When Bruno was announced as the follow-up, I was even less sure I wanted to see the film.  I expected more of the same just with a different character.  A few of the trailers looked funny.  I started to think about giving it a shot.  Betty at Wills told me that she had seen it and that it was incredibly funny.  I decided I would check it out when the DVD hit.  Unfortunately a lot of other DVDs hit at the same time, plus Best Buy had a sale on a bunch of season sets, so I left Bruno sitting on the shelf.

Last weekend I was looking through the DVDs at Wills and noticed a copy of Bruno in their DVDs.  For $2 I decided to give it a shot.  Last night I tossed it into the DVD player and gave it a viewing.  I liked it.  I liked it a lot.  While Bruno uses the same style of filmmaking that Borat used, the humor is completely different.  It doesn’t seem as mean-spirited.  I can’t quite put my finger on why it seems this way, but it does.  Most of Bruno’s targets are famous or want to be famous.  He doesn’t destroy a man’s antique shop or bring a bag of feces to the dinner table while insulting his host’s wife’s looks.  If he wants to trick Paula Abdul into sitting on Mexican laborers that are pretending to be furniture, that’s okay by me.  If he wants to see just how far a stage mom will go to get her baby a spot in a celebrity photo shoot, that’s fine as well.  These people were all willing to put their children in all sorts of danger just for the chance to be hired.  I enjoyed seeing their attitudes exposed.  Good for Bruno.

Of course the one thing that may sway opinion for a lot of viewers is the fact that Bruno is an openly gay character.  We see him engaged in (simulated) sexual activities with Diesel, his diminutive Asian lover, before he leaves for America and leaves Diesel behind.  There is male nudity.  Let me rephrase that, there is graphic male nudity.  If you thought the talking penis in The Groove Tube was outrageous, wait until you see the swinging, talking penis in Bruno.  And then there is the climax in a steel cage where the audience thinks they’re gonna see a bunch of men beating the hell out of one another and instead witness two grown men start ripping each other’s clothes off and roll around the cage kissing and hugging.  There is also a very funny and extremely graphic scene where Bruno visits a psychic and ends up performing a mime act that involves oral sex and a rim job on the unseen ghost of “Milli from Milli and Vanilli”.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but I couldn’t stop laughing either.

Bruno is not for everyone, but I got a good laugh out of it.  Equally enjoyable was the commentary track where star, Sacha Baron Cohen, and director, Larry Charles, discuss what it took to make the movie.  They are quite open about which scenes are scripted, which characters are actors, and which one celebrity was in on the joke during his scene.  I could probably sit down and watch this film again very easily.  I give Bruno 3 stars.

Prior to getting to this scene, we get an interestingly structured blaxploitation film.  The film starts with Charles on a ledge ready to commit suicide, and then fades back to before his arrest as a prostitute makes a deal with a client that takes place right in the middle of a police sting where the cops hope to arrest dope dealers Charles and his partner, N.D..  We watch as the dealers realize they are being watched by the cops and try to split.  One cop makes it a special point to try and capture Charles.  He misses, but another officer catches him.  The cop starts beating on Charles, and has to be pulled off by his partner.  Another flashback reveals that Charles had been having an affair with this cop’s wife.  The cop ends up beating Charles nearly to death and even attempts to cut off his manhood with a pocket knife.

Charles goes to court where he is railroaded and sent away to prison.  In prison he goes through a change and decides to give up pushing drugs.  When he gets released, he tries to get back with his girlfriend, but she is now a stripper and taking up with his ex-partner.  His partner explains that he owns her now, and proceeds to have Charles beaten up to drive the point home.  Charles ends up being befriended by the prostitute that was there at his arrest.  They move in together and he tries to get a job.  She quits hooking and becomes a waitress.  They try and make a life, but one night Charles sees the racist cop that beat him and starts his plan for revenge. 

Welcome Home, Brother Charles, or Soul Vengeance as the DVD is titled, is a pretty fun blaxploitation film.  The way the film plays with timelines to show us things before they happen or well after they have happened gives the film a different feel from most exploitation films.  And while I am not about to seek out the title music to put on my ipod, it works remarkably well with the feel of this film.  There are plenty of plot holes or things that don’t make sense in the film, but they actually add to its charms.  The fact that the cop’s wife doesn’t recognize Charles when he shows up at their house after getting out of jail and deciding to start getting some payback seems odd, but maybe she wasn’t really paying attention to his face.  The scene where she gets mesmerized or hypnotized by his manhood is priceless.

The IMDB lists Welcome Home, Brother Charles as 91 minutes, but the Xenon DVD lists the time as 87 minutes.  One person commented that the Soul Vengeance DVD had been edited which might explain the difference.  I did notice that there were several places the DVD seemed to skip, like a bad splice in the master had went through, but I just chalked that up to the film being a 35 year old exploitation film that was not released by a major studio.  If it is cut, I would love to see the uncut version.  There are some scenes in this film that have to be seen to be believed.   I give it 2 1/2 stars as it is.

As we move into the 30s the film looks at film noir and the use of double entendre to deal with sexual matters.  Since sex could not be shown, Hollywood sexualized the cigarette for example.  More time is spent on the post production code films of the 60s onward.  Plenty of scenes from Unfaithful are shown as are several scenes from Fatal Attraction.  Although Last Tango in Paris is mentioned, the infamous butter scene is not included. 

The film is a nice overview of sex in films, but I would have much preferred a more detailed decade by decade set than the fast paced 101 minutes the entirety of the 20th century is given in this film.  The movie also claims that now that “the genie is out of the bottle” in regards to sex in the movies, that it can never be put back in, but this ignores all the recent fights that have taken place between the MPAA and filmmakers.  Angel Heart was trimmed to get an R as was Eyes Wide Shut several years ago and there have been a string of other films that have faced the same battle.  The only place the genie has free reign seems to be on the DVD, and even then American audiences have yet to be given the uncut Eyes Wide Shut. 

I also would have liked to have seen more information on a few recent groundbreaking films like The Brown Bunny, Shortbus, and Scarlet Diva.  Unfortunately Shortbus was released 3 years after this documentary and The Brown Bunny came out the same year as the documentary.   As a “Cliff Notes” overview, I give Sex at 24 Frames Per Second 3 stars.  Enjoyable fluff, but not detailed enough to be truly educational.

So I have decided to scrap my original plan as well as the second plan to watch all the Best Picture winners in order and just take a more relaxed approach to watching and commenting on movies or other DVDs that I decide to watch.  Not as exciting perhaps, but hopefully I can live with that easier and find the time to actually watch something.

Action was a mean comedy.  It concerned egotistical movie producer Peter Dragon (Mohr), who has just suffered his first major flop.  The series chronicled Dragon’s attempt to make his next motion picture, Beverly Hills Gun Club.  Peter Dragon is not the kind of lovable sit com figure that people were looking for in their network comedies.  In the first scene of the first episode he verbally berates a member of the craft services crew for the studio commissary, telling him how worthless the man is and how superior he, Peter Dragon. is in comparison.  The man explains that Peter has just parked in his spot, a spot he earned as employee of the month.  When Peter asks him what he does on the lot, the man tells him and Peter asks if he got the employee of the month accolade for not peeing in the Cobb salads.  He then goes on to inform him how much money his last few films have made for the studio and tells the man who because of this he will park where ever he pleases because he is the employee of the f’ing century.  Very mean, very cruel, but very funny.  Unfortunately like Dabney Coleman’s Buffalo Bill before him, Peter Dragon was not embraced by America.

After the above exchange,we follow Peter to the premiere of his new film Slow Torture.  Along the way he and his driver, his Uncle Lonnie (Buddy Hackett) accidentally pick up a hooker (Illeana Douglas).  After the screening, Wendy, the hooker, is the only person willing to give Peter her true thoughts on the movie.  He immediately hires her as part of his production team.

Episode 2, Re-enter the Dragon, picks up with Dragon and company beginning production on Beverly Hills Gun Club.  The writer is told to start making changes to the script he wrote.  This leads into episode 3, Blood Money, where Peter attempts to secure the financing necessary from Bobby G. (Lee Arenberg), the very rich studio boss.  Bobby G. agrees to finance part of the film, but only if Peter can come up with an additional $50,000,000.  Writer Adam Rafkin (Jarrad Paul) is given more notes on changes to be made and continually gets ignored by Peter, who can’t even remember Adam’s name.

Episode 4, Blowhard, has Peter hiring his first star, Cole Ricardi.  Unfortunately Cole eventually confides in Peter that he is getting ready to come out of the closet.  Peter convinces him to keep his secret by lying, and telling Cole that he too is gay.  This leads to a friendly hug before Cole decides to give Peter a more intimate kind of affection.  Afterward Bobby G. tells Peter that he doesn’t want Cole in the lead role.  He wants a younger leading man, so Peter convinces Cole to go on and come out, breach his contract, and move to NY.

Episode 5, Mr. Dragon Goes to Washington, finds Peter testifying before Congress about violence in the movies.  After calling the congressman questioning him an old whore, Peter goes further and says that if violence in the movies is a cancer then he hopes the whole country gets cancer.  This leads to a PR expert, Connie Hunt (Amy Aquino) being called in to help reform Peter’s image.  Meanwhile a hotshot young agent tricks Adam Rafkin into leaving his agent of ten years and joining their agency.

Episode 6, Twelfth Step to Hell, features Peter looking for a new leading man.  He rejects Scott Wolf as too short, and he can’t get Tony Hawk to approach Leonardo DiCaprio with the project.  This leads to Peter pulling Holden Van Dorn (Fab Filippo) out of rehab to make the movie.  In episode 7, Dragon’s Blood, Peter finally signs a director, Titus Scroad (R. Lee Ermey) while dealing with Take Your Daughter To Work day.

Episode 8, Love Sucks, finds stress developing in Peter’s at home relationship with Wendy.  He gets more stress when he allows his assistant, Stuart Glazer (Jack Plotnick), to hire the lead actress without making her audition (or looking at a recent photo of her since she has put on 50 pounds).  Stress gets compounded when Holden goes off the wagon and is in danger of not being able to pass the insurance physical.

Episode 9, Strong Sexual Content, centers mostly on a rumor spreading about Peter and a rectally inserted frog.  Episode 10, Lights, Camera, Action!, takes place on the first day of shooting.  The crew experiences problem after problem.  A dove takes up residence on the set and ruins a take with its coos before Scroad shoots it, incurring the wrath of a humane society rep who is also disgusted by the lack of starring roles in features for birds of color, blackbirds like ravens and crows.  Holden has issues with one of his lines.  Then lead actress Reagan Lauren Busch (Jennifer Lyons) storms off because she doesn’t want the crew looking at her.  As the pressures continue to pile up, Peter has a heart attack, and as the ambulance rushes him to the hospital, he dies.  This was the last episode that aired on FOX.  They had failed to air Dragon’s Blood or Love Sucks, so this was their 8th and final episode.

Of course there were still 3 more episodes that had been filmed and did eventually see airtime on cable.  The first of those was Dead Man Floating which finds the film’s director drinking with Holden and then drowning in his own pool.  Once again Connie Hunt is called in to clean things up.  Episode 12, One Easy Piece, concerns Reagan’s difficulty in filming a sex scene.  In episode 13, The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess, Peter hires a new director, accidentally invests his own money in the picture, and then finds out that Rafkin had already sold the script to someone else under a different title.  Wendy agrees to return to her old profession for one night to seal a deal with the Rothstein brothers for all rights to the script.  After making the deal, she hands the legal papers to Peter and tells him that she is leaving to go live a clean life somewhere else.  Peter returns to the studio and the series comes to an end.

If the series had been successful, the plan was to actually shoot the movie and air it as part of the series.  It wasn’t and so Beverly Hills Gun Club was never made.

I had watched part of the final episode at some point when Action was on the air, but I hadn’t seen much of the series.  When I sat down and put in the first disc, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into.  What I got was one of the funniest shows ever on television, and one that very few people watched or remember.  I had looked at the DVD set many times at Circuit City, but never broke down and picked it up.  Eventually I found it at Big Lots for $3.  It is well worth the $3.  It is well worth the $20 to $25 that Circuit City was originally asking for it.  Because Peter Dragon is a mean character, he can get by with saying some of the meanest, yet funniest, things ever uttered on television.  And they got some stars to play along.  Salma Hayek plays herself and tears into Peter over the way he sexually harassed her when she was starting out.  Sandra Bullock plays herself and storms into Dragon’s office after finding out he had secretly made and sold a sex tape of her when they hooked up.  Other stars also pop up from time to time.

The regulars were all doing great work as well.  Buddy Hackett had some very funny moments.  Jay Mohr committed himself completely to the role of a huge egotistical asshole and gets some of the best lines because of it.  Even minor players like Arenberg’s Bobby G. and snooty restaurant maitre de, Asher played by John Vargas provide amazingly funny, if not particularly likable, characters.  The scene with secretly gay Bobby G. getting a proctology exam while discussing the movie with Peter and Wendy is hysterical, as is Asher’s dismissing of Peter after his film Slow Torture fails at the box office, or taunting him by asking if he would like some frog legs after Peter’s amphibian rumor hit the street.

I’m not surprised that Action failed, but I am sad that it did.  One of the writers, as well as the show’s story editor was the incredibly talented Will Forte who went on to SNL and MacGruber.

The 2 DVD set features a behind the scenes featurette as well as three commentaries.  The featurette isn’t bad, but could have been  longer and covered more about the way the show was aired out of order.  The commentary tracks are sadly pretty useless.  Instead of picking important episodes like the pilot, Lights, Camera, Action!, and Last Ride of the Elephant Princess to comment on, the DVD producers chose Love Sucks, Dead Man Floating, and One Easy Piece.  These are all fine episodes, but I want to hear about the first episode, the death of Peter Dragon, and the end of the series.  I would have also loved to have heard Will Forte in on the commentary.  As it is, I listened to the whole commentary on Love Sucks and about half of it on Dead Man Floating before I got fed up and gave up.  Mostly it was the producers, some of the writers, and the actor that portrayed the writer in the series sitting around quietly listening or laughing at the jokes.  There was very little behind the scenes info and half the time when someone would start to tell a juicy story they would get cut off by one of the others laughing about something in the show and derailing the conversation.  All I gathered was that Illeana Douglas may have been slightly difficult and that several members of the cast went on to play gays or lesbians in Queer as Folk or The L Word.

The show was executive produced by Joel Silver, and many of the things in the show were based on real incidents that happened to Joel or people he knew.  The series had a couple of other interesting things.  The theme was a piece by Warren Zevon called Even a Dog Can Shake Hands.  He had written an original piece for the series which the studio rejected.  The other interesting bit is that during the opening credits while Jay Mohn is sitting in a prop car talking on a cellphone, the entire current episode would play in the background through a colored filter and sped up.

I can’t recommend this series highly enough.  I loved it.  With the continuing storyline it’s a little difficult to remember where one episode ends and the next begins.  Episodes 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, and 10 are all perfect 10s.  3, 7, 8, 11, and 12 are probably 9s.  6 and 13 are possibly the weakest episodes, and they’re both 8s.  That gives the series overall a 9.3.

Police Squad! first aired in 1982 on ABC.  It was the TV show from the makers of Airplane!; David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams.  I remember watching the show, but I didn’t catch every episode.  Of course it only aired 4 episodes before it was yanked off the air.  Six episodes had been filmed and the final 2 were burned off in the summer by ABC and the show was laid to rest.  My friend Dana Grooms had taped all 6 episodes and I borrowed his tapes to watch them.  I liked them, but I wasn’t bowled over either.  When they came out with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad movie, I really wondered how they would make a decent movie out of the series.  Well they did, and they made two sequels as well. 

It seemed like forever before Police Squad! ever got the proper DVD release, but it finally did.  All 6 episodes are included with commentary on 3 of the episodes.  In addition there’s a gag reel, an interview with Leslie Nielsen, screen tests, and other bonuses.  I sat down Saturday morning and watched the first two episodes.  Today I watched the remaining 4 episodes and then rewatched the 3 with the commentary track playing. 

Police Squad! had several running gags including several in the opening title sequence.  Each episode opened with an announcer dramatically intoning, “Police Squad!  In color.”  This was followed by the introduction of the stars, Leslie Nielsen and Alan North, and then Rex Harrison as Abraham Lincoln.  Needless to say Lincoln never actually appeared in any of the episodes.  After Lincoln the celebrity guest would be announced and then quickly killed off before the credits were over.  The credits ended with the episode title being shown on the screen and the announcer reading a different title. 

Other running gags throughout the series included Frank Drebin (Nielsen) driving into something.  The original gag was that what he drove into would correspond to the episode number.  In episode 1 he hits one trash can.  In episode 3 he runs over three bikes.  Drebin’s visits to the police lab to talk with Mr. Olson (Ed Williams) who was always doing some sort of demented Mr. Wizard discussion with a young boy or girl, and his stop to talk with Johnny (William Duell) the shoeshine man who has info on everything were staples of all six episodes.  Each episode also ended with Drebin or his boss running down a list of all the criminals that had been put away in earlier episodes.  This joke would have worked better if the episodes had been aired in order.  Unlike Firefly and some other series, the DVD chooses to run them in broadcast order rather than their proper production order.  Finally the episodes alway ended with a fake freeze frame which would usually end up being broken by one of the cast members or a prop.

The first episode A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise) is probably the best of the six.  This episode was written and directed by Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, so it is the absolute closest to their Airplane! style of comedy.  The episode is packed with jokes of all sorts.  There were several I caught for the first time while rewatching this episode, and then when I watched it again with the commentary playing, I caught still another visual joke I had missed just the day before.  A couple of these jokes are so subtle, you really have to be watching your TV to get them.  Two of them work off of the initial joke in the episode where Drebin mentions that the city had recently had a large number of super models turning up unconscious and naked at local laundry mats.  Unfortunately, he adds, he had been assigned to investigate a bank robbery.  It’s a cute joke, but the follow up is perfection when Drebin states he was on his way to the crime scene from the other side of town where he had been doing his laundry.  Then later as he leaves Dr. Olson and goes to question a suspect, he states in voice over that he had been attending to a personal matter.  They don’t dwell on the line and they also don’t make a major point of making sure you see sitting in the seat beside Drebin is a basket of laundry.  If you’re paying attention, you can see the top of it, but the joke is not hammered out. 

The first episode also contains a bit of word play involving the names of several characters involved in the robbery. It’s classic ZAZ style humor and very funny.

The second episode, Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment), was written in part by Robert Wuhl and Tino Insana, and directed by Joe Dante.  It involves Drebin infiltrating the boxing world to take down a crime boss that is fixing fights.  It’s not a bad episode despite team ZAZ being involved only as production staff.

Episode 3 is The Butler Did It (A Bird in the Hand).  The teleplay was by Pat Proft, and the direction was by Georg Stanford Brown (who ironically was the guest star killed off at the start of episode #2).  This isn’t horrible, but even the Zuckers and Abrahams admit it’s not the most stellar of episodes pointing out how long it takes before you get to the first joke as a major flaw.  The episodes still has some pretty funny moments despite the slow start and an ending that goes on too long and then caps off with a horrible pun.

Revenge and Remorse (The Guilty Alibi) was the last episode aired during the initial run.  It involves someone blowing up judges and lawyers associated with incarcerating a professional bomber that has been released from prison.  It was written by Nancy Steen and Neil Thompson and directed by Paul Krasny.  Krasny had directed lots of TV cop shows, so he was able to give the episode a realistic feel of the genre it was spoofing.  The scenes of the bomber setting up his kills look just the way you would expect to see them on The Rookies or SWAT or any other crime show of the period.

After a four month break, ABC finally aired the last two episodes of Police Squad!.  Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood), another Steen and Thompson penned story gets direction from Reza Badiyi (another director of TV dramas).  This episode concerns a neighborhood being preyed on by a protection racket.  There are plenty of visual sight gags even if there are less of the pun heavy jokes you might expect from ZAZ.

The final episode of Police Squad! was Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh).  This was another Wuhl, Insana, Dante episode, but it also has the distinction of being probably the worst episode of the series.  A nightclub entertainer involved in drug trafficking is murdered, so Drebin goes undercover as an entertainer to take his place.  The scene with Drebin doing his act of jokes and songs goes on way too long and is more cringe worthy than funny.  The only thing I found funny in the whole bit was how they managed to destroy one joke in an effort to make it network friendly by substituting “hot tar” for “dog crap”.  Yes, there used to be a time when you couldn’t do poop jokes on television.  I was also surprised they got away with sneaking in the puchline, “I don’t think I can take 67 more of those” on an 8 PM show back in 1982.  I can only assume that standards didn’t know the rest of the joke.  It involves flatulence and a number two higher than the one mentioned on television.  Larry the Cable Guy has been known to tell it in his shows.

Testimony of Evil does have a few cute bits, and it has Dick Miller in a supporting role, so it’s not all bad.  It’s just the weakest of the six.  I would still rather watch it than any episode of Real Housewives, any Bridal shows, or a million other shows that have crossed the airwaves.  Even Robert Wuhl in the commentary seems to state that this is not his greatest work.  He continually talks about how he doesn’t remember this or he doesn’t remember that.  He also admits the Drebin stage performance goes on too long. 

So using a scale of 1 to 10, Police Squad! gets a 9 for episode 1, a 7 for episodes 2, 4, and 5, a 6 for episode 3 and a 4 for episode 6.  That averages out to a 6.66 which we will round up to a 7.  Amazingly if I had been asked to just rate the series, I would have probably given it an 8.

The writing also went through periods where it piled up.  I started trying to write my reviews as soon as I finished the movie.  Soon it became a case of “I’ll write it tomorrow”.  At one point I had about 14 posts waiting to be written.  Then at Thanksgiving I ended up getting behind again.  Almost an entire months worth of reviews got written over the last week as I struggled to catch up before today.

My reviews have changed as well.  When I started, I tried to cover it all.  I covered the plot, the acting, the technical aspects, the marketing, all the bonus features on the DVD, and the trailers.  I thought the Quarantine scale was a cute idea for the trailers, but then I started having second thoughts.  It seemed more annoying and silly rather than truly informative.  I did intend to mention the trailer for Blood Orgy of the She Devils simply because it managed to show almost the entire end of the movie in trying to find footage to make people want to see the movie.

There are several films I wish I had gotten to but failed to get in the DVD player before today.  Blue Sunshine is one I mentioned earlier, but two others were Birddog and Kicking Bird, the other two films from Kelley Baker.  I loved Kelley’s short films and The Gas Cafe.  He was nice enough to send me The Gas Cafe and Birddog, but I kept overlooking Birddog when I would scan the DVDs for something to watch.  I do plan to watch both of those films this next year as well as Blue Sunshine and Blind Beast Vs. Killer Dwarf, but the DVD every day ends today.  I really had no idea how time consuming this project would be.

So what is on my agenda for 2011?  I have two new projects in mind.  The first one starts tomorrow and it involves television.  In addition to all the movies I have on DVD, I also have lots of different box sets of television shows.  I’m going to start with some one season wonders like Action, The Tick, Wonderfalls, etc. and watch the entire runs in order.  The big difference is I won’t be trying to watch a disc every day, or a season every week, or any sort of structured viewing plan.  With a show like Stella, I might run through the whole show in one afternoon.  On a show like Angel with 5 seasons and hour long episodes, it might be one episode tonight, three tomorrow, none the next day.  It’s hard to say how I might break it down.  That’s another reason I plan to start with shorter running series first.

My second project starts on Sunday.  Since I am off every Sunday, I plan to watch the Academy Award winning best pictures in chronological order.  Some of them, like Wings, may have to be on VHS, and I may have to skip a few if I don’t have them.  At the moment I’m okay until 1937 when I am missing The Life of Emile Zola.  I am also considering whether to include Sunrise which I recorded off of TCM and was also named Best Picture in 1929 along with Wings.  One was Best Picture, Production and the other was Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production.  On the one hand Wings is the film officially considered as the Best Picture.  On the other hand this would be a chance to catch a film I have not seen and would mean I could wait another week before suffering through Broadway Melody again.

I do plan to also come back and do write ups on other films and DVDs that I watch.  I’m also thinking about going back through the DVDs I’ve watched over the past year and doing a top 10 list.  The problem is I’m not sure I could limit it to 10.  There have been some very pleasant surprises like Kelley Baker Angry Filmmaker Inc., The Onion Movie, The Sasquatch Gang, Netherbeast Incorporated, and Pontypool just to name a few that jump to mind. 

For those of you that have stuck with me throughout the whole year, thanks.  I hope you’ll stick around and check out what I do next year.  I also want to send a thank you out to Big Lots for helping to stock my DVD collection with oddities and classics while bleeding my wallet dry.  It wouldn’t be fair to end this project without also sending out huge thanks to Betty, Connie, Mark and all the other people at Will Jewelry and Loan as well as Corey and the crew at KV Fine Jewelry and Loan.  These guys watch out for product that they think I’ll like and put up with my endless layaways.  Today the DVD collection sits at 5944 DVDs because of the discs these fine people have sold me.  I’d also like to think everyone that took the time to comment on a post they read.  My old high school buddy Carl Clinton has been there since one of the very first posts and I appreciate that.  I also want to offer special thanks to Kelley Baker and Gorman Brechard.  Both of these men are professionals in the business, but they both took the time to let me know they had read what I had written about their work.  These guys are two of the great ones in my book.  Finally I have to give thanks to my wife, my daughter, my son, and his fiancée.  The kids have put up with me running them off the television so I could watch a DVD or running them off the computer so I could write a review, sometimes they experienced both in the same night.  My wife put up with that as well, but she also let me indulge my DVD obsession at the pawn shops and Big Lots.  She carried lists and a PDA to try and keep me from duplicating a bunch of titles.  She never once said a bad word or negative remark about this year long crazy project of mine.  She has been my support and I love her for it.  Plus she crocheted me a really cool armadillo toboggan for Christmas.

Happy New Year!

The Quiet Man is a romance.  It is not a western.  Surprise.  The Quiet Man tells the story of an Irish-born American named Sean Thornton (John Wayne) who moves back to Ireland after an accident that results in the death of a fellow boxer.  Thornton vows to never fight again and to return to his ancestral home and settle down.  He meets a young lady, Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara), and falls in love.  Unfortunately her brother has a grudge against Thornton and refuses to allow him to court his sister.  Through trickery he eventually agrees and the couple is wed, but at the wedding the scam is revealed and he refuses to pay up Mary Kate’s dowry.  He tries to start a fight with Thornton, but fails.  Mary Kate tries to force her husband into demanding her dowry, and when he refuses, she decides he is a coward and tries to leave him.  At that Sean rides down to the train station, drags Mary Kate to her brother’s place and demands the dowry.  This then leads into a huge fight that Sean finally wins.  By the end of the fight both men have grown to like and respect the other and the film ends with the families at peace.

I first got introduced to The Quiet Man when Steven Spielberg used clips from it in E.T..  I never really gave it a lot of thought until a friend mentioned how much he loved it.  I knew I had the DVD in my collection, but I had never gotten around to watching it.  Then I started this project.

So what did I think of The Quiet Man?  I think I was expecting too much.  I had been told by so many people how wonderful this movie was, that I had my expectations set way too high.  I am sure that in a few days as I reflect back on it, my opinion will change.  Right now all I am seeing clearly are the flaws.  Just as my television was having trouble with the saturated colors of Shock Treatment, it seemed to have issues with the colors of The Quiet Man as well as being seemingly too dark in places.  Not the films fault, but it lessens the viewing experience.  I also have some issues with the casual way women are pulled, dragged, shoved, pushed and ordered around.  I know this film was made back in 1952, but this still is jarring to me.  I also keep trying to find a deeper plot to explain the need for a 129 minute running time.  I just couldn’t fit my head around some of the problems they had.  Who cares if she didn’t get her dowry?  You got the man you loved.  Be happy and quit wanting him to fight your brother. 

I wish I had watched a few more John Ford films over the past year, but it’s too late now.  I had seen Stagecoach and really liked it, but The Quiet Man let me down.  I give it 2 1/2 stars at the moment.  It should be higher in a week or so, or with a second viewing.

In 2004 Universal released a remake of Dawn of the Dead.  I missed it on its initial run, but as luck would have it, I was working in Beckley and the film was playing at the $1 theater.  I paid for my ticket and was very impressed.  When the DVD came out, I bought the Widescreen Unrated Director’s Cut with the cardboard slipcover.  This was followed by the R rated version in Full Screen from Wills.  Then I went looking on eBay.  I got the region 2 edition from England, the limited 2 disc version that was released with a bonus disc when the DVD was first released in some locations, and several editions that may be official Asian releases, but may be bootlegs.  I especially love one version I got that lists the rating as PG-13.  It’s almost as good as the copy of American Pie 2 that I got where the box makes the movie sound like a political uprising instead of a teen sex comedy.  The last copy of Dawn of the Dead (2004) I added to my collection was one in Spanish that I found at Big Lots for $3.  That brings my total copies of the remake to 8.

As much as I love the original, I think I love the remake equally well.  I love the cast.  I especially love the cameos by some of the original guys from Dawn; Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Tom Savini.  Zack Snyder pulled off a rare feat by making such a wonderful film.  When I heard that he was doing Watchmen, I felt sure he would do the movie proud.  I was not let down there either.

Dawn of the Dead is just as exciting watching it for the fourth or fifth time as it was the very first time.  I have to give it 4 stars.  As further proof of my fan love for this movie in both of its incarnations, after my wife and I had been married for about a year and a half, I got a vacation.  We decided to go to Monroeville, PA so that I could visit the Dawn of the Dead shopping mall.  The wife was 7 months pregnant.  I had a cold.  We had no map, but had gotten vague directions from a map that was on the side of a trashcan at her parents’ house.  We were driving a white car in fog that was so thick that truckers were pulling over.  We stopping at a rest area right inside Pennsylvania, and I found a better map.  A short time later we saw the sign “Now entering Monroeville”.  The wife looked at me and asked, “Now, do you think you’ll be able to find the shopping mall?”  No sooner had the words left her mouth than a sign appeared exclaiming, “Entrance Monroeville Shopping Mall”.  I looked back at her and said, “Yeah, I think I can handle it.”

Edmond tells the story of Edmond Burke (Macy) who has an appointment rescheduled at work and decides to stop off and have his fortune told by a tarot card reader.  The old woman tells him he is not where he is supposed to be and he decides at that moment to radically alter his life.  He tells his wife he is leaving her and heads out to a bar.  There he meets Joe Mantegna who starts to discuss his racial viewpoint in a decidedly non PC manner.  He gives Macy a card and sends him off to a high-end gentleman’s club for the first time.  While a girl dances around topless on the stage, Denise Richards tries to talk him into buying her a drink and going with her to the back of the club.  When he is told the price of the “drink” he complains that it is too much and tries to barter down.  He’s not opposed to paying the girl for her services, but he doesn’t like the idea of paying half of that money to the management.  Needless to say he gets tossed out.

Edmond’s next stop is a sleazy peep show that promises totally nude girls.  He is led to a booth where a stripper (Bai Ling) tells him to put $10 in the slot and she’ll make him feel good.  He only has a $20 bill, so she tells him she’ll give him change.  He keeps trying to figure out how to make the glass partition rise so that the dancer can touch him, and she keeps telling him to “take your dick out”.  He also wants his $10 back.  She finally shoves a $10 bill back through the slot and drops the metal panel that covers the glass pane as Edmond storms out unfulfilled once again. 

The rest of the first half of the film covers Edmond’s other tries to get laid or get money from a 3 card Monte dealer and a pawn shop.  At the 3 card Monte table, Edmond ends up getting mugged and at the pawn shop, Edmond purchases a knife with a brass knuckle style handle.  When he is next taken advantage of by a smooth talking pimp that tries to rob him, Edmond has a switch flipped inside and savagely beats, slashes and kicks the man while letting spew some of the darkest racially motivated insults I have seen in a movie.  Edmond feels do alive after this that he goes to a restaurant and picks up a young waitress played by Julia Stiles.  After taking her back to her apartment and having sex with her, he regales her with the story of how he took out the pimp.  He and the waitress then discuss their mutual hatred for homosexuals.  The girl then starts talking about being an actress.  When Edmond tells her that if she hasn’t acted professionally she is not an actress, but needs to say “I am a waitress”, she gets upset.  Tensions escalate and Edmond ends up using his knife and killing her while screaming at her and calling her a bitch.

Shortly after this Edmond has another verbal altercation with a lady who ends up reporting him to the cops and claiming he tried to rape her.  The cops find the knife and link him to the murder of the waitress.  The last part of the movie finds Edmond in jail and making even more changes in his life and the way he feels about society.

Edmond is not the kind of film I expect from Stuart Gordon who I mostly know from his Lovecraft inspired horror films, but he does a decent job showing us Edmond’s descent into the underbelly of the city.  Mamet is not up to the level of Glengarry Glen Ross with his writing here in my opinion, but William H. Macy does a terrific job acting.  We believe Edmond every step of the way.  He plays him as a character who is swept along and influenced by other things.  He knows where the bad places are in town, but has no idea what to do once he gets there.  If there is a reason to watch Edmond, William H. Macy is that reason.

Overall it’s not a horrible film, but it’s not a particularly great film either.  Once Edmond gets put in jail, it felt like the film lost its footing and didn’t know how to continue the tone of the first half of the film.  Macy gives a 4 star performance.  Unfortunately, Edmond is only a 2 1/2 star film.