WOW! It’s been six months since my last post. A lot has happened since then and only half was caught on camera. And of that half, only .01% has been edited. I’ll save you all the long story of how my computer and camera both died because we Frankensteined them back to life. This is the first thing I’ve cut in several months. Big ups to Audio Porn & Alejandro Jodorowsky for the soundtrack. And thanks to Fantastic Fest for making it all come true.

Alright, here’s another trailer.

RIP Don LaFontaine and Jerry Reed.

Big news, people: AICN and the Alamo have arranged a special screening of Ratatouille hosted by Patton Oswalt this coming Monday. If you’ve read this blog in the past, you know I’ve been kissing Patton’s funny ass for years. Last night, at Hostel II, Tim announced that the second film on the bill Monday will be one of Mr. Oswalt’s new favorites, The Foot Fist Way. Screw the family fun stuff…Jody Hill, Danny McBride, and company have been making wonderful films ever since back in the day. You’ll hear about how awesome it is after the fact … and then feel like poop. Be there, people! I’m not asking nicely. I’m telling you…BE THERE! Support young talented filmmakers! Especially the ones that inspired me back in film school. Don’t believe me, check out some scenes here.

But before I can even get excited about seeing Fist/Foot, Jamaa Fanaka will be in town, live and in person, to present two of his classics: Welcome Home Brother Charles, and PENITENTIARY! Lars puts it best: “Director Jamaa Fanaka specializes in the smuggler’s approach to socially relevant film-making. He’ll sneak some serious shit past you like a jailhouse shiv while you’re looking the other way. ” Once again, I’m not asking you nicely to be there. I wish the Alamo turned 10 every month.

Check back soon to see Eli Roth getting his ass spanked with a cookie sheet. It really is something else and it needs to be shared with the world.

Well, Jeff already has his own private hate squad on the On the Lot message board. Awesome! Personally, I thought Jeff was great. He got plenty of air time, he was confrontational, and he put that blow-hard know-nothing Marty Martin (Marty Martin?! Come on, how do you name your kid Martin Martin? What’s his middle name, also Martin? Very original.) in his place. Everything we love about Jeff. To me it seemed like that Marty guy had never been on a movie set before. There is no sympathy and no love lost in Hollywood.

Update: Check out this post from the On the Lot message board. Another Jeff vs. Marty post. It seems like something Seth would write, and the username scr0tum is also very Seth-like. Ahhh… it all just makes me chuckle very hardily.

Greetings dear readers. I haven’t made an original post in a spell. Haven’t had access to the inTARweb. But that don’t mean there’s been grass growing under my feet. No-no. There’s been a cadre of odd things happening since I escaped The Basement Of The Alamo. The Obama campaign came to town, then SXSW. The last week of March had Joe Dante, the Grindhouse premiere with QT & RR, and Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost presenting Hot Fuzz. Whew. I love living in Austin. Were else you gonna see all these wonderful filmmakers?

Spring is here and it has unleashed the New York City film beast within me. Ms. 45, Fear City, Street Smart, Art School Confidential, Cruising, and Angel Heart have randomly ended up in the video machine. My system was primed for this thanks to the Radical NY exhibit at MoMA that closed a few months ago. Street Smart, as Shivers promised, was awesome. And Ms. 45 proved that there actually were rapists on every street corner in the Garment District.

Retrospectives. It’s time to take a look at your old friend Michael Haneke again. But this time think of him as a smooth jazz aficionado. Thanks to Chale and the AFS for bringing the new 35mm prints of Haneke’s work to town. I cannot think of a more appropriate director to focus on for the last AFS run at the Alamo Downtown. The Seventh Continent made me fall in love with that song “I’m Your Lady,” all over again. I think I like it more than Sheena Easton’s “For Your Eyes Only.”

This all coming on the heels of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo & Holy Mountain. Sorry about the imdb link. I must now give myself to the mountain!

Back to New York City…be sure to check out The Budos Band and Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. I’ve separated their performances in hopes of you being able to download them faster.

I almost forgot…I made the cut. And you get to see me from behind. When you’re watching Grindhouse, be sure to look over Eli Roth’s shoulder when he’s ordering shots at the bar. Don’t blink, because if you do, you’ll miss me walking gingerly though the frame. It’s from behind, but I’ll take what I can get. And for you readers not familiar with the Alamo downtown, right after the opening credits for Death Proof, there is a shot of the exterior. That’s were I’m at every day, even when I don’t have to work.

Thanks badman.

I’m still having problems uploading new movies, so in the meantime, here’s an old post from late February that has been hiding in the “drafts” folder on WordPress.

If you’re at the video store wondering what to watch, I saw a whole mess of wonderful films last week. Anchor Bay (Say Yes to MI!) … I love you. I saw Revenge Of The Cheerleaders at a way late-nite screening thanks to QT, but I have to say the original Cheerleaders is one of my new favorites. Watched that on a triple feature with Little Darlings and Hardcore. If you haven’t revisited the work of Paul Schrader (Say Yes to Michigan!) you should really do yourself a favor and watch both Blue Collar and Hardcore. Blue Collar has a wonderful cast and an On Time Richard Pryor. Hardcore finds George C. Scott trying not to chew the scenery and his restraint is wonderful. Plus you get to see him dressed up as a Porn Director.

If you’ve got some energy left over, check out the recently re-released Vigilante with Robert Forester and Fred “Who made up all that bullshit about black people not being able to swim?” Williamson.

Oh yes! Anchor Bay I love you! Visiting Hours with Shatner. Visiting Hours is the most suspenseful film I have seen in a long time. It’s over-lit and it’s still scary. Remember Michael Ironside from Total Recall? This guy was nuts even back in the day. Don’t ask, just rent and love. Mostly love. Visiting Hours gets my highest marks, thanks Shivers.

If you listen closely, you can hear a sample from Visiting Hours in The Basement Of The Alamo trailer. The doctor who “delivered” me was named Michael, so it seemed appropriate to add the sample of “telephone call for Dr. Michael” to the end of the trailer. It really gave the Josh K. CatSand scene an air of realism.

January is here. For film it can mean two different things. You see Golden glo- oh…I mean the People’s Choice Indepedent New York Actors Directors Guild thingy-mabob nominated films. And then the studios release the crap they don’t expect anyone to pay money to see, but the blitzkrieg (a word my spell checker just corrected) advertising campaign can net a few 20 million on opening weekend.

So I found it really f*ckin’ weird when the opening credits of Alpha Dog came to life on the big screen this evening before my very eyes. These glorious VHS opening images were set to the classic film song “Over The Rainbow”. But this ain’t your Grandma’s version, this ain’t Liza Minelli we’re talking about here. Alpha Dog, a period piece, takes place in the Y2K (or the AK- as in AK47 if you’re drinkin’ goodwater). Alpha Dog has not the time for a time honored classic. Over the Rainbow has been “re-imagined” by Eva Cassidy.

So anyway, I’m with Ang and she hasn’t been to the movies in awhile. And as these credits are rolling I say to myself: “Wow. We just drove 20 minutes on the highway to get to this theater. We have gone out of our way for this screening. Five minutes from the apartment, we can see both Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth. What have I done?”

And by the way, if you’ve been putting off seeing both Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth, because perhaps a neighbor says let’s drive the extra 20 miles and see JT in Alpha Dog…when you rent them or see them on a crappy flat screen TV you won’t be able to experience them with the random strangers in your community. The woman sitting next to me during my second viewing of Children of Men ran out of the theater before the last fluid master. My inner Bogdanovich is telling me to shut up, but Alfonso Cuarón’s fluid masters are insane. It’s the second movie that passes the No Popcorn Test. The NPT test was developed back when I sat next to a couple on a date. They had the Biggie popcorn and soda. The film was Saving Private Ryan. When the lights came up, the tub of popcorn was full. No popcorn had been eaten. The third movie to pass the NPT was Pan’s Labyrinth. Something about the future and horrors of the past that makes people not want to eat their popping corn.

ALPHA DOG cares not for fluid masters! Alpha Dog falls into two categories for me. The first is my most hated category of all time: Rich White People with Problems. It’s also known as The Michael Douglas Syndrome. The second category is one of my favorites: Sex in a Pool. When I found out it was about rich white kids and JT, without even having seen a preview I just knew there was gonna be Sex in a Pool. Usually in Rich White Kid movies, the kids are male. Women are usually thrown into the mix for sexual purposes. Alpha Dog has just enough misogyny, and in all the right places. You’ve really got to wonder what a director is going to tell the actors during the “get away/failed blow job” scene.

“This scene…It’s a very important scene to this picture we’re working on here. It’s the scene where you JOHNNY tell, uh, Sweetheart over there, that you’ve got more on your mind then sex. But you don’t say it verbally. Get it? That’s why your mouth won’t make his dick hard, sweetheart.”

Alpha Dog cares not for boners! January is the month when the studios release the Statue Movies. It’s also the month they release the crap. Most of the holiday films look like Jackson Pollack came over and decorated the insides of the toilet bowl with earth tones, then a studio thought it’d be a good idea to release it. Alpha Dog cares not for the likes of art!

[SPOILER WARNING]
It’s really hard to watch a movie that starts off with Somewhere Over the Re-Imagining and not think about the Statue films playing in the next theater over. But then…The Man Behind the Curtain is revealed. And that man is Bruce Willis. Big Upz to Sam Jaeger for Realz. Sam has starred in at least one movie with Kevin Smith, two movies with Bruce Willis, and over 400 Jeff Seibenick productions. If they could list all of Sam’s movies with Seib on his IMDB account the scroll down would be like sitting through the closing credits of Episode III. I ain’t playin’. So Bruce Willis gets trumped by none other than Harry Dean Stanton. I’d love to cast him, Powers Boothe, and Sam Elliot in a Statue Movie. Harry Dean is hard as nails and soft as a teddy bear. A drunk-ass teddy bear.

Alpha Dog is really good. It’s got a few flaws, but it is really good. Ben Foster was hilarious and I don’t mean that to be condescending, or do I mean contradictory? His performance is great, along with Anton Yelchin. Their performances were great despite the fact that nobody in this movie really cares about anything besides getting wasted and getting some ass. At one point in the movie a girl tries to tell her mother that they need to talk and the mother responds by saying “I’m X’ing right know, what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.”

The plot is really simple. A Punk, Foster, rips off a Drug Dealer. The Drug Dealer picks up the Punks kid brother, Yelchin, and holds him hostage until he gets his money. But Johnny doesn’t watch the kid, he gets the Thug With A Heart Of Gold to do it ( JT). Sex, drugs, sex, drugs. Sex. Beer. Drugs. Fight. Sex. And then it gets really messed up. Only one person is to blame. It’s the richest white kid with the most power over his other rich friends&em;who is this man, this Puppet Master? The one who gives them their happiness, the Drug Dealer. All the witnesses to this kidnapping somehow thought because the Rich White Kid was behind it, it was cool. “Yeah pass me that reefer. Sweet.” But in the end, somehow oral sex just doesn’t get you off anymore. Then the law comes in. And now you’re on death row, Alpha Dog.

Related: Whatever We Do

Welp…I didn’t see myself in the background, but the new GRINDHOUSE teaser trailer features a lot of footage from…Oh wait…I mean…it’s a real purty trailer featuring new footage from both Planet Terror and Death Proof. Yeah!