Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Wild Things!

Spot the subliminal alligator.

1998's Wild Things is the classic case of a movie you watch with the horniest of intentions but find yourself sticking around for the plot unironically. In fact, the details of the film's noir conceit are so much fun they're still elaborating on it through the end credits.

The working title for the script was literally Sex Crimes. Always a good way to pique a Hollywood producer's interest.

Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is the guidance counsellor at 25-y/o High School, Blue Bay, Florida, who, in a Rashomonesque off-screen event may or may not have raped preppy Stacy Kelly Van Ryan (the ubiquitous Denise Richards), prompting this hilarious outburst from her cougar Karen mother (Theresa Russell):

Least self-serving #metoo poster.

The plot thickens with the introduction of Kelly's trailer goth rival Suzy Toller (Neve Campbell, Scream), shyster lawyer Ken Bowden (Bill Murray, as himself), and cop duo Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon), but I will leave it to you to unravel the elaborate knot of intrigue that surrounds this cast of ne'er-do-wells and rarely-do-wells, because Wild Things is the rare erotic thriller that retains your interest to the end.

Choose your fighter.

I will say this though: watch the extended (lol) version for more of the fantasy centrepiece scene, to say nothing of more intra-credits gems. The world of Wild Things is a wonderful, lurid, vibrant sort of heatstroke daydream, where porno logic, telenovela sensationalism and brooding, True Detectivey atmospherics mesh into a strange, beguiling mood. The near-total excision of eroticism from the movies in the decades since has not resulted in greater, more honest works of capital-A Art; in fact, the movies have become dumber and lamer. It's almost as though that reptile brain part of us can't be neatly lobotomised away without dulling our collective humanity; our very sovl.

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 20. One Way Ticket to Midnight (Part 3)!

Previously...

Theme: One Shot at Glory - Judas Priest

To be continued...

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: A Man For All Seasons!

Well of course they tried to whack Trump, just as they tend to murder everyone who dares to stand athwart the designs of Progress. Sir Thomas More is not only cinéma's great reactionary hero, but one of history's too. A Man For All Seasons recounts with bottomless wit and pathos the escalation of his persecution by heretical, philandering fatass Henry VIII and his cadres of Maoist goons from the pointed nudge to threats, imprisonment, struggle session and show trial, to the final execution of the recalcitrant saint. Sir Thomas (Paul Scofield, who honed the role to perfection in many prior stage performances) seeks only to live up to the minimum standard Solzhenitsyn espoused: not to take arms against his era's iteration of the perennial petulant libtard revolt against truth, beauty, hierarchy and God, merely to opt out of it; not to say that which he does not believe. Let the lie come into the world, let it even reign there for a time, but not through me.

Who would win: the most painstakingly prudent man of his time, or everyone else being petty and retarded?

Sir Thomas remains a dignified enigma, one of the few grown-up protagonists to grace the screen, but the drama lays bare the small souls of his regime-compliant nemeses. Cromwell (Leo McKern), Henry's chief hatchetman, appeals to the consensus of the credentialed classes like the classic reddit midwit and/or Woman On Twitter (but I repeat myself):

Like UGH, like seriously? Like don't you see that all the celebrities you hate, the journalists who sneer at you, The Science, every corporation, and a bunch of soyjaks with "PhD" in their bios all agree that men are women, Russia blew up its own pipeline, covid was deadly to all gatherings except George Floyd protests, and Israel is our greatest ally? Like, do you even care about peer pressure at all?

Of course it's not too long before this crude veneer of sophistication gives way to blunt threats of torture on the rack. But most of us are neither More nor Cromwell, saint nor psychopath. Between the Good and the Bad scurry the Ugly. Perhaps you recognise yourself in this guy...

Or this guy...

Or this little asshole...

This oleaginous pissant is every resentful commie social climber you've ever met in your life. The most well-observed depiction of the true, abject face of evil in the movies.

All these people have their litanies of rationalisations. Of course, they all have to live under the considerable shadow of Fat King Fuckpants and his temper tantrums. Few scenes in movies demonstrate the hapless lot of sycophants trapped in the orbit of power like the one where Henry (Robert Shaw) jumps off his boat to find himself splattered in mud, turns and gives an I-meant-to-do-that laugh, taken up by his toadies, who all pile into the mud after him. It must be what it's like pretending Biden is the president.

Couldn't be me!

You know, as much as people shit-talk the boomers (and they're right to), at least the boomers actually sold out: they had goofy principles to begin with, but when they abandoned them, they at least got paid. My generation (millennials) abandoned all our principles for literally nothing. We all grew up laughing at Pain Olympics and the "Offended" page of Encyclopedia Dramatica, then at some point we all started pretending to be pious libtards, but we didn't even get anything for it. Man buries the millennial with this riposte:

You did it for worthless social credit.

Watch A Man For All Seasons, and repent.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Blackbeard the Pirate!

Yeah, I got all my screengrabs from a YouTube upload. Sue me.

Pirate movies before and after Pirates of the Caribbean 1 have uniformly sucked with the exception of RKO's 1952 banger Blackbeard the Pirate. Never heard of it? Of its star, Robert Newton? But I guarantee you've heard unwitting impressions of him from everyone from Geoffrey Rush in Caribbean to your relentlessly unfunny friends, for so definitive was Newton's performance in this and Treasure Island that he single-handedly bestowed upon the profession of pirate its iconic accent, complete with yarrrs.

His Mansonesque crazy eyes have equally become a staple of buccaneer comportment.

Blackbeard the Pirate is flagrant fiction, which is odd because the real-life tale of Edward "Blackbeard" Teach sounds almost suspiciously as though written for the screen (spoilers: his nemesis Robert Maynard ambushes him, duels him to the death and hangs his severed head from his ship's rigging. Nothin personnel...kid...). In the movie, Maynard goes undercover with Blackbeard as a surgeon to investigate rumours Henry Morgan has returned to piracy*. Blackbeard lets him remove a bullet from his fucking neck while openly shit-talking him and daring him to take the opportunity to bump him off, because Blackbeard is just that low in trait agreeableness in the movie (not, in fact, IRL). Maynard is a stuffed-shirt cipher like most ""hero"" characters, not half as entertaining as Blackbeard, nor half the badass that he was in life. Happily, Linda Darnell is typecast as a smoking hot babe, which makes up for it.

That's actually my worst-taste joke because she tragically died in a fire. A fire caused by her searing pulchritude.

OK, the swordfights don't come close to the Tyrone Power/George Sanders showcase in The Black Swan a decade prior, nor do the sea battles even hint at what the Caribbean flicks would later offer, but it's like comparing Browning's Dracula with George Melford's Spanish-language version. Sure, Melford's is better in every technical aspect, but Browning's has Lugosi, and Newton was to the image of the pirate as Lugosi was to the vampire: if your version doesn't define the archetype so thoroughly it becomes parody within your lifetime, did you even really play the role?

Arrr, yo ho ho.

*This would be an impressive feat, because in real life Morgan died when Teach was eight.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Lonesome!

The romantic comedy peaked in the 1920s and has been tumbling downhill ever since. 1923's Girl Shy married the formula with Harold Lloyd's insane stuntmanship. 1927's It made Clara Bow the silent era's biggest star and coined the term "It Girl", which then meant something like what problem glasses wearers would later call the "manic pixie dream girl". But it was with the following year's Lonesome that the genre reached its zenith.

>tfw no 1920s gf

As its title implies, Lonesome concerns the sense of isolation felt by its protagonists in the urban prison of New York City. Early scenes depict the frenetic and oppressive schedule of city life with a light touch that builds upon the montage fretwank of the silent-era city symphony craze like if a prog band discovered humour.

This manlet desperately hanging onto a handle too high for him ilustrates a problem in modernity: one size doesn't fit all.

Glenn Tryon is the Lonesome (1928) everyman machinist Jim, while 4'11" 20s 10 Barbara Kent is the less-probably Lonesome (1928) telephone operator Mary. A montage of their respective workdays is framed by the clock ticking away, a prison of mortality. Like Stefan Molyneux observing Taylor Swift, we can sense Mary's egg carton emptying to the ceaseless march of the clock's hands.

♪Despite all my ragie I am still just a wagie in a cagie...

Fortunately Jim and Mary get away from the metropolis for long enough to find each other on a beach. There's a charming will-they-meet-or-won't-they sequence in which Jim will catch sight of Mary just as she disappears into a crowd, or her reflection in a mirror.

>tfw no 1920s gf

Lonesome was shot to completion as a silent film but in '28 there was a rush to capitalise on the false promise of sound so a few scenes with synched effects or audible dialogue were added, including the most dorkish flirtation yet captured on film. These would be better excised, but whatever; it's an interesting quirk of movie history and with a feature runtime of 68 minutes, it hardly makes the picture drag. Besides, the unpretentious sweetness of the romance is the point: it's only at the seaside funfair that the wagedrones can retvrn to innocence, unhindered by the srs bsnsness and mandatory cynicism of the urban grind. We delight in their aw-shucks courtship and bewail their tragical separation by the teeming throngs of NPCs and sudden storm that sweeps the funfair. Are they doomed to be foreveralones after all? Find out: watch Lonesome instead of The Boys or The Acolyte or whatever other SHIT you think you have to watch tonight.

And if I am elected, we will Make Women Wear Hats Again.