Thighs Wide Shut

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Breaking The Fifth Wall
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 119 min

Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s Birdman is be like…

–

Michael Keaton is an actor who was once a superhero

and now is like nothing or something

&

a superhero kinda like Condorman

&

his daughter is Emma Stone

who’s like a strung out/sarcastic Daisy Duck

&

Keaton’s trying to put on a Broadway show
in hopes of reviving his career

but it kinda goes like The Producers
with Zach Galifianakis as the hybrid lovechild
of Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder

&

one of his costars is a jerky Ed Norton
who’s out to spoil all the fun
and steal the spotlight

(and Andrea Riseborough is kinda doing the same thing)

which makes it feel a little About Eve

&

the fragile Naomi Watts is about to break

&

all of it seems like one giant artistical battle
like totally like Black Swan yo!

but not nearly as freaky or freakin awesome

&

but its got shades of the creative long-take editing of
Hitch’s BRILLIANT Rope

&

the even more creative and longer takes of
Alfonso Cuaron’s BRILLIANT Children of Men

&

luckily Amy Ryan is our center of gravity
and source of comfort

so what does it all add up to? an interesting movie with great technique, with a story that kinda grows old after an hour

glad to see Keaton back in action, but Oscars??? psssshah – this aint no Bettlejuice, or even Johnny Dangerously, so if he wins this year, it’s a make-up call for not winning for them roles

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Birdman is fly enuff in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Road
Bleak of An Eye
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

The Road is about a nameless man (Viggo Mortensen at his rugged ruggedness bestness) who travels by foot with his nameless son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who’s no Max Records!) to nowhere. Wells, they do have a vague destination in mind (the ocean!), but really are juss trying to survive by simply living. While society and the earth itself has crumbled to pieces (we don’t get to witness tit tat all, which is completely fine, cause moist of the time shiz is scarier when you don’t know the why or how), the man doesn’t want to give up on humanity or his son, even though everyone else has, including his wife (Charlize Theron, seen in flashbacks, which we believe wasn’t a part of the book). The two meet all kinds of other desperate and unsavory souls on their path to anywhere but here, from cannibals, to thieves and the hopeless (including a barely recognizable Robert Duvall), and one can see that even when all is lost, love can still mean something. Oh boy, man, did that man love his boy! Not in that way you sick forks!!

Yeah kiddies, this a total debbie downer to the creme de^menthe degree! Even when there’s a slight ray of hope, it’s usually preceded or followed by very bad stuffs. Tis like the dirty emptiness of Children of Men with less people, future gadgetry or blow up pig balloons, with an added bit of The Mist‘s twists and burns. To be honest, we have not read Cormac McCarthy’s book, cause we’re ill-litter-rate. And where director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and writer Joe Penhall‘s take on the material treads, we may never want to learn how to read, let alone go down that ROAD again. We don’t mean that in a bad way twatsoever, but why would we want to endure the there will be blood, sweat and tears in a word form after digesting the horrific beauty that was painted in the cinematic version? Kinda a hard film to recommend, but how could we not when it’s the mos visually spectacular one of the 2009, although it would have been of the 2008 had they released it when theys was originally planning to. Maybe they wanted to show Roland Emmerich how it’s really done. Too bad more will flock to his 2012 than see The Road. Now you tells we, who needs an effin apocalypse to tell us that humanity barely eggists anymo?

Where They’re Going We Need Roads!!!: The Road chomps its own scenery, filming at actual ravaged or worn places like Mount St. Helens, hard hit Hurricane Katrina spots of Louisiana, and, as thighposted before, the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike (we are so going there ones day!)

Verdictgo: Breast In Show. duh, cause dystopia is dope!

The Road knows no bounds today in limited release. seek it out or be eaten by cannibals!

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

ps – was kinda odd to see Viggo married to Theron onscreen cause Theron’s real life beau is Stuart Townsend, aka the man picked to play Aragorn in LOTR, but who was replaced 4 days into shooting by… VIGGO!!!

Rachel Getting Married
Squirms of Endearment
Trailers & Mo

It’s been quite a long time since Jonathan Demme made a narrative film worthy of praise. 15 years to be exact, as Philadelphia was his last fictional work of note, which was quite an hamazin’ follow-up to the bestness that came a year before, Silence of The Lambs. While he’s excelled recently with a pair of documentaries (Jimmy Carter Man From Plains and The Agronomist), big budget Hollywood fluff like The Manchurian Candidate and The Truth About Charlie have been questionable choices for a man of such great talent, even the latter being repoopulously ridiculed by Marky Mark and Ari Gold on Entourage. We can now table such discussions as Demme surges back big time with the little ensemble family drama Rachel Getting Married, which has now sirpassed the funtastic Married To The Mob as his finest ‘married’ movie of balls thyme

From a character rich script by Sidney Lumet‘s daughter Jenny (not to be confused with his other daughter Amy, most famous for putting her giant rack on display at the 2005 Academy Awards), Demme throws an intimate wedding party (including such guests as Fab 5 Freddy, Roger Corman and Robyn Hitchcock… guess Jimmy Carter wasn’t unavailable) that’s almos as catastrophic and more unnerving than what transgressed in Meet the Parents. Anne Hathaway achingly plays Kym, the Gaylord ‘Greg’ Focker role here that’s eons away from the kiddie stuff she’s done before, and while you’ll feel just as sorry for her as you did for Ben Stiller, there aren’t many laffs to ease her or our pain. Kym’s been in and out of rehab for ages, ever since a tragic event in her adolescence, and she’s coming back home to celebrate, although ruin might be a better word, her sister (Rosemarie DeWitt, aka Mad Men‘s Midge Daniels)’s nuptials (to TV On The Radio‘s lead singer Tunde Adebimpe). While her family’s happy to see her at first, including her overly cautious pop (stage actor and Elmo pal Bill Irwin, who shines bright) and his cold and distant ex-wife (Debra Winger, who’s been sorely missed in the world of cinema), Kym quickly shifts the attention from her sis’ happiness to her unhappiness, and all hell breaks lose. There is light at the end of this dark tunnel, and the actual wedding is soulful and so gorgeous that you’ll wish you were invited. Rachel is dynamite stuff and is right up there with The Visitor, Mister Lonely, Towelhead and Frozen River as some of the mos touching and affecting films we’ve seen this year

Corny Stalk: Anne, beware of ESPN’s (un) The Talented Mr. Roto, who may need a restraining order cause he’s obsessed with you

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Blindness
See No Evil No See
Trailers & Mo

After City of Gawd and The Constant Gardner we’ve come to eggspect nothing but the best from director Fernando Meirelles. Blindness, adapted from the celebrated book by José Saramago, may not be on par with either of those last two brilliant films, but it comes awfully darn close. Blindness is about an unnamed city dealing with the outbreak of an unexplained… BLINDNESS epidemic. The blindness keeps getting passed from one poor soul to another, and eventually becomes such a major problem that the government quarantines the inflicted in an abandoned hospital. They’re basically left on their own, and if you can imagine the blind leading the blind, then you’ll have a purty good idea of how bad shiz will get. Luckily the wife (Juliane Moore) of a blind optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) can see, although not everyone is aware of this, and she does her best to make order out of the chaos, while trying to hold onto her sanity in the process. This cast is rounded out with remarkable performances by Gael García Bernal,
ef=”http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001999/” target=”_blank”>Maury Chaykin, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya and Don McKellar, who also wrote the screenplay

While this supposedly unfilmable film may be a bit muddled in the story and message delivery department, probably due to the fact that the novel was written in a stream-of-consciousness prose, we dare you to name another film this year that equals its beauty, or is as mesmerizing or stomach turning and churning as Blindness is. Actually Rachel Getting Married fits that bill, but it’s not about a dystopian society and we’re major suckers for that genre so take that! This is kinda like a junior Children of Men, which in our opinion, could be one of the bestest movies of the decade. This isn’t even close to being one of the best of the decade, but it’s close to breaking our top ten of 2008. Others don’t seem to agree and we hope they go blind

Blinded By The Light: while we haven’t seen The Miracle Worker or City Lights, here are six pics about blindness we recommend you viddy well… Tommy, Dancer In The Dark, Ray, The Village, Manhunter and Blind Date. OK, so Blind Date isn’t about blind people, but it IS about dates that are blind!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Humboldt County
Puff, Puff, Pass
Trailers & Mo

Peter(Jeremy Strong)’s a recently failed and disillusioned med student who needs to lighten up, and does so by lighting up. After a one night stand with a singer named Bogart (Fairuza Balk), he follows her to the Nor-Cal county in the film’s title, which if you weren’t aware is HIGHly known for it’s cannabis growing. The next day she ups and leaves, and leaves him with her wacky tobaccy family (Grima Wormtongue, Ruth Fisher, Doug from VCB). The fish out of water eventually learns how to walk on high land and is soon chillaxing and waxing about life with these granola barflys. While it may be a bit more realistic of a pot movie than Pineapple Excess was, Humboldt is like taking a hit from a cashed bowl. If you don’t know what that means, you probably won’t be interested in Humboldt, but if you do know what that means, you should juss stay home and pack a freshie

Building Bridges: Lawrence Bridges makes his acting debut with Humboldt, but the dude has a lot of other talents, including casting Brad Pitt in his first commercial, a Pringles spot

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Rachel joins Humboldt in very limited release, while Blindness opens thighs wide

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

There be lotsa people out there who’ve been able to compile a list of the Top Ten Bestest Movies of All Time. Howevski, I am not one of those people. The bestest that I can do is tell you what four movies that methinks are tied for #1 of balls thyme. And they is (in no particular order, since they’re all tied): Citizen Kane, Psycho, Trainspotting, and… A Clockwork Orange. If you haven’t seen them, go directly to Netflix and… Netflix them up, or go see Wedding Crashers, since u boviously have no taste! Each of these films represent some different aspect of uber-genius awesomeness cinemaking, but as the days turn into weeks, which somehow bypass months and go straight to years, I keep leaning on Clockwork as the one to rule them all. Hitchcock may be the lord, but Kubrick is king, and Orange is Kubrick’s 100 point game in Hershey, PA. No one in my mind can ever top it… although I’d love to pull my hair out watching Gus van Pretentious try his hand at a shot-by-shot remake of it in B&W.

Sure the themes aren’t easy on the eyes and on the thighs (rape, brainwashing, and even more rape), but who wants easy? I like my celluloid to be challenging, thought-provoking, and as far from fluff as possible. Every time I enter a theater (or sadly turn on the DVD player) I want to be wowed. It’s rarity when it happens, but it does indeed happen. And nothing has enraptured me and never let go of my conscience quite like the Clockwork has, ever since my British friend Paul made me viddy it well back in the 9-5. I was thirsten like Ellen Burstyn for mo so I went out and read Alex Burgess’ novel of the same name. That read made me appreciate Kubrick’s vision all that more and den some, with some dim sum. I could go on and on, but the real purpose for this post is not to masturbate about the work as a whole in words, but to qwikly boast and toast how the Kubester was able to create an incredible dystopian future world using eggisting people, places, and things on a shoestring budget of 2.2 mil… + other useless info

Before Kubrick ever tackled the project, several different ideas were floating around as to how Alex and his Droogs should be cast. At one point girls in miniskirts, old-age pensioners, and even the effin The Rolling Stones were considered. Actually Kubes wasn’t the first to bring it to the screen, Warhol beat em too it 6 years before with his interpretation titled Vinyl. I have yet to see it, and it’s only available on DVD outside of the US, but werd has it that it’s not very good. The opening scene, where there’s a zoom back from the main protagonist, was later aped by Kubrick for the very first scene in his version. After Kubrick, there were a few knockoffs, like the spicy Italian flicks Clockwork Terror (aka Murder In a Blue World) and La Gang dell’Arancia Meccanica. And it was only a matter of time before a porn was born: A Clockwork Orgy [More on Vinyl | More on rip-offs]

Any scene that had an outtake or was cut from the final film was burned at Kubrick’s request. Therefore don’t be looking for an extended DVD anytime soon. However, these two pics survived. One shows the Droogs accosting an old man (who may have been Col Sanders) outside of a library, and the other is of their beloved car, the Durango 95, taking them home after a night of tomfoolery. [More]

Speaking of the Durango 95, it actually was a real car called the Probe 16. Only three were ever made and only two eggist to this day. The third one was rumored to have been burned, and this juss may be it. Maybe Alex should’ve used these hot wheels to impress chicks, not drive to their house and rape them.

Many of the films locations hactually did eggsist (only 4 were built), like the lake where Alex gets personal, the tunnels where old bums deserved to get a beat down, and the Ludivico Centre where Alex gets a tune up. Luckily some bloke created a site showing and telling you about said places and MORE. But I’m sure u already know this since Visit Where They Filmed A Clockwork Orange hasn’t left my ‘Things I Need’ list since it’s inception. Sadly, the Korova Milk Bar was a set, and not a real drinking hole. Even more sadly, some peoples in NYC had the grand idea to open a bar of the same name and it not only does it not capture the hotness of the Milk Bar as it rightly should (see statue below), but it also sucks ass. They are hoping to land investors to open one in Vegas. Good luck wit dat!!

Kube was an artist, and so was his wife Christiane (who appeared in his Paths of Glory). Together they found a bunch of stuff to fill the walls de Clockwork, like the flowery girly works of JH Lynch, the gonzo looking Hydraulic Reference turntables, the dancing Christs and penis sculptures of Herman Makkink, and even some of CK’s own work. Most bestest was the borrowing/stealing of Allen Jones’ women as table and chair sculptures and turning them into the tables at the ole Korova Milk Bar. [More]

Thirsteabag for more? Set aside an hour or so and thumb thru the thumbcredible Malcom McDowell Tribute site, for which most of the above info was thieved from

End of post BONUS: Italian dub version wav files… Pasta | Pesto | Naples | Chef Boyardee

You are now eggzitting a pointless posting…

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• Me thinks me teachers (pre-school thru IU) were on to something when the forced me to read books. I was never much of a reader (all free time was reserved for Nintendo, bags of Utz, and masuerbatin), and most of the time, the assignments were tres torturous (Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, and the mc-bane of my eggsistance, Johnny Tremain), but there were always dustin diamonds in the rough. For had it not been for them and their curriculums, Orwell’s 1984 and Ellison’s Invisible Man (which I 1st thought was about a professor turning himself invisible) may have never graced my list of all thyme besteteses bookages (next to Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice). Once the edu-ma-cation ended, I was left to my own (sexual torture) devices to figure out what kind of books I would be reading for the rest of my daze. After a few missteps, I’ve finally fingered out what words whet my eyeballs: books that became great movies, anything about a future dystopian society, and Kurt Vonnegut(witcha). Everything else I’ve peeped in between has been decent, but nothing too memorable. That is until, duhvs course, I read John Kennedy Toole’s UNRELIEVABLE novel to end all novels, A Confederacy of Dunces. I’m no literary textpert folks, but I’d say if you dig the alienation of Salinger and whimsy of Vonnegut, you’ll find yerself in good hands here with Toole’s prose. If I had a pen on me whilst turning the pages, I probably would have written ‘LOL’ all over my body 14 times over. Our protagonist and savior of the 20th century, Ignatius J Reilly was rated the 17th bestest character in fiction, but in my humble mumbler opinion, the brother is #1. Maybe cause I see a lot of myself in him. Cept I change my bedsheets and I’d never read philosophy. So if you haven’t had the pleasure of thumbing thru the pages, I’m truly, madly, deeply jealous of you. I wish I could read it again for the 1st time, but without some shock-therapy and a time machine, this is more of an impossibility than Oprah going off the air. My only wish is that they never make ‘an abortion’ of a movie from this fine work. I juss wouldn’t want anything to tarnish my newfoundland love for something that culminates with the final word ‘mustache’. Effin brills.

• White Stripes, as eggspected, expanded their upcoming tour. They, along with the Shins & Brendan Benson, will hit up Coney Island’s killer Cyclone Park on Zeptember 24 & 25. Which puts me in a pickle: dem shows or Austin City Limits? I know it sounds like a no brainer, but like Pops, gotta have my Stripes.

• The shark has been jumped, EW has a blog. Please head for the shores.

• Supergrass will drop their 5th joint, Road to Rouen, this August. While we wait, here’s a nifty Micky Quinn ani gif.

• A Da Vinci masterpiece once was lost, but now it’s found. [via Synapage]

• Eleanor’s dog once was lost, but now he’s found.

• If Jason Mulgrew is the most eligible bachelor in the blogosphere, what does that make me?

• Lohag sports the ‘Hungry Like A Wolf’ look for her b-day party.

• Lodes of free summer flicks for Bostonians

• I can’t decide who’d I rather bone

• What’s that flying from Paris’ pants?

• Michael Jackson’s trail woulda been a lot cooler if it ended like this

• Always late to the party, but anywho: watch Tom Cruise get jizzed on [totally SFW]

• But did u know that Tom killed Oprah? [b-ware of sound]

• Batman peoples, if you ever think of including Harley Quinn in a future flick, may I recommend Ms. Bellucci and her two amici…