Let's talk a little bit about alcohol. Why do we drink it? Yes, it's a social lubricant, but why? What's the science here?
Not to make things too complicated, this is a family website, but in a nutshell alcohol makes us dumb. Blissfully dumb. The more you drink it, the more dumb you become. Drink the perfect amount and you become perfect dumb. Drink too much and you become too dumb and do something really stupid. It's amazing that the effects disappear the next morning, leaving only a headache as a friendly reminder not to abuse the privilege.
Shouldn't this be the way we measure alcohol's effects? Instead of breathalyzer's they should do an IQ test which would work something like this... Smart people can drink four beer per hour. Dumb people can drink one half of a beer per hour. You should have to breathe into the machine at the same time answering a series of tricky questions. The way I behaved this weekend, I wouldn't have been surprised to be arrested for drinking and walking.
Gonna be on set for the next few days and away from this blog type situation, but thought I'd leave you to ponder until next week why it is that nobody in Denmark actually closes the door behind themselves? There are fucking open doors everywhere and it's driving me nuts.
A new kind of movie is taking Hollywood by storm – let’s call it the, “you’ve got to be kidding me” genre. Films with story so ridiculous you need to have a pencil shoved up your nose (into your brain) to believe what you’re seeing. THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, DEEP IMPACT, ARMAGEDDON, anything with Ben Affleck (oh wait, is he still acting?) – some prime examples and now Sony Picture’s LEGION.
The 26 million dollar (US) apocalyptic action thriller’s premise is God has had enough of humanity and all of its (our) stupidity. The divine One orders his angel soldier, “Michael”(Paul Bettany, THE DA VINCI CODE) to destroy earth and in particular an unborn baby. Michael defies this and helps save the earth from the apocalypse with a bag full of guns and a little help from some humans (Dennis Quaid, former model Tyrese Gibson, Lucas Black). And yes, I know that doesn’t make any sense. The website Christianity Today calls LEGION “a confused mess of ideas” – a startling critique if you think about the hocus pocus in the bible. But, Christian film reviewers aren’t the only ones scratching their heads – the Los Angeles Times says it’s a “loud, dumb, time-waster” and The Daily Mirror calls it “preposterous”.
A review of LEGION wouldn’t be complete without mentioning what a complete rip off many of the action sequences are. Anyone that’s seen TERMINATOR 2 will be reaching for the nose pencils in one scene that’s stolen shot for shot. Compelling to think a movie with such a flawed central premise and rip-off action could do 17 million dollars on its opening weekend and will likely spawn numerous straight to video sequels.
Now here’s the twist. The strange thing about “Legion” is if you look past the horse manure premise and stop saying to yourself, “you’ve got to be kidding me”, it’s actually a fairly entertaining film. The dialogue is at times inventive, some of the performances halfway decent and I detected a few chills, some arm hair raising and even caught myself on the edge of the seat (and I’m pretty desensitized to this stuff). I left the theatre mildly transformed, expecting something devastating to happen outside the theatre – a sensation entirely unique to cinema and one of the reasons film makes such a great escape. “Legion” briefly altered my reality and even though it’s a good example of why God might actually despise humanity and want to kill us all, the film did what it was meant to do.
Here's my 420 word movie review of Travolta's FROM PARIS WITH LOVE for the Copenhagen Post... my first review:
I should start by saying I’ve never reviewed a movie before. I’m a filmmaker and assuming the role of reviewer is playing tricks with my gag reflex. The two Hollywood films I’ve co-written have been destroyed by the press and I have to confess some animosity towards the pseudo-intellectual film industry tourists that aggressively critique something they lack the talent to create themselves. But, things being what they are, I’m here and you’re there, so let’s get started ruthlessly dissecting FROM PARIS WITH LOVE.
But first an aside – I’m sure you’ll be interested in a brief look at the mechanics of a film review. How it works is the film distributor, in this case Nordisk Film, holds a screening a week before the release, first thing in the morning. They dish out free coffee and croissant and try as hard as possible to put the reviewer in a good mood. Did it work?
What happened to Travolta anyways? For his first movie without his trademark wig (he’s bald), you’d expect more… I don’t know, “oomph” – is that a film reviewer word? Travolta delivers some tricky lines, but his counterpart Meyers’ portrayal lacked verisimilitude and was so forced he might as well been reading cue cards. A few years back, I was Associate Producer of a movie that was trying to cast Meyers and after some serious inquiries we learned he was “trouble”. There’s a scene when Meyers briefly seems disinterested by the prospects of snorting a line of cocaine – perhaps the only real acting he did all movie.
Probably forgot to tell you dudes, I'm now the movie reviewer for the local English newspaper the Copenhagen Post. Today begins a series of the three articles that have gone to press - there's no access online to the film section, so I'll post them here and look forward to your comments. First up, a retrospective of Roger Corman's work...
When it comes to low budget horror blockbusters like the original Saw, Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project, most people can’t stand their insipid story lines, contained locations and amateur performances. These films made hundreds of millions of dollars though on a shoestring budget and regardless of your feelings for this brand of celluloid, the man responsible is Roger Corman. He didn’t produce these movies of course, his most popular work being Little Shop of Horrors (shot in two days for $30,000 in 1960!), but he did write the playbook for horror movies to profit, no matter how terrible, in How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime (1990).
Born in Detroit in 1926, Corman’s actually made 388 movies to be precise, 56 of which he directed dating back to 1954. He was the Producer young filmmakers dreamed of working for despite his perfectionist slave driving ways and stories of locking writers in a room. Corman took chances on raw creative talent and forced people to work fast and think on their feet – a style contemporary insurance and financing models have made all but obsolete. Future legends like Scorcese, Coppola, Cameron all got their start on Corman productions – Coppola even worked as a soundman and Cameron a model builder. Generations of Hollywood names, from the top to the bottom of the credit roll learned the fundamentals of story and craft on a Roger Corman production.
The retrospective Produced By Roger Corman is on at the DFI’s cinematheque through March and includes seven titles, two of which are obscure and compelling enough to forget the fact they aren’t any good. Devil’s Castle (1963) originally titled, Dementia 13 (US), was directed by Francis Ford Coppola nine years before Godfather and stars Luana Anders (Easy Rider). The black and white, Psycho inspired horror flick plays at Sunday, March 7 @ 14hr and Tuesday, March 30 @ 19:30hr.
Togrøverne From Arkansas (1972) aka Boxcar Bertha, is the film Scorsese made prior to Mean Streets, stars Barbara Hershey and David Carradine. Shot in 24 days for just over half a million dollars, it was completed with barely enough time and money to shoot a few scenes of his current epics and will reassure most young filmmakers that even Scorsese started somewhere (Tuesday, March 2 @ 21:30hr and Saturday, March 20 @ 16hr).
Corman’s work can be tedious, even unintentionally comedic, but if your taste extends to viewing creative talent and a genre in its formative stages, then check this out.
How much has the world changed now that there's a video camera almost everywhere? First Amercia's Funniest Home Video's, then youtube have given us the opportunity to look at our most embarrassing moments in slow motion. Unlike never before, new stars are made overnight like this elderly gentleman - perhaps the finest 36 seconds you're likely to see (God, I'm immature).
Today you lucky bastards get two posts. This one's on dogs.
Dogs have a super amazing sense of smell and their ears are totally awesome, correct? How does that work? The sound thing I mean. Does something that's loud to us seem really loud to them? What about those bark-y dogs that yap in that high-pitched yelp? They must make themselves deaf before their blowing the candles out on their first (7th) dog bone.
Let me be the first to congratulate you North Americans on your exceptional time change this past weekend. Another flawlessly executed mini-time leap. You've got the one-hour jump down to perfection now. But can you do two hours? More? I'd like to see that.
Denmark doesn't do it's time warp for another two or three weeks. We like to watch you guys do it first to make sure everything goes fine - nobody disappears from photographs or any weird shit like that. The result of course is now we're only five hours apart. I feel so much closer.
So apparently we've got a new richest dude in the world... and he's Mexican. Raise your enchilada if you didn't see that coming. Carlos Slim Helu (that's right, his middle name is slim), welcome to the pole position. He'll probably be there a while too - don't exactly see "Slim" giving away billions to charity.
No disrespect to Mexico, but you can buy anything you want down there for like twenty bucks. Maybe that's how this guy got so wealthy - he has to hop on a plane if he wants to spend any dough.
If you know the awesome show EASTBOUND AND DOWN, then you might be interested to discover the namesake of the title character is a Canadian stunt man from the 1970's. Briefly famous for perhaps the dumbest stunt in the history of dumb stunts, Powers attempted to cross the St. Lawrence River, by air, in a banana yellow Lincoln Continental.
There are many juicy tidbits to consider here - how did he raise a million (1970) dollars for such a obviously flawed concept? How did he break his back seven times previously? Where is he now? Was it his last stunt? Why did his car not make it? Well, that last one answers itself. But the question looms, has anyone ever done something this incredible and why, as Canadians, don't we all know the Kenny Powers name? Heck, this guy should be a household name in Korea, let alone his home province. This guy should be a legend and you'd have to imagine, that what drove him into that car was the idea that make it or no, he was going to be a remembered for all of time, beyond the cozy confines of blogs (like this) dedicated to such behavior.
What's a more spectacular failure - his abbreviated jump or our collective ignorance to this seminal event?
Further, one must acknowledge the pure Canadian-ness of such a feat. Nowhere else is self deprecating a finely tuned art like it is in Ontario. Fuck, I get homesick just thinking about it.
Another normal weekend here in Kobenhavn. Nothing special to report. Played Wii golf on Friday night with some guys and ate fried chicken later on. Rockin'. Why am I bothering to write when I've got nothing compelling to say? Good question. Still don't understand twitter or why people update their facebook status like we give a shit their cat looks cute in a sweater or they hate the new Bachelor.
Hurt Locker did well in the Oscar's didn't it? David beats Goliath. Hollwood really loves an underdog when that underdog isn't a white male (unless that white male is recovering from addiction). Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin must have been funny. The show didn't start here until 2am, so I'm just guessing.
You guys are probably wondering how Denmark did at the Olympics. Well... their best hope for a medal was the female curling team. That group went 3-5, missed the playoffs and the team "skip" cried in her game against Canada because the crowd intimidated her.
People have been quick to mention how well Canada did and most here seemed to watch the final hockey game (or at least said they did). They like to explain that their countries overall performance was so poor because there's never any snow here, nor any mountains or winter Olympic sport facilities. Three words guys - Jamaican bobsled team.
Watched the Swedish feed. After Canada's first goal, the announcer broke into English and said with his thick accent, "and the place goes banana's".
The European's score the Olympic standings by gold medals, so as far as the people over here are concerned, Canada or as they write, "Kanada", won the Olympics. Pretty weird to see Canada in this kind of a spotlight - probably a first for all of us.
Got to see the interviews with the Canadian players on Swedish TV and if you think they say boring answers on English TV, you should hear how severely they mail in their performance for foreign press. They barely even answer the question.
