Peter
Travers of Rolling Stone
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
Technically,
Mr. Travers is not a whore, just a critic with asotnishingly
bad taste and a penchant for cliched one-liners.
The Gift is "a sexy twist-a-minute
thriller!"
Vertical Limit
is "Thrilling!"
What Women Want is "the naughty-and-nice
romantic comedy we've been missing all year!"
Finding Forrester is "funny and touching. Connery
triumphs."
Snatch is "a rock'em sock'em caper
with go-for-broke energy!"
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Bill Bryson (still)- The
Lost Continent
The Best Show on WFMU - Interview
with the "Real" Fonzie
- It's a free file to listen to, just click on it because it'll
make you wet your pants. (The interview starts about 36 minutes
in.)
Suspicion,
a fine Alfred Hitchcock thriller starring Cary Grant and Joanne
Fontaine. Grant's his usual unemployed, charming slacker and
he wins the heart of plain-looking Fontaine. She's insecure and
always suspects the worst of her lazy husband. She slowly grows
to suspect he is going to kill her for the money he needs to
finance his gambling and expensive taste. It's a great fucking
movie, and I wish I was Cary Grant. He's so goddamn suave that
I bet he could still get laid even though he's dead. And Hitchcock
is a sadist. Man, he really loves to see people squirm.
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©2000 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
Snatch
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Filthy says:
"This Snatch is a sloppy hole." |
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I'm going to steal a phrase from one of Mrs. Filthy's friends
to describe Snatch, and I hope she's not as mad as the
time I stole her hot rollers because I was experimenting with
my bangs. The phrase is "And Then" because Snatch
is an And Then movie. "And then this happened, and then
that happened and then this other thing happened, and then I
stopped paying attention, and then I had to take a piss, and
then it still kept going."
It's a bad movie, laboring with more fake hipness than an
accountant in aviator sunglasses at a TGI Friday's happy hour.
Even worse, there is no snatch, as in poon, barn door, pussy,
slippy-lips, et al, in the whole fucking flick. Just some nonsense
about a giant diamond.
I won't describe the plot in too much detail, first because
it ain't worth bothering, and second, because if you've seen
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you already know
it. There are several London Underground subplots that miraculously
collide at the end. A gambling addict poorly played by Benicio
Del Toro transports an 84-carat diamond and then gets sidetracked
to an illegal boxing match. And then that match has been set
up by a deadly four-eyed thug, Brick Top played very well by
Alan Ford, who wants to rig the fight and feeds his enemies to
pigs. And then one of the boxers is Gorgeous George provided
by two baby-faced wannabe hoods. And then George gets the shit
beat out of him by gypsy Brad Pitt. And then the boys swap Pitt
for George in the fight, but Pitt won't take the planned dive
and that makes Ford very angry.
And then, all sorts of people are after the 84-carat diamond,
including Rade Serbedzija, some crooked pawnbrokers and a couple
of sleazy diamond brokers. And then they all run around, catch
their breath, then run around some more. And then you think the
movie is over and you're glad, and then the movie keeps going.
And then, you think it's over, and then it keeps going some more
until it's out of piss and steam, but you're just starting to
build some of your own.
Writer/Director/person-stupid-enough-to-marry-Madonna Guy
Ritchie is the most imaginative man working in the tiny little
corner he's painted himself into. I liked his first flick, but
not enough to see it twice, and especially not enough to pay
to see it chewed up, digested and shit out as a less-entertaining
imitation. I mean, this movie is a really crappy knockoff of
his first movie, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
The similarities are not only mind-numbing, they're ass- and
balls-numbing too. I guess Ritchie figures that if he rips off
his own movie people will forget that Lock, Stock was
just a good Tarantino rip-off in the first place.
Both movies are about young hoods in over their heads in the
London Underground. Both are incessantly narrated. Both are stories
where you follow the bouncing valuable object. Both have a very
nasty paternal figure who will kill the young hoods if they don't
deliver the goods. Both use Vinnie Jones as a bounty hunter (but
a different bounty hunter). Neither has any women of substance
(sorry the hot twins here don't count -- if they'd taken off
their tops, well...). Both end with the main characters not quite
getting what they want. And on and on. Near as I can tell, the
only real advantage Snatch has over the first movie is
that greasy new-age fucker Sting isn't in it.
This movie is being sold as "hip" and "cool"
and it'll probably fill that bill for teenage boys who aren't
interesting enough to hip or cool themselves. Hell, assholes
of all ages with no personality may think they're cool for having
watched this. But, it's all so labored, and the slick dialog
is so tired and takes so long to explain that no sixteen-year-old
is going to be able remember enough of it to repeat to his friends.
Really, I've never seen such a boring movie paced so quickly.
The main problem with Snatch is that every action is
driven by unfathomable stupidity. I don't mean that the characters
are dumb because that would be fine. It would be like having
a picnic with Mrs. Filthy's co-workers, what with all the blood
and running around screaming. But, Snatch is supposedly
filled with shrewd guys, always knowing the right thing to say.
Yet Ritchie never has them do a Goddamn logical thing because
if they did, his hipster house of cards would collapse. So, we're
subjected to a story that spins and twists arbitrarily.
The twists aren't surprising because to be surprised you have
to expect one thing and get another. Watching Snatch,
I gave up expecting anything. All the characters do is stumble
around as pawns to Ritchie's need to stuff mouths with B-rate
"wiseguy" dialog and thrust them into absurd situations.
For example, Ford's Brick Top is a man who, like bartender Tina
at the Arvada Tavern, would rather kill you than hear you apologize.
Ritchie labors letting us know this, giving him a stupid and
boring monologue about flesh-eating pigs and having the narrator
tell us how awful he is. Then, Brick Top lets a half-dozen dopes
in this story live for no other reason than so that Ritchie can
get them in more trouble later.
And why should we give a fuck? Ritchie never gives us a reason
to give a pony's left nut whether any of these jackasses lives
or dies. They're all unlikable pukes and he makes life so fucking
cheap with his "hilarious" scenes of people getting
run over. Nobody has a glint of humanity or redeeming quality.
The screen is so stuffed with unnecessary "colorful"
characters that nobody amounts to more than the nicknames Ritchie
loves to give them, like Frankie Four Fingers, boris the Blade
and Bulleth-tooth.
In Lock, Stock the four main characters are likable
because they've been unwillingly thrust into this dark world.
They're essentially decent people in a tough spot. In Snatch,
Ritchie is more than happy to let everyone wallow in his mud.
And while that makes a good time at the strip club, it's a little
tedious when it's all men up there and the mud is figurative,
not literal.
The performances range from very good to awful. Ford is menacing,
Serbedzija is funny as the Russian who can't be killed, and Brad
Pitt is surprisingly good. His incoherent Irish Brogue schtick
gets old very fast, though. The best acting belongs to the dog
who swallows a squeaky toy. He gets the only laughs, too.
Benicio Del Toro is a muttering Hasidic Jew and he's awful,
apparently trying to cover his face from the media throughout
the movie. Denis Farina is lost as Cousin Avi. He reads his lines
like he's trying on a suit that's ugly and doesn't fit. He keeps
shrugging his shoulders and looking around like "Is this
right?"
Two Fingers for Snatch, and I wish the movie
had given me the implied place to stick them. I imagine, though,
that my measly two fingers won't be enough for ritchie's new
wife. She probably needs at least four or five hands' worth.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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