Thighs Wide Shut

The Girlfriend Experience
No Experience Necessary
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Remember how boring 998/999^ths of Soderbergh’s Che was? Well at least that movie had guns, a story, beards, revolution and Catalina Sandino Moreno. Nerderbergh has returned small time to his small pictures and the resulting Girlfriend Experience is mildly more amusing than the unamusing Full Frontal exercise, but not even close to being in the same breath as the major of his minor leagues, the fantastic Bubble, which is without question his bestest movie (long live Misty Dawn Wilkins!). Look, being a call girl escort prostitute (acted in the film with the skill of a porn actress by… porn actress Sasha Grey) in reality probably isn’t all that interesting, endlessly listening to guys talk about their boring Wall Street jobs or Steve Jobs or Job 3:16 or Dirk Calloway spying on Mr. Blume and Miss Cross giving each other hand jobs, all while giving her Johns whatever kinda job they want, and dealing with a boyfriend who can’t deal with the fact that she’s a call girl escort prostitute, but ya wanna know what, the flick didn’t have to be at all boring… or edited out of sequence for no better reason than to take yer mind off at how boring it hactually is. Have you seen Secret Diary of A Call Girl? Answer yes and you can skip Girlfriend Experience cause then you already know how entertaining the life of a call girl escort prostitute can be, and if the answer is no, cause only 9 people have Showtime, then do yerself a flavor and watch the loose lipped Billie Piper show and still skip Girlfriend Experience… even though we did loves ourselves the brief but brilliant onscreen work of Premiere‘s Glenn Kenney (and Thighs Wide associate Ben Finklestein) more than the entire body of this work that doesn’t work. It’s not a movie, it’s an exercise in making 78 minutes feeling like the 330 minuted 1927 Napoléon epic. Yes, Napoléon is the only film longer than Benjamin Button

Hurl Grey: we had so much trouble finding really naughty pictures of Ms Grey, so may we present to you the sauciest pic of her from the internet’s lot

Verdictgo: Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous

Girlfriend is currently playing in limited release, but can be seen right at home on Video On Demand, but this is one video you don’t want to demand

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

dude, that Lost season finale was off the meat rack AND curtains! can you believe Doc Brown went to the future to get Dexter so he could go back to the past to do this to Jackie Treehorn’s right hand man?

this show should never be allowed to end, although it muss be said that the return/end to the Bernard & Doris storyline was hella lame. wandering the jungle like Moses, baking sh%tty matzah on their backs and growing beards for 3 years? that’s more weak than the Caps non-showing in game 7

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Logan’s Run-On
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

You’d think with a spin-off of a mighty popular movie franchise, featuring its moist mighty popular character, that the production would actually spend a good deal of money (is there such a thing as a ‘bad deal of’ anything?) on top of the line special effects, right? So what then is the story with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which features dodgy CGI that looks about as complex as the flight simulator the monkeys played with in 1987’s Project X? What? That’s not the finished version of the film that we watched? You mean to also tells us that them on-screen ADR directions weren’t subtitles of what the character was saying in a mutant language? That’s not what the dude in the trench coat in the dimly lit parking garage led us to believe when he handed us a DVD copy of this film with a label written in sharpie, and told us we had to watch it ‘as is’ or else he was going to kill our Queen and our Secretary of State-ments. We take all threats of Thighland’s national security vary seriously, and when that involves making tough choices like the one in which we were presented, sometimes you have to task not what your country can poop for you, but what poop can who flung on your country. Huh? Yeah, whatevaaaaa

Full-on CGI or not, Wolverine is about as good as any of the other X-Men movies, so take that for twatever it’s worth. To us, it doesn’t really mean shiz since we couldn’t really tell the difference between the three blah blah X-Mens, including that Brett Shatner one. They were decent enuff super hero flicks, but this caped crusader franchise is easily the least memorable of them all (plus everyone knows that DC Comics so kicks Marvel’s a$$, and anyone who disagrees can lick Aquaman’s chocolate starfish). Hugh Jackman is totally jacked and hughed and game for this adventure, but if this were a Choose Your Own Adventure, we’d probably choose a different path for him to follow. We did like the shaz in the beginning where Wolfy and his equally facial hair gifted bro are fighting in every American war known to man, eggecept for the Cola Wars, and all the action sequences that follow throughout are kinda tight, like a man’s anus, but the filler in between, endless military talk, medical experiments and running from one locale to the next, isn’t eggzactly our idea of eggcitment. Tis kinda a shame it turned out to be so rudimentary, hispecially since they roped in a prestige director (Gavin Hood of Tsotsi fame… then again, Gavid Hood is also of Rendetion disfame. shame what Hollywood can do to a talented filmmaker), sum thespian best-ians (Liev Schreiber and Danny Huston) + eye candy for the ladies (Ryan Reynolds, Dominic Monaghan, Taylor Kitsch & that a$$hole from Lost, cause ladies love the a$$holes). Then again, this thing was doomed not to rule as soon it was revealed that Will.i.Am‘s mutant power was being a CNN hologram

Mutton Chop Phooey: where would Wolverine be (or any of us cool kids for that splatter) w/o Ambrose Burnside and his mutton chops? the man’s last name, in reverse, gave rise to one of the illest, moist important words of balls thyme… SIDEBURNS ^{[citation needed]}

Verdictgo: it wouldn’t be fair for us to give one, so if yer a crazy X-fan, see it in a theater, and if you’ve had enuff X-crap, then you can stay away and rela-X at home (at watch the legboot)

The Soloist
Cello Darkness My New Friend
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

The Soloist is less about Nathaniel Ayers, a once promising Julliard student turned schizophrenic homeless virtuoso (Jamie Foxx, showing off his incredible ability for mimicry, like he did with Ray) and more about Steve Lopez, the jaded LA Times reporter who discovers and gives cover to him (Robert Downey Jr, so effin hammazin as a journalist once again, juss like in Zodiac… did you ever see that movie? juss had to ask for the 4 zillionth thyme). So much so that The Journalist woulda been a more apt title. As the great Time Werespanko pointed out to us, disability movies aren’t about the disabled, but about the person who has to help them. His main example was Rain Man, sayin it wouldn’t have worked tat all had Tom Cruise not been so balls to the walls in it (yet no Oscar nom for Tom? boo-urns!). Tis true what he says and the same thinking applies here, although The Soloist is Rain Main w/o the thunder and lightening cause it covers the feelings bases well, but not so much in the telling a story department. It does try to send a heavy handed message about the larger issue of homelessness in LA, and while it doesn’t fully succeed in getting it across, it was certainly worth trying to do so. Wees thinking that The Soloist was all over the place due to the fact that Joe Wright is out of his usual element here, directing a film that plays out in the modern era and is not starring Keira Knightley (although he did bring along his creepy friend Mr Collins from P&P). And yet despite its many flaws, we took to this beautiful film, as the performances elicited a few tears here and there, which is a sure sign of a fantabolous movie. So, have no fears for tears, or slapdash presentation, and go and see this flick that briefly stars a guy with one of the bestest IMDb headshots we’ve ever seeeeen

60 Minutes Divided By 5: justin case you missed the real deal, watch Morley Safer’s more rounded story on Mr Lopez and Mr Ayers… which also elicited tears from us. what can we say, we’re suckers for things that don’t suck

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Wolverine opens at a theater near Jews on Friday, where The Soloist is already isting

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

the 2009 NYC Beard & Moustache Championships

The Edge of Love
Couples Retreated
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

It’s WWII and London’s being bombarded by Germany. A beautiful young girl (Keira Knightley) takes refuge in an Underground Tube station, while she awaits desperately for the return of her true love, an average Joe solider, fighting on the front lines on mainland Europe. Sounds purty much like the borefest that was Atonement (and to some extent, A Very Long Engagement), dunnit?

With John Maybury‘s The Edge of Love (with a script by Knightley’s mum Sharman Macdonald… who also suffers from mosquito bites) that’s where the similarities with Atonement end, since her boy (the always creepy Cillian Murphy) comes home after the war, to Wales where she waits, and instead of an annoyingly jealous lil sister gumming up the works of our lovers, it’s her real life (yep, this is a truish story!) childhood poet pal Dylan Thomas (Brothers & Sisters‘ Matthew Rhys, a semi-doppelganger for James McAvoy) doing more damage than a close-up of Glenn Close. Thomas is married to casual Mondays-Fridays Sienna Miller, but his heart belongs to Knightley (she’s a bit conflicted herself, but ultimately stands by her man). The two couples live and booze it up before Murphy’s deployed (the ladies share a bath, but sadly it’s not a dirty one), and when he comes home shell shocked, their relationships and friendships strain more than 89 tons of spaghetti in the world’s largest strainer

The four lead performances are golden (even if we’re all suffering from K Knightley period piece fatigue), the production values are top notch, and the settings are simply gorgeous (book us on the first flight headed to Wales please!), but when the story hits its post-war patch, it lost much of the flavor it built up along the way. Yet we stuck with The Edge of Love to the very end (involving the lowest-keyed courtroom scene we’ve viddyed in ages), which cannot be said of Atonement (we kissed it goodbye after the first act). So is Love Knightley’s atonement to us all for Atonement? Without that irksome typewriter score, we’d have to say yes

They Shoots, He Scores!: the film’s luscious soundtrack was overseen by the brilliant Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent David Lynch collaborator. Some of the songs in the film were performed by the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Suggs from Madness and even Knightley herself! Lisa Stansfield appears in the film, but does not lend her pipes

Verdictgo: it borders a lil bit on Meritville, but it also has badges so Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Tokyo!
Three Stories Low
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Michel Gondry slowly turns a girl into a chair for no reason, Leos Carax lets a bearded creature on the loose and then puts him on trial, while Joon-ho Bong makes a shut-in stack pizza boxes and then finally go outside. Yep, that’s the gist of the three pointless lil stories that are being spun in Tokyo!, a head scratching affair that shoulda been called Tokyo? What more is there to say? Nothing, cept you should Netflix Paris, Je T’Aime instead, where the shorts are shorter and the hit to miss ratio is even, not all misses

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stinkin Badges

The Edge of Love opens in LA today, NY next week, and elsewhere elsewhen, while Tokyo! is currently playing in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…