Robert
Farnsworth of the prestigious film journal Fashion Wire Daily
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
Only Mr. Farnsworth
has the courage to rave about The Forsaken. "Terrifying!
The sexiest vampire movie since the Lost Boys!"
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Graham Greene - Our
Man in Havana
Jonathan Richman - Having
a Party with Jonathan Richman
All
About Eve
It's slow to start, it's long, and it's stagey, but God damn
did Joseph Mankiewicz know how to write women characters. Imagine,
if you will, women who are fully realized, with real ambitions
and who act for themselves, not in the service of a plot or to
help a man. Jesus, the rest of the world has progressed, but
this flick reminds us that Hollywood has regressed since the
40s. If you like to watch women verballly catfight as much as
me, then check it out.
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©2001 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
The Mummy Returns
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Filthy says:
"Like a buffet: all-you-can-eat slop." |
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It's fucking war. It's me versus AMC Theaters. Yeah, they're
bigger than me, but they're almost bankrupt and I've been able
to squirrel away almost $300 since I've been working more at
First American Video.
It's fucking war and it's going to be bloodier and uglier
than a live birth. It all started when I went to see The Mummy
Returns yesterday. See, those bean-counters at AMC promise
you free movies if you sign up for their "Moviewatcher"
club. You get a card with a magnetic strip and God knows what
they do with it. I bet they track you everywhere you go and sell
your information to time share salesmen and telemarketers with
speech impediments. But, that's not what pisses me off. What
really boils my cock is how the free movie tickets are worthless
shit.
I have two "free" movie tickets in my pocket as
my "reward" for frequently fighting with the surly
teenagers who take the tickets, telling the yammering idiots
in the theater to shut the hell up, and for making threatening
gestures at the three-year-old in the R-rated movie who kicks
the back of my seat. But, the "rewards" are only good
for movies that have been out more than two weeks. What the fuck
is the point of rewarding people who go to the movies a lot with
tickets for flicks they've most likely already seen? Doesn't
it stand to reason that the "frequent" moviegoer sees
things in its first two weeks of release? The reward stands to
least benefit the people that AMC pretends they appreciate most.
Fuckers.
The problem is compounded by Hitler, Jr., the fat, pushy kid
who delights in checking tickets to make sure you're seeing the
movie you paid for. If this disgusting tub of dictatorial goo
would just mellow out, then I could get into The Mummy Returns
using the tickets for Town & Country I got for free.
Hey, Hitler, Jr., this was your chance to right a wrong, to stop
being such a smug little prick who delights in keeping me out
of the movies. This was your opportunity to disavow your past
and overturn the Axis Powers of AMC, Mann and UA. You could have
done your small part to right the wrong, but instead, you said
"Fuck you, Filthy" and sent me back to the box office
to pay six bucks for the matinee.
And The Mummy Returns isn't worth that kind of money.
It's not an awful film, actually, it's just not very good or
original; it's what happens when you have unlimited money and
seriously limited imagination.
I won't go into too much detail with the plot because it's
so contrived and ridiculous that you'll only end up hurting yourself
if you try to follow it. There's something about bad people trying
to revive the Scorpion King (The Rock), who led the undead army
of the god Anubis. But, if Imhotep (a sort-of chubby Arnold Vosloo)
can defeat The Rock in a fight, he can lead the army, and take
over the world. Then there is some nonsense about reincarnating
his wife, a very hot Patricia Velazquez, so they can rule together.
Also, Brendan Fraser is back as a low-rent Indiana Jones who
now has an annoying son with smart-mouth dialogue taken straight
from "Home Improvement" reruns. He and his wife, Rachel
Weisz, have to stop Vosloo and the Rock, along with countless
other underdeveloped villains. And, to make it all the more confusing,
there is some lip service paid to Fraser and his son being "chosen
ones," or some such crap. Not that anything ever comes of
that.
The main problem is that all that silly plotting is there
because writer/director Stephen Sommers had all these ideas for
action sequences and then he cooked up a harebrained plot to
justify it. I mean, this is more a mediocre special effects demo
reel than it is a story. It's perfect for people who love action
and have cerebral meningitis, or parasites that have eaten the
part of the brain that controls logical thinking. You might say,
"wow, that looks great," but you won't ever say, "holy
shit is this exciting." Because it isn't. The action is
so incessant and so arbitrary that it becomes tedious. It would
have been nice to give a flying fuck about at least one character,
but the The Mummy Returns is too busy getting shit blown
up to bother with character development.
It also would have been nice for there to be some creativity.
How can Hollywood spend a hundred-million bones and not even
have some new ideas. Fuck, with about ten dollars worth of beer
in me on a Friday night, I got all kinds of new ideas. The
Mummy Returns is big-ass action, but it's all borrowed. You've
seen it before, so you don't wonder whether the skull the camera
lingers on will open its eyes; it's just a question of when.
And rather than surprise us with new monsters or exciting chills,
all it does is give us the same shit over and over, bigger and
bigger. Bigger is better for dicks, tits and cakes, but there
isn't a whole lot more excitement to be gained by seeing 1000
computer-generated warriors ten times than by seeing 100 actually
do something interesting.
And fuck is this movie long. Long after it's used up its tricks,
it keeps going. There isn't one climactic fight, there are about
three and there is nothing at stake in any of them. Sure there's
a lot of fighting, but we know who is going to win, and Sommers
doesn't have the courtesy of throwing a monkey wrenches in to
make us wonder. The only good fights are between Weisz and Velazquez,
two hot chicks in bikinis and with swords, just like in my fantasies.
Oh, yeah, people are making a big-ass deal out of The Rock,
but he's in the movie maybe ten minutes. And of that, he is computer-generated
for five minutes. The CGI version of him looks more like a plastic
action figure than a human being. It's fucking lame.
Two Fingers for The Mummy Returns, plenty of
action and no brain, which is fine for a porno, but unfortunately,
this isn't one.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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