Anonymous
Unfamous A’mous
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 130 min

Roland Emmerich makes the shittiest of shit movies - Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, The Patriot, 2012, Godzilla, and a zillion other disasters that deal with natural and man-made disasters, including, but not limited to disasters in the crafts of writing and acting.  Not for a second did we ever think Emmerich was capable of making anything remotely enjoyable, let alone watchable.  Crazier things have happened, and there’s plenty of crazy things happening in Emmerich’s Anonymous, EASILY the best movie he’s ever made (although we still need to see Stargate), and in general, a f$%king fun popcorn flick that blends revisionist history with high adventure, in a yarn that actually doesn’t have much adventure to make high

Credit times 9 zillion to Emmerich and writer John Orloff, for taking a pretty dry subject (did Shakespeare write all those plays OR WAS IT SOMEONE ELSE???!???!) and making it wet like a hurricane.  Every scene feels like it’s super important, even if it’s not, and this is how Emmerich’s background with disaster flicks directly benefits his attempt at making a real movie, and unbelievably somehow makes it all work!!!  And the end result be one the moist entertaining Tudor era movies we’ve seen in quite awhile!!  IT’S TRUE!!!!!

The idea that Willy Shakes is a fraud is not a new one, but we’re sure most average moviegoers don’t know much about those conspiracy theories.  Those who don’t should relish this hot dog, and those scholarly folks who do, should juss shut their brains down and enjoy it for what it is.  And what it is aint juss an authorship question movie, but also who that asks ‘who’s yer daddy?’, filled with plenty of saucy sexual secrets + plenty of awesome facial hair and ruff-neck bidness!!!  Plus+++ the cast is udderly fantastic, top to bottom, from Vanessa Redgrave‘s Queen Elizabeth (+ her daughter Joely Richardson playing the younger version of her!) to Rhys Ifans as the bard behind the bard (+ pretty boy Jamie Campbell Bower as a dashing young version of him), to David Thewlis and Edward Hogg as the mos regal royal assholes since Count Rugen, to Sebastian Armesto, who’s like a cheaper James McAvoy, and Rafe Spall, who’s like a cheaper Ryan Reynolds, as Shakey, who wethinks invented crowd surfing

Learning fake (OR MAYBE TRUE!!!) history has never been this fun!!!!

Roland With The Homeboys: Emmerich’s London home is blammazin!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers MOOOOOOOOOOOOOS Worth A Peepers

Anonymous will be known today at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Texas Killing Fields
Womann Can Do Whatever Mann Can Do
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 105 min

The air is mighty thick and the accents, not so much (Sam Worthington, who should be banned from any kind of American accent), in Michael Mann’s daughter’s directorial feature film debut Texas Killing Fields.  Ami Canaan Mann can surely strike a hazy moody cinematic atmosphere just like her papa, and while the story presented might not eggzactly be Killing it, Texas has some don’t mess with it qualities to make it a pretty good first try for you to Field [look at that, we sorta used all three words from the title to describe it!!! sorta!!!]

Sure, nepotism in Hollywood sucks (Colin Hanks), but it’s excusable if there’s talent to back it up (not Colin Hanks).  Jennifer Lynch may be not David, but if her 2008 creepy fun Surveillance is any indication of what a director’s daughter can direct, we hope more of these daughters of directors start directing, even if it’s not AS hammazing as what their daddies can do!!!  Like… Ami Canaan Mann, who shows enuff something here to make her daddy proud, and to make us hope for even more of a something more in the future!

So what is it all about?  Inspired by true events (who knows how loosely though), there’s some shady murders going round in Texas City, with bodies popping up in… THE KILLING FIELDS!!!  Cept instead of Sam Waterston and Haing S Ngor doing stuff, we get Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (this guy should be working a lot more than he does) growling around town, looking to catch the killer(s).  Alongish for the ride are underused Jessica Chastain, and Chloë Moretz, who at first doesn’t seem to have a reason to be in the movie, until she has a reason to, which we guess is reason enuff.  Throw in some Sheryl Lee and Stephen Graham scenery chewing, and that’s that, which is what it is, which is fine enuff, and stuff (read: a good rental)

Oh, there’s one other thing, Danny Boyle loved the script but passed on directing it cause the material was too dark.  We thought it could’ve been darker!!  Wonder what Danny boy woulda had done with it.  Perhaps Jai Ho-it up a bit, no?

Toasting Toast: Texas Toast is the mostest!  so how’d it come about?  the most likely mother of invention story is…

The Pig Stand‘s Royce Hailey initiated the most famous invention: Texas Toast. When he had asked Rainbow Bakery to slice his loaves of bread thicker, slabs of bread appeared that were too thick to fit in the toaster. One of the cooks suggested that they butter them and toast them on both sides. What a hit with the customers! Unfortunately, Hailey failed to patent this invention which had its birthplace at the Pig Stand on Calder, Circa 1941 [via]

Bless this man, and the Pig Stand, who apparently pioneered  drive-thru windows in 1931, fluorescent lighting in 1939, as well as the first eatery to serve fried onion rings!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Fields fills NY & LA theaters today, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Bombay Beach
Adrifted & Talented
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
Not Rated | 80 min

Hell on earth is often an idea of a place that doesn’t really exist, but the Salton Sea area could easily be such a place that does indeed exist, if you can call it an existence.  Once a hot resort spot of the 60s LA crowd, it is now a bastion of broken and forgotten dreams, littered with sketchy people who’d be right at home in a Harmony Korine film.  The Salton Sea is right up there with the Gaza Strip and Uranus as one of the least likely places we’d ever want to live.  Luckily we don’t have to, or even go there, cause Israeli docuemntarian Alma Har’el takes us there (specifically Bombay Beach, which isn’t even a city, it’s a ‘census-designated place‘), presenting us with a poetic postcard of a true American nightmare

Har’el first encountered the area while looking for a music video shooting locale for Zach Condon’s Beirut band, and if you watch the end result of Beirut’s ‘Concubine’ you will see the ugly/beautiful seeds that sprouted this rotten/lively tree that is her first documentary feature.  Condon returns the favor by scoring the doc, and it feels like an 80 minute music video.  That’s a good thing.  We sure hope Fincher’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is too, like its trailer, but it won’t be

Har’el follows 3 sets of folks – a pilled up kid with anarchist parents, a lyrical and moldy old dude who sells individual cigarettes for teeny profits, and a South Central LA transplated kid who has found an escape in a place where most people want to escape from.  Some of their scenes are manufactured, like a lot of reality TV shows do these days, but this is a lot more realer, and morer hauntingerer than anything you’d see the Kardashian sisters do

Life isn’t always a beach, and thankfully, most beaches aren’t like Bombay Beach

Muss Be Sea-n To Believed: ‘Life After People’ did an ep about the Salton Sea, even though there are people still there!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers MOS DEF Worth A Peepers

Bombay sets sail in NY this Friday, LA next Friday, and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
Still Alive & Kicking In The Boneyard
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
Not Rated | 107 min

There’s no denying the awesomeness that is the band Fishbone.  Juss ask peoples like Flea, Les Claypol, Ice-T, No Doubt, George Clinton, Branford Marsalis, and us!  All of these people (minus us!) testify as much/such in Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler‘s up-close and personal doc Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, with narration by Laurence Fishburne (he also has the word ‘fish’ in his name!!). If you’ve ever boned in their boneyard (read: are a fan), you’ll wanna feast yer eyes and ears on this, even if it’s not exactly one giant happy party at ground zero.  And if you know nothing of them, we invite you all to join in as well, cause it’s about time you caught on to Fishbone’s truth and soul

We’ve always wanted to see Fishbone in concert, especially at the height of their career in the 90s, but sadly/madly never got around to it.  In the past few years, we’ve remembered this want, but still haven’t done anything about it.  In the process, we’ve noticed that the band still exists, with key members Angelo Moore and Norwood Fisher still punk skankin’, but are barely making much of a scene, playing in tiny venues and sometimes even on booze cruises.  This made us kinda sad/mad, and we started wondering where it all went wrong, or more specifically, why did Fishbone not make it like they probably should have?

Great question!  Thanks!  And there are many a answers (a creative African-American band that ended up being too hard to classify and market by record labels) and even more questions as to why not (if No Doubt can make it, why couldn’t they?  that’s our question, not the filmmakers’) in this documentary.  We love when questions get answered!  And get frustrated when more questions pop up!  But, Fishbone rocks, and after seeing them in this, we want to correct our not seeing them on a stage issue like yesterday, and until then, we will have nuttin but endless sunless Saturdays

Beachy Keen: Fishbone might juss be the very first cool and ‘alternative’ music that we ever grooved out to (think they were also the very first band we bought a t-shirt of, but then again, it might have been Elvis, after our virgin visit to Graceland).  The love & madness all began for us at age 10 when we saw them duet ‘Jamaica Ska’ with Annette Funicello in the ‘classic’ campy flick Back To The Beach

they should totally bring this movie back to theaters… in 9-D!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Fishbone is served in NY this Friday and elsewhere elsewhen 

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Abduction
Wolfkid’s Got Nards
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 106 min

There are bad movies that are juss flat out bad, and then there are bad movies that are fun cause they are bad.  Abduction is fun bad.  It’s a movie that is played out rather seriously, but no viewer would possibly be able to take it seriously.  And if you take it for what it’s not, you might end up enjoying it, like we did… somehow.  IT’S TRUE!

We’ve always been on team Jacob (Taylor Lautner), THIS IS ALSO IT’S TRUE!!!, but the Twilight movies never let him win.  In Abduction he’s finally the center of brooding attention, fighting the good cheesy fight, and even gets the girl in the end.  Plus, this girl (Lily Collins) is far better looking, far less annoying, and doesn’t pine for undead dudes who play vampire baseball at dusk like someone one we all know and don’t care about!!!

READ: KRISTEN STEWART IS THE TWIWÃœRST!!!

Abduction‘s got some quality out of place talent on board (Maria Bello, Jason Isaacs, Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver), something resembling decently-ish directed hot action action (John Singleton, who’s gone from examining gun violence, to becoming a gun for hire), and sum well needed Amtrak Pittsburgh Pirates love (they might juss have the best font in all of sports), but it’s all undermined by a bumblepooped script (by Shawn Christensen).  Hard to tell if it read better as a script than how it sounded in a film, but there’s no way lines like ‘I hate balloons‘ was ever going to make much of a pop.  And who hates balloons anyways, besides maybe the boy in the plastic bubble??

Still, the clunky dialog, and in & outnane story (enrypted names on a phone or something with the wolfkid‘s dad that’s like a secret dad, which somehow also deals with nightmares about home gas attacks in Paris from the past, or something) hactually helps to make this nonsensical sensicalnon consensual nonsexual conjob watchable

Biggest benefactor of the cruddy verbiage is Dragon Tattooer Michael Mikael Blomkvist Nyqvist.  This tired & grumpy looking Swede was born to play a generic Eastern European baddie, but hopefully he’ll get better baddies to play in the years to come, or perhaps star in remakes of Daniel Craig movies

This film is thighly recommended for people who love thick eyebrows.  Everyone else – eye-browse at your own risk

Reprised Possession: we were blind-sided by Phil Collins’ daughter Lily in The Blind Side, and she will forevermore be stroking us with her invisible touch

Verdictgo: can’t believe we’re typing this but Jeepers Kinda Sorta Worth A Peepers

Abduction is lost and found at a theater near jews today

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed, but team Jacob isn’t…