Edgy MD

Best parts of the soundtrack were non-Seattlian.

Xavier McDaniel stars in Cameron Crowe's tale of the dating scene in Seattle among young scenesters with earnest careers and terrible taste.

That's pretty much where I am, except to say that casting Neill and Dern and Attenborough were off-book choices that were just as effective as the obvious ones. That said, what an impressive spread on the voting.

Well, I wouldn't argue with that. But that's true of a lot of films --- most even --- and some of them are still OK. Like Titanic and maybe Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, you get the idea that if the filmmakers really believed in the message of the danger of man's hubris, they'd've not made these films in the first place.

Stupid? Well, it's an action film. Implausable? I think the last 18 years say otherwise. Scientists are about to start breeding wooly mammoths. Who cares? Well, it goes a long way --- through the character of Ian Malcolm --- to try to get folks to ask questions about new technology before unleashing the wonder. It also bangs a signature Speilberg drum, trying to remind folks of the importance of prioritizing family. So it sure wants you to care. I give it two puntos for the second-tier John Williams score alone.

Two paleoscientists and a mathematician are summoned to a Central American island to give a professional opinion on a natural preserve, only to find out it's operator has used cloning technology to bring dinosaurs back from the extinction. Power shuts down in the park, everything goes pear-shaped, and children are placed in grave danger.

Director Tony Scott, famed auteur of the merger of man and machine/penis, tells the story of a runaway train and the two lunchbucket railworkers (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine) who try to run it down before everything goes pear-shaped in Pennsylvania.

Matt Damon --- in a latter-day version of his Good Will Hunting character --- plays a man of special talents which only lead to a deepening alienation. Only this time, instead of being an amateur ghetto polymath, he's a San Francisco medium looking for a career change. The tale of his attempts to get out as his brother keeps pulling him back in very gradually merges with two other independent story lines, one of a British kid with a junkie mother, and another of a French telejournalist/tsunami survivor. So you have three protagonists --- all really sad. The suddenly-never-more-prolific Clint Eastwood directs.

I've seen them without really meaning to and really don't understand their currency. I mean, these have Charlie Sheen, right? And Charlie Sheen trying to be funny is just... un-funny, right? They do contain the legendary comic chops of Corbin Bernsen. This, I'll grant you.

Well, yeah.

Prince-and-pauper comedy features Kevin Kline as an asshole president and the everyman-presidential imitator hired to take his place when said asshole president has a stroke. Lots of loose ends but lots of charm also. No rape scenes.

Jack is a limo driver with horrible hair under a nearly omnispresent touque and is about as anonymous as anybody in the the NYC region --- until he gets fixed up with Connie, a pastey introvert noticed only by the perverts she seems to be a magnet for. Despite both their lack of experience or self-esteem, they stumble into a relationship. As they progress, though, the couple who fixed them up turns out to be a disastrous cautionary tale. For those of you who bemoan the stupidity and shallowness and contriveyness of relationship movies, here's one about real people --- but it may (or may not) make you long for the fluff of the Amy Adams/Ryan Reynolds type of dealios, because while the DVD box promises hilarity, there's little forthcoming, but rather odd snickers and occasional graces (and graces are wonderful things) among terrifically awkward long silent shots and real --- but mortifyingly embarassing --- situations. Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars, produces, directs... caters too, I guess.

Frayed Knot wrote: Best/Worst Tool: Speed/defense That's always an unsettling combo.

I've been weighting this one. Seeing a buncha Bourne films instead. I think The Bourne Angioplasty is next.

metirish wrote: Eh is such a put down too, being doing that a lot lately Edgy. Sorry. It's not really meant as such, and to the degree that it is dismissive, it's toward the Cohen Brothers, and not you. I'm sure each film adapted more than once from the same source material would have the later creators go back to the original source. But they also have to acknowledge that frequently the success of the prior adaptation(s) is what gave their film viabliity and bow to that at some turns. The makers of The Addams Family bent over backwards to declare that their film was based on an original interpretation of Charles Addams cartoons, but of course it was informed by the TV series as well.

Eh, they all say that.

Hey, whoah, those are lessons from subsequent Die Hard movies. (Also, they're too close to true for comfort.)

Germans are clinically cool, fashionably dressed, murderous bastards. Long-haired men, too. Corrupt to the soul. Biggest threat to civilization? Scumbags. Cops could carry handguns on planes back in 1988. Didn't know that. The media are spineless parasites. All of them. Society would be safe if they just let good cops do their jobs and fuck peple up. They know who the scumbags are. Cops, man --- the good ones are kept down by the asshole brass who supervise them. The Japs can build a big financial giant. But they're not ready to find out how things really go down in the U.S. of A. The sixties of Mad Men had nothing on the eighties. You want to have sex or do some blow during an office party? Just go eight feet down the hall and do it in a vice president's office. She won't mind. Neither will the president and founder when they catch you in the act. If you call the police and report the headquarters of a multinational corporation is under attack, they won't take you seriously and will tell you to hang up. Better to blow out the first three floors of the building with a few bricks fo C-4. That'll show those impotent assholes sitting on their ass while good people are dying. 1988 was a funnier year than I appreciated.

I suppose there are more fantastic things than that on this earth, but I can't imagine what they would be.

I think it's one of those things where you remember the virtues and forget the flaws, see it years later and say, oh, right... Hopefullly, George Plimpton isn't in the room at the time.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: I'm with Ben on the Gopher business. It was stupid. This should have been a movie about a poor kid weighing an invitation to privileged adult society against the cost to his soul. Which it was, it's just that the story got hidden behind the set pieces. And the boobies.

I kinda liked Caddyshack as a movie about Danny, but really the whole Spackler subplot has nothing to do with the story except for the contrived gopher finish, and robbed from it, as good as Murray was at it. All the other oddballs play some kind of role in the arch of the story. Still has a lotta laughs but not a great movie altogether. It is strange that he's the protagonist, yet not featured in the film's marketing at all. DVD extras revealed it was clearly a script about him and his rivalries and interactions with the other caddies, but as the talent came on board, they started writing more action in the clubhouse and less in the titular caddyshack. Other things gleaned from the DVD extras: Jon Peters is as much a freaky over-the-top Hollywood jerkoff as Kevin Smith makes him out to be. This movie set the eighties standard for gratuitous boob shots. George Lucas lent them John Dykstra to create the gopher. Chevy Chase and Bill Murray had some bad blood from their SNL days and brawled on the set. Not included: Where Kenny Loggins pulled that insane vocal arrangement out of. Why Harold Ramis is the happiest guy in Hollywood when he hangs out with Bill Murray who seems to be the saddest. You get the idea that all those surreal juvenile punches sewn into it --- the caddies storming the pool, the mayhem at the yacht club --- are all Jon Peters. He's probably also responsible for the goofy symbolic nomenclature. Sarah Holcomb (Maggie) is also the actress who played the teenager who passes out on Tom Hulce in Animal House. Cursory research tells me Caddyshack was her last film and she retired before 20 --- drugged up and schizophrenic.

See, Sarah Holcomb and the robot gopher are more of what I watch movies for.

Still, though, half a star? I reserve that for 8mm bootlegs of I Am Curious Yellow.

Class warfare plays out on the links of a private golf club --- or "gof," as they call it in Scotland. ESPN ranks this as the number eight sports movie of all time. Robotic gopher created by John Dykstra.