p e n g u i n d e v i l

In the midst of some failings this week (a spell in which The Graveyard and Wishmaster were briefly attempted, then spurned on account of their terribleness) we managed to down some films, all pretty good.

First, from a ways back, we watched The Spaghetti West. It’s a documentary of the history of Italian westerns. I thought it was pretty good, covering an interesting range of films from the 60’s and 70’s and filled with interviews from heavy weights of the films. On the plus and minus side, it strives to cover the whole genre, yet with depth, so it seems at times as if you are just running from movie to movie, but there are times when it seems the films are well covered. Relying on so many interviewees and with hundreds of possible movies to cover, the interviews really decide which movies get the most focus, but that is fine, because they have some great folks involved. The movies that they deem to consider the most important are mainly movies that I have (and I don’t even have too many), which made me feel as if I had pulled my Italian westerns out of a “best of” box (I guess that’s what comes from endless review reading)… Moviewise, they don’t talk much about the Leone’s, but they cover Django heavily and they give big props to The Great Silence, which is one of my favorites, but they also give props to the roles of Tomas Milian, which I can’t stand. Anyway, some of the folks talking here are: Sergio Sollima, Sergio Donati, Franc Nero and even Clint Eastwood. Plus they show some great scenes from these films, so I would certainly list it as suggested viewing for anyone with an interest in this genre. It even made me want to try and appreciate the Django movies again.

Then we watched a fine little piece of social commentary from the genius who brought us both Beavis and Butthead and The King of the Hill… I stumbled on a cheap used copy of Idiocracy at Music Millennium. This is a movie I’d heard a good deal about and wanted to see and then promptly forgot. Before I’d forgotten about it, I had read some reviews that led me to wonder if I would like it or if it would be too dumb. Well… both: I really liked it, and I thought it was quite dumb. But even with it’s overwhelming dumbness (some of which is the point), it has a very real and pressing message. It is the story of two losers (a prostitute and an army guy) who are put to sleep and then, due to an accident (ala Looking Backward), wake up five hundred years in the future as the smartest people on Earth. Stemming from, of course, the proliferation of pop culture due to peoples obsession with stupid television. As they go about seeking a time machine to return to the 21st century, we get to take in the wild world of the future Uhmerica. The movie goes overboard in a sense, and not far enough in the other. A lot of the social aspects are cartoonishly overplayed, but the people themselves are no dumber or more shallow than many folks one encounters in a regular day. There are just more of them in the movie. But it is very funny and the social cracks (the city-sized Costco, the Carl’s Jr sponsorship of everything, a wrestler for the President) are overdone and silly but in a manner that is uncomfortably close to the truth.

heaps o’ garbage…



teleprompter of the future…


the president…
Then I rounded off the week with an old favorite, Returner. At times it’s hard to tell if this is an action flick, a sci-fi yarn or a kids movie. It feels like a combination of Terminator and E.T. with a flavor of The Matrix thrown in. But it’s a lot of fun, with lots of shooting… In the future, aliens invade earth and go about destroying humanity. The last surviving humans, in an attempt to undo what brought this invasion on, send someone back to the present day in a time machine. Of course, she stumbles into Miyamoto, a fellow who is a freelance killing machine and she forces him to aid in her mission. They have to go up against the local triad in the quest to save a wounded alien. The bad guys are represented here by yet anther example of my favorite archetype, the remorseless bleach blonde yakuza. This time it’s Goro Kishitani as Mizoguchi (who, co-incidentally, killed some of Miyamoto’s friends back in the day) joining the ranks of Tadanobu Asano (from Ichi the Killer) and Shingo Tsurumi (from Sharkskin Man) as the funnest part of these Asian crime films. The movie is a fun stream of shooting and chasing, with lots of it in slow motion. As I said, fun!Sadly, my bootlegish dvd has terrible picture quality, which is too bad because I find this film to be easily re-watchable



bleach makes you bad…