Sex, Drugs, and Machine-Gun Kidnappings: A Review of Alpha Dog

Christmas Eve is a special day of the year, a day for warm apple cider, family, and shagging your high school ex while home from school. But I fucking hate apple cider, only care for my family in an abstract way, and do not have a high school ex. Consequently, I spent the day drinking protein supplements and watching Alpha Dog, a film that—in keeping with my wishes—totally wrecked the Christmas ambience my kin so wished to maintain.

In the main, Alpha Dog consists of just three or four types of people: wiggers (this is where Justin Timberlake excels), gangsters, and hot sluts. When the gangsters are not kidnapping innocent teenage boys and thrusting them into situations shimmering with sexual possibility (more on this later), they are smoking weed, drinking, or trying to off someone. To offset the patent lack of realism that characterizes some of the scenes, the characters who witness the hostage (played by Anton Yelchin) with his captors are numbered as witnesses with on-screen text—Witnesses #x, #x+1, #x=2—to remind you that, yes, this really did happen. But once the number of witnesses exceed twenty or so, the repeated on-screen labels become annoying, and the viewer begins to wish that the director had achieved realism in better ways.

This leads me to the sex scene in the pool, the part of the movie that strained not only the bounds of my belief but also the crotch seams of my underwear. We find Zack Mazursky, the hostage, being taken to a pool by Julie (played by Amanda Seyfried from Mean Girls), the girl who has wanted Zack's nuts since she found out that he is a hostage (she thinks "That's hot."). Her slutty sidekick joins them for some skinny dipping and a tantalizing game of Marco Polo. Before long, Zack is sandwiched between them and the scene fades to black.

This is perhaps my biggest complaint. There is no need for modesty or propriety in a movie that, overall, contains enough unnecessary filth (a guy shitting on a living room floor, for instance) to make a full-blown sex-scene a mere accessory. I would have liked to see Zack engage in some Wesley-Pipes style fucking. Such a scene would have fit well with everything else in the film, and it would have been most entertaining.

If you find Christmas as boring as I found Christmas Eve, and you have access to On Demand premium channels, I recommend blowing off the holiday vibe and watching Alpha Dog. Unless, of course, you have a high school ex.

The Dark Side of the Deep South: Review of Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

As someone who has just recovered from his first taste of (toxic) Appalachian moonshine, I feel that I am well qualified to post a review that I've been meaning to write for some time: my thoughts on Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a BBC sponsored documentary on the Deep South. The documentary originated when some wealthy Brit received a copy of Jim White's debut album Wrong-Eyed Jesus (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted). Impressed with its distinctive sound, he set out to find the origin of music like this. His donations to that end spawned the documentary. Jim White himself leads the camera crew through the backwater regions of Florida, the ghostly hills of Virigina, and plenty of places in between, all the while participating in his own spiritual sojourn. The result is more than enough to make the average Connecticut Yank shit in his L.L. Bean britches.

There are basically two types of scenes in Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus: the frightening and the merely unsettling. Examples of the first sort include a woman (whose mouth seems to be rotting by the second) discuss her cancer and son's death during a respite from her job at a Jesus-freak roadside restaurant, a Pentecostal scene in which everyone is either crying or babbling in their own tongue, and a Confederate-flag wearing biker who decides, during the interview, to put a few holes in a nearby stop sign with his 1911 pistol. Falling in the latter category, we have Jim's visit to a honky-tonk (apparently in LA), in which some drunken white trash discuss the delicate relationship between sin and salvation, and the local floozy grinds against any rube who is willing to take hell in exchange for a dry hump.

This leads to perhaps my biggest criticism of the film. While the intent of the documentary is to find the origin of music like Jim White's, it quickly becomes a documentary about the Deep South in general, and therefore it shoulders the burden of providing a representative view of the South as a whole and not just its lower class. While viewing the film, I was inclined to ask: Where are the Atlanta suburbs? Where is the Southern genteel? And where the fuck are cultural icons like Charleston and New Orleans?

A related gripe is that some of the scenes (in addition to which locations are visited) are excessively contrived. At one point, Jim White seems to doctor his automobile on some country road, and while he is at work, a random old man walks up and begins to tell stories about his youth. But a little research shows that the man is not random at all, but is rather the famous Southern author Harry Crews, and the seeming happenstance of their meeting on a road turns out to be planned. Scenes like these make the viewer question the all-important authenticity of the film.

In any case, the documentary is worth a watch. While those not from the South will get the most from it, even Southerners by birth like myself can learn a few things. And we need not wear diapers while viewing.

Rambo 4 Title Contest

Sylvester Stallone, while playing Bridge in his Beverly Hills retirement village, recently thought to himself, "I really f'd up the Rocky series with 'Rocky 5' and 'Rocky Balboa'. I really do have talent...somewhere. If only there was a way I could redeem myself and show everyone that I'm not really an over-the-hill, roid-pumping botox bitch. I know! I'll make another Rambo! Nurse, where are my Depends? I am heading to the studio!"

Yes, Grandpa Sly is at it again. He is creating another unneccessary end to a film series that has been stretched tighter than the skin on his cheeks (which now can be found on his forehead). Sure to be the most violent Rambo yet, the preview starts a preemptive body count to the tune of, what else, but "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor". Sigh, Sly.

To help the Italian Stallion out a little bit, I thought we could have a contest to come up with the best alternate title to the movie. Kyurious Hype and I have been working for the past half hour to come up with a few, such as:

Rambo IV: Killin' before I Die

Rambo IV: Assisted Living, Assisted Dying

Rambo IV: Thats not a roman numeral 4, he's seroiusly on an IV

John Rambo: Badass with Botox

We need your help, America! (And yes, Canada, you can play along too.) Give us some other alternative names for this turd-flick. Slyvester needs our help, first witht the movie title, and then probably helping him off the toilet. Get to it!

Javier Bardem = Long Lost Murderous Beatle

So I finally found out why there’s no country for old men. Javier Bardem will MURDER you before you reach the ripe old age of 30. Basically he will murder you. That’s the gist of the Coen Brother’s new deathtacular western-noir No Country For Old Men. Long gone are the sardonic f-bomb cratered tirades of the dude, or the mustachioed purrings of our favorite Pater Familias, and even the neurotic mumblings of Barton Fink. No, this new country—bereft of old men—is simply comprised of three things: Murder, sweating and running away from being murdered, and the ramblings of a tired Golden Retriever marauding as Tommy Lee Jones. And Murder.

As much as I enjoyed the cat and mouse game between Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem (which is less cat and mouse more armored War Bear and monkey [no I won’t stop bashing the Golden Compass])… I was upset, confused and beffudencholy at the seemingly elitist and confounding ending of the film. No, no… I’m sorry ending is a harsh word. Let’s say the way the film just stopped. No closure, no explanation, no reason, just shit happened and then it stopped happening because the screen went black and the credits rolled.

Now I could’ve missed something. Maybe the projectionist switched up a reel and there was something that happened after the credits. But he didn’t, it didn’t and it was a letdown.

For the last 8 minutes of the film watching Tommy Lee Jones (or TLJ as his BFF’s call him), talk about not one but TWO dreams he had, I couldn’t help but hear the Coen Brothers laughing giddily like Knox Harrington, the video artist. They did however find a way to give Milton from Office Space his stapler--and by stapler I mean silenced shotgun and by give I mean shoot in the neck.


Now to a completely different tangent: I love Lindy West. She writes for The Stranger out in Seattle and she’s hilarious when she writes about movies. But after discovering her new-found love of Cheesecake Bites at Arby’s I’m now… perplexed, forlorn and moved to start taking up money for her inevitable double bypass. Basically eating fried Cheesecake is about as healthy as rolling in a pit of bears (armored war ones) covered in honey and meat tenderizer after eating poison and swallowing a jar of bees. Plus I hear they’re about as addictive as fried cocaine. Maybe I’ll pick up a half dozen tonight…


PS: Javier Bardem’s thinking of murder right now.

Michael Bay loves Trannies

So I was on a long plane ride and finally got around to seeing the latest advertisement for America—I mean, Michael Bay flick, Transformers. It was everything I expected it to be.

-A high school romance inconceivably woven into a plot that encompasses the possible destruction of the world.
-A competent American Military defeating a nigh invincible intergalactic threat on behalf of the world.
-Computer enhanced EVERYTHING, creating lightening quick “action” only to be appreciated when you try to re-watch the film frame by frame.
-Giant Robots.
-And of course, that inevitable “No matter what happens, I just want you to know blah blah blah” moment.

Ahhh. An instant classic. It truly had me from the opening line—uttered so butterly by Optimus Prime—I knew exactly where it was going and exactly how it would end. “In the beginning there was…the cube. We know not where it came from…blah blah blah blu bling bling blah.”

You know… the cube. The Cube!? Of course… Thaaaat cube. I used to make chicken soup with that cube, but then it left this planet to start life in other galaxies and later returned as the ultimate plot device.

Hi, I’m writing a movie, this is what’s going to happen. I’m going to start off with something you’ve never heard of, and I’m going to introduce it right off the bat and slap you in the face with it so you know what it is. Then I’m going to drag you through an egregiously long and illogical plot* and then I’m going to say… hey. Remember that thing I showed you at the beginning? Well, we’re just going to use that to end the movie and basically nothing else you just watched really mattered.

But at the same time… it was so damn entertaining…

I felt like I had just sold my soul to the devil. The whole time I thought to myself… just sleep and this plane ride will go faster, when in actuality I found myself routing for Shia TheBeef and his intrepid band of loveable robots. Son of a bitch!

The moral of this story—really—is that giant robots are seductively sweet. Even if they’re unfathomably complicated and over-animated. Now… to wait 15 years until Michael Bay releases his master epic, Power Rangers…

*"So if the robots are after us, we should lead them into LA where they can do more damage!” – soldier “Good idea!” –Secretary of State Jon Voigt