PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Thanks for the movies marathon 3

I enjoyed the unrated director's cut of King Arthur a fair bit. It's a gritty, fight fest. Lots of big battle scenes with lots of effects and stabbin'. The story isn't the old legend we know from movies. It's got Roman's and Saxons and Samaritans and Picts and Scots all stabbin' each other. They do have a round table. It's very nice. Antoine Fuqua directed, he seems to go from one different type of project to another. Fuqua is very stylish director who likes color and movement. He started in music videos and his first feature was The Replacement Killers, Chow Yun Fat's American debut, which was a nice revenge flick with the additional bonus of Mira Sorvino in her underwear. Lots of gun shooting, some in underwear. Chow complained his hands were numb from shooting so many rounds. Bait, a nice action comedy with Jamie Foxx followed. Training Day, Denzel Washington's award gathering decent into hell was great. Tears of the Sun took Bruce Willis into Nigeria to rescue a doctor and her group from advancing rebels. His movies get bigger and bigger in scope. A talented director well worth watching.

Insomnia has been sitting for some time, waiting patiently to get watched. It's Christopher Nolan's 2002 remake of a 1997 film with the wonderful Stellan Skarsgård in what would become the Al Pacino role. Skarsgård was also the hulking Cedric in King Arthur. I saw the Norwegian original but I can't remember enough details to be sure how close the two were, but some guy on Amazon mentions a pretty big difference, one I won't mention here. See if you can guess. It's a moody psychological thriller with Robin Williams in a dark bad guy role. He's good, as is the supporting cast, Hillary Swank, Martin Donovan, and a fav of mine, Paul Dooley. This movie is not going to be a favorite of mine but it's still pretty good. Alaska looks nice now, wait until it snows.

A Man Apart wasn't too bad, an average cop revenge movie, with some good action shoot-ups. It's an F. Gary Gray film staring Vin Diesel. Vin's a tough cop who takes down a big drug cartel guy. El Diablo moves in to fill the vacuum and then, somewhere along in there, someone comes knocking to kill Vin. Only Vin's wife dies. After a period of mournin' comes the killin'. A lot of shoot outs in this one. If you look at Gray's film list all of his films are crime films of one sort or another. Just mentioning it. I'm sure there's some crime going on in some of his music videos. If you like Vin, he's ok in this. On the DVD he looks like he could kick my ass. He's got a good intensity. I like the Riddick films and recently The Pacifier. Quite a versatile actor that guy.

Kung Phooey! was pretty much dumb fun, and it does live up to it's no MSG promise. It's a low budget ($500K), but not timely, parody of Kung Fu. Better late than never, I guess. It's a comedy in the Airplane style, lots of gags, some of them related to Asian cultural differences. It's funny at times, there are a few groaners, and the cast is OK. The fights are pretty bad. I just recently saw some of the first episodes of the original Kung Fu tv series and the fights on the show are pretty bad. My mom could bitch slap some of those villains and make it look more realistic. It was still fun to watch, and I'll certainly watch it again, if I get the time.

Shaolin vs Evil Dead carries on the tradition of the Mr. Vampire films, but with out Lam Ching-Ying, who passed away in 1997. Wow, has it been that long. A Shaolin monk and his two comic-relief assistants get into some silly vampire chasing and fighting. It's almost as good as the early Mr. Vampire films from the 80's, and Gordon Liu is ok as the monk. It's just an average film, you could skip it.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D has been ravaged pretty well by all the movie pundits. "Worse thing I ever saw". My ass! I have to discount anyone who says anything at all like that in a review. Obviously haven't seen nearly enough movies, and let me tell ya', after seeing The Turkish Star Wars, there is always a new low in film making. Yet, those wacky low-expectation-havin'-Turkish-motherfuckers sure made me laugh. I'm looking for what's good in a film, and in Sharkboy and Lavagirl there's a nice heartfelt story, some exciting visuals and a few jokes. The kids are cute and the 3-D worked well on my TV, it gave a very good illusion of depth. It looked way better than Spy Kids 3D did on my old tv, which I had out for the Thanksgiving dub-a-thon. I'll have to pull the Spy Kids 3D dvd out and have a gander. The story isn't very original but it was pulled out of the head of Robert Rodriguez's 7 year old son Racer and it's just fine. It's all about dreaming and being creative but still keeping a hold onto reality while making your dreams come true. I would like to see the dream where I get a cookie come true, hardly anyone ever gets shot in that one. No one gets shot in Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and there is a land of milk and cookies. It's a fantasy from a kids POV, and I liked it.

Final Cut was kind of dismal through out and deadly at the end. Robin Williams plays a guy who edits people's memories for funeral memorials. It's a bit in the future and people can have a chip installed at birth that records their memories for playback after death. There's a whole movement against it for invasion of privacy and other things. There's a rich guy who might have done something, something that movement wants to use against him. It's this mix that Robin Williams gets thrown into. He's a pretty fucked up guy who's carrying excessive emotional baggage from his youth. It's not so much a thriller, it's a hard one to sell to regular folks, what with all them sociological implications, an' all. Good but not mainstream. Not for everyone.

Friday Night Movies 34

The first of our cinematic double dip in the psychotronic pool of film, Dünyayi kurtaran adam (The Man Who Saves The World or the Turkish Star Wars), was pretty fun for me. I laughed alot. This wonderful 1982 movie uses footage from Star Wars and other sci fi and horror films to jazz up their crappy fight picture. "Star Wars" footage was not all that was "borrowed" from Western movies for this film. Popular movie soundtracks were also used, such as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (used throughout the film), "Moonraker," "Flash Gordon," "Planet of the Apes," and "The Black Hole." (IMDB Trivia Page). Greg picked up the bootleg somewhere, the box of which mentions three other Turkish Delights...The Turkish Oz, The Turkish Star Trek and The Turkish Exorcist. The last a scene for scene recreation of the original. Wow. Them Turks. The mind boggles, especially after seeing this. IMDb readers sure seem to like it. You can download clips at this site. Sometimes, that's all you need to see. The clips don't have the subtitles, that translation is gone, daddy gone. The subtitles provide a huge bunch of amusement. There were often three lines of dialog on the screen, once there was four lines. Nice subtitles, white and clear looking...the movie looks like crap itself. In the part of the movie actually produced by the film makers we see two pilots from earth shot down on a planet and captured by the natives. The film looks like the cross between an Italian sword and sandal epic and a Hong Kong Chop socky punch up. The two heros fight their way through the picture, get tortured and eventually save the day. Unfortunately, only one of the brave guys gets his miniskirted prize.

Bizarre, is pretty bizarre, but not so bizarre you'd go mad or something cool like that. Originally titled The Secrets Of Sex in it's native England, the film was retitled Bizarre in the US to attract less attention. As you can see the current dvd is titled Bizarre on the box but it has the original title on the film. It's a pretty amazing film, but not from a cinematic viewpoint, oh, no. It's pretty amateurish and it's pretty funny. But, not intentionally I'm guessin'. It's very late 60's, and English. I had a lot of fun watching this movie, it's pretty damn silly. The narrator is the mummy on the box. He talks a lot. I wish I had paid more attention. He leads us in and out of the vignettes, some of which have naked people. Some of the girls were pretty cute, and the guys were hunky. The guys also showed off their naughty bits, going the full monty. There were some complaints about man-ass. The first reviewer on IMDb has a pretty good description of the series of vignettes that make up the bulk of the picture. I like seeing other people's copies of this sort of movie. Then I can make up my mind if I want to buy on for myself. I probably won't. I can just borrow it again. Some movies you can only see so often.

Thanks for the movies marathon 2

Only three so far this day. I have been busy spot checking the dvds I have been burning and scanning through some tapes to see what it is that I have here. Right now I am watching Daily Shows from 2000, and the news is still funny. Somethings are timeless.

Panic Room has been sitting on my self for ages, getting passed over for other more fun things. It wasn't too bad, David Fincher is a pretty good director, I've liked all of his movies mostly. It's a crime thriller, some guys break into Jodi Foster's new brownstone and her and her daughter hide in the phoneless panic room. Unfortunately, that's where the swag is. Forest Whittaker, who's always good, and Dwight Yoakam, who just gets better and better, play two of the evil trio breaking in. Jared Leto plays the third guy, he gets his brains blown out. Oops. Sucks for him. The boys try over and over to break into the room, or get our gals to leave. It just gets worse and worse as the girls fight back and the guys just fuck things up. The scene starring the cylinder of propane is just great, best preformance from something so very round. And on fire!

Wimbledon finally came down some in price and I bought a copy. It's a tennis driven romantic comedy with way too much tennis and not enough comedy. The big match at the end went on way too long. Kirsten Dunst is cute as ever. Some guy, at 35, who is nearly done as a tennis pro is having his one last splash at Wimbledon. He meets Kirsten Dunst and they fall in love. There's a lot of tennis after the usual romantical ups and downs. I don't care for tennis.

Warlock III - The End of Innocence is the worst of the Warlock pictures, and while the best is no great shakes, this is just a by the numbers horror film. A girl unexpectedly inherits a mouldy old house and stops over to see what family treasures there are. Her friends arrive on a dark and stormy night, of doom! Ha ha ha. They are followed by the evil Warlock played by Bruce Payne, who replaces the much better Julian Sands. The Warlock needs the house and the gal and her friends for his evil plans. He intends to sacrifice all of them to release some unspeakable evil. Like anyone would want that. Since it's such a stormy night out, they let him stay and that's when the killin' starts. I taped this off of Scifi anticipating that it wouldn't be something that I would want to watch again. Righto. Into the bin with ya'.

I took a break to check through the dvd's I was burning, no use tossing the tapes and finding the dvd is no good. When I was done with that bit of work, I figured I had time to watch one more movie before Friday Night Movie Night. I picked another "taped from Scifi" selection, Species III, and watched that. It was not so good. I like the original, lots of naughty monster/human sex, topped off with a bit of chasin' and killin'. I liked the actors better in the first, this new lot isn't much to cling to. I am betting that the Unrated Director's cut of the dvd might be more interesting, in some as of yet unguessed way, but who would want to pay to take such a chance. This ain't Vegas, house don't always win in the real world. Species III might not be a great movie but it's gooey.

Thanks for the movies marathon

Nice to have a day off. I didn't sleep in and got up just after 6 am. I made tea, oatmeal and a clean kitchen table. I took my old computer and piled it on the floor, replacing it with my spare tv and the borrowed dvd burner from work. I planned to use the 3 day weekend to burn dvd's from tapes. While I'm doing that I planned to watch some of the movies that have been piling up on the shelf.

First off, Secret Window, David Koepp's film version of a Stephen King short story. Sometimes I like the movie versions, sometimes not. This one not so much. I could see why it did poorly at the theater, there's no one on screen you can like very much. It's like a horror story for Tales from the Crypt. There is a good cast, not wasted, lead by Johnny Depp and John Turturro. Charles S. Dutton, Timothy Hutton and Maria Bello all were good. It's just they're all fucked up, especially Johnny. He's a writer and John Turturro is a weirdo claiming John ripped off his story and fucked up the ending. Now it's on, bitch. A guy gets a screwdriver in the head, but that's just not enough to make me like this movie more. I'm just not into this sort of psycho-thriller mostly but I do like the actors. It was only $5-fiddy at Target, a good price. I am sure some people would like it more than me, and I'm not sorry I bought it. There's a commentary by Koepp and some deleted scenes, I'm sure I'll enjoy those once I get around to them.

Changing the mood, a romantic comedy with Sandra Bullock, on sale at Best Buy for $4.99. If I could be bothered to have a secret crush, I might have one for Sandra Bullock, but I'm savin' that for Kirsten Dunst. Two Weeks Notice also stars Hugh Grant and Alicia Witt, she's a hottie. It's a good average romantic comedy of the obviously incompatable types falling in love sort. Sandra is an activist lawyer who meets Hugh Grant, a millionaire company executive, in order to get his support to save a Coney Island architectural landmark. She goes to work for him in order to secure his support for the landmark building. They have some comic business adventures, there's a bit of slapstick, then the trouble period and finally the nice ending. Bullock is good at this sort of romantic comedy, the modern screwball type. The director, Marc Lawrence was also the writer of this and three other Sandra Bullock films.

Chain Reaction was a mere $5-fiddy at Target. I hadn't seen it before and it has Morgan Freeman in it, so I took a chance. It's an average evil government organization that is collapsing in on itself movie, directed by Andrew Davis who has directed better movies. Keanu Reeve's plays the hero science guy and Rachel Weisz plays the beautiful science girl, both working on an alternate energy science project. Morgan is the science fund director. On the night after their great science breakthru some bad guys come and kill the head scientist, frame Keanu and Rachel for his murder, and blow up the science project and some 8 square blocks of the non-science neighborhood. Then there is a huge long runny bit while Keanu and Rachel lead the police and FBI on a merry chase. Fred Ward and Kevin Dunn play the FBI guys, and they are good.  I'm a Fred Ward fan. Brian Cox plays the head evil guy and he's always good. I particularily enjoyed him in The Long Kiss Good Night and the two recent Bourne films.

Madagascar was pretty much fun. Nice animation and very colorful, not too complicated of a story, good dialog and some silly slapstick. Ben Stiller and Chris Rock were very funny in their characters and they are joined by Jada Pinkett Smith and David Swimmer. They all play spoiled animals in a fantasy New York Zoo. Chris is dissatisfied with being locked up and heads off to the wild, or at least upstate. The others follow and they wind up in Madagascar where Ben rescues the lemurs from the hyena types. After some hunger issues, sushi saves the day. It's a very stylish looking universe which I grew to like as the story played out. The animation was good. The characters are very cartoony in their reality. I liked the penguins.

Groom Lake was pretty stinky. If I was going to make a bad joke, I might say "written, directed and starring William Shattner. That says it all." But, it doesn't. From the look of it I thought this was a made for tv movie, but there's bleeped swearing. Shattner made it for the big screen I guess, but I'm bettin' it did not play many places. Amy Acker, from Angel, is in it and I was curious about that. She was pretty much like her Angel character. Her character is dying and she's with her boyfriend on a trip to see if there really are aliens behind the sightings at Groom Lake. It's her dying wish, to see an alien. Groom Lake is a dry lake bed next door to Area 51. I bet she gets her wish. I don't remember rays shooting out of the aliens eyes, they shoot out of his hand area. Why don't they have an aliens that shoots rays out of it's ass. That would make me laugh.

The Last Samurai wasn't too bad. It's a little long at 154 minutes and a bit draggy, but I'm livin' in the 21st century and the past is damn slow. Perhaps I need some Ritalin to slow me down. The movie gets a really high 7.9 rating at IMDb, so a lot of people liked it. It's got lots of action and horse riding, lot's of killin'. Pretty much everyone is fucked in this one, even if they don't die. Japan's Westernization just didn't go over very easily. None of those big culturial shifts pass quickly with out a death toll. A particularily bitter pill even for those who like that sort of thing. The movie looks good and there's lots of great outdoor scenery type stuff. The look reminds me of later color Kurasawa films like Ran. The cast is good and everybody has nice costumes, that look good with blood on them.

Matchstick Men was more interesting than I had hoped it would be. I liked the cast, which is mostly Nick Cage and Sam Rockwell. Alison Lohman, Bruce McGill and Bruce Altman were also good. It's directed by Ridley Scott and I usually don't care for his films. I haven't wanted to see any of his others over again since Alien and Blade Runner. Of course, I watch those two over and over again. But everything after, not much interest to my noggin', let me tell you. This was a good con story with a couple of nice twists. It was also cheap at BestBuy.

You'll Find Out was something I taped off of Turner Classic Movies. It's a 1940 Kay Kyser musical set in a haunted house. Among the guest stars were Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre who play a trio of scam artists with a phoney séance game. A rich girl has hired Kay and his band to play her house and the trio of villians are there to put on a show too. Hi-jinks, you betcha! It's a slapstick rompfest with a few musical numbers thrown in, it's Kay's movie after all. I was curious about our trio of villians and they were all entertaining. I don't have much interest in Kay and his gang of idiots.  They spelt Kay's name wrong on the box. Dicks.

By the time I got all of these done it was pretty late in the day, nearly midnight and I hadn't left the house for over 24 hours. A rare day. I wonder if any news happened.

Friday Night Movies 33

We watched Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I sure liked it a whole bunch. I laughed out loud. I found everything about it entertaining. The sets were wonderful and the cast was great. I hadn't read the book in 40 years, not really interested in Dahl anymore, although I did read that this version is fairly true to the novel. The Christopher Lee part was added for the movie, to give some family backstory for Johnny Depp's wonderful Willie Wonka, the detached and reclusive candy guru. His comments to the kids during the tour of the factory were wonderfully sarcastic and funny. The script is by John August who wrote the fairly entertaining Go, both Charlie's Angels movies and his hat trick of Tim Burton films Big Fish, followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride.

Deep Roy plays the Oompa-Loompas, all 165 of them. According to the IMDb he got a cool million for all that work. He is well worth it. I'd seen him in other movies but often did not know it. He's a small person who has an amazing set of credits and a good bio. Deep Roy also had a quarter of a part in our second feature Freaked. You'll have to see it for yourself to understand what I am talking about. He also did stunts in Freaked.

Freaked came out in 1993 and is finally out on DVD, a nice 2 disc set from Anchor Bay. Tom Stern and Alex Winters directed and co-wrote the script with Tim Burns. Alex Winters was Bill in the Bill and Ted movies. Keenu plays the Dog Boy in Freaked, just one of the many wonderful characters  in this oddball comedy. Winters plays a jerk of a movie star who becomes a shill for a chemical company and on a South American trip he runs afowl of Randy Quaid who turns him into a sideshow freak with the aid of chemicals. Ironic much. Like the previous movie there is a showman with a magical place. In Charlie it is the wonderful, and functionally edible, chocolate factory. In Freaked it's Freak Land, and that magical outhouse. If you haven't seen it, there's no point in explaining it, it's better to catch it with your own eyeballs. There are even eyeballs with machine guns in this movie, but that's the kind of movie it is, I'm just glad they put it out on dvd.

Boys and Girls

I go through my video tapes occasionally and upgrade some of them to new dvd's. The prices are always falling. All these romantic comedies were under ten bucks each.

Boys and Girls, from 2000, is a pretty lightweight but entertaining romantic comedy of the opposites attract...eventually, type. At first meeting Freddie Prinze Jr and Claire Forlani are at loggerheads but by the end of the movie they can no longer be kept apart by their own preferences. Jason Biggs plays the goofy college roommate who can't get laid to save his life, mostly because he's a liar. Allison Hannigan has a small part as Freddie's girlfriend, but they split up pretty soon, she's only on screen for a few minutes. Amanda Detmar plays Claire's neurotic roommate and Heather Donahue, of the Blair Witch Project, hardly has any snot running down her face. Check out Amanda in Drop Dead Gorgeous, a wonderful comedy, with a great story and an even greater cast.

The Chase is a fun romantic comedy of the chase kind. Charlie Sheen, an escaped criminal on the lam, sweeps Kristy Swanson, a rich girl, off her feet when he kidnaps her in a convenience store and takes her for a long auto chase. Much of the movie is about the chase and the resulting media circus. I originally picked this up because it was directed by Adam Rifkin, of The Dark Backward, and I liked it more than most of his films. Charlie Sheen is fun, Kristy is pretty cute, the pace is fast, and there is a huge cast. There's lots of jokes and it gets pretty sarcastic before it gets over. I've watched it several times and wind up enjoying it every viewing. It's the strongest of the trio.

I first taped All I Wanna Do from some cable network in 2001. The movie came out in 1998 and is also called Strike, or if you live in Australia, The Big Hairy Bird. I had dubbed it over to dvd earlier in the year and a few months later, out comes a low cost real store-bought dvd. I got me one. It's all purdy. Like the other two above it's a pretty barebones dvd, just the movie. It's a bit of an updated The Trouble With Angels, with more smoking and drinking. Set in 1963, a young girl is sent to a girls school in hopes of making her a better woman and keep her mind off sex. It doesn't work so good. There's a lot of yelling and some funny bits, and a bit of sex, or at least some Sears underwear. The girls are all cute and there's a whole ton of 'em, acting up a storm. At least you'd think it was raining, everyone's face is wet near the end. It's the most melodramatic movie of the trio, those girls aren't always laughin' like on the box.

In all of these movies it isn't just the story that pulls me back to watch them again, it's a combination of the characters and the actor's that play them.

Friday Night Movies 32

It was just Joe and me over at my place, Sperhauk was sick and Greg and Mike were Awol. Joe brought two Hong Kong features and we watched those. It was an Ekin Cheng filled evening, and if you don't know who he is, here's his IMDb page. It lists 50 films since 1988 and I have seen about 12. He's certainly one of the most handsome men you can find.

First up, The Legend of Zu, a Tsui Hark film from 2001. He's made a lot of interesting films in his 20+ year career. I'd recommend the first Zu movie, Zu, Warriors From The Magic Mountain; Peking Opera Blues, one of my favorites; Once Upon A Time In China, the first three for sure; The Chinese Feast, a fun romantic kungfu cook-off with a great giant fish scene; The Blade; and Knock Off in which Tsui makes Rob Schneider into an action star and Jean-Claude Van Damme watchable.

The Legend of Zu is based on a 64 volume novel. It's a fantasy story set in the Magical Zu Mountains in China. Some legendary characters live there, their homes on giant flying rocks. Sammo Hung plays the Master of the Omei clan which is under attack from the all powerful Insomnia, who appears as an undulating series of blobs. There's lots of fighting, and flying, and bolts of energy blastin' and it's all very much like a superhero movie. Everyone's got a costume, and Sammo has amazing eyebrows. Nearly everyone in the movie is super powerful and sad. There just aren't that many humans, and those few are sad also. Here's a site with a bit more info on the film's rather complicated story. Here's a site with some small pictures. There are a lot of special effects in The Legend of Zu, floating giant rocks, flying people, giant magical swords, and most of them are pretty good. This won't appeal to everyone but it's sure fun to watch. The story gets a little too melodramatic with everyone having a bad day or two, but it mostly comes out all right in the end.

A Man Called Hero is even more sad. Based on a comic series, the story is sprawling and lots of people die. Hero's family is killed and he kills in vengeance. He leaves China to escape the law and winds up in America, a near slave in a work gang. Elvis Tsui plays the creepy Bigot with a joyous glee, and I'm a big fan of his work. He's been  in 100 films, a lot of them involving naked women. We move forward 16 years and Hero's son comes to America to find his father, he does and more people die. Apparently everyone who comes in contact with Hero will die, he has bad juju. Ekin Cheng plays Hero and he's absent from a lot of the film. There are some good fights, a few jokes and lots of sadness. The battle on the Statue of Liberty is pretty good, the CGI isn't perfect, but it works well enough. The same group of people made the highly acclaimed Stormriders and later The Duel. It's worth watching. I got my copy as a free selection from some on line Hong Kong video store. Many of them give away a free movie with so many purchased.

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Our first feature was The Flesh Eaters, recently restored on a newly minted dvd. I bet you can guess from the title what the movie is about. Yup, eatin' flesh, but it's not about cannibalism, don't get fooled. I'd seen this several times in the past. Nobody's eatin' nobody. Not a great movie but a fun movie with a great story.

Short time actress Rita Morley plays a boozy actress with a need to get to Provincetown in a hurry. Her assistant, played by another short timer Barbara Wilkin, hires Byron Sanders to fly her and her boss in his sea plane. Byron has a face to fit his name and he wasn't in very many movies either. None of them are good actors, but they're still fun to watch. Our trio run into a storm and mechanical trouble forcing them to land the sea plane near a small island. They seek shelter with a German scientist and his big tent. I don't know who plays the tent but the scientist is played by Martin Kosleck, and he's great, probably the best actor of the lot. Check out his bio. He often plays Germans. That's him on the dvd cover, in all his arrogant glory.

Turns out science guy has a secret plan. I won't tell you what it is. It's a secret. The flesh eaters live in water, and they are ravenous, thumbnail sized, glittering critters who eat any living flesh. A full human skeleton, still all connected together, washes up on the shore. The flesh eaters have stripped it clean. Trying to cover up, our scientist suggests it was sharks. That lie soon unravels, but not before the arrival of Omar, played by Ray Tudor, who was also in Sidehackers. Omar, one of the best characters in the movie, and Ray, one of the worst actors on set, blend together to form a tasty mélange. His great part is only bettered by his grisly death. A grisly death now enhanced with restored footage of his see through corpse. And who doesn't like that. Ironically Omar arrives and leaves the island with a great deal of yelling.

There's more murder and mayhem and bad acting ahead. The script is a hoot, and combined with interesting characterizations by the actors, sure made me laugh at times. There is a giant monster at the end. It does double duty as a dog size monster as well. At 87 minutes it's a short movie but the time is well spent, as I've said I've seen it several times before.

I'd seen Waxworks II: Lost In Time  about ten years ago and I didn't remember anything about it all. Zach Galligan returns and leads a chase through time to save is girlfriend from a murder conviction. A disembodied hand from the previous movie killed her dad and she ground up the evidence. Hoping to get proof they rush through various times and places. There are a lot of movie references, spotted with a bunch of cameos. The jokes aren't too good and it drags alot. It would have been better shorter. It's more interesting for the guest spots, especially the Bruce Campbell bit. I perked right up and after his grisly death I nearly went back to sleep. We actually stopped the film near the end to confirm "that sure looked like Drew Barrymore". Turned out to be her. Look for David Carradine briefly.

4 days a week is good

I watched The Daily Show tonight, live. I often time shift it, now that the Colbert Report is trailing after. I watch that too. It's uneven but often oddly funny. Better to scan through the commercials and save some time. Much to watch. As Billy DeWolf used to say, "Busy! Busy! Busy!"

Tonight's Daily had a great piece on the secret closed door session of the Senate, and a reference to the donkey growing a set of testicles. After some jokes, Jon went to Ed Helms at the Senate chambers, which are closed again. For make-up sex, hand jobs across the center aisle. They showed a clip of the senate orgy barge from the Penthouse movie Caligula, which was supposed to be the Live feed from C-Span 5. There were some more funny jokes. Then it was back to Jon in the studio where he starts showing clips of Bill Frist complaining about this hijack of the Senate and how the Democrates have no convictions. Jon commenting for Frist, "Our party on the other hand, I think we're going to have plenty of convictions."

If you haven't seen the set of the Daily Show after it recent upgrade it has the typical news desk and Jon Stewart sits behind its classic crescentness. Behind him are three large projection  screens with different graphics changing as needed. On two of these screens they alternated different clips of Bill Frist and Harry Reed complaining about each others tactics. This went on for a bit and the complaining got more and more heated. As this is going on Jon starts watching the clips and the camera pulls back he gets out of his chair, his head turning left and right, faster and faster. Finally at the peak of the caterwaulin' each man says it was like a slap in the face and both screens replace the senators with the Three Stooges slappin each other. The camera pushes back into Jon as he returns to his seat and swivels his chair to the camera. "And that." Pause "And that is how a bill becomes law."

It was an exceptionally timed and blended multimedia piece of political foolishness and slapstick, performed wonderfully by Jon and Ed. Mike Wallace was the guest and his first comment was about how great he thought that piece was and how the earlier rehearsal and 15 minute break for a rewrite made it even better. He's right, it was great, and it's pieces like this that bring me back to series. You couldn't give these guys enough rewards or money.

I have been watching some old shows I have on tape. I am dubbing them to dvd to get rid of the tapes. I taped the Daily onto tapes that I had taped movies on. Often there is 20 -30 mintes left over and I hate to waste that tape. Since upgrading many movies to dvd I have these tapes with Daily shows on them. It's nice to watch some of the old ones. And they still funny after several years. Stewarts been behind that desk for 6 years now and he's still fresh.

They run clips on the Comedy Central Daily Show website and I this piece might show up.