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: Citizen Vigilante!

Theme: The Man in Black - Johnny Cash

I think "Citizen Vigilante" is Spanish or something for a vigilant citizen; someone who looks out for others. That's what I took away from Uwe Boll's new opus about a dude that teaches people moral lessons about road safety and the importance of paying bus fares.

Sorry interior design bros, black turtlenecks are for straight people now.

Boll is often bashed for the alleged badness of his films, none of which I had ever seen, so eye dee kay, but since Citizen Vigilante is objectively 6/10, it's easily and by far the greatest and best film of the 2020s, followed by nothing, and then nothing else. Citizen Vigilante (I'm going to assume that's his name) lives in the country of EUROPE, which is a subtle reference to the erstwhile IRL continent of the same name. EUROPE is getting ruined by criminal migrants, so Citizen does what noone else will do and the authorities actively try to prevent anyone doing: he very politely offers them multiple chances not to be scumbags, then ends up killing them when they limbo dance under the very low bar he has set for them.

James Gunn thinks it's absolutely deranged to believe this.

For whatever reason, Citizen has drawn comparisons to Dirty Harry and Death Wish, but this is misleading, because those flicks are POZZED. The villain in Dirty Harry was a raaaycist white guy and the ones in Death Wish, despite their dialogue being obviously communist in nature, spraypainted a Buddhism sign on the wall of the crime scene to remind you that ackshyoowally don't forget that moustache man bad too, goy. Pathetic! Citizen makes no such egregious concession to zioshitlibry, though its producers and/or star (self-described cannibalism fetishist Armie Hammer) likely made sure it didn't take aim at their evil ethnocartel too. Nonetheless, it's certainly the closest thing to not being 100% ghey to have been made this decade, unless you count The Will Stancil Show (which I do).

We love you Emily <3 say it back.

Last decade had The Joker, which I told you back then would get a sequel denouncing its fans, and it did, apparently, although, like everybody else, I never saw it, prompting the koan: if a filmmaker throws a bitchfit in an empty cinema, are the chuds owned?, prompting the answer: no. WILL Citizen Vigilante likewise get a struggle session sequel (struggle sequel?) throwing us under the bus for liking it wrong? The thing is, Super Girl just came out and bombed because everyone already knew what it was going to be like, so this already rather desperate stratagem seems unlikely to succeed: you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube because everyone's online now and will simply read someone on twitter dot com dot world wide web telling them all what regime simping is to be found in the sequel and avoid it, perhaps going for a walk instead. Pick up some litter. Help an old lady cross the street. Be a Citizen Vigilante (2026).

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.

Accidentally Rìght Wìng Movies 3: The Final Chapter!!11

Theme: My Own World - Screeching Weasel

Scarface

"So how come there are still more women and children on these boats than on the ones landing in Europe every day?" Uhh, SILENCE NO MORE QUESTIONS

See? No one fleeing the authorities could ever be a bad man.

Fury Road

Both Mad Max movies (1979's original and 1980's Road Warrior) are extremely, even hilariously, based and rightist, and are not coincidentally among the greatest and best movies of all time ever made. Evidently, then, sometime between 1980 and 1989 (1984, perhaps?), George Miller must have been treated to a re-education course at the Ministry of Love, because everything he's done since then has gone the route of pozmaxxing in craven imitation of h*llywood. Fury Road is, on its face, a feminist thesis:

Of course, this doesn't work at all. The villains are supposed to be religious fanatics who make wahmen wear oppressive garments and blow themselves up in suicide attacks, which can't help but evoke a real-world group that rockets up and down the progressive stack caste system hierarchy depending upon whether we're supposed to be justifying bombing them into paste or mass importing them in any given conversation. Since you're not allowed to talk about that, though, the War Boyz (perhaps named in honour of Games Workshop's tabletop Mad Max ripoff game Gorkamorka; only 90s kids will remember this) have an hilarious white power skinhead aesthetic instead, which fits so poorly it almost works as meta parody of how only one group is ever vilified on film.

Their logo looks a lot like that of 90s MTV staple The Offspring for some reason. I mention this only because where else am I going to find a segue to observe that blink-182's smily face logo mogs N*rvana's smily face logo with the force of a medium-sized tactical nuke:

I'd have kys'd myself too.

But even if you take the War Boyz at face value, they're still somehow the good guys, because the movie actually demonstrates the noble feminist collective completely fucked up and destroyed their prelapsarian idyllic Green Space, leaving nothing but barren desert, while Immortan Joe has managed to carve out a functioning society against all odds, sensibly rationing water and maintaining peace through trade with his most dangerous neighbouring factions. Furiosa selfishly effects the escape of his wives, dooming the entire populace as Joe needs an heir to maintain continuity of governance. This was of such pivotal importance throughout history that the Ottoman Empire actually made it the law that when a new sultan was crowned he had to murder all his brothers to prevent a civil war over the leadership, so Joe's far milder and more reasonable efforts to ensure he leaves a single viable heir are just plain responsible.

My boi did NOTHING wrong.

When Furiosa murders Joe and assumes leadership herself, she opens the floodgates controlling the water supply, ensuring it will run out quickly and the entire citadel will die of thirst. The only way to counter this reading of the ending is to argue that the water in the middle of this desert is just infinite for no reason, which is insane, but is how leftists actually think things work, which is why you can't let them run anything, ever.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Story

Interestingly, the Furiosa prequel is actually a bit more based, in that the main villain is plainly Karl Marx: an evil beardo who exhorts the dregs of Joe's society to rise up and murder their rulers, which exhortation falls flat in one of the funniest and most satisfying scenes I've ever seen, with Joe just wiping out Karl's vanguard with impunity. The movie still has major problems, but if you just watch it as a standalone and edit out the last few scenes that set up Fury Road, at least you get a happy ending with Immortan Joe in charge.

Funny Games

Michael Haneke's home invasion flick, like much midwitcore, attempted to indict the audience, forcing them to question why they were still watching the sadistic brutalising of a family for entertainment. Thing is, though, Haneke made anti-white agitslop flick Caché/Hidden, too, so he endorses the invasion of white countries and the rapes and murders that ensue in real life, making a farce out of his impotent efforts to shame his viewers, who, despite his intro-to-philosophy-ass efforts to muddy the waters, can distinguish perfectly well between fiction and reality.

Incidentally, I've yet to come across a libjoint that can't be improved just by adding a laugh track.

For instance, in this fiction the home invaders are clean-cut whitebois with bourgeois manners, which turns an otherwise quite mundane horror effort into an hilarious accidental satire of the movie industry's near-blanket whitewashing of crime. As edgecore, it's easily mogged by Irreversible or The Poughkeepsie Tapes, but as absurdist comedy, it's pretty funny, except for the extended sequence when the killers leave, which is supposed to make you bored and then feel bad for feeling happy when they show back up again, which also doesn't work because noone feels bad for enjoying a black comedy in which bad things happen, nor does anyone care what a shitlib with the blood of Mollie Tibbets and Lee Rigby all over his hands thinks of our moral character.

Batman Returns

The reason Batman sucks today is that filmmakers, like a primitive cargo cult, have fallen into the pattern of treating the material seriously, whereas all the classic Caped Crusadery of yore was basically an human centipede of gleeful parody: the 1960s show with Adam West lampooned the 1940s serials, then Burton upended the colourful antics of the show by making its daft villains into horrifying monsters. Burton was essentially shitcanned in favour of Schumacher because the suits completely failed to see the humour in his children-traumatising depiction of the 60s' lovable cad Penguin as a deformed Caligariesque creature who lurks the sewers seething with hatred for the Christmas festivities above.

Really makes one think!

Another group[citation needed] who failed to see the humour were Jews (which explains the state of standup). After self-reporting hard over They Live scant years before, G-d's least self-aware Chosen Race shrieked en masse that the subterranean villain was clearly meant to represent them.

Jews not see an horrifically evil monster and blurt out "he's just like me fr fr" challenge: apparently impossible.

Never mind that Oswald's parents' gravestones are shown in the movie and both bear Christian crosses; our tiny-hatted Brahmins reacted to this flick like Claudius reacted to that play in Hamlet. Just astonishing, really. Returns picks up bonus points for the fact timid secretary Selina Kyle starts spouting feminist clichés after she goes insane and becomes (Burtonised) Cat Woman.

We're really testing the folk wisdom that hot chicks can't be cringe.

Oliver!

The much-loved musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' old/pol/ classic attempts subtly to rehabilitate evil child groomer Fagin by portraying him as a kindly, comical old anti-villain with an heart of gold. Too bad the lyrics let slip a different tale:

Here, Fagin indoctrinates the class of 1838 to sing the praises of his most favoured alum, and least symbolically named Dickens character, William H. Psycho (colourised).

As with X-Men, you half wonder whether the DP went rogue and used his magic to reveal a more truthful take on the character, as he appears first cloaked in steam with a fork reminiscent of the devil's pitchfork:

You keep your goddamn wiener away from those kids, buddy. I don't care if they were promised to you 3000 years ago.

The movie ends with Sikes (the monster) lynched by the ubiquitous angry mob while Frankenstein (Fagin) escapes, briefly to entertain the notion of going straight before allowing a literal child to talk him out of it - yeah, right!

You do that, average screenwriter.

My Fair Lady

Audrey casually hat-mogs every wahman ever to wear hats. Good game, hatlets, but this is real life.

Before incel evopsych theory was declared thoughtcrime, it was universally agreed to be true and the basis for one of the most beloved (by wahmen!) movie musicals. Audrey Hepburn must CHOOSE between a sweet-natured dork who adores her and a total dickhead who relentlessly abuses her, and ends the movie stiffing the nice dork and going back to the asshole, which is portrayed as perfectly fine. Based both for validating the theory and because it pits a chick against a dude and the dude wins hands-down, flawless victory. Literally impossible to imagine a movie like this being made today, and not only because it's good.

Dead End Drive In

Kinda-sorta Mad Max ripoff Dead End Drive In has a great B-movie premise: a young couple go to the drive-in movie only to find their wheels stolen and themselves stranded overnight, whereupon they discover that the drive-in is secretly a prison camp to get unemployed delinquents off the street. Sadly this premise is completely wasted because it just turns into an insane screed about how anyone concerned about immigration is LE BAD and (naturally) a heckin natzeerino. No, that doesn't make any sense, but that's what happens. Car chases and 80s new wave fashions abound but you, the viewer, now have less hope of enjoying escapism than the inmates depicted onscreen.

Bear in mind that in the movie's own backstory there was a full-scale genocide of whites but you're still not allowed to have any concerns about our collective wellbeing. Also note that they made it April Fool's Day, because, y'know:

Now we know that the result of open-door immigration policy throughout the west and Anglosphere has been mass stabbings and mass rape, our never very likable protagonist reveals himself a villain for the ages. In this scene, damningly nailing the mental killswitch in the leftoid brain that led to the atrocities of Rotherham and others, his response to his gf's concern that a migrant might rape her is, literally, "nah".

If only crimestop ever served to stop an actual crime.

This reading renders the otherwise mundane ending (he physically escapes the prison camp) more interesting, because he's only traded a physical prison for a mental one. But, as always, that's a layer too many for the writers to apprehend.

Candyman

Sometimes they just come right out and say it.

"Aha, Pat, this time you have reached too far and cannot but beclown yourself", you titter impishly, rubbing your doughy, sweaty palms together like a rotund fly, for surely noone can question the impeccable on-messageness of Candyman, that much-needed reminder that It's All White Peephole's Fault for slayvery and raycism. Or so it seems until you actually watch it and he just admits straight up that his victims are innocent:

"Uhhh, your honour, uhhh, my client's IQ, which doesn't exist, makes him unfit to stand trial. Release him on the populace at once!"

The actual message of this unintentional kino, therefore, is "it doesn't matter if something bad happened to you, you can still choose whether or not to be an evil piece of shit". You wouldn't think that would be an extreme right-wing position, but the entire mass media and ""justice"" system disagree with you. What about red lining under FDR? The Kay Kay Kay? What about Micro Aggressions? The Talk! What about the heckin En Wooord?

Total Recall

Spoilers for this one, like you haven't seen it.

>mrw dinner isn't on the table the minute I slouch in from a long day at the ḇłồģ mines

This one's actually pretty fun in that it uses all the audience programming motifs to get you to play along with its conceit because they couldn't not do it that way. You know - the Good Guys are The Rebels, the Bad Corporation is white mayles, Arnie's hot blonde wife is evil and the brown woman is good, and so on. But then, if you're paying attention, the whole plot is fake and gay in-story, so actually that's all nonsense pumped into his brain, which he chooses to continue to believe at the end anyway, because it makes him feel like a hero. I think there's a good chance Paul Verhoeven is actually trolling libs while pretending to be trolling chuds badly, but I wouldn't want to blow his cover, so don't tell anyone.

WILL this be the final chapter? PROBABLY, because I think you get the POINT. It is impossible to make anything simultaneously good and l*ft-wing, because the truth slips through the cracks, like Hope ever outpacing the demons of Pandora's box. There's a certain disingenuous type who will bewail this sort of post as Doing A Heckin Culture War, implicitly maintaining that the multi-billion dollar industry filling these flicks with their increasingly unhinged ideological tantrums is not Doing A Heckin Culture War; only autists with small ƃlởgǥes noticing and easily destroying them with shitposts in our spare time. We'll keep laughing at them - and we'll win!