Andrew
Johnston of US Magazine
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
A Knight's Tale "Kicks off the summer in
high Style! A blend of Gladiator and Shakespeare in
Love!"
Moulin Rouge is "4 Stars! It carries the
musical intot he 21st century on a tidal wave of glitter and
raw emotions."
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©2001 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
Pearl Harbor
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Filthy says:
"Rah rah, america makes great wars and shitty movies." |
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To those of you who wished me well as I recovered from my
fall down the stairs, thank you. For those of you sluts who switched
your allegiance to the Arvada Tavern Harelip faster than a liquored-up
bridesmaid drops her panties; fuck you. Here I am, recuperating
from a nasty fall, and all you fucking care about is, "Oh,
poor me, who's going to write something to preoccupy me from
my shitty desk job this Monday morning?"
For the three of you who care, I'm fine. The bruises healed,
and I can walk again if I don't put any pressure on my toes.
In fact, I was fine last weekend, but I didn't have any God damn
electricity in the apartment. Our breakers are all screwed and
my cheap-ass landlord won't pay to repair it. He says I busted
it up so I have to fix it. What a load of crap. I remember getting
sort of drunk one night and I remember being mad at the electric
company because I was thinking about this bitchy guy who chewed
me out for always paying the bill late, and I sort of recall
going to get my tools to teach them a lesson. But that doesn't
mean I busted up the electrical panel.
Actually, I do remember taking a hammer to it, but admitting
that to the landlord will only make him right. Fuck the man,
and to hell with anyone who tries to keep us down by making us
pay for his problems. If my landlord doesn't want his electrical
panel busted up, he shouldn't put it in my apartment.
But I'm back, and just in time to have my eyes gouged out
by the obnoxious spectacle of Pearl Harbor. What a steaming,
rah-rah pile of crap. I mean, it's annoying enough listening
to some insecure asshole who has to keep pat himself on the back
for something he did years ago. But, It's about a billion times
worse being around people who have to pay Hollywood to slap them
on the back, and that's what this is. It's those greedy fuckers
in Los Angeles saying "Show us how patriotic you are by
giving us your money." Calculated, cold-hearted horseshit.
I'm about as patriotic as the Harelip, who showed her national
pride last Memorial Day by flashing her tits at the cops and
trying to stick a burning sparkler up her nose. I don't need
national pride to make me feel good about myself, and I never
will so long as beer is legal. But if I did I wouldn't be so
fucking stupid as to think that this movie really had a message
beyond the lazy absolutism that America is great, and the implication
that the Japanese are emotionless villains who wear funny underwear.
While the "America is fucking great" story is a
big part of Pearl Harbor, the main plot is a love triangle
starring Ben "I Still Suck" Affleck, Kate "I Suck
Too" Beckinsale, and Josh "I don't Suck as Bad"
Hartnett. The movie gets points for writing dialog that perfectly
matches the actors: stiff as a blue corpse in the river. But,
holy fuck, are these people boring. Who gives a rat's red ass
if two models from an "American Male" catalog are in
love with a bony model from "Abercrombie and Fitch"?
Pearl Harbor is three hours long, and it's time that
would be better spent on the toilet, dripping hot diarrhea until
your bowels feel twisted and tight like a wrung-out dishtowel.
I think director Michael Bay went into this thing thinking he
needed to make an epic. He didn't think "I need to make
a good movie," or "I have a story to tell." He
went in with the idea of "Pearl Harbor" and "epic".
But to pad this fucker out to epic proportions, he subjects us
to two hours of Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale acting out the
most timid of scenes from Norman Rockwell paintings. Seriously,
that's what the goal is here: a superficial, phony feel-good
view of America. It's dreamy, soft-lit nostalgia for cowards
afraid to look at the real past.
Hartnett and Affleck play pilots with the personalities and
complexity of sidekicks in a comic strip from the back of a Capt'n
Crunch box. There is some nonsense about Affleck being dyslexic,
but as typical of Hollywood, it amounts to nothing. Beckinsale
is part of a fleet of wholsesomely attractive nurses in white.
Affleck and Beckinsale love each other, they send each other
love letters, Affleck is shot down and thought to be dead. Oh,
shit! He's not dead, but now Hartnett and Beckinsale love each
other. What will happen? Who cares? Beckinsale needs a big dick
inside to straighten her out, not a couple of boys with skulls
as thick as Russian novels.
With uncanny skill, Affleck once again inhabits space without
being matter. He's as stiff as they come, and in many scenes,
you can see what a bad actor does when he's trying too hard:
he squints-a lot. Hartnett might be a better actor, and I'm sure
the girls think his beady eyes and tiny mouth are dreamy, but
writer Randall Wallace asks him to vomit up dialog as foul and
clumped as the hair-trap in a YWCA bathroom. Beckinsale looks
kind of pretty, but the kind of pretty you see in sweater catalogs,
not the kind of pretty that looks like she would give you a good
blowjob, or even like sex. And all she does in Pearl Harbor
is get dewy-eyed about Affleck and model vintage clothes. I'd
rather spend two hours getting my ass kicked by the teenagers
who break bottles in the Conoco parking lot. Just by busting
glass they prove to have more personality.
But let's talk about the fucking bullshit war part. First,
this movie is attracting a lot of old people who might be WWII
veterans, or maybe they are so old and fucking senile that they
just think they are. Either way, they haven't been to a movie
theater in years and have forgotten that they need to behave
themselves. Some old timer behind me was hacking on the same
phlegm ball the entire movie. Imagine, three fucking hours of
hearing some old guy moving around some platelets of snot. Another
guy down the aisle was about to die of tuberculosis, and he coughed
his raspy cough the entire second half of the movie. He also
loudly said, "That the way it was" after every fucking
scene, which I seriously doubt unlesshe was boning Beckinsale
60 years ago. Gentlemen, get the fuck out of the theater if you
can't shut up. I don't care if you personally won WWII, this
movie is not a tribute and it's not really patriotic. It's just
a shitty Disney movie that is exploiting the emotions of simpletons
like you. They didn't make this movie to honor you, they made
it to drain your wallet. And as such, you don't have a right
to be so annoying. Then, there are the numbnuts who applaud at
the end. What the fuck? Are you so roused up that you want to
go back to war with Japan?
The war scenes do look pretty, probably as pretty as war can
look. They aren't scary, they're like a very expensive fireworks
show, all meant to make you say "Ooo," and "Aaah."
I still can't figure out how Bay did it, but he makes sinking
ships and drowning soldiers look like a calendar you'd buy at
Hallmark, and he works hard to up the quotient of young men in
underwear. Part of the problem is the over-the-top score that
swells and bleeds like a malignant tumor under the surface of
the movie. It's always there, you can feel it, and you know it's
bad.
But what gets my fucking goat and chokes it is the knee-jerk
patriotism of this dung-heap. Bay and Wallace wear patriotism
like it's a protective cloak and it makes them immune to the
rules for making a movie tolerable. So, they can be lazy and
show the Japanese as an efficient killing machine. Sure, they
probably think they are being even-handed about the land of the
rising sun, but if they are, why is the audience supposed to
root every time an American calls a Japanese "son of a bitch"
or "bastard"? Why are they portrayed as people who
think only of war, and why is no soldier ever sad to kill them?
I don't know the answer, but I do know that Bay uses the Japanese
as agit-props to fire us up. Disney would be thrilled if audiences
applauded when they die.
It's a fucking shame. If our country is so fucking great,
why do we spend so much time revising history and barfing it
back up in sugar-coated form for the dumb masses? Why are we
so hellbent on retelling our past in black and white, with us
always winning and being the good guys? Are Americans so insecure
we need Hollywood to reassure us with this pap?
Yes. One Finger for Pearl Harbor. And for the
English readers, shut your gob if your knee-jerk reaction is
to write to tell me that indeed Americans do suck. The only people
more pathetic than patriotic Americans are the lowly limeys who
take every opportunity to bitch about us because it's easier
than facing the reality of their own crumbling empire. You guys
are a broken record.
Oh yeah, about my script. It's done. No, you can't read it
but maybe some day you can see it.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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