Thighs Wide Shut

The Eagle
Soar Subject
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

When not in HBO’s Rome we don’t really care what Romans do, cause none of them there Roman TV shows or movies that have come after HBO’s Rome are nearly noble Roman enuff to be fully worth roaming out and about to see.  But if you haven’t seen HBO’s Rome then maybe you can be more open to Romanesque Roman things (Romain lettuce or Polanksi don’t count), but if you haven’t seen HBO’s Rome, well then you’ve missed out on one of the bestestestest shows of the 2010s.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.  Sorry, but we work for HBO’s Rome street team, even though the show ended 4 years ago and there is no street team, and even though the term ‘street team’ is almos more lame than saying yer a part of some team like ‘team Jacob’.  GO TEAM HBO’s ROME!!!

Anywhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo… welcome to The Eagle, director Kevin Macdonald‘s take on Rosemary Sutcliff’s book The Eagle of the Ninth, which was inspired by the real life doings of (not HBO’s) Rome’s Ninth Spanish Legion.  That’s a lot of 9s and eagles and adaptions!!!  It’s also a pretty decent premise about a 2nd century young Roman dude (dude Channing Tatum, who’s actually a purty dependable leading man) who wants to restore pride in his family’s name after his papa and his solders disappeared in the tribal hinterlands north of Hadrian’s Wall in Great Britain, and lost their treasured GOLDEN EAGLE THINGIE!!!!!  So Roman Channing dude leaves the confines of some forts and Roman hanging out places where wise dudes like Denis O’Hare and Donald Sutherland (who’s voice is almost worth the price of admission to any film he’s in) roam, and takes his newly acquired slave and future BFF (Jamie Bell) on a quest to conquer the unknown questions, and the unknown in general!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So the journey begins, and while the vistas we travel thru are mightily vistastic (Hungary, doing a fine job standing in for the ye Olde Country!), this puppy doesn’t really start cooking until Roman dude and his Billy Elliot slave meet up with a tribe of Native American looking savages covered in mud that are called Seal Peoples or something (led by A Prophet‘s Tahar Rahim), AND THEN the tables are turned and like the Roman dude is now like a slave and the slave Billy Elliot kid is like a Billy Elliot with all the power cause the tribes people hate Romans (no word on what they think of HBO’s Rome), but not the slave cause he’s from the area, but none of this is as awesome as HBO’s Rome.  What does this all have to do with dude’s lost pops and that golden eagle???  Uh, everything!!!!!  And it’s kinda cool, but its only a sliver of cool, cause there was like a ton of sorta nothing & boringness leading up to it, and a sum of sorta nothing & boringness following it, and sometimes when Mark Strong shows up in a movie it can either be a strong thing, but sometimes it can be a weak thing

So, have you ever seen HBO’s Rome???  DO IT!!! Or check yerself out some of Macdonald’s munch munch more munchable non-fictional frictions One Day in September and Touching the Void

Bold MacDonalds: Kevin Macdonald’s brother Andrew has produced a lot of his films + Trainspotting & other Danny Boyle joints, and their second cousin is…. NORM FORKING MACDONALD!!!

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Eagles lands today at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Robin Hood
The Man Who Hood Be Bilking
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Yoooooooo! (or in ye olde English, would that be Yooooooooooooe?)  What up with everyone dissin and pissin and eatin Nissin about Ridley Scott/Brian Helgeland‘s totally passable, plausible, and entertaining enuff Robin Hood?  Yes, we all know Russell Crowe is a cockmuffin, and so is that d-bag from Lost, but here they aint d-cockmuffin bags.  As Robin Longstride or Stridelong or Strongbow or Strongcockmuffin and Little John, they fines as they is, and even aints the focus of the entire movie (there’s other stuff, like castles!  and wars!!  and crowns!!! and old chicks dressed like nuns who say things!!!!  and for some reason there are kids in the woods who wear scary masks and steal seeds!!!!)

Sure, RH & LJ and the merry mens aren’t all that merry here, when compared to the ones we all know and humped from any previous incarnation, cause this aint’s a previous incarnation, this is new one!  One that goes all backstory and no frontstory! It’s no mind blowing or arrow splitting shazzle badazzle, but at least it’s realistic (they have beards and sometimes bleed AND sometimes bed chicks OR sleep with dogs)!  It’s like The Tudors (we always have to compare, sorry), but with better actors (Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Danny Huston), but with no boobs (SHIT!!!)!!  And guess what, Mark Strong plays a bad guy!  That’s the smallest shock since a dwarf tried to give a frog a shocker!!! Hollywood, give Mark Strong a vacation from a movie set and our lives!!!

What more do you people want?  Gladiator sucked and this was far more fun than that cause that’s the truth. What, you want Kevin Costner talking about baseball in Sherwood Forest?  Look, all we want is Disney’s Robin Hood put back onto the big screen, but we don’t run Disney, a movie theater, or the world, so that aint happening, but Ridley’s Hood is happening enuffffff!  Well, enuff to tide us over until something that’s both ye olde and mo mammoth comes to a screen near jews, like The Hobbit, or a 3-D version of John Wayne Bobbitt’s life story with theme song by the Bee Gees!!!! [SFW]

Sure Wood: did you ever watch the 80s British series Robin of Sherwood, later starring Sean Connery’s son (and Mia Sara’s one time hubby) Jason? probably not, but it was so 80s good!!!  and the theme song by Clannad kicked nads!!!

Clannad – ‘Robin (The Hooded Man)’ [empeethree]

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Robin is currently gettin medieval in your HOOD

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Kick-Ass
Escape From The Planet of The Capes
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Wanna know what kicks ass in Kick-Ass?  Certainly not our even dorkier Peter Parkerish title character (Brit Aaron Johnson, a mother lover if there ever was one, pretending a tad too hard to be a dorkier American Peter Parker), his best buds (Clark Duke and Evan Peters, with nothing to do, cept for us to imagine how each of them would have fared in Kick-Ass’ costume), his pointless pursuit of his pointless Mary Jane Watson (Lyndsy Fonseca, missing an ‘e’ in her name, and any sort of screen presence), his semi-nemesis Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, forever stuck in McLovin mode), Red Mist’s gangster dad (Mark Strong, who’s the Samuel L Jackson of never saying no to taking a bad guy role), Red Mist’s dad’s Jersey boy thugs (no names worth noting), Toronto standing in for New York (again???) + a generic, tired, trying to be way too energetic soundtrack (think we need a moratorium placed on the use of J Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’)

Wait, we didn’t name a dang thing that kicked-ass!  Bare with us.  We haven’t read one word of writer Mark Millar & illustrator John Romita, Jr‘s overly-meta comic book series, but then again, neither did director Matthew Vaughn and co-screenwriter Jane Goldman.  That’s cause they started filming the movie when the 3rd issue hit newsstands (do comics even hit newsstands anymore?)!  It kinda shows, cause there’s no full vision on display, juss a chop suey of superhero conventions that sometimes play dumb and loose, like Mystery Men, and when convenient, serious and meditative like Watchmen

Vaughn is a little out of his depth here in caped-crusaderville, which makes it two times in a row (after the messy Stardust) that he’s been unable to jump cleanly into another genre.  And yet he’s got some fight in him.  Lest we forget that he produced Guy Ritchie’s first two scruffy Limey fun-fests, and then showed his own skill with his delicious-enuff Layer Cake. His command of fisticuffs is his bread and butter, and when he unleashes it in Kick-Ass, it… KICKS ASS (rated R style)!!!  It’s easy to lose interest with what’s going on in the first two Kick-Ass character-centric acts, but when the throwdown climax jazzed all up in our faces, the gripes found in the first paragraph disappeared quicker than the Detroit Lions come playoff time

So if Kick-Ass himself doesn’t kick-ass in Kick-Ass, who does?  Two characters who do deserve their own comic and movie, free of the chirpy cheese dripping in their path: father and daughter vigilantes Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.  Nicolas Cage IS Big Daddy and IS awesome.  His character’s a loose electrical wire, with a killer ‘stache, but Cage is somewhat restrained… well, at least when compared to his Big Easy over the top sleazy work in Bad Lt.  But the real draw here and overall is Chloë Moretz as Hit-Girl.  Every minute she’s on screen, she lights it up, and knocks us out.  And every minute she isn’t on screen, well, Kick-Ass could use a good kick in the ass, at the hand of her foot

Sealed With A Twiss: as in Deborah Twiss, and her mammoth mammaries, which are showcased (clothed, which sometimes is hotter than not) and drooled upon (not literally) in Kick-Ass

pee es – Sophie Wu aint so bad neither

Verdictgo: it’s all a hit with Hit-Girl, and there’s enuff of her in it to make this Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Ass rips it at a theater near jews this Friday

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…