I Did A Riffing Thing

Inspired by the greats over at Rifftrax.com and MST3K, I've always wanted to riff a video, so why not Steamboat Willie? Let me know if you like this one, and I might do another.

First You Get the What?

Brian De Palma's Scarface Outtake

(INT: TONY'S HIDEOUT.)

•     Tony Montana: In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.

Manny: (confused look)

Tony: What's the problem?

Manny: Could you run through that again?

Tony: (Smiles) Sure! In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.

Manny: (confused look)

Tony: What? Why don't you understand what I'm sayin'?

Manny: Well... I thought it was, "you gotta make the monkey first."

Tony: Monkey? What the **** are you talkin' about?

Manny: Monkey! You know: Chimpanzees! Gorillas!

Tony: WHAT?! Those are not monkeys, Manny!

Manny: Huh? 

Tony: Chimpanzees and Gorillas are from the subfamily of Hominoidea, you dumb ****. Monkeys are Haplorhini Simiiformes!

Manny: You know I studied Italian in school, Tony! What do you mean?

Tony: Monkeys have tails!

Frank: Yes, but the women have the tails, too!

Tony: No!! I'm talkin' about the prehensile tails! Apes just have big, hairy butts!

Frank: From what I hear, Manny has a big, hairy butt!

Manny: Hey!!! (pause) That really stings, man.

Frank: (apologetically) Sorry Manny.

Tony: Enough of this ****! We're gettin' nowhere.

(long pause)

Manny: You know, if you get the money, you could buy whatever you want, right?

Tony: Sure!

Manny: Well then... I could buy the monkey!!

Tony: WHY ARE YOU OBSSESSED WITH THE MONKEYS?!!!

Manny: (long pause)(sotto voce) I like the monkeys.

Frank: (tentatively) I like the monkeys, too.

(long pause)

Tony: Yeah, I guess I like the monkeys, too.

Manny: Especially, Mickey Dolenz.

(SCENE)

Hollywood's Belated Best

February came and went without an Academy Awards program, and for a brief, blessed moment I thought we would be spared the annual self-congratulatory exercise in gonzo marketing. My blood pressure went down. My worry lines smoothed out like a character in a Sade song. I stopped angrily shouting at George Clooney. I even considered getting a pedicure. Alas, they only pushed back the ceremony a month to give Meryl Streep a chance to work on her new Esperanto accent. Also, my toenails look like grim death.

This year not only are they going to go through with it, but it will be co-hosted by, as near as I can tell, every single human being in show business. The usual three-hour show is expected to double in length, adding on an additional three hours for the credits and an extended musical number with Sir. Ian McKellen. This means it will be almost exactly like watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, only with better dresses.

Once again, the Best Picture nominee list consists of ten films, because the Academy were too lazy to whittle it down to five and also wanted me to work twice as hard as usual. The joke is on them, because I only work half as hard when writing this post, meaning that it's exactly the same. At least that's what Price Waterhouse told me.¹

And the nominees are...

Belfast

Kenneth Branagh's coming of age dramedy is set in 1969 Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of the Troubles, so you just know what's coming. Trouble.

Buddy (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a young child growing up in a very Protestant family, the kind that doesn't have fish on Friday, trying to make sense of the sectarian hatred in his hometown of... you guessed it... Belfast, Ireland.

He meets a very, very, VERY Catholic girl, Sister Mary Katherine, (Kristen Dunst) who is equally troubled by the all-consuming hatred that some of the people feel. She is also deeply troubled by the Cheech and Chong routine "Sister Mary Elephant," especially the knife-throwing part.

Their relationship is severely tested when local rabble-rouser Billy Clanton (Ralph Fiennes, in full Voldemort makeup) threatens Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. After getting his ass shot up in the wild west (no, NOT Galway), Clanton comes to Belfast to rabble-rouse even more, culminating in his vicious attack on the city in a Vought SBU Corsair loaded with nuclear bombs. Fortunately, the bombs fail to detonate. However, they do land smack-dab on top of beloved local priest Father Brown, ending his life and any chances of solving the O'Riley murders.

Just as all hell is about to break loose (the O'Rileys), Buddy's grandmother (Dame Judi Dench), known to everyone as "Granny," reveals that she is in fact the retired head of MI6 and uses her connections to have Commander James Bond (Daniel Craig) shoot up the rest of Billy Clanton, in a fifteen-minute extended slow motion scene that both Protestants and Catholics loved in previews.

Coda

Coda is the heartwarming story of a young woman and her deaf parents, and if you think I'm going to make jokes about deaf people, you've got another thing coming. I would even sign this entry, if I knew how. (Walks out. Departs in a Vought Corsair.)

...

OK, I'm back now. What did I miss?

Don't Look Up

The chilling remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, only just with pigeons.

Kate Dibiasky is a post-grad ornithologist with a thing for leather, which explains why she's at Yale. During a clambake, she meets a bankruptcy lawyer named Rod Taylor, becomes intrigued with him (because who wears chaps to a clambake?), and playfully stalks him out to his palatial home on Martha's Vineyard.

After meeting Rod's charming mother, even more charming little sister, and not-at-all charming regular client Donald Trump, Kate begins to notice that she is the attention of some stalkers of her own, namely a flock of approximately one billion pigeons that she deeply offended when she offhandedly called them "feathered rats" during a symposium.

The pigeons begin to systematically torment her and her new friends. They start with a few well-aimed poop dive bombs (for Pete's sake, close your mouth). This is followed by the birds landing on a set of school monkey bars, pooping all over it, and then grabbing Kate's purse and placing it on top of the monkey bars. (Spoiler: She gets the purse back.) Next, they kill Kate's new schoolteacher friend, Suzanne Pleshette, by pooping her eyes out. This scene alone is the reason for the film's NC-17 rating.

This leads up to a spectacular attack on Martha's Vineyard which covers at least a hundred Lamborghini's and Bentleys, all convertibles, in ripe pigeon guano. The angry fowl also cover the streets with number twooooos, leading to some mildly amusing slipping videos that will be replayed on dozens of YouTube channels for the next decade. The townsfolk attempt to escape any way they can, by boat, town car, Prius, and Vought Corsair, all of which coincidentally crash into each other in a big fire-poop ball.

In the end, everyone is horribly, horribly killed, except for the charming little sister, who survives until an alien messily devours her 16 years later.

Drive My Car

This Japanese film about the making of the Beatles' song from their Rubber Soul album is in turns tuneful and argumentative, because the premise of the film is that Yoko Ono turned up in John Lennon's life a full year and a half earlier than in the real world. This explains the rough, tuneless, Japanese-accented "VRROOM"s in the film's version of the famous song.

The film is shot in documentary-style, which consists mostly of being black and white and having Ringo wander in and out of frame, wearing an awkward smile. (This is particularly awkward during the extended sex scene between John and Yoko.) 

Paul McCartney brings John the unfinished version of the title song, asking him for help with the lyrics, which up until that point consisted of "Baby, baby, baby" and an extended quotation of the play by play commentary of English boxer Brian London's 1963 bout with Ingemar Johansson. 

John is conflicted about how to help with the song until Yoko points to a small dot in the sky (an F4U Vought Corsair) and whispers into his ear, "birdy." John returns to the studio, argues with Paul for four straight hours about whether coffee or tea is superior, and then they magically write the song out in a three minute musical number.

Two minutes later, the Beatles break up for good, and we never get Sgt. Pepper's, dammit.

Dune

The remake of the adaptation of the cult classic of the something or other (which is how David Lynch successfully pitched his version), Dune takes science fiction to the next level, which is to say a film Zendaya would agree to do in those outfits. ("Dreadfully flowing!" - Melissa Rivers)

I'm not going to bother you with the plot at all, because I tried to read Dune in college back in the eighties and bogged down in the plot shortly into page 72 of the acknowledgements. David Lynch's version made as little sense to me, except as an extended Sting music video with a really crappy song made up of film dialogue and a guy with worse skin than Jabba the Hut.

Also, to my horror, there is not a single Vought Corsair in the entire picture, IF you don't count the one they accidentally left in the distant background of the love scene (a taut thirty seconds) at 152:35, just before the intermission. I love Corsairs, but couldn't they have used CGI to take the plane out, the way they removed Josh Brolin's body hair?

Needless to say... hmmm... if it's needless to say, let's move on to something else.

Anyway, the sand worms were quite impressive, screaming like the late, great Meatloaf, sweating through the second hour of an outdoor concert in July. The sheer size of the things was also amazing. It's the first-time critics have ever described something as "Texas-sized" and meant "literally the size of the state of Texas."

The ending was quite surprising though. I'm not going to give you any spoilers, but I did not expect to see Andy Kaufman AND Elvis in the same room. Because they are... sorry Andy... were... WERE the same person. 

Anyway, to paraphrase most of the critics' reviews, "What just happened here?"

King Richard

An adaptation of Richard III, only set during the Wimbledon Finals, the film opens with the death of famed tennis coach Hank Lancaster (Denzel Washington), whose even more famous father Hank Sr. (Kenneth Branagh) won five Wimbledon finals. After the obvious historical significance of this opening, like Shakespeare's play, the film quickly turns to murder, kidnapping, assassination, more murder, and most violently of all, a tiebreaking set on center court (Act V, Set V).

Henry's players are all inherited by his son Eddie "Rosie" Lancaster (Samuel L. Jackson) and his assistant Richie York (Will Smith), the latter known for his "hunches" about players. However, Ed is soon killed in a bizarre tennis ball cannon accident (for Pete's sake, close your mouth), leaving Richie tentatively in control of the Lancaster enterprise.

Richie has Eddie's daughters (Venus and Serena Williams), known worldwide as the Princesses of Tennis, imprisoned in the tower of a castle at an Orlando miniature golf course. He then proceeds to consolidate his grip (get it?) on the business. He and his friend Michael Corleone violently extort other coaches to send their best players to him. He appears regularly on The Tennis Channel Live as a analyst and bon vivant. He has gaudy advertising banners flown over London by plane (Vought Corsairs, natch). Finally, he arm-wrestles John McEnroe in a favorite pub of tennis players, only barely winning when he distracts McEnroe by coughing and shouting the name "Björn Borg" at the same time.

All of this is undone when Richie's best player is beaten senseless on the Bosworth Court at Wimbledon by an up and coming player named Zazou Pitts (Naomi Osaka), coached by Harry Richmond (Rowan Atkinson). The enraged Richard is accidentally killed when he shouts out, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and is trampled by a startled Reg the Wonder Pony, making a special and unexpected promotional appearance at Wimbledon.

Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson's coming of age dramedy centers on a young couple's dare to find a pizza topping even worse than pineapple.

Alana (Rachel Ray) is a young working woman with a Cordon Blue diploma, specializing in chain restaurant menu development. After making her reputation by inventing the Gordita, her career takes an unexpected nosedive when she advises McDonald's to go all in on the McRib. This humiliation ("it stings like over-smoked BBQ sauce!") turns her to the dark, unsavory world of bizarre food, which seems a bit redundant after the McRib, if you ask me.

Gary Valentine (Alton Brown) is a strapping young lad (he likes to wear straps) looking for an experience that he thinks will make him into a man. He gets drawn into adventurous eating contests, devouring weird delicacies like fried grasshoppers and circus peanuts, but this is not enough for his unsettled bread basket.

Soon, Gary and Alana cross paths at a dangerous underground food party hosted by Andrew Zimmern. After an opening course of cinnamon-spiced menudo (the Skyline Chili version), the partygoers wheel out a build-your-own pizza buffet (build from a very modified Vought Corsair). Most of the partygoers are satisfied to stick to the usual weird pizza toppings (pineapple, tofu, broccoli) but Alana and Gary soon become embroiled in a reckless and frightening game of challenges to throw back slices covered with the most ridiculous and obscene toppings imaginable outside of a John Waters film. 

After starting with snails (shells on!), they soon move to more exotic fare, such as buffalo wings (from actual buffalos), Rocky Mountain Oysters, actual oysters, Bazooka bubble gum, pickled herring, kippers, black pudding, Jello-brand gelatin black pudding, souse, haggis, gas station sushi, McRib, and Carolina Reapers.

Finally, they look at the last ingredient on the buffet: Licorice. The old school kind that feels and tastes like the vinyl seat in a beat up Ford Edsel. They slowly pile heaping mounds of it on a fresh pie. Their eyes water with grim expectation as the pie slowly inches its way through the scorching pizza oven. They draw in the sickly-sweet aroma of the melted goo as it is sliced and lovingly presented on their plates, and then, just as they are about to masticate the monstrous mountain of, well, licorice... they both drop dead.

Gas station sushi. It'll get you every time.

Nightmare Alley

The remake of the adaptation of the cult classic of the... here we go again! Guillermo del Toro's remake shifts the focus of the classic tale of twisted greed and ambition to a single alley in the carnival where "all the nightmares occur." This is in conjunction with Walt Disney's Hollywood Studios attraction "Nightmare Alley: The Ride," which will be the first Disney ride with nudity, though thankfully none of the passengers.

Bradley Cooper plays Stanton "Stan, Stanley, Stan the Man, Stanorino, Stan By Me, Stan Lee, Stan Antonio, Stan Diego, Stan Francisco, Stana Stana bo-banna Banana-fanna fo-fanna Fee-fi-mo-manna Stana" Carlisle. However, most people know him as "Jack."

Jack is a lowlife drifter who becomes a carnival worker. (I'd make a joke here, but I prefer my funnel cake without spit.) He begins working in a mind-reading act with Madame Zeena (Toni Collette, in a Harpo Marx wig) and her husband Foster Brooks (Foster Brooks). After Zeena's husband is killed by being accidentally impaled during a performance by carnival chakram-thrower Xena: Warrior Princess, Jack takes over the act, and a slightly blood-stained and aerated sportscoat.

It's at this point that things get weird. 

One night, Jack and Xena... sorry, Zeena! One night Jack and Zeena are walking through the carnival when they turn down into (JARRING CHORD) Nightmare Alley! After waiting out the enormous queue (because Jack wasn't clever enough to get Disney Genie+), they enter the shadowy, eerie, foreboding, 100% trademarked alley.

Soon they are on a nightmarish trip worse than the ones in a Roger Corman film, although only slightly worse than the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jack watches Zeena's body turn inside out, while Zeena watches Jack's body turn outside in. Jack turns into Jack from 30 Rock while Zeena turns into you-know-who the Warrior Princess. Then they both turn into Spiderman and point at each other, just like the dreadful meme. Finally, Jack turns into a Vought Corsair and explosively sinks Zeena's battleship (not a euphemism). They wake up just before Zeena screams, "You sunk my battleship!" which would have triggered a lawsuit from an even cheesier film.

After the experience, Jack and Zeena promise to never enter Nightmare Alley again and henceforth take the slightly longer route through Gasoline Alley instead. Also, they swear off the LSD for good.

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion's trenchant and powerful adaptation of Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl (TM), reimagined as a gritty western, begins when troubled loner Frisky (Rex) enters the rustic frontier town of BARK-er, Montana. Frisky and his brother Boomer - named for his loud flatulence - are in the middle of a long cat drive across the unforgiving wilderness. This explains Boomer's catchphrase, "This is just like herding cats (loud fart)."

Frisky soon meets a saucy bitch (calm down; I'm talking about a dog) named Saucy (Ginger) and falls head over tail for her. Saucy has a thing for puppies in chaps and boots, as they make great chew toys at playtime.

Soon, and unpredictably, Frisky, Boomer, and Saucy are competing against the team of Rover, Princess, and Rowdy Boy in the inaugural Puppy Bowl I, played in beautiful, downtown Miss-AROOO-la, Montana. Initially, the game goes badly for Frisky and Friends (their official GEICO team name), but the tide turns when Saucy realizes that Rowdy Boy is very easily distracted by squirrels. At halftime, she hires a notorious gang of flying squirrels to fly by at a critical point in the game (in a Vought Corsair for some reason). This leads Rowdy Boy to adorably collide with Rover and Princess, while Frisky romps into the end zone, sealing F & F's victory.

Unfortunately however, during the excitement of the game, the cats Frisky and Boomer were herding were rustled. They were only found two years later in the one-room apartment of an old woman in PURRRiest Lake, Idaho.

The film then ends with a completely unnecessary and extremely bloody gunfight, which the critics loved.

West Side Story

Steven Spielberg's remake of the beloved Broadway musical adds some unusual twists and turns to the familiar retelling of Romeo and Juliet, not the least being the ending, where the couple realize that everything is OK and fly off together in a Vought Corsair to Brazil. There they open a Puerto-Rican/Italian fusion bistro named Maria's. 

The film ends with an extended television ad punctuated by the jingle, "Maria's! You'll love all the grub at Maria's!"

1. There are no footnotes for this year's list. Except for this one. Listen, deal with it, OK?

The Best Movies from the Worst Year

Let's face it. 2020 was a burning garbage scow of a year that produced a sweltering combination of sickness, death, misery, political mayhem, controversy, stupidity, and pain. While that's a pretty good description of any year in Hollywood, it was a great description of this year, as the industry worked around pandemic restrictions to produce a crop of films that was as wildly uneven as a dinner table fashioned by a carpenter on LSD.

So, without further ado (no, not Freddy Adu), here are the Academy's eight choices for Best Picture of 2020.

**********

The Father

Anthony Hopkins plays an aging father struggling with his failing memory. Things look grim for him until one day his caretaker daughter accidentally drops a Ming vase on his head, and in the tradition of great narratives like I Dream of Jeannie and Batman, the bonk on his noggin causes him to regain his complete memory. 

He realizes he is in actuality the infamous cannibal mass murderer Hannibal Lecter, and that his "daughter" is really FBI agent Clarice Starling, keeping tabs on him so he doesn't turn the nursing home ward into a barbeque joint.

This commences a grand battle of wits, as Lecter plots and carries out dozens of escape attempts, all foiled by the equally resourceful Clarice, or by him having to suddenly go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, or by urgent foot cramps, or he gets winded and needs to sit down for a few hours, or Wheel of Fortune is on, and who wants to miss that?

His most daring escape attempt occurs when he hires a plane (a Vought Corsair F4U-5, natch) by phone to fly past the nursing home at night. He manages to get to the top floor of the building (elevator, natch) and leaps from the building, missing the plane by several dozen yards, because planes can't fly very close to buildings.

He plummets helplessly to the ground, but just at the point of impact he awakens to discover that, in the tradition of great narratives like Dallas and Newhart, it is all just a dream, and he is still in the nursing home, his memory still foggy, and his daughter suddenly trying to convince him of the joys of vegetarianism.

**********

Judas and the Black Messiah

The story of a famous incident during the filming of Tim Rice's and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ, Superstar, when Carl Anderson, the African-American actor who played Judas, and Ted Neeley, the Caucasian actor who played Jesus, switched places one day on the set, to see if director Norman Jewison would notice. 

Jewison does notice, but pretends not to, because he wants to make the actors think they had pulled one over on him. Also, it's the '70's and he is as high as a weather balloon. Seventeen scenes later, the actors tell him about the prank, but Jewison, impressed with the way they had handled each other's roles, and also unable to feel his nose on his face, has decided to completely revise the film, changing the title to Judas and the Black Jesus. Someone suggests the title Judas and the Black Messiah has a better, less alliterative ring to it, and Jewison replies, "Sure, what the hell! Pass me that doobie."

Soon though, Webber and Rice find out about the dramatic change to their magnum opus (well, at least until Cats, right?) and they hustle over to the Colonies from Old Blighty, travelling all night by Vought Corsair. By this time, Jewison has completely converted the production into a reboot of Ben Hur, with Neeley as Ben, Anderson as Hur, and Charles Nelson Reilly as Masala (inventor of the sauce).

Webber demands that Jewison be stopped, and Rice concurs, saying, "Yeah, I guess." The production is halted and re-retooled back into the original production, all at a cost of only 85 million dollars ($195,000,000 in 2021 dollars, half of which was the cost of knocking down the chariot racing arena.) Amazingly, the cast and crew complete the picture on time, and the rest is revisionist Hollywood history.

**********

Mank

The story of the making of the writing of the screenplay of the film of Citizen Kane (more or less). Herman J. Mankiewicz - known to his friends as "Mank," because he hails from Manchester, England and drinks like it - is an experienced Hollywood screenwriter looking for new challenges. Wonder boy genius Orson Welles persuades Mank to co-write a film about William Randolph Hearst, and hoo boy, this is where the trouble begins.

Mank's first draft is rejected by Welles as being too much like a Western.

"I know I tell the press I watched Stagecoach 40 times to prepare for this, but I wasn't planning on remaking it," Orson's drolly replies, eliciting a lugubrious titter from Mank and a dramatic swoon from Louella Parsons. 

They quickly work out that Mank had mistakenly thought the film was to be about Western actor William Randolph Hearst Scott, more famously known as Randolph Scott. Further versions mistakenly reference western star William S. Hart, William the Conqueror, Randolph Churchill, and (especially strange, given that neither were famous yet) Body Heat star William Hurt, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (full birth name William Rudolph Hearst).

Finally, Mank writes a treatment that actually centers around William Randolph Hearst, ending with Hearst flying his private Vought Corsair F4U-1P (the one with the gold trimmed R-2800-8W Double Wasp engine and a miniature wine cabinet) into the Hollywood sign. Welles considers everything in the script to be perfect, but cuts the ending (due to the cost of blowing up the Hollywood sign). This sends Mank into a spiral, not unlike the F4U-1P with its tail rudder out of alignment.

The film is (of course) a masterpiece, but the experience leaves both men forever distant from one another, and RKO with a gigantic fireplace set eventually used in looped YouTube holiday videos.

**********

Minari

Minari is the gentle and touching (the dad is a chiropractor) story of a Korean family who move to Arkansas, in the United States to start a new life. 

Unfortunately, Hollywood executives, starved for profits due to the pandemic, decide that the story is far too gentle and touching and needs to be spiced up by turning it into a touching and extremely violent kaiju film.

The Yi family are struggling to make their way as farmers in 1980's rural Arkansas (get in line!). The Minari water celery the family is growing on their farm, is just about ready for harvest when a freak accident at Arkansas One, the only nuclear reactor in the state, causes a cloud of radioactive steam to be released. The steam menacingly floats across the state, making a beeline for the farm like a Ko Jin-young approach shot at an easy pin.

The steam causes the celery to mutate into a gigantic green monster that resembles a pale Godzilla with a leafy hairdo. The creature quickly heads for the state capitol, squashing numerous state troopers, chicken farms, and Walmart Neighborhood markets on the way (and that is how you do product placement, people!)

The beast - well, technically the veggie - proves invulnerable to attack. Bombs, missiles, flamethrowers, even the machine gun fire of 10,000 Vought Corsairs, proves useless until the fateful moment when the giant, mutated Minari steps into a rabbit farm and is devoured within 60 seconds. The state is saved.

Unfortunately, the radioactive celery causes the rabbits to mutate, and - you guessed it - Minari turns out to be the prequel for Night of the Lepus.

**********

Nomadland

This documentary details the origins of Disney's least beloved section of Disneyland. During a particularly successful period in Disney's history, a giddy and reckless Uncle Walt decides to dip into his vault (which interestingly looks exactly like Scrooge McDuck's vault) and build a new section of Disneyland based on the long forgotten Disney live-action film Drunken Hobos of the Union Pacific Line, starring Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan, Tim Conway, and Foster Brooks (especially Foster Brooks).

Despite desperate pleas from his brother Roy and a distraught Annette Funicello, who had a bit part in the film, Walt signs off on the project. He approves a long train ride where passengers are accosted by tramps asking for  bottles of Everclear. His Nomadland vision also includes a cracked tea cup ride, a merry-go-round made up entirely of mangy train yard dogs, and a ride where visitors soar above Nomadland in Vought Corsairs, dropping knapsacks of beef jerky and tins of Van de Kamp's beans on a sea of Disney cast members dressed as Foster Brooks's beloved character from the film, "Ol' Smelly Joe." Numerous skull injuries ensue.

Eventually, Walt realizes that the complete and utter shabbiness of the venue, not to mention the stench, is ruining the park for the rest of the visitors. He shuts the entire project down, until it is repurposed decades later as California Adventure.

**********

Promising Young Woman

A disturbing psychological tale of a young woman who compulsively makes promises to everyone she knows. 

It starts with her parents, to whom she promises she will become a lawyer. Unfortunately, she flunks out of law school after defining the legal term "Nolo contendere" as "Marlon Brando's famous line from On the Waterfront." She next disappoints her best friend by promising to be her maid of honor, even though she has already been married four times by this point (twice to Tom Green). After then promising to be her matron of honor, she misses the wedding when she oversleeps after a marathon overnight session of annoying people on Twitter. (To be fair, that could happen to anyone.)

With no career prospects and having alienated her family and friends, she hits the road, taking odd jobs (they all involve prime numbers). Even this desperate trajectory is impeded by her obsessive failure to keep promises. She promises to be a wing walker for a flying circus but gets on the wrong plane (a Vought Corsair AU-1) and is nearly decapitated when it flies through a barn. She promises to drive a Lamborghini cross country, but runs out of gas while doing donuts in the parking lot. She promises to be a prom date for a gawky, underconfident young man who thought she looked cool doing the donuts in the Lamborghini, but she nervously backs out when she finds out the prom theme is "Flying Thru The Barn."

At her wits end, she accidentally foils a convenience store robbery by killing the robbers with their own Uzis. As the ambulance wheels the bullet-ridden corpses of the criminals away, she has a sudden epiphany that this is her gift in life: to make all the bad people pay. So, she becomes The Equalizer.

**********

Sound of Metal

This grating documentary is a 12 hour compendium of the seemingly infinite (especially around hour seven) sounds that different types of metal can make when grinded together.

The documentary is structured in chronological order throughout history, starting in the early Bronze age, where primitive craftsmen attempt to fashion medals for future Olympic games. Much of this section is made up of bronze on bronze sounds, until civilization discovers there are other metals that can make your eardrums vibrate like an overloaded washing machine.

Soon (well, hour four), we are listening to the sounds of armor and weaponry clashing, the collision of building materials, a Vought Corsair colliding with an enraged MechaGodzilla, and a wrecking ball putting some very serious dents in a 1953 Rolls Royce Phantom IV. Also, there is a fascinating seventeen minute sequence where someone slowly files through a steel drum while simultaneously playing it.

The director mines as much of this as he can, and when the film is over, and you have woken up, you will be glad it is over.

**********

The Trial of the Chicago 7

Directed by wacky West Wing impresario Aaron Sorkin, this taut drama seems very confusing until you realize that the title has a typo in it. The actual title is The Trail of the Chicago 7. The film is a western about seven tenderfoot businessmen (they all have bunions) from Chicago, who decide to leave behind their cushy, late 19th century gigs as merchant bankers and become lion-tamers. No! No, sorry. They form an adventurous gang of bank robbers in the wild, wild West (Peoria). 

Soon, they conclude that they need to move even farther west (Peoria's a tough town, after all) and make subsequent stops in Davenport, Iowa City, Des Moines, and strangely, Charlottetown, P.E.I. (where they are thrashed within an inch of their lives in a vicious barroom fight by a plucky, young red-headed woman). Eventually, they wind up in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

The film is full of weird anachronisms. For example, all of the gang members wear Beats headphones and Air Jordans. When sentenced to hang for knocking over a Rainforest Grill, they appeal for clemency to President Josiah Bartlet. And, in one of the most action-packed scenes, they attempt a horseback robbery of a Vought Corsair F4U while it is in flight over Guadalcanal. (Even I must admit, watching the horses leap from wing to wing was thrilling.)

Finally, they realize that their foggy dreams of becoming infamous, wanted desperados are nothing more than the infantile projections of a mid-life crisis, and they return home to form a garage band named after their hometown.

1. There are no footnotes this year.

We're 15!

Listen, I know there hasn't been much going on here, but we did turn 15 just last month, and like most teenagers, we're pretty sullen and flaky about things like deadlines, keeping up appearances, and run-on sentences.

Not the Best Timing

Yesterday, I glanced up from my plate of Pâté aux pommes de terre avec Salade Aveyronaise to my smartphone to discover there was only a limited slate of Premier League football matches scheduled for the weekend. After I got over the shock of that (I nearly spilled crème fraîche all over my intérieur de la cuisse), I also noticed, to my horror, that the Academy Awards₁ are tonight.

Usually, the Oscars are saved for late February, but apparently the organizers of the program this year wanted to time the show so that it would be a huge party celebrating the successful impeachment of President Trump.

Anyway, as is my tradition - not unlike Sisyphus, here are this year's nominees for Best Picture award.

**********

Ford v Ferrari

This riveting legal drama is an Italian version of Kramer vs. Kramer. No, it's not the Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep picture, but rather the lost episode of Seinfeld where Kramer sued himself in order to collect damages from himself. (It was very meta.)

Ford (Michele Richardsaroni) discovers one day that he has been left an enormous sum of money by Neumann (Waynio Cavaliere) but can only collect it under the legal surname of Ferrari, a pseudonym he used in the episode where he and Neumann try to sell an old man's records (Season 4, Episode 18: Il Vecchio).

Rather than legally change his name to Ferrari, Ford decides to sue "Ferrari" in court, in the hope that the judge will have pity on a miserable wretch. While Ford waits for the decision, Jerry, Giorgio, and Elaine wait interminably for dinner at an Italian Restaurant in what was is ostensibly a reference to Season 2, Episode 11: Il Ristorante Cinese, but is in fact a film within a film remake of Luis Buñuel's Il Fascino Discreto del Borghese.

The film ends as Kramer... I mean Ford walks out of the courtroom, thoroughly defeated by the logic of Ferrari's attorney (a vibrant, and weirdly young Al Pacino). A solitary Vought Corsair soars overhead, disappearing onto the horizon like Cosmo's dreams. (It's symbolic!)

**********

The Irishman

The surreal story of a collection of Italian mobsters who, Benjamin Button-like, suddenly begin to grow young again, only in a weird, CGI, Polar Express sort of way.

Directed by Martin O' Scorcese, the film opens with the solitary figure of Seamus Yeats (Robert McNiro) aimlessly wandering the New York City docks with his chicken, looking for opportunities to stage illegal cock-fights. Sean Heaney (Albert O'Pacin) catches up to him, trying to entice him with bigger, more lucrative jobs and also bitterly reminding him that his chicken is actually a frozen Butterball turkey.

Suddenly, a Vought Corsair passes over, emitting an eerie green light that washes over the docks like seagulls over a picnic. Our protagonists are at first concerned, but, after feeling no ill effects aside from the desire to binge-watch Netflix shows, they forget about the incident.

However, the next day, both of them find that they now look mysteriously younger, like Joan Collins, after a double face lift. Their newfound vitality inspires them to pull dozens of risky, exciting, and expletive-laden jobs that result in lots of "guys gettin' wacked and gals gettin' slapped around for bein' too mouthy" (from the Leonard Maltin review).

It all fails to last though, as they are revisited by the Vought Corsair (actually a benevolent alien entity named Krinkles), who explains that the gift of their newfound youth was meant to help them turn over new leaf and find redemption outside of the usual crime films. Disgusted with their corruption, and creeped out by their oddly robust hairlines, Krinkles absorbs their youth, eventually transplanting it into a grateful Mickey Rourke.

**********

Jojo Rabbit

The tragic story of a rabbit who is hit on the head by a falling rivet from a passing Vought Corsair and comes to believe he is Adolf Hitler.

One day, Jojo is bouncing around a meadow, doing what all rabbits love to do best: eating grass, procreating, and annoying the hell out of gardeners. While in the middle of a particularly good salad of fescue, Dandelion, and bluegrass, a metal object falls from the sky, dinging Jojo smack dab in the mullet. When he wakes up, he feels the irresistible urge to organize his fellow rabbits into a marauding horde of vicious killers, persecute Jews and other minorities, and invade Poland (Farmer Poland's cabbage patch). He quickly builds a munitions factory in the burrow behind the pond, and begins churning out the instruments of death. He harangues his fellow rabbits with racist speeches about how low the squirrels and chipmunks are, despite the fact they are watching him from the treetops, and incites them to attack pretty much everything that isn't a rabbit.

Fortunately, because he's just a rabbit, and unable to effectively wield automatic weapons, Farmer Poland blows his scum-sucking little Nazi face off with a shotgun in mid-rant. The End.₂

**********

Joker

The grim tale of the most forgotten card in the deck, this creepy little horror show opens around a table of poker players in a smoke-filled casino room. The dense clouds of cigarette and cigar fumes drift over the gathering, as the players eye one another, looking for some tell or weakness that might give them the vital edge they need.


It's at this point, through some mysterious quirk of fate that only the plotters at DC Studios (or possibly Marvel) could explain, that the Joker of the deck, sitting unnoticed and unloved on the edge of the table, suddenly becomes sentient... murderously, malevolently sentient.

Swiftly, the card throws itself around the room through the necks of the players, like a Ricky Jay deck through a watermelon, it's sharp, unworn edges easily severing the jugular veins of the players. Finally coming to rest, like a Vought Corsair after a long and turbulent sortie, it sits, blood-soaked, perched against a half-empty stein of Michelob Ultra.

The rest of the film details the grisly reign of terror of the card, it's superficially comical exterior hiding the relentless homicidal energy beneath. The body count of the monstrous game piece only comes to an end at the hands of the Caped Crusader, as he trounces the Boy Wonder in an exciting, death-defying game of Go Fish.

**********

Little Women

The 750th adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel, this version is significantly more upbeat and traditional than the last one (Thelma and Louise).

Meg and Jo March (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis) are the elder two of four sisters, all of whom were raised by martial arts master Black Mamba (Betty White). Feeling the need to support the family (Colin Hanks), Meg and Jo enter a martial arts tournament sponsored by the Cobra Kai school (Ralph Macchio), under the belief that the grand prize of a year's worth of Domino's Pizza will see their family through another hard winter (Roseanne Barr).

The younger sisters, Beth and Amy (Meryl Streep and Daryl Hannah), spend much of their time avoiding Harvey Weinstein (Kevin Spacey) at parties and knitting black belts for the family to wear during formal competitions. Beth contracts scarlet fever (later called "Mexican beer virus" by all of the characters, without explanation). Her hallucinations are so vivid, she claims to see a squadron of Vought Corsairs (Jane Fonda and Keanu Reeves), decades before the invention of powered human flight.

Meg and Jo easily win the martial arts competition after becoming enraged by the Cobra Kai sensei's dismissal of them as "little women." They sweep both his hobbled legs (Randy Quaid and Jack, the Wonder Spaniel), apologizing profusely after he explains he was simply reading the title of the script.

Faced with a complex and hostile world through which women martial artists must roundhouse kick their way, the sisters retreat to their cottage of karate boards and pizza crusts, hoping that change will come for the better (so they will have some cash with which to tip the fetching delivery boy[Regis Philbin]).

**********

Marriage Story

Marriage Story is the story of, well, a divorce. I suppose you have to have a marriage to get to the divorce, but the producers seem to have left this part out, preferring to zoom straight to infidelity, court trials, custody battles, and make up sex (the last of which takes up 90% of the film).

Husband Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and his wife Rey (Scarlett Johannson, taking all the roles again, as usual) are reaching the end of their New York City-based marriage, as there is only so much time the light and dark sides of the Force can share one bathroom, if you know what I mean.

Rey leaves town for Los Angeles in a Vought Corsair F4U prop job (despite John Denver's song Leavin' on a Jet Plane blaring in the background), and the two begin new, separate lives. This proves confusing for their son Henry (Dean Winters) who is stranded at a bus stop in Burning Mattress, Arkansas and wondering why the breakdown of his parents' relationship caused them to be so inept at parenting, child safety, and planning coach excursions.

Eventually, they become reconciled to the notion of being apart forever, which, of course, means they are not actually reconciled, meaning they become reconciled to not becoming reconciled, which further confuses Henry, along with the audience, who were hoping for them to resolve their differences with a really good light saber battle.

**********

1917

The story of the year 1917 opens on December 31st, 1916. As the big, electric ball thingy₃ drops down to the sound of cheering throngs of pre-Prohibition, inebriated revelers, the spirit of 1916 departs, leaving the newborn 1917 with these sage words of advice: "You're on your own, you creepy little bastard."

1917 quickly matures, soaring through the winter like a Vought Corsair through barn doors... in other words, leaving its wings and tail fin behind in a cow stall. It careens into spring, stopping to smell the roses, only to realize the roses are dead, because they were all killed by the Kaiser's mustard gas deployments.

Things get even grimmer for our plucky little year, as it waddles, Chaplin-like, into the summer, sweating like Tom Arnold surrounded by a pack of drug-sniffing dogs. The mayhem of the war, combined with the lack of proper air-conditioning and the insistence that everyone wear at least three layers of wool clothing, leaves the year perspiration-sodden and as wrinkled as Robert DeNiro wasn't in The Irishman.

Autumn arrives, which is the name of its plucky housemaid, but fall soon follows, and 1917 is quickly covered in leaves and Sears-Roebuck catalogs. The pangs of age rapidly begin to creep in, and the year knew that, as with the World Series champion Chicago White Sox, corruption and disgrace could not be far away.

Finally, the year limps back to Times Square, facing the giant, shiny ball and the unbearably smug and cherubic face of 1918. As the new year faces the old one with hushed expectation, 1917 departs, leaving the only advice it can think of: "Fiddlesticks!"

As it turns out, fiddlesticks stocks went through the roof the following summer, and 1918 retired a very wealthy year.

**********

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

An adaptation of the most little known of the Grimm Brothers' tales, this film opens with Little Red Riding Hood (Scarlett Johannson, natch) walking through the woods on the way to her grandmother's house. Red is interrupted by the Big Bad Wolf (Tom Waits) who explains that he is down on his luck,
having sworn off grandmother meat since becoming a vegan, and could Red spare him a few bucks for some tofu or edamame.


Meanwhile, Hansel and Gretel (Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson), upon reaching their 21st birthdays, are told that they are in fact not brother and sister. When asked the reason for this ruse, their step-parents (Billy Crystal and Carol Kane) respond, "To keep youse from getting it mit the jiggy," after which Hansel and Gretel get quite jiggy indeed (in the film's only 3-D segment).

Meanwhile, Sleeping Beauty (Saoirse Ronan) and Snow White (Beyonce) go prince shopping in Beverly Hills, not realizing that there is only one Prince, that he is deceased, and that he lived in Minneapolis. After purchasing a variety of handbags and platform shoes, the two decide to form a punk band called 40 Winks.

Meanwhile, Rapunzel (Gal Gadot, with hair extensions) decides she's had it up to here (holds finger halfway up her hair) with life outside the tower, and decides to free climb her way back in. However, Prince Charming (real name: Howard Farnkle - see above) talks her out of it, convincing her that her tresses would be invaluable as a giant wind sock for passing Vought Corsairs (like I would forget those).

Meanwhile, I'm out of space for this segment.

**********

Parasite

Parasite is the feature-length dramatization of the Big Brother television series, and consequently is too horrific (rating "Incredibly NC-17") to be discussed on a PG blog like this one.

Listen, all I can say is that they were finally blasted to kingdom come by Lupita Nyong'o (flying a Vought Corsair LTV A-7) while trying to decide who got to eat the last package of Tim Tams. There were crumbs everywhere!

**********
1. Motto: "We put the 'scar' in Oscar."
2. Actually, the film ends with Farmer Poland's wife announcing that she's pregnant by saying, "The rabbit died," to which Farmer Poland responds, "What a coincidence!"
3. I told you I was writing this at the last minute. There aren't a lot of Thesaurus entries for "ball thingy," at least not ones I can use here.

HEEEENNRRRYY! HEEENNNRRYYY FONDA!!

Turner Classic Movies is showing several Henry Fonda films this evening, including John Ford's classic adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I suspect a lot of people don't know that the famous "I'll be there" scene was originally much longer. For your edification, the original version of the key part of this wonderful scene is below.

TOM

Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...

MA

Then what, Tom?

TOM

Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.
Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.
I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad -
I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.
An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

(PAUSE)

Wherever a guy is runnin' for his life from an angry mob, I'll be there.
Wherever a man is cryin' over spilt milk, I'll be there.
I'll be in the way ladies say, "bless your soul" to a dumb guy -
I'll be in the way commuters push an old fella to the ground, trying to ta' make their train.
An' when the people are sittin' in the john, enjoying indoor plumbin' in a warm room, while readin' a good book - I'll be there too.

(PAUSE)

Wherever a dog is ridin' a skateboard, I'll be there.
Wherever priests in cassocks do handstands on a merra-go-round, I'll be there.
I'll be in the way little kids make sloppy raspberry sounds wi' marbles in their mouths -
I'll be in the way athletes say, "Y'know" a lot 'cause they failed English and can't wait to get out of that interview.
An' when the people are playin' Twister in the nude on a crisp, autumn night - You better believe that I'll be there too.

(PAUSE)

Wherever a guy is eatin' a comically large bowl o' ramen noodles, I'll be there.
Wherever people dance the meringue in feather-lined thongs, I'll be there.
I'll be in the way Abraham Lincoln's top hat never seemed to fall off in a high wind -
I'll be in the way banana peels are slick on one side and weirdly rubbery on the other.
An' when the people are transgressin' the laws of nature in ways that defile and degrade the human spirit so that we're little more than the basest animal in mind and body - I'll be there too.

MA

I don't...

TOM

(SUDDENLY)
Wherever a Dali Lama is ridin' a horse sidesaddle while jugglin' kumquats, I'll be there.
Wherever contortionists run parkour through M.C. Esher constructions, I'll be there.
I'll be in the way bosons and fermions play tenuous games of passionate courtship in the quantum realm  -
I'll be in the way Existentialists and Logical Positivists share raunchy stories about each others' metaphysical underpinnin's behind their backs.
An' when the people are defenstratin' artificial mechanical intelligences in defense of their personal bodily autonomy while yet strivin' to stretch the flimsy tentacles o' careless human knowledge into a vast and seemin'ly unfathomable universe - I'll be there too.

MA

I don't understand it, Tom.

TOM

Me, neither, Ma, but just somethin' I been thinkin' about.

Is Anyone Reading This?

Seriously, is anyone reading this? Leave a comment. Pass along a Twitter mention. Effusively praise us on Facebook (where no one will believe you). It's the least you could do besides nothing.