Vice Presidents

Ford: pardon's Nixon and loses to Carter.

Bush: wins war against a dumpy little nobody and loses to Clinton.

Gore: Comes off as smart during VP-hood but reverts to Og the Cave man in Florida.

Andrew Johnson: Follows assasinated Lincoln and is Impeached.

Lyndon Johnson: Follows assasinated Kennedy and wins big against Goldwater, but blows great society with Vietnam.

Truman: Okay he's a nice guy and a straight shooter but his lack of attention to the details of the founding of Isreal has lead to fifty years of the crap that is going on over there. And bombing Nagasaki!? Not to mention the 50,000 troops killed in Korea.

Probably the best VP to take the helm from a President was Theodore Roosevelt. But even he gave us a legacy of overseas intervention that is dubious at best. He almost got that thrid term as an independant. What is it with them Roosevelts?

Usually VP's make lousy Presidents or, at the very least, one-termers. Early on it was the secretary of state that was slated to follow his boss. But look at ol' John Adams. What did his federalists contribute? He gave us the Alien Sedition Act making it a federal crime to criticize the government. Thankfully that dead waterbuffalo was repealed.

Even when they come back form the dead they usually cause problems. Look at Nixon, the zombie of American politics. For a while it looked as though not even a silver bullet could rid the nation of that dude.

I don't think we should allow members of the current Executive Branch the ability to run for office for at least eight years after their term ends. Frank Roosevelt hadn't been in an administration since he was secretary of the Navy under Wilson.

Washington...well...there was no administration for him to follow.
Lincoln was not a part of any administration.
Jefferson: Okay so this guy was minister plenipotentiary to France but he was Jefferson. And he didn't have an easy time either.
Andrew Jackson was just a war hero.
Ike: Just another war hero.
Grant: war hero
TR: yeah he was a VP but he was also a war hero

X-Men

As far as I can tell this movie is totally historically accurate. Interesting effects, though I feel sorry for the poor bastards in any effects lab. No effect is cool anymore. They're so predictable that your brain just says "oh thats an effect...now what" This movie is okay. I guess I give it a 6. One of the better comic book movies.

Gladiator

[6]

Okay so this is a remake...sort of:
1964 "Fall of the Roman Empire" gets an 8

This movie starts out with the final vitory of Marcus Aurelius over the germans and the untimely death of Marcus Aurelius. The hero of this film is the general Livius. Livius vows to carry out Aurelius' wishes to reform the empire. Commodus shows up and fucks things up and the two end up in a duel in Rome, surrounded by praetorian gard. Commodus dies as does Livius. In 1964 things are more pragmatic for after the duel a new emperor is proclaimed and the so goes rome. The art direction for the 1964 flick is awsome and is probably better than Gladiator.

Truth: Commodus was chosen by his father to succeed. Commodus was as much a fighter as his father and had taken part in numerous battles. He was not the eldest of Marcus' sons but he was the only one left alive at the time of his father's death. At nineteen he was not very experienced at statecraft. He fell victem to his position and, like a later Nero, let the power go to his head. He did fight many gladiators and killed all of them. He was a powerful warrior but rather simple minded. He was murdered but not by a gladiator . He was drowned in his bath tub by a hired assasin. Despite his murder he was a very popular emperor. The commoners loved him. The Senators hated him. His reign signified the end of the golden age of the Roman Empire. The five good emperors that preceeded him spanned 84 years. I think there was around a 25 or 30 in the next 100 years. I would fault Marcus Aurelius for this. He, alone of the five good Emperors, chose his son to succeed him.

The movie: Rome never looked so good. Nice costumes, cool fight scenes, good acting, awe the glory of Rome! I just wish the story was more interesting. Once I new it was a remake I new the end. A few months back I read the Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus and there is so much material in that book that would make a great movie....oh yeah...I forgot....They made I Claudius. But still there is a lot that could be done with that bombastic, hauty, splendid Empire.

President Who?

I don't want to tell you who to vote for but just let me say that if you want:

Drilling in the arctic.
No increase in the minimum wage.
No tax cut.
Increased regulation against organized labor.
No progress on national healthcare.
No progress on inner city poverty.
No attention payed to developing alternative fuels.
Money taken away from public education and given to the rich to offset their private ed costs.
No reform of campaign finance laws.
No vision of national community IN short no leadership.

Then, by all means, vote for Ralph Nader.

I am voting for Gore. Why? Well the answer is clear. Subterfuge. I do not like Gore much, although he is superman compared to the dickwad Bush. Witchever candidate wins the man is going to be a very weak president. He will have to deal with a deadlocked congress and will have no mandate to do jack shit. However if Gore wins then in 2004 I can confidently predict that John McCain will be the parties nominee of choice. If Bush wins then, no matter how badly he sucks, and he will suck, he will be the nominee in 2004. Who will apose him? ON the democratic side I see no fire or intelligence. Monkeys would be flying out me ass if Nader some how became a viable force. No it would be a D vs Bush race and it would produce nothing, just another lost opportunity. So I am wanting Gore to win so I can have the pleasure of ousting him in 2004.

Vote Gore for McCain in 2004 !

Magnolia

[6]

Really long and well acted. Did I mention this film is long? Another dark little movie. It's long too. I don't know how to take the ending. It has one of the most truely surprising and bizzare endings of any film I have ever seen is it a good ending? I am not sure about that. This film is really long.

Orphans

I don't know what I detest more, films that truely suck or films that are merely lame? The former gives me more ammo to hurl at it, but getting that ammo mean actually watching it. The latter gives me little ammo but is damn boring that it might be a worse experience that watching a really bad film. Well whqat have I got to tell you this week about the cinematic epics I did watch?

Orphans: A Scotish movie so scotish it needed subtitles.
(1-10) gets a 8. The scotish dudes just know how to make good dark-humor.

Survivor

I was hoping for squadron Air Cav gun ships to fly over the beach and pepper the last bunch of incipient freaks to death with settling rounds. "Survive this you backstabbing scum bags!" the gunner would scream over the rotor wash. CBS Videobroadcast van explodes as two missiles hit it. Kafooom! Survivor cast runs for cover in rat infested forest only to be nap'd into foamming, firey goo balls. Choppers land and the air cavelry commander gets out. "I love the smell of Survivor in the morning. It smells like......the end of the series."

Autumn in New York

The winner of the "Absolutely No Chemistry between leads" Award goes to this little dreadful work. Grew plays himself. Can he play anyone else? Ryder plays role of young dying person who knows everything about life.

Story: Guy who is a homemaker falls in love with dying lady. He cheats on her. She tells him to be a nice person. He says ok. She dies. The end.
Rating: 4 for the cinematic.

This was not a love story since there was no story and no love. Just a bunch of crap that was boring to watch and unrealistic when the dialogue did happen. Yuck I want my money back! I did come across a thought that gave me the shivers. Since seeing the 9th gate and Eye of the Beholder, I think my movie mind has been bucked up so that a really bad movie like this one might not get the lowest rating it should get. The afore mentioned movies were horrible. If my mind compares autumn in New York to those dopplegangers from hell then the rating might not be accurate. Oh who really cares.

Politically corrected into oblivion

Ah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"You should never joke about that kind of thing..." The big fat slob said with extreme, selfrighteous, nose stuck up in the air, she-is-better-than-us, attitude. Donna and I had been talking about fleas and how we do not like them. We then made a crack about either killing the fleas or the dog upon wich the fleas live. Ha Ha Ha. Then the lady flipped her crap at us about how we should not "joke about thaty kind of thing" In Donna's office, about ten feet from the lady in question, Donna said, "I guess she doesn't like our humor." I then said, being the levelheaded watercalmer that I am, in a louder than normal voice "Big deal. If she doesn't appreciate our humor thats her problem. It's not as if I was seriously thinking about blowing the dogs head off or anything. Or stomping in it unitl it was flat! I love dogs! I love to eat'm! On a slice a'corn bread wisom ol #7 and slab a fatback on the side. MMM MMM good!" People who bristle with anger over a couple jokingly discussing flea infestation suck. How much angst can they generate over the billions of fleas that will die as a result of chemical armegaedan? Do they use mouth wash? Fucking a they do. How abou the trillions of bacteria they kill off and then spit out into the sink. Do they mow grass? I am sure they all have fucking gardens full of flowers and you can bet your sweet ass they're out there pulling weeds on the weekend. You know I don't like off color jokes anymore than the next dufus but come on! Can't people mind their own business? Do they have to feel it necessary to stick their hypocritical noses up the ass of life whenever anyone around them spouts off about fleas and dogs? Is this what the greastest experiment in human history has got us? The right to be a pest? To be, in a literal sense, a little anoying bug that bites you and makes you scratch? I will now make another off color remark. Perhaps we don't need bug bombs so much as.....oh hell somebodies probably reviewing the emails today anyway.

Law Suit!

Bail Jumper was and still is under contract with Rotten Banana Films. His appearance in Covert Operatives is a direct violation of his contract and we intend to file suit against him or squash him with a hammer. Even though he was a bit player and was killed in the first few seconds of the film he still should have asked if it was okay.

As for the film Covert Operatives. Animation wise it is not up to RAP standards but what is? Story wise it is a bit plebian too. Art direction wise it sucks. Sound wise it really sucks. Comparing Star Adventures to this film would be wrong but I am going to do it anyway. Our story has much better characters, a deeper script. Better art direction and sound. This film does have technically more blood but there was no scene in it more macabre than the elevator scene. This film looked like it took about a month to shoot.

Finally: If wuch a film is viewable on iFilm.com should not the REAL thing be available as well? It would run 39 minutes but so what. Thoughts?

Milk - It does a body... good?

The stench of milk drying in 85 degree heat can only be matched and surpassed by the following true story:

Two weeks ago Donna and I worked for two days cleaning up the the basement. We hauled out old nonsense we did not need. We vacumed where we had not vacumed in months. We shipped old books off to the Goodwill. And in the end Jessica could have a sleep over in the basement with all her friends. Cool!

To make it easier for us to clean we propped the door to the garage open so we could easily enter and exit from the basement. We used a small board for this purpose. Just a unassuming peice of 1/2 inch pine board. Near the end of the last day of cleaning the door closed. Oops! I went to prop it open again. Board? Couldn't find it. Where had it gone? Who knew. Maybe Donna was using something else. Okay a shoe will do just fine. Party went great.

Weeks passed, (Weeks). Then, four days ago I decided to boil up some ravioli's. I go down into the garage to our freezer to get the suckers out. I open the door and picked up a package of ravioli's. Brain first uses sense of touch to determine that A: package is warm and B since it is warm it cannot be frozen. Sense of smell is then hit by the equivelent of a tsunami. The olfactory center of the brain is wrecked, neurons scrambling for cover as the cascade of stench has to be processed. Nerve impluses are quickly sent to the left arm to slam the door shut as a last desperate attempt to stave off the oncoming horror. Higher neural functions then process the data.

Food not frozen, stink comming from freezer really nasty. All this means a catastrophic event has occured. I check the back of the freezer to see if it is plugged in. Oh...there is the board that went missing. When the door closed, a whopping two weeks earlier, it had propelled the board behind the freezer and uplugged the unit.

After several minutes of extremely nasty cursing, I take a safty breath and open the door. It is like the physical incarnation of an HP lovecraft novel. The call of Cthulu wafts out from that dank coffin of decayed meat. We had about seventy pounds of beef, lamb, and other meats in there. They have all thawed out and created a black lake of moldering blood in the drip pan at the bottom of the freezer. It only take a few seconds for me to mentally right off the entire contents.

We decide to plug the unit back in and refreeze the abominable contents so that when I clean it out the disguto-meter will not be destroyed. The inquest into what happened, and what should be done to make sure that so tragic and accident does not occur and again, determined that the gap between the freezer and wall should be covered. I used the same board for this purpose. The inquest also determined that the plugs should be screwed into the wall so that they cannot easily be unplugged. Gory disguting meat is now languishing in the dump.

The End.

Good Bye Alec Guniess

Oh crap now Alec Guiness is dead. I wonder if he'll be walking around in a blue arua?

2 for None

Okay, I am fucking pissed (Fist slams into wall with blood and plaster) Some ass-munch needs their gray matter exposed to the light of day. Who makes people like the dick wads that made the last two movies have had the grotesque misfortune to have to sit through. No sit through is not the proper term. Remember in A Clockwork Orange when malign McDowell is strapped into a movie seat, his eyes forced open with metal wires. That is how I felt. I was vomitsously sick. I needed a colon's after this mambo-fucking-jumbo nonsensical crap fest. I mighty has well have had my mouth stacked to the ass end of a Mr. Ed all night long. This was horrible, not in the 'oh that was a bad movie' way, but in the "give me the shotgun now!" sort of way.

There is no way I am rating either of these two non-films. They suck so bad that there is no number, or fraction there of, existent in the universes that could rate these bucked up drums of shit.

9th Gate - Johnny deaf

Book slug, who goes after rare books is hired by a total Fuji head to determine if his devil book is the real deal. Okay so far. So what happens? NOTHING! Nothing happens. The story is totally intelligible and useless. There was no bucking script for this hunk of dung. I hate this movie and want to excoriate it's memory from my brain.

Eye of the Beholder - Ewon McGregor

You know what you behold? NOTHING! I beheld the movie trailers before the movie and that was it. This movie stunk even worse than the 9th Grunt. I wanted to gouge the eye of the beholder out of my head. To behold this trash is to behold fly larva living in shit, to behold a pussy wart , to behold the total vacuum outside the universe. It is the total perspective votes in reverse. This was a bad film. I hope that none of you had the near total misfotune of having to sit through either of these abominations, these mental route canals.

Short of drinking a gallon of saline I don't know how I can purge myself from the effects of these squalid events. I feel impure, filthy, mired in some kind of artistic hell, I was shown the seventh seal of Morton picture Amageadan. Yuck!

I kept waiting for the steady hand of teanibopper action-flickism to take over but I couldn't even be allowed that. Not even a cliche' ending with lots of CGI. Only the cold, moldering, oblivion of non-movie. It was as if both movies ended at the end of their opening credits and there was nothing left but the gaseous emissions of the set carpenters and chatterers.
To know that, as Alec guineas lay dying in England, I was sitting and wasting these travesties of sublime mediocrity, is to die a little myself.

Barny Imagination Island

[10]

From the high quality cardboards sets, to the giant foam packed dinosaur suit, this film has it all. Cheesy computer graphcis, kids who sing and dance to songs I have heard millions of times before. A nutty professor who makes toys to play with. Harsh TV stage lighting. This is entertainment for the American masses. Who needs Shakespear!?

American History X

[8]

Edward Norton plays a neo nazi, bashing heads and spewing propaganda. His little bro is quickly turning into him. Their family is falling apart. Then he kills two black men and goes to jail for 3 years. This film is great in that it gives a totally believable picture of nazism. The main character. Far from being ignorant white trash, is smart, articulate, and charismatic. The dialogue is perfect and is so well thought out that you can really see the seductive nature of the white power movement. The arguments that are made by the Nazi's dove tail so well into modern American politics that it is scary. The film is pretty brutal and has a very sad ending. It is simple story done really well.

The "Puzzling" Mr. Ripley

[3]

Puzzling because we are given so little info about this idiot. He lives in a dump in NYC and he makes cash on the side by impersonating people. Okay. So what? His actions in Italy are never put into the context of his life. There are a couple of good things about this film. One is dicks Greenleaf, the American expatriate, jazz loving, rich kid. You'd think his character would be typical and suck but it is actually a great character and it is too bad the movie couldn't have been about him. Matt Damon's insipid little character deserved to be shoved off the back end of the Queen Mary. The visuals are nice too. Speaking of the Queen Mary there was a nice bit of composition of the worlds best liner, at birth at Long Beach CA, sliding through New
York Harbor. The Italian unit had fun shooting at all the save locales and the film did a good job of convincing us that we were in 50's Italy. I just wish the story wasn't so fucked up.

Bicentennial Man

[5]

It is a very nice film and tells one of the great Sci-fi stories of all time. However, unlike Green Mile, it trys to shove the whole story into a digestable 90 minutes. Argh! Not good at all. It made a great story as digestable as white bread that has been sitting in warm watrer for five days. The only redmeaming aspect is the quality of the story, the acting, and the set decoration; music isn't bad either. If your going to tell the story of the life of a two hunred year old robot you better take some time!

Best Sci-fi / Futurism films:

1. Star Wars Episodes 4-5-6 - 'nough said.
2. 2001 - mind-blasting even today.
3. Metropolis & Things to Come - (the reigning glory of Deco-Nuvo Futurism, you gotta have both)
4. Blade Runner - (Syd Mead unbound, wholly crap man.)
5. Alien - really dated visual effects, mumbled lines, simple story, fucking scary even now!
6. Close Encounters - Best of the happy-aliens genre, better than ET
7. Forbidden Planet - Captain JJ Adam's finset moment.
8. Planet of the Apes - Charlton Heston inherits the NRA's future.
9. Contact - Should be higher than number 9 but look at its competition!?
10. Gattaca - Nice use of late-FL Wright's buildings housing an interesting story.
11. Lathe of Heaven - Very simple story but very well done.

The Green Mile

[9+]

The best 188 minute long movie I have seen in a long time. It takes a pretty good filmaker to fully utilize 188 minutes of movie to tell a story. I am having trouble marking this film in the 1-10 scale. Many aspects of it were in the 4-6 catagory.

What was the point of the film?

Why have the John Cauffy character super natural? etc.

Yet the whole of this movie is greater than the some of it's mundane parts. It was almost a throwback to a thirties meledrama. Where force of character and dialogue had to carry lame stories and non-existent effects. In this way the movie is amazing.

Even though the story was middle-of-the-road the characters were very well difined and superbely acted. Compared with American Beauty this film kicks ass. Both films are based on subject matter that has been done to death, no pun intended. But where as American Beauty had characters right out of angstfilled-central casting, Green Mile's gards and prisoners were much more interesting. Where American Beauty, in my opinion dehumanized people into unrealistic sterotypes, Green Mile humanized every thing, including the mouse. It was fantastic (Arthorian legend style )

I'd like to have this movie on DVD. I guess I'll give it a....roll on one......a.....roll on two! I'll give it a 9+. Not many movies get that...not from me anyway. I think I thought of giving Shawshank redemption a 9 too. Hmmm?

Best Prison Films I have seen:

1. Shawshank (1994) Redemption
2. Green Mile- (1999) tied with the above, sort of SR part II with more special effects
3. Midnight Express- (1978) ouch!
4. Coolhand Luke - (1968) What we got here is a great movie
5. Stalag 17- (1953) A Billy Wilder Best
6. Papillon - (1973) Oops I almost made this movie 5
7. Dead Man Walking - (1995) Susan Sarandon as a Nun? The world would weep.
8. Gideon's Trumpet -(1980) H Fonda
9. Each Dawn I Die - (1939) Really old Cagney film I saw on chanel 12 when I was a kid.

The World Is Not Enough

(1-10......gets -550 billion on general scale)

Bond Scale( 1-10.....Gets a 5)

If you could view the score I gave for this movie in 3-d it would be so small that you would need a scanning electron microscope to see it. Or maybe that couldn't view it either. Physicists would be using quantem mathematics to hypothesize of its existance based on how it's potential existance may, or maynot, interfere with larger particals, such as..I don't know say sub-atomic nuclei. This film was really hokey. The bad-line-o-meter, back in operation after months of rebuilding thanks to Lost In Space, was instantly vaporized at the end of the film when Bond says to his girl of the moment, named Christmas Jones, " I thought Christmas comes only once a year." Blech! However Bond films can be terrible and at the same time rudely entertaining and this was that.

13th Warrror

[8]

I can't remember if I wrote a review of this movie but I was thinking of both American Beatuy and 13th Warrior so here we goe. This move is one of the best barbarian movies ever made. It is a great story of Vikings. It has an intelligence to it that floored me. If this movie had been a foreign import with sub titles it would have been hefted into the catagory of films by likes of Akira Kurosawa. Visually it had a great primordial look to it. The sets were proper for the period as were most of the costumes, some license being taken with armor. Another nice part about this films was that so many characters were played by people of the proper ethnicity. Old king Hrothgar (Same king as in Beowulf?) was played by Sven Wolter. Antonio Banderas came off well as an arab. The story has mild Beowulf overtones to it; a wayword warrior and his band have to return home to fight off a mysterious force that is terrorizing Hrothgar and his men at night. The force in this fiom is not a single monster and his mother but a host of thousands of canibalistic cave dwellers. This sounds kind of campy but it is pulled off in a scary realistic way. This film is the best Michael Chriton book-to-film thingy that has been made.