!!! Sometimes I have to choose comics that transcend their basic non-good-ness and become strangely great in some way. NOT TODAY. This is the Murphy's Law of comics." This continues to be produced, and has become even less readable. Most recent pages don't even seem to have any lettering, just insanely huge scans of scribbly penciling.

April 17 - Cyber Dark Infection.

"You wouldn't believe how much mediocre drivel I had to sift through before I grudgingly settled on this unique solution to the problem of wanting to be a cartoonist without knowing how to draw. Over 150 pages of this SUNDAY WEBCOMIC to choose from."

April 24 - Okay! Fish.

"Guess what! Another SUNDAY WEBCOMIC!! I often see things that make me say, 'Yes, I can see why that is supposed to be funny.' Like this SUNDAY WEBCOMIC. You can see why it is supposed to be funny. Be sure to look for the secondary supporting punchline below each cartoon, which you can also see is supposed to be funny."

May 1 - NO SUNDAY WEBCOMIC. I must have spent three hours searching for something truly amazing and that was way too much.

May 8 - Just One Hat.

"Heavens be praised, a new SUNDAY WEBCOMIC! Just One Hat. Get it?"

May 15 - A Magical Roommate.

"Presenting the winner of the SUNDAY WEBCOMICS Lifetime Achievement Award! Nine years in the drawing, 2080 strips - each with accompanying descriptive paragraph giving deep insight into the creative process. This is the War and Peace meets Gravity's Rainbow of comics. See how many you can read before your brain chokes up or try changing the page number in the URL for a random selection."

And now I am up to date.

Movies

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) Directed by Sergio Martino, music by Bruno Nicolai. I established an eight-word rule years ago - if a movie has eight words in the title, watch out. This has twelve and thus transcends the rule. In this one the black-clad slasher with the big hooked knife is pushed off into a subplot and the story focuses on the ugly relationship between a dissolute unsuccessful writer sucking down J&B Scotch and his abused wife (Anita Strindberg of the wonderfully sculpted countenance) in a decaying villa. A gang of Party Hippies, a motocross race, and a visiting niece (Edwige Fenech takes on the nudity duties) who sleeps with everyone - EVERYONE, add more detail. Once you get hipped to how the scheme is set up and who is really behind everything, and figure out that a major subplot is lifted from a famous literary source, there are few surprises left in the last few minutes, but the sheer lurid excess keeps it rolling along. They really don't make them like this any more. 6/10

Anita Strindberg and the BLOODY SCISSORS

J&B Scotch - Buy it by the case!

Death Walks on High Heels (1971) Directed by Luciano Ercoli, music by Stelvio Cipriani. A fortune in diamonds is the object of the black-clad slasher and it is extremely helpful that one of the possible possessors of it is a Parisian strip-tease artist. Set in Paris and England, but everybody still speaks Italian. The settings are interesting and colorful, the story convoluted and puzzling, with everyone a suspect and participant, and a big flip-around at the end. It doesn't get real stabby, but one of the main characters is an eye surgeon for some gross-out effect. Gets an extra point for the plot structure, which really goes beyond what you might expect. 7/10

Movies

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) Directed by Emilio Miraglia, also responsible for The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. Of the two I think the latter is the superior film. This is the story of a centuries-old family curse in which every hundred years the evil sister kills seven people, the good sister being the seventh. Guess what year it is. It must all be a scheme of some sort, because the evil sister in this century is dead. Maybe. It's different from the run of the genre in that the mad stabber is a woman in a red cape who doesn't reserve her stabbing to women who have just taken their shirts off without locking all the doors and windows, and its tone is a bit more gothic than usual. What I found most enjoyable was the fact that the good sister, the Woman in Peril, is a fashion photographer so there were lots of fabulous clothes in picturesque settings. Also the most appalling and claustrophobic wallpaper I have ever seen. 6/10

The whole room is like this.

Death Laid an Egg (1968) Directed by Giulio Questi who, unlike these other directors, was not a studio hack - his list of works is quite brief. This is clearly influenced by the experimental approaches of the day and comes just short of being a satire of genre film. It is stylish and stylized and its ideas are unconventional. Set in an ultramodern automatic poultry farm, it's not a repetitive mad slasher film as it first makes you believe. The scenes and settings are striking, the dialog is slightly eccentric, and the addition of the poultry motif, with bizarre ad campaigns and the development of limbless spherical mutant chickens take it into the social-commentary realm of Godard and William Klein. This is quite an odd film for Gina Lollobrigida to be in, and in the dubbed print I saw, she is voiced by someone else. Not always what I would call a good movie, but overall quite a memorable experience. 8/10

The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (1972) Directed by Sergio Martino, one of the studio hacks referred to above, who has made some memorable and atrocious entries into western, giallo, cannnibal, post-apocalypse, and animal attack genres. A million dollar life insurance payout is the motivation for the leatherclad throat-slasher. The story proceeds rather mechanically - every attack is followed by a meeting in which theories are exchanged, then people are sent out to look for clues until the next attack. It's all explained in the end. The most notable thing about this for me was how frequently bottles of J&B Scotch intruded into the side of the scene. Kept my interest, but much of that had to do with the sculpted face and hemispherical bosoms of Anita Strindberg.

Three minutes into the movie - what are they drinking? J&B

What's that on the coffee table? J&B

Great by the TV - J&B!

Note the clamshell flip phone next to the TV. That's another thing I love about these, the endless variety of telephones.

YOU HAVE BEEN TROLLED

Back in olden days, when you had to buy a book to learn how to use the World Wide Web, when a 24k dialup modem was all you needed, there was an internet with no pictures, just words, called usenet. It consisted of ftp sites, where you could find and download software, and newsgroups, where people with common interests could meet and interact through written words. There was a common sport in the newsgroups called trolling, named after a fishing technique - bright whirling lures are drawn slowly through the water to entice unwise fish to bite. The simplest method of trolling was to say the most ridiculous or outrageous thing you could think of and see who had a fit over it. A victim, if carefully nurtured, could be trolled indefinitely. When an exceptionally pompous, humorless and absurd person appeared in a newsgroup and showed a susceptibility to being trolled, it was a celebration of cruelty. The object of trolling was to get the victims to make such an outrageous spectacle of their idiocy that they became forever objects of universal ridicule. The supreme ideal was to do one single thing that would cause an astounding over-reaction, a pathetic display of misguided destructive and self-humiliating emotion which the deluded victim believed was a proof of their righteousness, rectitude and intellectual superiority. When after days or weeks of prodding them into hilarious displays of idiocy one tired of this primitive entertainment, the victim was duly informed YHBT. You Have Been Trolled. They never believed it. They always thought that they had shown themselves noble and victorious, masters over all who would question their supremacy. True mastery of the art of trolling was reflected in the ratio of stimulus to response, and I have seen a master troll (Nickie Deathchick is her name, may it be revered forever), with a single brief and taunting line of text, drive a handful of fools into a frenzy of blatant stupidity which had rarely been equaled in the 20th century. This is the 21st century and the bar has been raised.