Chink in Travolta's Armor

The real John Travolta, on a hammock, in repose, with minimal make-up.

(Photo courtesy The Superficial)

You know what they say about dominoes, right? As soon as one falls, they all knock into each other and make a mess or something. I think Sartre probably said it better in the original French, but you get the idea.

Yesterday, in a manner of speaking:
After decades of being an asshole in obscurity, John Travolta was finally outed as a Scientology freak who not only generously supports one of the world's largest, fiercest cults (blackmail's a bitch) but also--allegedly--would rather let his son die than have the medical care he needed. Both those links are must reads, by the way, so take your time on this one.

Today, in the same manner of speaking:
Travolta is outed as hiding for years and years what I would officially consider 'not-that-bad baldness' (see photo above). Apparently, Johnnyboy didn't think he should wear his cute little widow's-peak hairpiece to the beach one day and he was dead-wrong. A guy who demands reshoots of publicity photos because his piece ain't workin' right just doesn't make a mistake like this, folks. Is he slipping? Is he cracking? Are we on the verge of something big here?

[I must insist we also discuss how pale, flabby, and death-like JT's face looks in this photo. Are you trying to tell me those are human eyes? If so, you're wrong--that is clearly a robot from space sent to eat medium-rare hamburgers and destroy squirrels for a greater purpose we will never begin to understand (Dianetics, page 317). -Ed.]

Travolta at his most naked, his most honest, his most creepy. Coincidence?

Tomorrow:
What can we expect? Will His Travoltaness finally be broadcast live in streaming HD blasting some beaverboy between the buttocks on a beach in balmy Bermuda?

Well, as they also say, in Hollywood anything is possible...so stay tuned, people of the ether!

And a special message to all the beaverboys out there: Please do not underestimate the seriousness of your task to capture your delicious deeds on digital video. Truthseekers and anti-cult crusaders (whose memberships admittedly overlap considerably) everywhere are counting on you; you're our only hope.

Image courtesy LucasMonster Egocentric Vanity Enterprises, Inc

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Ridley Scott Is a Hack

Yes, I have finally said it out loud and, for clarity's sake, I must inform you my tardiness in so doing is most certainly not due to any wavering of opinion glinted by misguided fanboy nostalgia.

I had merely forgotten about him because his movies are so forgettable and he has been so delightfully irrelevant until the recent fusillade of Robin Hood advertisements plaguing my fair city and its otherwise carefree citizens.

Yes, he directed Alien. Yes, he directed Blade Runner. Yes, he directed Thelma & Louise.

I feel the need to point out, however, that he did not write those movies. He did not create those worlds, those stories, or even the characters. Which is not to say he did nothing, as I am well aware of the tasks performed by a director, but directing those movies hardly puts him on the same shelf as Francis Ford Coppola, who at least wrote Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, and Godfather II before deciding to stop making movies that anybody gave a shit about or even the same shelf as two-hit wonder Michael Cimino, who wrote the story for The Deer Hunter and the script for Heaven's Gate before taking a 22-year nap.

Not only that, but I have no special place in my heart for either of the three aforementioned 'seminal' films he directed. They are favorites among many film geeks/historians and feminist theory professors, but they do nothing for me. I have seen them all and never had a desire to see one again.


And so it is no surprise to me that Scott's laughably ill-conceived and wholly-unappealing reworking of the Robin Hood myth was eviscerated today by the fine folks at Movieline.

A selection of gems from their review:

No wonder Russell Crowe, who plays the renowned bandit hero in Scott’s big fat mess of an epic, looks so cranky and numbed-out. Robin Hood isn’t merely misguided, or overly ambitious, or excessively laden with special effects. Its problems are much bigger than that: The picture is simply oppressive in its blandness, a lumbering symbol of everything that’s wrong with big-budget moviemaking these days. Reportedly, Scott may have spent as much as $237 million on this dreary parade float of a movie, but why quibble about the actual amount? The real outrage is that the dollar signs don’t even show.

The picture’s numerous battle sequences are cluttered and imprecise, but worse than that, they’re just plain ugly.

And the story — set in the days before Robin Hood started robbing from the rich and giving to the poor — is all mechanics and no drama. Brian Helgeland’s screenplay (from a story by Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, and Cyrus Voris) is needlessly complicated. The filmmakers obviously think murkiness and unnecessary digressions are the same as depth.

No actor in Robin Hood escapes with his or her dignity intact, with the exception of Eileen Atkins as Eleanor of Aquitaine. [Cate] Blanchett, often a fine and subtle actress, is somnambulant here — she drifts through the movie like a half-awake, half-aware ghost. She also comes off as sexually indifferent to, if not outright repulsed by, Crowe’s Robin. When the two move in for a kiss, their smooching has a perfunctory, “Think of England” quality.

Crowe is playing a quality here — a kind of drab, holier-than-thou dignity — rather than a character, and Scott never calls him on it. He either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care, but that’s all of a piece with this bungled picture. Scott isn’t a graceful director, and we shouldn’t expect lyricism from him. But any filmmaker telling the Robin Hood story should be able to achieve more than a persistent throb of dullness, which is the best Scott can manage here.

Ouch!

Historically, James Cameron generates a lot of ink for his bloated budgets (think Titanic + Avatar) and uses this free press to feed his bank account until it overdoses, but I think spending $237 million on this inglorious turd (plus over $100 million in marketing costs), will only reward Scott with innumerable mentions alongside Waterworld director Kevin Reynolds (despite the fact that it eventually turned a slim profit), as there is no way in hell Robin Hood is on anybody's wish list this weekend...or ever.

[Incidentally, you will be pleased to know that Waterworld director Kevin Reynolds also directed the previous Robin Hood turd, starring Kevin Costner (which somehow netted $390 million globally, despite sucking). So Scott and Reynolds have even more in common than at first blush! -Ed.]

I would wish you luck this weekend, Mr. Scott, if I did not crave your failure like Cathy craves chocolate.


Why so harsh on the Riddler, you ask?

For your consideration:


"Hmmm...all of my movies have sucked since 1991...what should I do now? No, wait--what would George Lucas do?"

Enter Blade Runner: Director's Cut, Blade Runner: Final Cut, and Blade Runner: This Is Totally the Next-to-Last Cut, I Swear DVD re-issues and not one but TWO Alien prequels.

What else would you expect from a 72-year-old egomaniacal hack?

Seacrest out.

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Happy Birthday, Death

The fact that John Goodman's jowls have officially swallowed his face at the age of 57 is fascinating but irrelevant, as is his ghostly pallor.

Question: How has a man who clearly believes in limitless indulgence cheated death by coronary thrombosis/diabetes/stomach explosion/gout for this long?

Answer: He has embraced the dark side. He will live forever, growing increasingly more grotesque--yet mirthful--with each passing day. He is unstoppable. He might eat you just for fun and present his children with a clever brain-stimulating puzzle made from your mangled bones.

If you are curious as to what he will look like on his 60th, look no further than this image I recently obtained from the future:



Perhaps George Lucas can somehow seize this fertile opportunity to make another billion dollars for no good reason? Reinvigorate the flaccid franchise while saving millions on special effects?

If he and Spielberg are done ruining the Indiana Jones series, that is...

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Steven Spielberg Should Be Crucified

Why?

That's why.

I know it's a bit harsh, in light of all the good he has done in the past (Jaws, E.T, Indiana Jones I & III, producing Goonies, Back to the Future, and Gremlins), but he's let his previous success get to his head and still thinks he should be behind the wheel in Hollywood.

Don't people retire anymore, once they cease to be relevant?

Clearly Spielberg won't let us alone until he kicks the bucket and hands one of his sons the reigns to the empire that is Amblin Entertainment; it is for this reason I think he needs to be taught a lesson--Pilot-style.

Oh, what do you think should happen?
We tickle him until he says he's sorry?
I'M sorry, but that just won't cut it.
He doesn't deserve that kind of leniency.

Not after:

- Hook (1991)----Ugh.

- Jurassic Park (1993)---a great book, a pretty hokey adaptation (example: of course he has to make the girl the smart kid, for no reason, but then doesn't follow through and she becomes a screaming damsel in distress, as opposed to a truly strong female character)

- Schindler's List (1993) --Not that great, people. The cinematography is enjoyable, as always, but that credit goes to Janusz Kaminski, not the Berg. Story-wise, script-wise, directing-wise? Pretty hokey and boring. Just because it involves the Holocaust does not mean it is Oscar-worthy.

- Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World (1997) ---did we need to go back?

- Amistad (1997) ---not even sure what to say about this one...

- Saving Private Ryan (1998) ---awful; the first installment of the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg Shitbox Trilogy. Realistic, expensive special effects in the opening D-Day scene; that's about the only thing worth watching. You want to see a GREAT fictionalized movie about WWII? Try watching one by a talented director who actually LIVED THROUGH IT--Paul Verhoeven's Black Book.

- A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001) ---Not necessarily a great project, but I do not doubt Kubrick would have pulled it off; how much more glaring can the gap between a great director and a populist director be?

- Minority Report (2002) ---so many glaring improbabilities, within the world he created. Example: Everybody is looking for Tom Cruise, every retinal scanner in the city is searching for him, finding him...to the point where he pays somebody to REMOVE HIS EYEBALLS. Then he takes those eyeballs and uses them to access to the most secure facility in the city, the hall of super-secret records, or whatever. You mean to tell me they didn't lock out his access? Really? Or could Steven just not figure out any other way he could get Tom in there, and he didn't think anybody would notice or care, because his audience is dumb and just wants the good guy to win? And that's just ONE inconsistency...

- Catch Me If You Can (2002) ---please. A great real-life story made totally boring, mostly by stretching the truth to increase the role of the pursuing investigator, so that it would be worth Mr. Hanks' time. It wasn't. Everybody on the crew should have stayed in bed those 3 months.

- The Terminal (2004) ---Yet again, another true-life story that could have made a great movie. But instead, Spielberg casted Tom Hanks to play an Iranian man stuck in DeGaulle for decades. Of course, Spielberg moved it to JFK, made him from a fictionalized country, never mentioned the real-life story, and felt obliged to add in a love interest--Catherine Zeta Jones. Yeah. The real story just wasn't interesting enough--it's so much better when you add in a completely-unrealistic romance with a sexy woman.

- War of the Worlds (2005)---Tom Cruise tried desperately to prove his masculinity in the opening scenes. Let's see...he's a single father down on his luck who drives around a sexy muscle car and helps the neighborhood auto mechanic when the guy just can't figure out what's wrong with the car he's fixing... And then shit happens and he's stuck with his kids, trying to help them stay alive, and it's tough, lemme tell ya. But things aren't so tough for most people, evidently. His wife's entire family, including grandparents, somehow make their way safely to Boston and are chillin' at a brownstone in the tony Beacon Hill neighborhood--which is somehow untouched by disaster, as if aliens respect rich people too much to go after them.

- Jurassic Park 4 (2009)-----he didn't have the heart to direct the 3rd one, but he did executive produce it... I bet this one is gonna be killer. Let me guess: bigger better dinosaurs...a precocious child or two...aliens that look like E.T...soft furry animals that make for great licensing items...and a 2hr-long piece of crap.

[Side note: Can't wait for his Lincoln movie...Liam Neeson as Abraham Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, Harrison Ford as Vice President Johnson...and let me make a suggestion for John Wilkes Booth--Shia LeBoeuf. Hey, why not? It's not like it will matter how good this movie is--it's a Spielberg joint, dawg, we gotsta go see it!!!]


Oh, brother. I'm so tired of bitching. He isn't even worth the breath, this Spielberg, and yet I expend it. One last pass:

Is it any wonder that two of the three richest men in Hollywood (Geffen is safe...for now...) are both guilty of ruining their own legacies by not only returning to them for no reason, but also for proceeding to sully them beyond believe? And, let me tell you, both Lucas and Spielberg's heavy hands were visible on this one. I blame Lucas for the prairie dogs and monkeys, I blame Spielberg for everything else.

In closing, go to hell, Steven Spielberg. You have done more to ruin movies than you ever did to help them. I hope you realize that some day.



Question of the Week:
It took 18 years to get a script everybody agreed on and THIS was it? THIS was the one that everybody loved? What were the other ones? Various people's excrement smeared on 3-hole-punched toilet paper? Fuck you.