Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Broken Arrow!

Theme: Quote Unquote - Mr Bungle

SPOILEUSE!!!

The great where-do-you-want-to-eat-tonight standoff continues.

The greatest and best of the 90s' Big Orange Fireball Explosion movies, Broken Arrow is chiefly notable for its use of doing it right - a long-forgotten cinématic technique where the list of boxes you tick looks like this:

Fun, likable, resourceful hero: ✅

Fun, hammy, but credibly menacing villain: ✅

Likable feminine heroine: ✅

Creative action sequences: ✅

Twists and turns in the action to keep it fresh: ✅

Cool scenery porn: ✅

A bit of humour: ✅

≥4 helicopters blowed up: ✅

John Woo is perhaps second only to James Bond in his inexplicable antipathy toward helicopters.

The plot concerns an average day in the life of John Travolta (The Punisher), whose scheme to hijack a pair of nukes for ransom and/or shits and giggles hits a snag only when his copilot and bro Christian Slater catches wind and tries to stop him, enlisting the aid of adorable park ranger Terry (Samantha Mathis) as he goes, for this kinögraph is set in Utah's Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, because it looks cool.

In the good old days you just had to stand around with your thumb up your ass waiting for kino clouds to form.

When a movie does everything right, it often leaves little to talk about. The most nonsensical component is the contrived ticking clocks that result no less than twice when one of the nukes is armed. Naturally, these give our heroes just enough time to escape and/or disarm them. While the first time can be overlooked because Travolta needs to get away as well, the second time he's planning to die in the blast, so why set it to five minutes instead of five seconds? Fortunately, "to be moar entertaining" is a perfectly good explanation for this character in-story, because his main motivation seems to be to set himself a challenge and have fun.

This is in fact also my motivation.

It's kind of endearing the way Travolta sort of mentors Slater through the runtime, even though they're enemies for most of it. It's like their broship doesn't have to end just because one of them turns out to be a psycho. You get the impression Slater would have visited Travolta in the can had he been taken alive. Every man should have a bro as tight. Also, the movie has a guy get kicked off a railway bridge, which is worth a star in itself.

I hope he's alright.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Galaxy Quest!

Theme: Phasers on Kill - Screeching Weasel

These are the trips of the space vessel Project. Its half-decade task: to look for novel fauna and uncontacted societies; to confidently venture where noone has yet essayed.

Since we can all agree Star Trek the Motion Picture was barely a Star Trek movie, the best Star Trek movie is of course 2000's Galaxy Quest, which also isn't a Star Trek movie (no, there aren't really any good Star Trek movies). Tim Allen, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Allan Weaver head up the cast of has-been actors from the fictitious TV show Galaxy Quest, which we are told aired in the 1980s but in 1999 or so remains popular enough to sustain a convention circuit just like Trek, where the most unwashed of autismos go to soyface over their devoted fandom, in the presence of the burned-out, jaded cast.

Me meeting any of my many fans (not you, though. You're my favourite).

But their world is TURNED UPSIDE DOWN when one particular group of awkward NERDS turn out to be IRL ayylmaos in real life in the movie (not in the show in the movie) and have an actual ship built after the specifications from the TV show, which they believe constitutes actual historical documents of real events. You might think little details like the credits would serve to disabuse them of this notion, but go away, it's a fun premise. It doesn't actually matter that movies make sense, only that they make enough sense for the type of movie that they are. If you get hung up on the details here, you might as well put Road Runner cartoons on blast because you can't really walk off a cliff onto thin air until you look down.

I like the one that makes SOME sense.

Anyway, once in spehss, our not-actually-heroes soon run into trouble with Stan Winston Workshop's finest creation since the Predator, stock villain Sarris:

All I want in life is to be a stock villain with an evil claw hand.

Sarris wants to kill the NERDS for some reason, who cares. WILL the TV stars bluff their way to victory? WILL Alan Rickman's ayy prosthetics last the entire runtime? WILL Sigourney Weaver's costume? FIND OUT, but it's no.

There's no blooper reel on the DVD I got from the charity shop, indicating against all odds that their deadpans held out longer than either.

The movie is FUNNY, parodies entertainment clichés out of love, not faux-superiority, and still plays more like a real movie than today's tentpole blockbusters, because the requisite emotional beats were still there and the filmmakers had the confidence not to undercut them with bathetic interruptions like Jar Jar Abrams and similar Josh Sweden imitating HACKS. Take, for instance, the scene where the captured has-beens must finally reveal to the ayys who they really are:

In honour of this forgotten level of taste and restraint, I won't even spoil the moment by pasting that fat guy that cries at trailers' face over the ayy.

I'm a little bit surprised Galaxy Quest isn't more widely known and referenced by YouTube critics, for were I, say, Disparu, I'd use this clip reliably in every other video:

Me watching anything at all.

But those are just my thoughts, what are yours? Like and subscribe to Khoomei Masterclass on YouTube Dot Com, stay hydrated, look both ways before crossing the street, put your left foot in, your left foot out, do the Bartman, never give up, never surrender, and I'll see you next time, and as always, don't eat yellow snow.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mask!

Theme: Swing Set - Jurassic 5

The first and last time CGI had sovl.

Zoomies and alphies will know Jim Carrey (if at all) for his John Wayne Gacy tier schizo ""art"" of, like, Blumpf bumming himself in prison or whatever, but before he was a dribbling mental case, our Jim Jam had a trilogy of kinographs of surpassing quality in the 1990s: Ace Ventura Pet Detective had him fighting crime and saving animals in a succession of Hawaiian shirts, headbanging with Cannibal Corpse and making transsexuals seethe, while Liar Liar cast him as the slick attorney one day cursed with the affliction that he cannot utter falsehoods, which would also make transsexuals seethe.

IT'S...NOT...MA'AM

Yet between these pillars of dopey hilarity there was another one which I watched more recently, hence the article. The Mask has Carrey start off as a hapless everyman hopelessly orbiting a 4, before his life is TURNED UPSIDE DOWN when he finds a The Mask (1994), which, when donned, makes him The Mask (1994), a guy with a bright green face and no ears (no, IDK why). This alter ego is imbued with the power of being a Tex Avery cartoon, which makes him invincible, amoral and capable of producing physical objects from some wormhole situated just behind his back. Like a less hooker-murdering Edward Hyde, he does all the whacky, crazy things that normal!Carrey was afraid to, like rob banks and romance 7s like Amy Yasbeck and Cameron Diaz.

Every man just wants a beautiful mid to call his own.

The characterisation of The Mask is wonderfully multilayered, in that he's a wish fulfilment fantasy, but for a sensitive young naïf, who therefore wears a bright yellow suit with a pimp hat and says cool guy things like "Party: P-A-R-T-WHY? Cause I GOTTA!". It's like Jon Arbuckle's idea of cool, but because he shares the fantasy with you, the viewer, the world around him must play ball. It's one of those cinématic nowhere-cities that's not quite contemporary to the movie's release, but also has art deco imagery from the great depression and film noir times.

People don't dance like this anymore and I didn't know I want them to.

While The Mask was loosely based on some comic noone's ever read, it was originally scooped up by New Line because they wanted a new horror property to pick up where the Nightmare on Elm Street series left off, and offered it to Dream Warriors director Chuck Russell, whose input largely was to make it this love letter to old-timey cartoons instead, which is a fun trajectory for a project to take. You can't go wrong by making movies fun male wish fulfilment fantasies, because they just consist of a man getting to enjoy a bit of romance and adventure, while female ones are all oddly mean-spirited and empty. Today reviews would screech that normal!Carrey's perfectly modest complaint that "nice guys finish last" proved he was really a thoughtcriminal, and "entitled" (which in newspeak means not entitled to something, much like "privileged" means shut up and know your place). Needless to say, retvrn.

"Somebody stop me!" If only they never had.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Just For A Day!

There can be no question of the fact that Slowdive's second album, Souvlaki, is probably the best album of all time of the week, the year, the 90s and the history of recorded music (at least tied with Loveless; Isn't Anything preferrers go be tryhards somewhere else). Nor can there be much question that Pygmalion was an audacious change of pace and a respectable, tasteful hipster fave, nor even that their later works make excellent use of the possibilities of more recent production techniques. If you play Just For A Day and Souvlaki back to back, not a jury in the land would convict Souvlaki of anything less than a brutal murder of the OG effort, nor could I endeavour in good conscience to appeal the verdict as anything but just.

But I like Just For A Day, because it is so pure in concept and because it blew my tiny mind upon first hearing it, and no man can but fondly and wistfully recall the first such blowing he received. Souvlaki is, unquestionably, the better collection of songs, somehow more pop and more sophisticated and more audacious at once. You'd have to call in a certified caprinologist to review it; I just know a GOAT when I see one. "Souvlaki Space Station" is weird, "Alison" sublime, and "Dagger" brilliantly jarring in its waking to regretful recollection from the dreampop haze.

But Just For A Day plays like variations on a theme, its noisy swells elemental, oceanic, like waves pounding inexorably, crushingly, yet gracefully, upon a sullen and deserted shore, and after each such surge recedes it leaves those swirling eddies in the crevices and rock pools in its wake. In opener "Spanish Air" Halstead opines "I long for the sun, the wind and rain". By "Waves" his wish, and life, has been fulfilled: it "felt so good to see the sun". The whole album evokes a long and solitary walk along an overcast beach in the liminal seasons of spring and autumn; melancholy, calm and elation all flowing in and out of one another like a tide. It's music by which to contemplate eternity.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week DOUBLE FEATURE: Whirlpool and Blood Music!

This year marks the 35th anniversary of Chapterhouse's debut album, Whirlpool, for which auspicious occasion they have reformed and are touring around playing the whole thing for their eminently discerning fans. Sadly I won't be attending any of these shows because I only found out about it yesterday, which made me so mad I spent forty minutes pacing angrily around my room stimming and babbling to myself until I got dizzy and crawled under my weighted blanket for a sob. Fortunately I can still celebrate the occasion with a blȭǥ post, which also gets me out of having to think of a thing to post about.

Shoegaze was brilliant, so naturally the music press hated it and murdered it in favour of utter shit like grunge and brit pop. Ostensibly, the reason they despised it was because it was "too middle class", which is a stupid reason to cut short the best genre of its era. Powdered wig aristocrats have classical, football hooligans have oi!, so why shouldn't the poor saps who pay taxes have a genre for themselves? If jamming Chapterhouse is "middle class", then mow my lawn and run my 2.5 kids off to school, because Chapterhouse is great and Tony Blaircore sucks.

But since so many shoegaze pioneers were too polite and easily embarrassed to resist getting bullied out of soaking longer in their daydream genre (Lush and Ride went brit pop, Slowdive and The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa took a turn for sparse electronic and Catherine Wheel went space rock, prog, hard rock then prog again), it was only sensible and prudent for their fellow purveyors of swirly headcandy to have an escape plan of their own, which was already somewhat telegraphed on Whirlpool: with their followup Blood Music, they went largely dance-rock.

To this very day I can't decide which album I like more. On the side of Whirlpool we have an obvious ringer in the form of "Pearl", which might be the entire scene's most pristine pop gem. "Satin Safe" is as ominously droney as "Breather" is sunny and light, while "Come Heaven" provides the gritty/swirly template for gothgazers Love Spirals Downwards. Blood Music boasts fewer standouts but is more consistent and coherent as a whole. Blood Music loses points for more intelligible vocals but matches Whirlpool's array of pedals with a sonic sprawl all of its own. Whirlpool is the captivating rush of spring and summer, Blood Music the flourescent melancholy of autumn, but, like Yin and Yang, each contains a drop of the other.

Demos released on their recent Chronology comp suggest a third album might have further integrated the two styles, but we'll never know because after Blood Music they stopped altogether, quitting while they were creatively, if not commercially, lightyears ahead of the curve (no offence to Curve). It's like if I'd dropped The Real Slim Stayvun and The Stayvun by Edgar Allen Poe and then retired into obscurity, content to let the GOATs speak for themselves.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Jawbreaker!

Theme: Candy Pop - LEN

One million years ago I came up with a movie pitch that was essentially Mean Girls meets The Death of Stalin, which, of course, I called The Death of Stacy (w/t DONUT STEEL).

This is a parody edit I made from some tumblrcore feminist agitslop, which only makes it funnier.

I even wrote a first draft of a short screenplay, but never really cared for it enough to bother with a second. Fortunately, someone or other in the 90s had the same basic insight: that clique flicks must be structured like mob movies. Jawbreaker is basically a Scarface or Goodfellasesque rise-and-fall narrative set within the shiny halls of that familiar celluloid vista, 25-y/o High.

Trooning out solely so I can go into the girls' bathroom and make cat noises obnoxiously as they beef.

Scream's Rose McGowan plays the usurping Casey whose prank kidnapping of alpha queen Stacy Charlotte Ayana cuts short her reign and life, leaving McGowan presumptive leader of the pack. Sycophantic Macy Julie Benz has her back but conscience-addled Laci Rebecca Gayheart (Urban Legend) wants out, which incurs the ostracism of the newly crowned Stacy (no, they don't actually have rhyming names, like in my screenplay, but they should).

#relatable #justgirlthings #xoxo

Yet the coverup is jeopardised by incidental witness Becky (not her name either) (Judy Greer), who Rose McGowan buys off with a Faustian offer of popularity. But will the new Casey get too big for her designer heels? Will there be tears, recriminations, character assassinations, catfights, double-crosses, sass and sabotage? Of course, but, better still, there's heightened art direction that makes everything you've ever seen look phoned in.

Round shapes as of the titular candy haunt the characters' headspace...

Hang like an albatross around their necks...

Or loom overhead like the sword of Damocles.

Here, the Jawbreaker (1999) looks like the planet from Eraserhead...

"I've seen Blue Velvet too!" - director

Oh, don't mistake me, this is 100% a Stacy-bashing high school angst revenge fantasy. The director clearly favours the gay-theatre-kid and tryhard-scenester side characters, wilfully blind to the fact they're every bit as cliquey and bitchy as the very meanest hot girls IRL. The name of the school, Reagan High, also speaks to soybitch resentment (yeah, I hate Reagan too, but for based and redpilled reasons. Hollywood libs hate him because they think he was good).

"Classic Americana MUST be rotten with hypocrisy, otherwise I'd be the one who's wrong, and that's impossible" - Cope & Seethe, Attorneys at Law.

But, like all mob movies, they can't help but make their villain protags look cool, making Jawbreaker as hard a self-own as Starship Troopers and The Joker. The reason rappers see Scarface not as a cautionary tale but as a wish fulfilment fantasy isn't despite Tony's violent downfall, but because of it: going down in flames at the height of your glory is part of the dream; to burn out, not to fade away. No one wants any less to be a cool Stacy at the head of a clique after seeing Jawbreaker. Get real!

I come not to bury Stacy, but to praise her.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Demolition Man!

The lunch lady at St Pat's Primary School (1995, colourised).

Everyone loves Demolition Man, the greatest Stallonekino and one of the more entertaining movies of the 90s, or, indeed, ever. John Spartan (Stallone) is cryogenically frozen after a run-in with arch-criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes). Flash forward to the far future of 2032 (we've still got time!) and Los Angeles is now transformed into the peaceful utopia of San Angeles. But is all as it seems? No!!!

"Somehow...Phoenix returned" - not actual dialogue.

For some mysterious reason Phoenix is sprung from Ice Block C and proceeds to wreak havoc on a world that has evolved beyond violence, and thus has no idea how to handle it. Snipes, utterly wasted in lame hero roles in other flicks, is gr8 fun as the homicidal psychopath finding to his bemusement and subsequent glee that this brave new world is his brave new oyster.

Basedly, the Hall of Violence has the same font as the menus in Diablo II.

Just watching Phoenix go around bullying the bewildered quokka-folk of San Angeles would be entertainment enough, but beaming uniformed waifu Lt. Huxley (lol) (Sandra Bullock, a revelation before everyone got tired of her bullshit five minutes later) has the bright idea to revive Stallone and sic him on the risen Phoenix.

Cute!

But also...

Hilarity ensues as Spartan must learn to navigate a world of feeble law enforcement, strange technologies and social taboos like an autist in the real world. The fish-out-of-water is a time-worn formula for entertainment and the pairing of Stallone's jaded old-school action hero and Bullock's wide-eyed retro-junkie also makes this technically a buddy-cop flick, meaning it relies as much on their chemistry as the gimmick.

Judging by this look and the snail trail she leaves behind her, we're in safe hands.

Much has been made of the social satire element, but, like most satires, it's as much a time-capsule today as Stallone's character is in the 2032 of the film's setting. Sure, the notion of an overly-polite high-trust society being immunocompromised against exploitation by violent criminal scumbags is as relevant now as it ever was, but the gentle lampooning of late-80s/early-90s political correctness culture makes the classic blunder of assuming good faith from its proponents. Flash forward to now and it's abundantly apparent that those who promulgate politically correct standards and shibboleths are as much cluster-B manipulators and psychopaths as Phoenix, and their risible goofiness is little more than a veneer for squalid self-advancement on the heads of those less slick of tongue and short of integrity. Though there are hints...

This dude dressed like if a Japanese chick became Pope might be significantly cast: he played the smooth-talking bureaucrat in Yookay TV's Yes, Minister.

Is the V-shaped SAPD badge design a subtle nod to INGSOC's curiously hash tag inclusive logo? You decide!

But whether you read surface-level whimsicality or deeper, darker subtext into it, this kino crushes as pure entertainment. WILL Spartan curtail Phoenix's rise? CAN he solve the three seashells? WAS Sandra Bullock really likable? Find out!!! Watch Demolition Man today!

"Imma Chargin My Laser!" - actual dialogue.