An Alan Moore Kind Of Day (Kinda)

Like every other comic fan (and apparently a lot of normal people, considering how many copies have sold on Amazon) I started re-reading Watchmen after watching the trailer. I wasn’t a huge fan of Watchmen when I first read it back in grade school or high school (can’t remember which). I do remember buying it at a Barnes and Noble after continuously reading about how awesome it was in Wizard. I think I basically didn’t get it back then. I’ve read it a few more times and enjoy it more and more with each read, especially after reading some more of Moore’s work. I’m only four issues in, but damn, this is an enjoyable read.

Back in college, I made a deal with Em where I’d read the first Harry Potter book if she read a trade. I made the mistake of giving her Watchmen. The problem with giving someone with limited comic book experience Watchmen is that it’s just so damn dense that it’s hard to get through. I’ve also discovered by giving non comic book fans different books, that there is a mechanic to reading comics that fans take for granted that new readers don’t necessarily know. The most difficult thing tends to be which order to read the word balloons in (something I still have trouble with). It seems like it should be something uniform like top left, then below that and over or everything in the top row and then the bottom (like a typewriter). I’m definitely off on a tangent here, but I’m curious to see what people who bought the new edition based on the coolness of the trailer think and whether they’ll move on to other Alan Moore comics or other trades in general.

Speaking of Alan Moore movies and trades, Em and I watched League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tonight (a.k.a. LXG, hehe). I actually like this flick. It’s very obviously a huge departure from the first LOEG volume (one of my all time favorite comics, I even wrote a 17 page paper on it in college) but it does have some fun elements. Also fun was trying to explain how much I liked the comic book and how different the movie is and also how much I like the movie. She just started laughing at me and said I sounded like her trying to convince me to watch a chick flick.

In the end she enjoyed (didn’t love) the movie, which is pretty much how I feel. Now I’ve just got to try and get her to read the trade. She’s also looking to re-read Watchmen along with me, maybe I’ll get her thoughts on the book after we’re done.

Going Commando

I know this blog is free and all, but it would be great if you could pick up the last few issues of ToyFare, specifically 133, 134 and the upcoming 135. Not so much because it puts any more money in my pocked (it doesn’t), but just so you too can enjoy what has turned out to be my personal favorite Twisted ToyFare Theatre of all time. For those of you that don’t know what that is (mostly those of you who I know from my life pre-Wizard), Twisted ToyFare Theatre is this section in the mag where we pose action figures in funny poses and give them word balloons. For the past three issues, we’ve been working on this Manly Movie Men parody that takes shots at all kinds of 80s action stars. Of course, I didn’t really realize how good of a job we were doing until I watched Commando last night

To be honest I was pretty blown away by this flick. Not because it was great, or even all that good, but by the shear volume of quips that Arnold throws around. The basic plot involves some guy kidnapped Arnold’s daughter (Alyssa Milano). The guy wants Arnold to do something for him in some Latin country that’s actually fake, but Arnold gets away, hunts the bastards down and gets his daughter back, all the while gaining a stewardess co hort (Rae Dawn Chong).

I highly recommend checking Commando out, if for no other reason than to see Arnold in his prime just killing dudes left and right. There’s a scene where Arnold’s on a plane supposedly on his way to the Latin country. He sits down in first class with this who who he punches in the face and then BREAKS HIS NECK ON THE PLANE. The best part? No one around them even notices. He then sneaks out through the wheel well and jumps from the ascending plane into a marsh. From there, it’s all killing and bad jokes thanks to screenwriter Jeph Loeb (he writes a few of the comics in Wizard’s Top 10, plus Teen Wolf and Heroes).

And boy does he kill dudes. All kinds of dudes. Short dudes, tall dudes. The second guy he kills is actually one of my favorite character actors of all time David Patrick Kelly who played the dude in The Warrios who says “Waaaaaariors, come out at plaaaaaaaaaaay.” He also played Jerry on Twin Peaks which I still need to finish.

The only real drawback to the movie is Rae Dawn Chong. She overacts her way through half her scenes and then makes terrible jokes through the other half. Basically, she’s pointless except for the fact that they wanted some tail in the movie.

Overall, this is a great “dude put in a crazy situation and DEALS with it” movie. I was seriously worried that Arnold wouldn’t get off the plane int he plane scene. There’s even this great scene where you see Arnold watching a stewardess close the door and you’re trying to figure out how he’s going to get out. Additionally, these really are some of the best/worst quips in the game. My personal favorite is after killing the dude on the plane he tells the stewardess not to bother him because “he’s dead tired.” Oh, and at the end when he kills the main bad guy with steam pipe he says something along the lines of “It’s time you let off some steam.” Just imagine that in Arnold’s voice. It’s GREAT!

But seriously, I do enjoy these kinds of movies where the main character is just so single-minded and you literally can’t stop you. He’ll even storm the mansion from Beverly Hills Cop to get his daughter. He’s an unstoppable killing force and it’s a shame he can’t become the president of these great United States.

Zone-ing Out

Okay, so there’s a channel we get called My 9 that shows basically all syndicated shows. It’s not usually a channel I watch, but I happened upon a King of Queens rerun which had both comic convention staple Lou Ferrigno and comedian Patton Oswald (plus, remember when Leah Remini played Alyssa Milano’s friend on Who’s the Boss?). Anyway, during KoQ I saw a commercial for an upcoming episode of Twilight Zone which I SWORE had Heroes’ Adrian Pasdar and super hottie Shannon Elizabeth. So was I right?

Yup. I stuck around for the next hour as Forrest Whitaker introduced me two different episodes from the 2002 TZ relaunch. I’m a big fan of these kinds of shows (the original TZ of course, both the old and new Outer Limits and, my favorite, Tales from the Crypt) so I would have watched anyway (it also helped that Em was out running errands and visiting a friend).

So anyway, yeah the first episode of TZ I saw was called “Dream Lover.” In it, Adrian Pasdar plays a graphic novelist (that’s a comic book writer AND artist for the less pretentious). He was super successful with his first graphic novel and is trying to work on his second so he starts drawing this sexy woman in a towel who comes to life. He assumes she’s his muse and only he can see her, but it turns out to be a big twist (duh) and that SPOILER SHE actually created HIM! Oh snap!

I’ll be honest, I didn’t see that twist coming so it was a pretty welcome treat. Overall the episode was great. I couldn’t place the artist who drew all the comic book drawings (and IMDB wasn’t much help), but it looked like pretty solid art. Shannon Elizabeth’s character even drops (or tries to) a comic book in-joke with the line “Alan Moore couldn’t do better.” Now, this is funny for two reasons. The first is that Alan Moore’s name got said on TV (it’s still weird for me to see comic creators mentioned in the “real” media). But the REAL reason it’s funny is because Adrian Pasdar is DRAWING at the moment.

It’s a great episode to check out for comic fans, it even reminded me of a Tales from the Crypt episode where Harry Anderson plays a comic book artists whose creations keep coming to life (though I think they kill him or something, it’s been awhile).

Oh, one last thing, when Shannon Elizabeth first appears and Adrian Pasdar disappears at the end of the episode the effect is straight out of A-Ha’s video for take on me.

The second episode was a standard bad-guy-getting-haunted-by-kids-he-accidentally-had-killed story. The only thing that really elevated it was that Jason Bateman played the guy. Also, they made him agoraphobic, so he’s actually too scared to leave his house and once he really tries to the kids have locked him in with creepy kid magic. And by that I mean these kids are super creepy. Not, twins-from-The-Shining creepy, but close.

One day I hope to get the Tales from the Crypt DVDs or even the original Twilight Zone DVDs and do disc-by-disc or season-by-season reviews. Any PR people out there listening?

Yo Joe!

Okay, I’m not a huge G.I. Joe fan. I know that might sound sacrilegious considering I work for ToyFare, but I was just too young to really absorb who was who and I completely missed out on the Marvel comics by Larry Hama and company. That being said, I did LOVE the cartoon and the action figures. I still have a shoe box back in Ohio filled with those little dudes (most of them whose names I’m just really learning now).

So, why did I read G.I. Joe: World War III? Well, because it’s a darn good comic book. A few months ago, while the story was still coming out and G.I. Joe’s move from Devil’s Due to IDW hadn’t been announced yet, guys in the office were raving about this story. So I checked out the first few issues and then completely lost track (it happens a lot, even when you’re surrounded by comics on a daily basis).

Well, the fine folks at Devil’s Due (mostly my former roommate and Wizard-intern-in-arms Brian Warmoth) sent a few copies of the Omnibus to the offices and so I blazed through it. And I mean blazed. I basically sat down and read right through the whole 12-issue story in one sitting (though I did shift around quite a few times as I’m wont to do).

The book was written by Mark Powers with Mike O’Sullivan and drawn by Mike Bear, Mike Shoyket, Pat Quinn & Jean-Francois Beaulieu and stars all of the still-surviving G.I. Joes getting together to try and stop Cobra Commanders near takeover (and later destruction) of the Earth. I’m not sure if it’s because I knew that this is the last DDP G.I. Joe story or just because Mark Powers is a fantastic write (which he is), but I really thought that Cobra just might win. Of course, I didn’t want him to, but the way the Powers sets things up, you really don’t know how the good guys are going to win. Cobra takes over the White House for Flint’s sake.

And while the overall story is incredibly compelling, Powers does a great job of juggling smaller stories taking place literally all over the world and not one of them feels like a dropped ball. You’ve got a double agent coming in out of the cold, trouble in the ranks of Clan Destro and way more, but probably my favorite part was seeing Storm Shadow and Snake-Eyes fighting side by side together and kicking ass.

I did have a few question marks when it came to some of the relationships and the continuity that has been set up since DDP got the license back in the first round of ’80s nostalgia books, but that’s what Wikipedia’s for, right? The gaps didn’t even bother me that much and mostly made me want to go back and check out the previous volumes of Joe comics (including the Marvel books) and has peaked my interest in the upcoming IDW launch.

In the end, I highly recommend checking this book out if you like wide sweeping events, G.I. Joe (duh), military intrigue, espionage, ninja anticts and just plain old action stories. Also, it’s cool to see pages filled with the toys I used to play with as a kid, like a big set up battle in my living room.

Number One With A Bullet

Hey Gang, so, I’m not a big werewolf movie fan. It’s one of the many things I share with Brian over at
Horror Movie a Day. So, when I read about how much he liked the Stephen King-based Corey Haim, Gary Busey, Terry O’Quinn, Lawrence Tierney werewolf movie from 1985 called Silver Bullet. I’m actually going to let his
review speak for me as I essentially agree with him completely.

I will say, that I really enjoyed seeing Terry O’Quinn in something besides Locke (and the boss from Old School) and Tierney as someone besides Joe from Reservoir Dogs. It’s fun seeing these guys in other rolls when you’re so used to seeing them as specific characters.

Also, I gotta say that I found this to be a pretty effective movie. The werewolf effects weren’t great, but there was a Jaws-like sense of suspense by not showing him all too much. The mystery of who the wolf really is isn’t the main thrust of the flick, but it is a pretty tense moment when you find out who it really is.

And finally, you just can’t go wrong with Busey. He basically plays a slightly less crazy version of himself now and even adlibbed a lot of his lines, which King himself approved (if IMDB is to be believed). Good stuff.

Sometimes They Come Back for a Death Race…2000

Okay, so I’m CLEARLY reaching for a title on this one. Probably because the two flicks I watched have little-to-nothing to do with each other. They were the Steven King-based TV movie Sometimes They Come Back and the Roger Corman, soon-to-be-remade Death Race 2000.

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

Written by Stephen King, Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal (Beverly Hillbillies, Superman IV)
Directed by Tom McLoughlin (Jason Live, Freddy’s Nightmares & the Friday the 13th series)
Starring Animal House’s Tim Matheson and a bunch of other people I didn’t recognize

I’m going to keep these two review brief, so here goes. The basic story is that Matheson’s brother was killed by some greasers back in the day, but now he’s moved back to his home town (a common thing in King’s work that I’ve read). He’s a teacher and it turns out that the ghosts of the greasers (they were killed when a train ran over them after they killed his brother) show up in his class room. He understandably goes a bit crazy as these dead kids threaten him and his family.

When I grabbed this DVD I didn’t realize it was a TV movie, I was just looking for another movie to check off in my copy of Creature Features by John Stanley (the best horror/sci-fi/fantasy book in my book, too bad there hasn’t been an update since 1999/2000). I was a little bummed that there wouldn’t be any gore or over the top violence, but I’ll tell you what, it was a pretty creepy little movie. All of the actors I’ve never heard of did a good job of coveying the creepiness of the situation, especially Matheson (who I’ve obviously heard of). It was nice to see him playing against type.

Anyway, these are the types of stories that freak me out the most; the kind where something really bad and crazy is happening to you, but it’s so crazy and bad that no one will believe you. How do you function in life if your parents/wife/friends/family don’t believe you’re going through these terrible things? Beats me, that’s why everyone should set up a code word for when they’re being extra serious.

Anyway, good on everyone involved for treating me to a surprisingly good and creepy movie about the undead (even if the are over-the-top greasers). The real clincher for me was the fact that Matheson actually inadvertently killed the guys, adding an added layer of guilt and weirdness to everything. That and the scene where Matheson gets to talk to his dead brother’s ghost. It’s pretty intense, but maybe I’m just a big softy.

You know who’s not a softy? Roger Corman.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

Written by Ib Melchior (original story), Robert Thom (the awful Bloody Mama) & Charles B. Griffith (the fantastic Buckets of Blood)
Starring David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone and others

In the future, there’s this race about death where you get points by killing people. Um…that’s about all these is to the plot of this Roger Corman-produced flick. David Carradine stars as Frankenstein, a driver who’s supposedly had most of his limbs broken, smashed and then replaced, but still looks just like the dude from Kung Fu. Stallone’s in it too as a crazy, Tommy gun-toting driver.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really pay much attention to the plot of this flick (something I don’t think would bother Corman). There’s a subplot about people who are against the race because of its ties to the government, so they help by adding more explosions. There is a pretty good fist fight between Carradine and Stallone, with Carradine winning (as you would expect as this predates Rocky).

Basically, the cars are cool and you can tell they’re really traveling as fast as they seem. There’s lots of explosions, people getting hit and blown up. It’s great stuff. Plus it’s around an hour and a half, so you don’t have to put too much time into what’s basically another death-as-sport metaphor flicks. Though unlike Rollerball or Running Man, I gotta admit, Death Race had a lot more satire and chuckle-worthy moments (like the government constantly blaming the French for all the bad in the world and the lady commentator being called Grace Pander). Oh, there’s also a lot of hot 70s chicks who don’t always wear there clothes, so, you know, bonus if you’re into that. Oh, plus I get to check it off in my Creature Features. I’m really just a simple creature folks.

Go Go Gadget Rave

As you can tell, I’ve been on something of an off and on ’90s kick lately. Mostly I’m just finally getting around to checking out flicks I never got to see when I was younger. I remember seeing the ads for Go (both TV and comic book, remember those?) and was curious (mostly because my fellow Christ the King grade school attendee Katie Holmes was in the flick). Anyway, I realized it was on my Blockbuster queue, bumped it up to the top and here’s what I thought.

Go (1999)

Written by John August (Charlie’s Angels 1 & 2, Big Fish, Corpse Bride)
Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Jumper)
Starring (deep breath) Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, Timothy Olyphant, William Fitchner (Prison Break), Taye Diggs, Breckin Meyer, James Duval (Donnie Darko) Jane Krakowski (30 Rock) and Desmond Askey as the British guy

First off, it MUST be said that Go owes something to the films of Quentin Tarantino. Now, I’m not saying it’s a rip off or anything like that, but you definitely get a similar feel, especially with how the dialog is delivered by some the actors (especially Polley). There’s also the whole thing where the movie is told in non-linear segments. Again, not a direct lift, but considering Tarantino borrows a lot of elements for his films, I doubt he’d be too upset.

Okay, so onto the story. We start off with this chick Ronna who may or may not be 17, but is also getting evicted from her place and needs some money so she works an extra shift for her British co-worker. She gets caught up with drug dealers and cops and ends up getting hit by a car and left outside a rave to die. But that’s not all we see of her as we then hop back in time and follow a few other folks’ adventures and eventually see how they all tie together.

In general I like these kinds of movies. The kinds in which a few dumb mistakes lead to all kinds of crazy shit happening. Ronna doesn’t have enough money to pay for the ecstasy (or X as the kids call it), so she leaves Katie Holmes there as collateral. But it turns out that the guys who wanted it (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) are actually cops so she flushes the pills and then puts stolen aspirin in the bottle and trades the fake pills for Katie Holmes. She then goes to a rave with her friends (one of whom took TWO of the real pills, which Olyphant strictly forbade) and sells off the rest of the aspirin and allergy pills she stole from the grocery store at a rave. Olyphant (who’s freakin’ terrifying and funny at the same time) shows up, hears everyone talking about how this girl is selling the best X, chases her down and then she gets hit by the care. Holy crap, right? Right.

And that’s just part one. I gotta say, that, even as convoluted as the story may be, it’s a fun one and I definitely appreciate writer John August’s ability to keep so many characters straight and intertwine their stories so well. There’s characters that show up in this segment that show up in the next and everything ties together nicely. From what I hear, Crash is like this too, but I haven’t seen it yet. Plus, it’s crazy to go from this to Charlie’s Angels to working with Tim Burton multiple times.

The next section features the British guy (who works with Ronna and is her usual drug dealer, which is why she jumped up in the food chain and went to Olyphant himself), Taye Diggs, Brecken Meyer and James Duval going to Vegas, shooting a strip club bouncer and implicating Olyphant in said shooting (the British dude swiped his credit card which they used at the club). They head back to LA, which is apparently where the story takes place.

Holy cats, it turns out that Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf weren’t cops themselves, but working off a drug charge by helping Fichtner catch drug dealers. I think they might even be TV stars, but I kind of missed that part (that’s what happens when I get to the part of the movie I’m blogging about, I miss things). Hey Jay Mohr even invokes the title, nice work Jay. Okay, giving a play-by-play from here on out might get a little crazy, so I’m actually going to watch the movie for a while, Be right back…

Okay, movie’s over and it turns out everyone’s okay for the most part. There’s some weird scenes with Mohr and Wolf in Fichtner’s house, he’s married to Jane Krakowski and both he and his wife hit on the dudes (who turn out to be a couple). Anyway, they find out that they were cheating on each other with the same guy who’s at the rave. They’re the ones that hit Ronna with the car, leave and then head back to see if she’s dead and she’s not so everything ends up being okay. Even the British dude gets amicably shot in the arm by the bouncer whom he shot in Vegas.

So, I know I said I wasn’t going to summarize the movies so much, but Go seemed to fit the old style. Otherwise you’d have even less idea of what I’m talking about than I do and that doesn’t make for a very good blog post.

As you can see by this long summation, there’s a LOT going on with this movie and I love that. They don’t slow things down, you’ve just got to keep up or lose, which I like. I assume that’s what this blog can be like at times, especially after I’ve had a few and am on my third day trying to watch something. I also like the moral ambiguity of the ending. All these people who do relatively bad things end up fine and dandy (though I’m not sure if it’s physically possible to get hit by a car and left in a ditch for part of the night and still go into work the next day, but whatever).

In the end I recommend this movie to anyone who likes Tarantino flicks, X, Katie Holmes, crazy intertwining stories and raves. Side note, I’ve never done X, but if it makes you wear day glow pantaloons and dance around with glowsticks like a d-bag, I’m OUT. Just say no to lame, kids.

Book vs. Movie: The Virgin Suicides

So, remember when I said that I didn’t read books too often? Well, after finishing Slam I looked at the growing stack of novels I have next to my bed and picked one kind of at random. It was Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993). Someone had put it on the free table at work and I snatched it up, not really knowing anything about it.

So I started reading it and was hooked instantly. It only took me about three dedicated days of reading to get through it (so about a week, real time) and it was one of the most moving, ghostly reading experiences I’ve ever had. The story follows the Lisbon Family as all five of the daughters kill themselves over the span of a year, the first of which Cecilia, predates her sisters by a full year. What really grabbed me about the telling of the tale was that the narrator speaks in the “we” and comes from the point of view of one of the boys in the neighborhood who fell in a sort of love with the girls and desperately wanted to help them. After they killed themselves, the boys spend the rest of their lives (at least to the point we find them in the book), trying to figure out why these five young women took their lives.

Another element of the book that got me was the way that Eugenides packed each page with so many characters, either actually involved in the story or just mentioned by name. Almost all of them seem incidental at first, but come back into play later on. The great thing about it, though, is that I never felt lost. Maybe I didn’t take much stock in such casually mentioned characters, but they all came back in one way or another, which really makes the reader feel like a part of these boys’ (and later mens’) club of failed avenging heroes.

The sense of not being able to penetrate another person is one that I’ve often thought about. Even the girls’ own father who lived under the same roof as them had no idea what was going through their heads as they planned an elaborate suicide plan that involved a number of the neighborhood boys. No matter how hard you try to decode someone’s thoughts and actions, you just can’t get inside their heads. The best you can do is gather accounts to try and put the puzzle together.

Sophia Coppola’s adaptation (1999) is pretty faithful to the book, but not necessarily to the version in my brain. But I think a lot of that comes from the basic differences between books and movies. For instance, in the book, you don’t really get a sense of the girls as individuals until the narrator does which is well into the book. Of course, in a movie, you can obviously see the differences. Though, I do have to give props to the casting folks for making the non Kirsten Dunst sisters all look pretty similar and easily confused.

Aside from Dunst who nails the promiscuous and evocative Lux to a T, the casting didn’t quite do it for me. I didn’t get the same feel from Kathleen Turner’s mother character as I did in the book, even though she looks almost exactly like how I pictured her. The way its conveyed in the book, it’s hard to not feel like she’s majorly to blame for the girls’ suicides. Again, I’m thinking this is because we actually see her reactions to things like her first daughter’s suicide.

I was really most curious to see how Coppola and Co. handled the first person plural narrator of the book in the film (he always uses “we” and never deviates). She got Giovanni Ribisi, an actor I’ve liked since I randomly rented Suburbia at the age of 16 and developed a pretty deep man crush on. Anyway, he does a great job, but isn’t utilized enough to really set the same tone as the book. The lack of entrenchment along with the neighborhood boys leads to more focus on the girls, which almost completely removes the element of being an outsider looking in on them which is central to the novel. Heck, it’s hard to be an outsider when you’re right in their living room as they play Chinese checkers and watch wildlife shows.

One of the downsides to watching such a faithful adaptation so soon after reading the book (I finished it Saturday in between and after errands I didn’t want to run) is that you know when everything’s coming and what’s going to happen. I didn’t feel that way watching Virgin Suicides. I was mostly curious to see how Coppola translated such an artfully crafted novel onto the screen. And kudos to her for doing such a great job. The movie never lags (it’s just over an hour and a half) and, while you’re nowhere near as firmly entrenched with the neighborhood kids as you are in the book, you still develop an attachment for these girls and desperately want to help them, even though it’s a forgone conclusion from about the second line of the script that they’re not going to make it.

All in all, I enjoyed both works, though obviously I liked the book better. I can’t recommend the book enough to people. Heck, if it only took me a few days to read, you should be able to get through it quickly. But, if books aren’t your thing, I also give the movie my thumb’s up.

Getting Smarter

I was a big big fan of Get Smart as a kid. I assume I watched it on Nick at Night or some other daytime syndicated re-rerun channel. (I think Nickelodeon played The Monkees at some point, but the old memory is fuzzy.) Anyway, I was pretty excited about the Steve Carrel remake that came out earlier this summer because he seemed like a really good replacement for the inimitable Don Adams. Of course, Anne Hathaway doesn’t hold a candle to Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99 (sorry Anne, no hard feelings).

Well, I heard the movie wasn’t so good from a few sources, but the main one was the guys over at Totally Rad Show who I tend to agree with at least 51% of the time and especially when they say they don’t like a movie.

So, I was looked towards a Get Smart-less summer until I checked the Best Buy ad online yesterday and say that they had the first season on DVD for $20. Score! So, I made sure to head to the Palisades Mall today and picked up this Mel Brooks and Buck Henry-created show. If you don’t know who Buck is, I highly recommend checking out the first three seasons of Saturday Night Live on DVD (though you can skip the first few episodes). Anyway, I told three people about my plans to pick the set up. Rickey was for it. Emily said something like “couldn’t we just rent it.” And Dave of Indie Jones fame went so far as to say he’d actually stand in my way so I couldn’t by that. Well, I left him badly beaten in the Best Buy and am now enjoying the hell out of the first two episodes.

The first is in black and white, but all the classic gags are there. Shoe phone? Check. “Woudja believe?” The cone of silence. The Chief. And of course the dreamiest of all spies, Agent 99. As far as spoof work goes, Brooks, Henry and Co. do a killer job of skewering ‘6os spy movies and pop culture in general. Watching 99 show Max how to dance like the kids do, was both hilarious and pretty sexy for the day. I can’t wait to check out the rest of this season and all the others. Thanks to HBO for getting their stuff together and putting these bad boys out on the non-Time Life Books set (those things get pricey).

Stranger Than Fiction

“Based on a true story” is one of those tags that tend not to mean too much on a movie poster. You can get anything from Monster to Texas Chainsaw Massacre under said banner. Of course, as you probably know, TCM wasn’t REALLY based on a true story, but borrowed a very few details from the life of serial killer Ed Gein.

Anyway, this post has nothing to do with TCM or Monster (which I haven’t seen). I happened to watch two “based on a true stories” flicks this weekend, 21 and The Bank Job. I actually had no idea that Bank Job was based on reality (or that it was set in the ’70s because I apparently don’t pay attention very well). Here’s what I thought.

I had 21 on my Blockbuster account for a few reasons. I dig Kevin Spacey (just not as Lex Luthor, sorry). I also really liked Jim Sturgess in Across the Universe (you guys should check that out). And finally, I like Vegas movies, plus the fact that this was actually based on a true story intrigued me. I’ve done absolutely no research on this, but I think I remember seeing something about these guys back in the day on the Discovery Channel. Could be someone else though. I do know that this movie was based on a book of the same name.

Anyway, it’s your standard, “normal kid enters a morally compromising world in order to make money and gets overtaken by it for a time.” The main kid’s a math genius and joins up with professor Kevin Spacey who has this crew that he teaches to count cards in blackjack. The main dude just wants to make enough money to pay for Harvard Med School, but he goes a bit crazy with the money and the strippers and what not. It ends with a kinda-twist ending that isn’t all that surprising, but I liked it overall. It’s a good movie to turn on while you’re doing other stuff because you can easily bounce in and out of the room without losing too much track of the story.

The same can be said for The Bank Job which I rented solely because of Jason Statham’s involvement. Like I said, I didn’t know much about it except for that fact that one of the best action stars in the world (yes, Statham) starred in it. I was actually expecting more of a flick in the vein of Transporter or even Ocean’s 11 (you know, flashy and what not).

But I was wrong. And I’ll be honest, the only reasons the movie that Em repeatedly called “dry” didn’t disappoint was because Statham’s so damn charismatic and because this bad boy was based on a true story. I, of course, did no additional research, but there’s just something about watching a wild movie like this that actually happened (to some extent).

The basic story is that Saffron Burrows convinces Statham to get his crew together and swipe the safe deposit boxes from a bank vault. They succeed, but it turns out that the government is after them because the crooks (or villains, as the Brits continuously call them muck to my delight) also snatched some compromising pictures and videos of officials and the princess. But, like Em said, it is a pretty dry movie, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the story itself or because everyone in the cast is British.

All in all, I’m glad I didn’t drop $10 to see either of these movies in the theater, but it was worth taking up a spot on my Blockbuster queue.