RazorFine Review - Media Under the Knife

A Life-Altering Voodoo Mind Trip with Steve-O and God

Tim Dodd / May 25, 2005 / Uncategorized

ZolarCzakl takes a sip of magic brew and contemplates his place in the universe

Imagine a black-magic voodoo priest whipping up a blood-tinted bubbling cauldron of mystical potion. He’s standing there, outside at night at some sort of voodoo camp and he’s all decked out in the feathers and the long things hanging from his hair and he’s even got a bone through his nose. He’s chanting in an ancient language while carefully placing an array of sketchy items into the brew: pieces of bats, assorted insects, cups of various blood-like substances, and even a few powders (which he takes a snort of from time to time). When the ingredients have all been well mixed and the voodoo soup simmers for just the right amount of time, the chanting reaches an orgiastic climax as the priest yells the magic incantation and he gets the crazy eyes, full of fire and full of death.
He raises a clay cup of the heated brew to the sky and speaks one final incantation, and for just a quick moment the thousands of visible stars in the sky seem to shift ever so slightly. You are standing a few feet in front of him, taking all of this in. You see the stars do their thing but try not to be freaked out. You feel a strange rumbling in the ground but think it’s maybe just that Poncho’s burrito you somewhat foolishly ate for dinner. Then the priest, whose name is Benny, steps forward and brings the cup close to your face, right up to your now trembling lips. His crazy-eyed stare has you captive and you have no choice but to ingest a mouthful of the rather warm and truly horrible-tasting brew… then comes the biggest change you’ve ever experienced in your life.
Suddenly you’re flying high above the ground, soaring over houses and Vietnamese restaurants that you know and adore. Time seems to have stopped, for there is no motion on the ground. Everything and everyone are frozen in their tracks, some people in mid-walk on the sidewalks, others in their cars with the lights on and the exhaust streaming from the tailpipes. You now exist outside time and outside the laws of physics, soaring high straight into the mind of what you can only imagine is God.
After flying around in a daze for what seems like quite a while (time is non-existent at this point so you don’t really have much of a concept of it) you feel very overwhelmed and find yourself flying into a glowing white room high up in the clouds. You arrive at the room and float into a very regal-looking but rather comfortable reclining chair. It takes a few moments for you to collect yourself and regain your wits, but once you do you look around the room and see that there is a rather nice widescreen television set suspended in front of you. To the right of your recliner is a TV tray with a bitchin’ assortment of snacks and drinks. To the left is another stand with a remote control on it. A loud booming voice erupts in your eardrums and you nearly leap from your bones. It says, “Watch now as the secrets of all the universe are revealed to you oh special one, for you have been chosen to taste of the holy voodoo brew and be imparted with my perfect knowledge so you can spread the word of true enlightenment to all your fellow man.”
The lights dim, the remote floats into your sweaty hand, and you instinctively press play as the television comes to life.

What you see for the next three hours is a close-cropped dark-haired goofball doing a plethora of shitty and retarded things to himself and to others. He snorts salt into his nasal cavities, takes a shot of tequila and has someone from the audience squeeze a lime into his eyes. He has people staple dollar bills to his shirtless torso and arms. He takes broken glass, slashes his tongue, chews up the glass and swallows it. He goes to a used car lot and pisses himself while trying to test-drive a car. He dresses up in a funny wig and jogging suit (the ass of which he has filled with chocolate pudding) and runs around asking people if he can use their bathroom. He wraps his legs with saran wrap and hires a hooker to pee on him. He climbs up onto the roof of a hotel and jumps into the pool. He and his buddies repeatedly smash their heads into a pumpkin in an attempt to break it. He loads his head with hairspray and has a friend spit fire onto his hair, singing it and burning his face. He dresses up like a clown, gets drunk, vomits a lot, goes to a bar, and gets the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of rednecks. He walks around in a park on stilts, juggling and entertaining families until he falls over and acts like he’s been seriously injured. He dresses in that funny wig and half of the jogging suit and dances around the city while listening to music. He dresses in a suit and hangs out at a train stop, acting like a lunatic until the cops show up. Him and his buddies rub down a barely-clothed crack whore’s ass with Vaseline and light her ass on fire as he skateboards over it. He also balances a rather large knife on his nose.
And all of this only takes place in the first half-hour!
By this point your mind is so overloaded with these images that you realize that your consciousness has forever been altered. After watching such disturbingly banal acts with no hint of social value, not even to mention any real hint of true entertainment, you have reached an almost Zen-like state. Millions of non-sequiturs pop into your mind. Random thoughts, complex questions and juvenile, ridiculous situations all fight for space in your mind and try to find their proper place in the universe. As the voodoo stew has melted your brain into a primordial soup, only one thing snaps you out of this corpse-like sleep of stupidity: the voice of God.
“What you have seen is a sampling of what humanity truly has to offer from this point in history until the end of mankind, which will be in 34,262 years, but that doesn’t really mean anything to you… anyway, now that you have been imparted with this very important information, you must make a choice.
“You must either
1) Accept that humans are silly, stupid, selfish, gross, idiotic, hurtful, mean, nasty, evil, and wasteful and not let it eat you up inside… be ok with it… let all of your bad feelings toward people and society go… just be happy, live your life, and don’t be so gosh-darn angry all the time, or
2) Kill yourself.
God out.”
At precisely this moment you are transported to a ledge outside a very tall building. You have to stand up straight against the side of the building in order not to go tumbling over the edge to your death. This is no longer a weird dream – this is real. To your left you see an open window, which you can easily crawl into and be safe. You’re about to make your move then your mind is filled with images of that close-cropped, dark haired goofball getting peed on by a hooker…

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The Longest Yard: Lockdown Edition

Aaron / May 23, 2005 / Home Video

As with most sports films, you know how the final game ends up. What makes it such a treat is how director Robert Aldrich gets you there. The Longest Yard jumps from comedy to sports film to drama with equal ease, and the level of cynicism and bleakness inside each jumps out with alarming intensity. This is the film for football fans, and anyone interested in catching the upcoming Adam Sandler remake should skip the theater and just give the far superior original a go.

The Longest Yard: Lockdown Edition
4 & 1/2 Stars

Burt is dead sexy

When people think of the great sports movies, football-themed films are always conspicuously absent from the list. Baseball, of course, rules the genre, with basketball and golf taking up the next two slots. So why, when football is such a massive part of American sports, are there no great movies about it? Well, to tell the truth, there is a great football movie, and no it’s not Any Given Sunday or Rudy. It’s the 1974 Burt Reynolds classic, The Longest Yard.

Seriously. Why? Well for one, it’s just a great movie. Man vs. The Man. Underdogs bucking authority for one last shot at dignity and pride. Great stuff, that. But most importantly it’s the football. The last 1/3 rd of The Longest Yard is the game between the Burt Reynolds led convicts and the prison guards and, if you took out the talky bits, it’s as if you’re watching a semi-pro game. It moves like a football game, and boy does it hit like one. They didn’t pull any punches filming this, and that shows up on the screen. Having the bulk of the teams comprised of ex football pros certainly makes it feel all the more real.

The gist of the story is this: former All Pro quarterback Paul Crewe hasn’t played a game since he was kicked out of the NFL for points shaving. Fed up with his kept life, he steals his gal’s car, tears through the city in a high speed chase, dumps the car in the bay, and then beats up two cops. Needless to say, he goes to jail. He ends up in Citrus State Prison, where the warden (a phenomenal Eddie Albert) has pulled some strings to bring the ex NFL great to his little facility in the hopes that Crewe will coach his guards’ semi-pro team to a national championship. Crewe refuses to help, but eventually agrees to lead a team of convicts against the guards in an exhibition match which Albert thinks will be an easy win for his law-lovin’ boys.

Boy, is he wrong. Crewe collects an assortment of violent offenders and near-sociopaths that manage to come together for their own pride, dignity, and a shot at crippling the guards who torment them every day.

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Ludicrous Hullabulloo

Alan Rapp / May 23, 2005 / Home Video

What ever happened to Michael Keaton’s career? Seriously folks, I’m asking you, the guy was Batman for cris’sake! I can only assume that his latest film, White Noise, is a very loud and extremely painful cry for help from a guy who looks to be about one year away from doing gay porn. I personally do not believe in EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon), contacting dead people through the static in your television, and I have to say the movie only made me sorry for those that do, which I sincerely doubt if that was the director’s objective.

White Noise
1/2 Star

Jonathon Rivers (Keaton) is a successful architect with a young son and a hot new second wife (Chandra West) who mysteriously disappears one night on her way home. Paranormal expert Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) approaches Rivers and explains his wife is dead and trying to contact him through his television set. At first Rivers is skeptical, but after his wife turns up dead, rather than going to the police, he buys into the guy’s rather flimsy story with ridiculous speed, never looking back. He joins with Price and Sarah Tate (Deborah Kara Unger), a young woman who is trying to reach her dead fiance, into discovering what messages his wife is trying to send him from beyond the grave.

Rivers becomes increasingly obsessed after hearing his wife on a tape Price plays for him; he buys thousands of dollars of computer equipment, recording equipment, television monitors, and VCRs to spend 20 hours a day recording looking for messages from his wife. He totally ignores his job and his son, sending him off to live with his ex-wife. After several attempts he discovers his wife always comes to contact him through the white noise at exactly 2:30 (am or pm seems to not matter to ghosts). In her message she seems to warn him against some danger.

Along with seeing his wife he also finds images of people in danger which he later discovers are people still alive that he has a chance to save if he follows the clues his wife has given him (I can’t believe I watched this whole movie!). Also in the static are three mysterious strangers that have some stake or control in all of this very odd tale. I won’t tell you anymore about them, not because there’s any kind of plot twist, but simply because that’s as far as these guys were developed. Even from watching the director’s commentary I was unable to learn anything of interest about them, except that the director thought they were “really cool.”

The extras include 3 documentaries about EVP presented by the experts in the field. As laughable as the movie is it looks sullen compared to these people walking around hotel rooms with microphones asking ghosts to talk to them. One of the extras even shows you how you to can record voices from white noise, giving you lists of the equipment you will need and a nice step by step how to guide on how to record. After watching moments of these extras I seriously wondered whether the makers of this DVD think EVP is complete crap and used this opportunity to let these people show how laughable their “science” is.

Also included are a commentary track with director Geoffrey Sax and Keaton which gives some nice shooting and production stories, but does nothing to explain this stupid, stupid script. Of course a DVD wouldn’t be complete with out some useless deleted scenes with optional commentary by the director on why they weren’t worthy to be included in this gem of a movie. Also included are some previews to movies you could be watching rather than this one.
As for the sound and picture quality they are what you would expect from a major studio DVD, with the optional different languages and subtitles.

The problems in the movie are too numerous to go into much detail, but here are a few. The movie never explains how people still alive are contacting Keaton’s character through the white noise that only the dead can use (let alone how the dead are doing it). The three odd gentlemen/creatures are never developed nor explained, nor is the reason why all contact happens at exactly 2:30. Rivers never once stops to consider he is being hustled, part of an elaborate hoax, or is going insane, all much better explanations for what happens than any given in the movie. The police never think it’s suspicious when Keaton keeps ending up finding dead bodies, or when the people helping him turn up dead or injured.
The documentaries are unintentionally laugh out loud funny if you can manage to sit through them. The seriousness that these people take to finding sounds in radio waves or television signals is just so bizarre you can only chuckle.

I can’t really recommend this to anyone; if you believe in EVP you won’t after watching this, and if you don’t you will just see this experience as a terrible waste of time.

One final note, the movie begins with a quote from Thomas Edison, who I honestly believe would have electrocuted himself on his first light bulb if he knew his name would ever be associated to such…….noise.

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Will Ferrell shoots….and kinda scores

Aaron / May 13, 2005 / Movie Reviews

Kicking & Screaming won’t take any space on the ‘great sports films’ rack, but it should provide families with some easy laughs and some rainy day diversions. And if nothing else, it’ll provide moviegoers with the all important tetherball fix we’ve so desperately been lacking.

Kicking & Sreaming
2 & 1/2 Stars

Will Ferrell doesn’t exactly break cinematic ground with Kicking & Screaming, but as yet another entry in the ‘kid sports’ genre, it’s certainly a little unique. Not nearly as blue-collar and sarcastic as The Bad News Bears (which gets its own update this summer from Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thorton), K&S provides a lot of unexpected laughs.

Scream, Dracula, scream!

Ferrell plays a meek and embittered vitamin supplement store owner who just can’t measure up to his hyper-competitive dad (Robert Duvall), who just happens to coach the little league soccer team his son plays on. After Duvall trades Ferrell’s son to another team, Phil decides to coach the perennial losers in an effort to one-up his old man. Phil brings in the help of Mike Ditka, who has been warring with his dad for years, to get his coaching skills up to par. By definition and federal mandate, hilarity then ensues.

Put rather simply, Kicking & Screaming is The Mighty Ducks Play Soccer; same idea, same ‘coach becomes win-obsessed jerk’, and same hokey finale. Except that in this version, the kids are really nothing more than afterthoughts to the comedic force of Will Ferrell, who almost assuredly ad-libbed a good portion of his performance. You’ll walk out of this movie remembering only Will Ferrell and Mike Ditka (who just steals every scene he’s in).

There are some inspired moments with Ditka and Duvall, who bring a gleeful malice to their interactions as bickering neighbors, especially to their confrontation over who’s the better coach, but in the end this is Will’s show. No one does over-the-top reactions like Ferrell, and his moments of lunacy are enough to make you forget just how flimsy the rest of the film is. It’ll be interesting to see how this effects his steamroller momentum in Hollywood, but I can’t imagine it’ll put too much of a dent in it. Judging from the audience of soccer kids at the screening, it’ll be a hit with the younger crowd. After all, there’s nothing kids like more than seeing adults make fools of themselves, and Ferrell is blissfully unafraid to be a complete buffoon.

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Danny the Dog

Aaron / May 13, 2005 / Movie Reviews

Action fans should be sated by the sheer brutality, and less-visceral seeking filmgoers should find a lot to enjoy with the film’s emotional heart, but Li has a long way to go before he can be judged by his American output. Overall, Unleashed should provide action fans with some solid, if fleeting, summer enjoyment.

Unleashed
2 & 1/2 Stars

Jet Li, unlike Jackie Chan, hasn’t had a solid American release since his journey to our silver screen, and frankly he’s due. While he doesn’t possess the charisma or easy charm of some of his Asian ambassador co-horts, Jet Li’s sheer physical prowess and humble attitude should translate easily with American audiences. Sadly, Unleashed doesn’t exactly live up to the potential he’s shown. Fortunately, it’s a sight better than previous efforts, if only due to the attention and care brought to the film by writer/producer Luc Besson, and co-stars Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins.

Jet Li says “Arf”

The premise of Unleashed is unique enough to set it apart from the rest of the ‘unwilling hero’ genre that chokes the action film market. Li stars as Danny, a vicious and unstoppable killer whose been trained to be little more than an attack dog by his low-level mob owner/uncle Bob Hoskins. Until he’s let loose on whatever target Hoskins has picked, Danny is a meek man-child who doesn’t understand the world around him, but instinctively longs for a better life than the one he’s living. After an accident, Danny finds his way to Morgan Freeman’s Sam, a blind piano tuner who lives with his teenage daughter Victoria (Kerry Condon). Sam & Victoria tend to Danny’s wounds both physical and psychological, and try to get him accustomed to the world at large, but Danny’s old life comes back to haunt him as Bob Hoskins relentlessly tries to get back his most prized possession.

In all actuality, were you to replace Li with Van Damme, Speakman, Seagal, or any other martial arts star, this film’s plot could be easily switched with any number of late 80’s / early 90’s fight flicks. Tortured hero finds peace only to be dragged back into a life they’ve desperately tried to escape? That’s about as original as a sunrise, but what sets Unleashed apart is the care paid to Danny’s rehabilitation, and the respectability lent the film by Freeman. (As an aside, what is it with African-American Oscar winners going for an easy action flick as soon as the Oscar is in their hand? Halle Berry did it with Die Another Day, Jamie Foxx is starring in a Top Gun-meets-War Games action flick (Stealth) this summer, and Lou Gossett, Jr. went from Officer & A Gentleman to Jaws 3-D.) Freeman’s performance lends the 2nd Act of Unleashed more respectability than it probably deserves, but for an action film this piece manages to carve out an emotional core that is sorely lack from similar efforts, which makes the 3rd Acts descent into type all the more disappointing. But until that point, the interaction between Danny and his newfound family is both endearing and uncommon, if a little creepy. Victoria’s less than platonic interest in Danny is a bit baffling, and none too uncomfortable upon reflection.

The action sequences are among the best Jet Li has been able to produce with an American studio, which might be due to the involvement of Yuen Woo-Ping, the famed fight choreographer. Director Louis Leterrier finds a perfect balance of brutality and grace in Li’s physical performance, and let’s the camera pull back enough to enjoy the sheer visceral impact of every kick, punch, head-butt, and body slam. To be sure there’s no shortage of jump cuts and quick edits, but more than not the camera lingers on every hit, which drives home just how impressive Jet Li remains, even at the age of 43. Similarly, the camera work on Unleashed is above the norm, with Luc Besson’s influence seeping through in every frame with subdued color work and striking camera movement. Had a little bit more care been shown in how the last act played out, Unleashed might have been able to really distinguish itself from the current slate of punch-out films, but as it is Li will have to settle for better than average.

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