Blood and Fun Move the Wheels of Myth and History

Today, beloved reader (since i only have 1 reader I intentionally use the singular here), I am here to tell you the story of a man.

A myth.

A legend.

Beloved by some, hated by others, he made dreams a reality, and in his darkest moments dashed our hopes against the rocky shoals of madness. Cast away from from the people he loved, he wandered aimlessly. His greatest sins were committed at that point, until he discovered that not all was lost.

He found absolution, and like a phoenix was reborn, more powerful than ever and returned to us with a most precious gift.

I speak to you, reader, of Brett Ratner

 

From the diseased mind who brought us X-Mans 3: The Last Straw, Ratner has created something wonderful. Something fun, something enjoyable for the masses, the intellectuals, children & the disabled.

He has given us Hercules.

I sit here after braving the fires of Hades on my trip home from the theater, completely satisfied, above and beyond my wildest expectations. Hercules, the 2014 film starring Dwayne Johnson, is a completely faultless Swords & Sandals epic tale of the untold heroism of Greece's most famous multiple murderer/animal abuser.

I had heard before I saw the movie that it was the most historically[mythologically] accurate Hercules production to date, and that piqued my interest. What resulted was nothing short of one of my favorite films of the year. I had so much fun at this showing, I almost don't know where to start in this analysis, so forgive the scattered nature of my diatribe.

A detailed plot synopsis is unnecessary, since i was never once angry or upset or bored or confused by what was displayed onscreen.This is honestly something that should be watched, wholeheartedly with enjoyment. Basically the movie starts with a recounting of the legend of Hercules. Born from a union of god and mortal, he was destined for greatness from the start. The narrator of the story lightning fast recounts Hercules' encounter with the Hydra, the Nemean Lion, and the Erymanthian Boar.

It's soon revealed that the narrator is a young man (Iolaus), retelling the story of Hercules to his captors as he dangles of a spike that threatens to impale him. The pirates laugh off the threat of Hercules, a mere story, until Dwayne Jonson strolls into frame with the lion hood Hercules is so well know for. He threatens the pirates to leave or die, he gets paid either way to get rid of them.

attacked by the pirates, Hercules lures the gang into a trap, where he and his merry band of sidekicks handily defeat them.

Here's where you know this is gonna be enjoyable.

Hercules has five sidekick assistants that he picked up during the course of his Labors.

1: A crazy mute berserker, Tydeus of Thebes played by some guy i don't know.

2: His nephew, Iolaus a young storyteller and not much of a warrior, who spreads the legends of Hercules.

3: Atalanta, a kickass Amazon archer who puts Legolas to shame played by some pretty but tough Norwegian actress.

4: Autolycus, his childhood friend, and master bladesman, played extremely distractingly by Rufus Sewell. When i first saw him onscreen i went "is that Rufus Sewell? It looks like him but his eye isn't off center." the next two hours were torture as i was trying my damndest to figure out if it was him, until the credits rolled and to my surprised confirmation it WAS. I can only assume he has made enough money of his long and enjoyable career to get his lazy eye fixed.

and finally, 5: Amphiaraus, the spear wielding seer, played by Ian McShane.

Ian. Fucking. McShane.

The rest of the movie plays out in a fun way, Hercules is a mercenary and gets hired by still-living actor John Hurt, king of Thrace, to help him defeat this bad guy who is terrorizing and trying to conquer Thrace, and Hercules trains an army, they battle the guy and defeat him, but it turns out JOHN HURT is actually the bad guy, usurping the previous king and basically tricking Hercules into creating a military dictatorship.

It's a great 2nd act twist, and is played really well, and Hercules winds up smooshing John Hurt with a giant statue of Hera.

The most interesting part of this movie is the fact that there are no supernatural events in it. Hercules is a normal man of great strength (which is obvious since he's played by The Rock, more muscley than i have ever seen before), but still just a normal man. the hydra was only a gang of thieves that King of Athens JOSEPH FIENNES (i'm not lying when i say this was an all star cast) ent him to kill.

his sidekicks helped him defeat the Nemean lion and Erymanthian boar with tricks and teramwork.

Nothing about this depiction of Hercules is supernatural, for all we know the gods do not even exist. His labors are merely the result of folklore and embellishment by those retelling them.

It's a fascinating and refreshingly enjoyable angle for a big budget action movie to take. Sure it was only rated PG-13 so you didn't get any awesome decapitations of greek full frontal nudity, but at the end of the day it wasn't needed.

Hercules had a chariot that had giant horizontal swords pop out of it like springs.

He flipped a charging horse and rider over his shoulder and said "fucking centaurs".

Ian McShane kept prophesizing that he would die from a flaming spear to the heart, and when a spear was thrown at him and passed through fire before it hit him he opened his arms and closed his eyes, ready to die, only for Hercules to GRAB THE SPEAR OUT OF THE AIR AND THROW IT BACK AT THE GUY THAT CHUCKED IT.

It's things like that that made this movie unironically fun and worth watching. I might even go so far as to say it's worth owning on DVD. It was well shot, well acted, and even well written. If you have the chance to see it, go for it. You have my blessing and encouragement. It's stuff like this, that lets you walk out of a theater HAPPY, and smiling, that makes the day worth living.

The world is better off for Hercules existing, to the point where X3 is but a distant memory and only minor mistake. 

It is a good day to die. either we go to Elysium to sit in the shade of heroes, or, to quote Autolycus: to Hades, where all the fun people are.

Francis Ford Coppola Should Be Turning in His Grave, But Isn't

Where do you start with a movie like Twixt?
I refuse to call this piece of shit a 'film' for douchey reasons and so as not to bring this to the same Asgardian realm that creations like The Godfather (I & II) and Apocalypse Now inhabit. Francis Ford Coppola, esteemed uncle of American Treasure actor Nicholas Cage, is possibly the greatest living American director; and is comfortably in the pantheon of best filmmakers of all time thanks to his work in the 1970's and early 1980's. The man single-handedly reformed the gangster picture genre, inspired countless more directors (just for an obvious example Martin Scorcese), and created a branch of Hollywood filmmaking that still influences the best and brightest artists today.

His fall from grace was sudden but noticeable, and at this point has been consistently producing shit for 20 goddamn years. The crap that he makes nowadays can be legally fucked in all countries except for the Middle East & Tunisa, and has been ready and willing in 12 US states including California for more than 2 years.

You can legally take Jack out for a fancy dinner at some shitty chain like The Melting Pot, convince it that it's fine dining, and rail its brains out in the backseat of your BMW later that night after curfew when you find a dark enough parking space. The Godfather Part III can get drunk off the cheap wine coolers you brought and then go down on you while you listen to whatever trendy music youths these days are listening to, that Iggy Azalea abomination or whatever.

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I preface this entry with all of these gross and uncomfortable images because, as the inexorable march of time drives us to our graves, so too will Twixt be out slutting it up and bringing great shame upon our families by not using proper protection while being viewed by middle-aged predators.

Val Kilmer's fat fucking face and godawful ponytail are the most visible initial atrocities. A "bargain basement Stephen King" as described by the inimitable Sheriff Bruce Dern. Kilmer is a shitty author who writes a book series about witches and is in this haunted Tom Waits narrated town, for a book signing, and is immediately reminded of how shitty he is by having to sign autographs in a hardware store. No one reads books in this haunted town except for Sheriff Bruce Dern, who off-duty writes vampire fanfiction.

I wish i was kidding you.

Kilmer, washed up alcoholic that he is, is henpecked by his wife over skype to stop drinking (he doesn't) and write a better, new book (he tries, but also doesn't). In a wine fueled masturbatory nightmare he dreams up Elle Fanning as "V", a 12 year old girl who was murdered along with 12 other children in the hotel he's staying in this shitty town, and takes the story to Bruce Dern who show him his automated vampire killing machine that he created while on the beat, financed by tax dollars. Kilmer then drunkenly tries to write a shitty story based off his ethanol-hazed ideas, reminding me of Jermaine Clement's character from Gentlemen Broncos while trying to change the names enough to not get sued.

It sucks.

The dream sequences of this FRANCIS FUCKING FOR COPPOLA WRITTEN, PRODUCED AND DIRECTED feature are referential to Frank "The Fascist" Miller creations like Sin City and The Spirit at best, and downright plagiarizing at worst. What's a good way to indicate to your retarded, popcorn munching audience that you're in a dream? Try to be creative, like Inception? Fuck that, just make it black and white, with only red as a visible color, and the ghosts are pure white instead of gray. Elle Fanning is white, btw. Blindingly so.

She's also the murdered, staked body that Sheriff Bruce Dern is keeping and tried to show Val Kilmer at the beginning in his city's morgue, a modified shipping container since that's all this backwoods 1/2 horse town can afford (Spoiler alert, btw, and if you need a spoiler alert for this fuck you)

Kilmer, inspired by his dream of "Edgar Poe" (not Edgar ALLEN Poe, mind you, we're not that formal since we're all world-class alcoho-thors), tries to write a book so his bitch of a wife stiops skyping him, telling him to start making money or else she'll burn his 1st Ed. copy of Leaves of Grass (my ass). So, in another Jameson's induced blackout, Kilmer gets writing lessons from the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe.

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I watched The Raven a few weeks ago. The Raven made We Hate Movies' (http://www.whmpodcast.com/) WORST OF 2012 list, and their commentary is hilarious. John Cusack played a better Poe, a less shitty Poe, and a Poe I'd rather watch, in addition to having a better written, plotted, directed and conceived story despite having Alice Eve as an actress in it.

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Taking a leaf out of Paranormal Activity's book, Kilmer decides to find out who murdered all the kids and Elle Faning in this haunted town by using a Ouija board, and gets the cast of The Andy Griffith show to help him: Sheriff Bruce Dern (aka Bobby LaGrange), a fatshit deputy, and a snotnosed redhead kid. 

The board predictably goes nuts, pulling everyone's hands until fatass Kilmer asks who killed the kids, where it answers "B". Sheriff Bruce Dern panics, for no reason at all don't worry, and says that it must have been the teens at the lake that killed all these plot expedience children. Since it's always teens.

Kilmer decides to go down to the lake, and walks into the set of a Christian Youth Ministries video about the dangers of smoking marijuana cigarettes. All black eyeliner and slutty lace clothing everywhere, and meets the head goth. Predictably we're sent down the wrong path again through painfully convoluted and symbolic dialogue, and we learn there's still 25 minutes of movie left.

 In YET ANOTHER GODDAMN DREAM SEQUENCE Val Kilmer, who at this point possesses shamanistic powers, conjures up Eddie Poe to recreate to him the memory of Elle Fanning and the rest of her churchgoing peers, who were murdered by a Jim Jones-esque priest a bunch of years before, seemingly the 1950's based off the clothes.

(Zack Snyder directs more nuanced and creative storylines, just in case you were wondering)

Eddie Poe continues the story by elaborating that Elle Fanning escapes from Jim Jones, saved by the same gothy youth fuck on a motorcycle that Kilmer just talked to down at the lake, only to be recaptured 30 seconds later by Jim Jones making the entire sequence not just confusing but unnecessary.

I'm going to drop the ironic dream sequence colors here since this is where it gets... really stupid.
Blatantly ripping off The Cask of Amontillado, Jim Jones immurements Elle Fanning (tying her up and bricking over the entrance to her cell). The GHOST OF EDGAR FUCKING ALLEN POE then tells Val Kilmer that his wife, Veronica (also oh so creatively Elle Fannings name), dies in all of his stories, under different names. So no we're in an Eddie Poe story.

Jim Jones then kills himself, and Sheriff Bruce Dern bursts in to wake Fat Kilmer up and tells him that all the girls in the story they're teaming up to write were killed because they were "evil sluts".

Then things fall apart.

 Edgar Allen Poe dream escorts him to a cliff, where it is revealed through exposition that Val Kilmer has been suffering the entire time from depression for being too hungover to chaperone his daughter to the lake to ride boats with her friends, who was subsequently decapitated in a hilarious boating accident that i am not creative enough to describe, which explains why he's more of an alcoholic, why his wife is such a cunt, and why Poe keeps trying to tell Fatman to kill himself.

He then immediately wakes up, Bruce Dern has hung himself for some reason (probably for either being the priest who murdered the "evil sluts" or has just been going around killing ladies for some unexplained reason), and GUESS FUCKING WHAT he killed Elle Fanning. Who, upon Fatman Kilmer pulling the sheet off her body, grows vampire fangs and attacks him because why not.

Oh also in poorly done CGI her braces pop off her teeth and Kilmer tries to dodge them.

Then SMASH CUT and it turns out this was all a book that Val Kilmer was writing and his publisher tells him "you've done it again", Kilmer says "Nevermore" and we're treated to a paragraph of text telling us the book sold 30,000 copies and Kilmer's wife never burned his copy of Leaves of Grass.

Cue credits.

This negates anything FFC has ever done. Fuck all of the Coppolas. Lost in Translation sucks, too. May his bloodline be ended and their graves salted so nothing may ever grow. His destruction is the will of the gods. We are their weapon.

https://ia601607.us.archive.org/35/items/Episode92-TheRaven/TheRaven.mp3