Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dollar for the Dead!

Theme: Wild West - Lissie

Exhibit Z in the increasingly slam-dunk case that just doing the clichés properly is always better than trying to be clever, 1999's forgotten Dollar for the Dead just takes the spaghetti western formula and delivers like Santa on meth. Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club) plays "Cowboy", which is scarcely any better than "Stranger" from Any Gun Can Play, but what are you gonna do?

Sometimes I try sitting like this all mysterious not talking to anyone. No one's picked a fight with me yet, I'm sure because they're too afraid.

Cowboy teams up with Dooley (William Forsythe), a Confederate veteran with one piece of a puzzle that will lead them to a stash of gold. Dooley is affable, Cowboy terse. Along the way they fight redlegs led by Mike from Breaking Bad, a hulking menace with a mysteeerious beef with Cowboy, and a Mexican general or colonel or something, IDK. The action is of the coolmaxxed variety: Cowboy does things like drop a shot glass, gun down his enemy, and catch it before it hits the floor - the sort of thing they try to have characters do in Disney Starwars but actually cool instead of ear gages and vape shops """"""""""""""""cool"""""""""""""""".

The entire genre of parody is cope for noone being this cool IRL.

Another gag you may recognise has him spin round in a circle shooting bullets through the floor until a whole circle of floor falls out from under him, delivering him handily from the antagonists rushing after him. Kate Beckinsale later copied this move in her mallcore goth flick Underworld.

"Weee" - Cowboy.

I don't actually know if it originated here or whether Dollar also ripped it off from somewhere, but if I were to come up with something that expressed the intersection of cartoon logic and cool, it would most likely be something like that (maybe dumber). It would be kind of funny if it turned out he shot dozens of random civilians through the floorboards, but you know he didn't because the world warps to accommodate you when you're a cool gunslinger instead of a real-life fuckup.

Note that Dollar shares the old Castellari motif of sticking the camera between, atop or underneath things ADHDly, for extra authenticity.

There's a lot of fun dialogue in the movie, too, which is nice because noone writes good dialogue anymore. I tried to think of a good line from a movie made this decade, and I couldn't, even though I tried as hard as I could possibly be bothered to. This wasn't very hard, and that's my point: they're just not good enough to try.  Watch Dollar for the Dead, practice quick-drawing finger-guns in front of your mirror, wear a cowboy hat, have autism, and, as ever, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: We're Outta Here!

Theme: R.A.M.O.N.E.S - Ramones ft. Lemmy (the narrator from Tromeo & Juliet)

Actual punks pass righteous judgement on the posersphere.

The first Ramones album I ever heard was the live album of their final show. When I went back and heard their OG studio recordings, they seemed way too slow. This is because the Ramones kept playing faster as they went along, with the result that by the end they less resembled that orangutan trying to hammer nails in that one video you've all seen and more resembled Travis the chimp on the fateful day of his gamer uprising.

This is because Johnny, the reactionary chud who invented the punk guitar style*, also forced the band to wear their signature uniform leather jackets and bent his efforts toward endlessly refining and perfecting the sound now most ripped off in all pop music history. I know it's fashionable to pretend prog was actually gr8 and punk ruined everything, but you're wrong on that, and the posers who immediately co-opted punk are right: two-minute songs that sound like Dennis Hopper wilding on that log with a chainsaw are the Platonic form of rock, and everything good about prog found its correct expression in the metal of Crimson Glory, Queensrÿche and Megadeth.

But as much as the sound saved rock from disappearing up its ass completely, it would never have transcended gimmickry without the songwriting, which is funnier than any imitator to this day. The greatest lyric ever written isn't "Scaramouche, can you do the fandango" (???) or "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon"; it's "now I guess I'll have to tell 'em/that I got no cerebellum" from DDT abuse cautionary tale "Teenage Lobotomy". A thousand monkeys on typewriters would replicate the works of Shakeƒpeare twenty times before they'd write something that good. Likewise, "Cretin Hop" consigns your attempts and mine at political incorrectness to the tryhard penalty box of shame. But it's not just the household-name hits that are on parade here: hardcore dabble "Wart Hog" makes the cut along with "The Crusher" from Dee Dee's epochally bizarre rap album. The most inexplicable choice is to end the set (and their career as a band) with a cover of "Any Way You Want It", but it wouldn't be the Ramones if they didn't throw a questionable curveball at the moment least expected.

It is a testament to their singularity that the most ripped-off band in history's like will somehow simultaneously never be beheld again on Earth. Everyone gets one time-machine gig to attend, and this one would be mine, after I was done giving thalidomide to famous boxers' mothers and planting a rotary telephone in Ötzi the ice man's cave.

*We will entertain no hipster ackshyouwallys of any kind.

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.