The Barnesyard

Christian Bale plays the character of Jack "Cowboy" Kelly (early in the film, he performs a solo western dance that would have killed the career of a lesser man, instead of just hurting it a lot), but he also has a handicapped, Jewish sidekick named "Crutchy" played by Marty Belafsky. I'm not shitting you...the Jewish runt who walks around lame with a crutch is named "Crutchy". Whoever pitched that idea in the Disney story meeting must have got a gigantic raise right on the spot.

"You see, Mr. Eisner, sir, we thought we might 'humanize' the Jack character a little by giving him a Jewish sidekick...he's a spunky little Jewish runt who limps around on a crutch."

"What's the sidekick's name?"

"Well, Mr. Eisner, sir, we thought we might call him 'Crutchy'."

"Someone get this man a raise and a blowjob!"

My favorite scene in the film is at the end after the strike is settled and the corrupt juvie home has been closed down -- a van pulls out and kids from the home stream out...there's a teasing pause as the camera holds on the shot of the empty van door...and then...yes!! It's Crutchy limping out! It's Crutchy! Cue tears and applause.

Of course, "Newsies" went on to become an enormous bomb for Disney -- it seems as though they cut costs by shooting the film on small sets, but "Newsies" made less than $3 million at the box office and was savaged by critics. But the film lives on in the hearts of young girls and pedophiles everywhere.

Here's a review of the film I grabbed from IMDB:

""Newsies" is one of the few Disney films that can be classified as 'great'. What makes it even more amazing is the fact that, although it's a Disney movie and based on actual events, it actually stays very close to what actually happened. (Who would've thought?) The movie has a very good script, great acting, and music that make even the biggest musical-hater tapping his/her feet. Add into this mix show-stopping choreography, humor, and some of the best actors and actresses you can find anywhere, and you will see why this movie has generated more fans than any other movie in history."

And some more from Netflix:

"There are not words to describe how amazing this movie is. While not artistically directed, or critically acclaimed, rent it and i guarantee you will love it...but be aware that it is a musical! The music is engaging anf catchy, with sentimental moments also. A great family movie...but also starring Christian Bale in his early days...a fantastically talented actor (who is also extremely hot, might i add) ...anyway....must see for anyone, any age."

"I just saw this movie for the first time a week ago. I don't know what the HECK is wrong with me. Hey, I've seen it now though, don't hurt me. And boy, am I glad. I've always loved, loved, loved old New York. Even when I was little I used to pretend I was an orphan living in an orphanage around the turn of the century. I don't know, I was a strange kid. And I love those newsies caps. But anyway. The singing and dancing in this movie are superb. Well, except from Christian Bale and David Moscow (Barnesyard editorial note: Bale and Moscow are the stars of the film). They certainly did wonderful, though. Christian Bale can really do anything, though. He gets the New York accent down perfect. I had no idea he was British before the movie was over."

And finally a heads-up for Weintraub, Walters, and all the folks at the Sacramento Bee:

"Newsies is a must see for anyone working in the newspaper industry. Chock full of pearls of wisdom on what sells a paper ("Headlines don't sell papes. Newsies sell papes.") but ya gotta listen for them!"

The latest edition of Netflix' Sacramento Local Favorites list is out, and I have to say that I'm impressed with the effort. Among the usual dreck and CSI episodes, we find a Hitchcock, a Clouzot, a few movies made in the ancient times before 1984 (or as many film fans know it -- B.B.C., Before Breakfast Club), several foreign and arthouse films, and Dave Chappelle. More important: no "Monk" episodes.

The fare is growing slightly tonier, and I would like to think it is a direct result of my influence and nothing else. The flecks of quality spattered throughout the list almost make up for the presences of rat-poison manufacturers Hilary Duff, Robin Williams, Jet Li, Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love in "Trapped", "The In-Laws" (the remake, not the good one), and George Lopez.

ALMOST.

Without further ado, the list (remember, these are films that Netflix subscribers from Sacramento are renting predominantly more often than other members throughout the country):

1) Blood of Beasts
2) The In-Laws
3) Yes
4) CSI Season 1
5) Blind Horizon
6) The Wages of Fear
7) Ultimate Fighting Championship 52
8) Head in the Clouds
9) Redemption
10) Once Upon a Time in China
11) Trapped
12) Lifeboat
13) Panic
14) Charmed: Season 2
15) Smile (a good beauty pageant satire with Bruce Dern and Melanie Girffith)
16) Dave Chappelle: For What It's Worth
17) Jumanji
18) Raise Your Voice
19) Mansfield Park
20) Steamboy
21: Ringers: Lord of the Fans
22) Greenfingers
23) George Lopez: Why You Crying?
24) Willow (finally getting its due)
25) CSI: Miami Season 3

Well, I didn't get more than ten minutes into "Blind Fury" last night before falling asleep, so that review will have to be pushed back another day. Ditto the Duelling Reviews of "Two Women" -- Dub has already sent his review but I haven't watched the film yet. But I did get a chance to see an interesting old film called "International House", starring W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen, and a lot of film and radio stars from the era. I will write a little more about it later this afternoon.

In the meantime, I was hoping some of you would talk about some of the movies you've seen over the past couple of weeks. I'm sure you must have seen SOMETHING of note over the Thanksgiving weekend, so this is your chance to talk about it.

I am also seeing the new Harry Potter movie after work tonight...I am a fan of the books, but I thought the first two film adaptations were as perfunctory as they could possibly get. I felt that the third film captured the everyday-ness of the magical world, but the new one has a different director. Anyone seen it yet? Any thoughts or opinions?

OnDemand From A-Z, Volume 1 - The Letter "A"

"AGNES OF GOD" (1985 - Director: Norman Jewison)

The OnDemand festival got off to an extremely inauspicious start with the French Canada-based "Agnes of God", a contrived, skittish film about religious fervor and lost faith. Jane Fonda plays a chain-smoking, court-appointed psychiatrist who is asked to investigate and sign off on a murder-insanity case involving a young nun in a cloistered sect. The nun, played by Meg Tilly in the film's only moderately bearable performance, carried a baby to term and apparently killed it in an act of madness. She hid her pregnancy from the other nuns, who seem all too willing to shuffle the controversial nun off to the madhouse. They are led by Anne Bancroft as the Mother Superior, a tough-talking, no-nonsense nun right out of a Monty Python sketch.

Fonda's character is a lapsed Catholic whose sister died in a convent (of course), so she gets personally involved and starts snooping around. She finds that Tilly is a crazed "innocent" who sees religious visions and occasionally bleeds stigmata from her palms. Still, Fonda insists on psychoanalyzing and hypnotizing her patient (you know, just to see if anything's wrong) and begins working for her acquittal.

Sounds good enough, and with Georges Delerue composing the score, "Dr. Strangelove" production designer Ken Adam creating the sets, and Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist coloring the film in shades of muted browns, the film has the aura of a classy production. Indeed, the film was nominated for several Oscars (including Tilly and Bancroft, who is flat-out terrible, for acting) and Tilly won the Golden Globe for Supporting Actress. But "Agnes of God", adapted from a stage play, comes off stagy and dull, with lousy dialogue (a scene where Fonda and Bancroft "riff" on tobacco use by biblical hereoes is the dictionary definition of "forced banter"), contrived characters, and a story ultimately lacking in courageousness.

Norman Jewison is a Canadian-born filmmaker who has had a lot of success in Hollywood -- he won an Oscar for "In the Heat of the Night", and did "Cincinnati Kid", "The Thomas Crown Affair", "Rollerball"; "Moonstruck", and so on. He won the Irving Thalberg award several years back, but he seems too impersonal and facile for any sort of pantheon. David Thomson had a quote about Jewison that I meant to bring in, but the gist of it is that if you're going to give the Thalberg award to a talent as middling as Jewison, it's time to discontinue the award altogether. His films all have a sort of lighthearted heavy-handedness to them -- he has a remarkable talent for turning can't-miss properties into mediocrities, and turning mediocre properties into garbage.

"Agnes of God" only grows more solemnly ridiculous as it goes along -- under hypnosis, Tilly claims that God sired her child, then admits to the murder. In the next scene, she is acquitted for the crime of manslaughter. Is that a law in Canada? Kill your baby, claim it was immaculately conceived, admit to the crime...and you're off scot-free? Is that it goes down up there?

This was one of the last films Fonda made before semi-retirement, but she looks like Rickey Henderson playing with the San Diego Surf Dawgs in "Agnes of God" -- not quite ready to admit that it's over, ready to phone it in one last time. Her performance here reminded me of her work in "Klute", only even more strident and unconvincing (a feat I never thought possible).

Grade: D+.

Let's hope I have better luck next time when OnDemand From A-Z explores the letter "B", with Norse God Rutger Hauer starring as a blind, Zatoichi-esque truck driver in "Blind Fury". It comes with the Jay Baker Seal of Approval.

So has anyone seen "The Squid and the Whale" yet? Any thoughts or opinions? Am I full of shit or what? I'm interested to hear what people think.

I went home and reviewed my notes and realized that I forgot to talk about Howard Hawks' 1960's slapstick comedy "Man's Favorite Sport?", starring Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss. That film would also fit in the category of mediocre efforts by master filmmakers. The story involves Rock as a smooth-talking fishing expert for Abercrombie and Fitch who secretly hates fish and has never even attempted to catch one. When Prentiss bullies and cajoles him into entering a prominent fishing tournament, he is forced to adopt the macho outdoorsman personae, bumbling his way into Prentiss' arms and the tournament championship. It is hard not to view the film as a sly commentary on Rock's closeted homosexuality, with the fish as a vulgar metaphor for females (this connection was made particularly explicit in the Mark Rappaport's first-person quasi-documentary "Rock Hudson's Home Movies"). And it is downright impossible to shake the ghost of Hawks' earlier triumph "Bringing Up Baby" -- you have the same storm-tossed free spirit shaking a tight-laced square out of his routine, the same slapstick involving animals, even a ripped-dress scene borrowed straight from the Hepburn-Grant classic. Unfortunately, Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss, while good, are no Hepburn and Grant, and the film is mostly weighed down by goofy slapstick and leaden pacing. An amusing film, not much more.

Grade: B-.

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I will return this afternoon for the first chapter in OnDemand From A-Z: we begin with the letter "A" -- Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft, and Meg Tilly in Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God". The real question at this point is where to go next -- do I choose "The Beast" with Jason Patric, "Blind Fury" with Rutger Hauer, or "Butterflies Are Free" with Goldie Hawn to represent the letter "B"? Any suggestions?

Despite the tidal wave of cinematic mediocrity I encountered this past week, I did see a couple of films that commanded my attention and captivated my imagination. The first was Samuel Fuller's "Shock Corridor" (1963), a quasi-psychosexual B-thriller about a reporter who, with the help of his girlfriend, fakes insanity in order to get committed to a mental institution so he can solve a murder. The film is pure Sam Fuller gutter poetry, with incredibly insipid ideas about madness and psychoanalysis bumping up against genuinely chilling scenes of psychotic outrage and surreal dementia. "Shock Corridor" was shot by Stanley Cortez (who had previously lensed Welles' funhouse mirror-noir "Touch of Evil"), and he lends a razor-sharp urgency to scenes like the one in which a black inmate incites a race riot against the other black patients, or the one where the reporter finally succumbs to his own madness by imagining the mental ward getting flooded by water. There is also a hilarious sequence in which the reporter is attacked and nearly cannibalized by a room full of nymphomaniacs. However, Fuller's screenplay also includes a number of overbaked howlers, all of them leading up to the supreme howler, when a despondent doctor informs the reporter's girlfriend that he has succumbed to catatonia, and looks out the window to deliver the immortal line, "What a tragedy...a deaf mute will win the Pulitzer Prize." Madness in front of and behind the camera have rarely collided so fortuitously...too stupid to fully embrace, "Shock Corridor" is nonetheless required Sam Fuller.

Grade: B+.

But the one great film that I have seen in recent weeks, and the lone great film of 2005, is "The Squid and the Whale", Noah Baumbach's queasily humorous and incisive story about the divorce of two New York writer-intellectuals, and the disturbing ways that their separation and joint custody affect the children caught in the middle. In its briskly paced telling of family scars and secrets among a faded New York intelligentsia, the film can't help but recall Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums", but Baumbach's film feels lived-in and authentic where Anderson's comes off as an outsized cartoon. Jeff Daniels does brilliant work as the father, a bearded professor whose pretentiousness masks a defeated man who is further emasculated by his ex-wife's affairs, including her dalliance with a "philistine" tennis pro played by William Baldwin. Daniels' character glibly informs the children of their mother's affairs, and this exacerbates the family's already-strained relations (the older son hero-worships the father, while the neglected younger son latches onto his mother). Just as Baumbach's expert balance between torrid familial relations and brisk humor recalls the best work of Woody Allen, Daniels' performance reminded me of his dual role in "The Purple Rose of Cairo", in which he played the dashing cardboard movie hero who leaps from the screen as well as the real-life actor who plays him, who is manipulative and self-interested. Daniels' character in "The Squid and the Whale" is a legendary cinematic scoundrel (he encourages his older son to play the field and neglect his sweet girlfriend, leaves his younger son at home alone for an entire weekend, and shacks up with an oversexed young student played by Anna Paquin, who has cornered the market on oversexed youths), and yet there is something almost strangely sweet and fragile about him...he is a once-promising writer who realizes that greatness has passed him by and can't deal with it. His final line to Linney (who also does award-worthy work here as a woman vacillating between self-interest and self-indulgence) -- "I got you in for the children's price" -- is strangely tender, the product of a cad trying to express his heart and only sounding more like a cad. "The Squid and the Whale" is a cutting and confident film that is full of such moments -- it's the first great film of 2005.

Grade: A.

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I'll be back tomorrow with my review of "Agnes of God", the first installment of OnDemand From A-Z.

As Darcey mentioned earlier, I neglected to mention that we also watched the notorious Disney musical "Newsies" (1992 - Director: Kenny Ortega). The lavish yet claustrophobic film tells the story of a newsboy strike in 1899, and stars Christian Bale as the group's charismatic leader, with support from Robert Duvall as Joseph Pulitzer and Ann-Margret as a songbird. The Broadway-lite songs are written by Alan Menken (who wrote the Oscar-winning tunes for "Beauty and the Beast", "The Little Mermaid", and "Aladdin"), and the lead character is a handsome orphan-wastrel with a yearning in his heart for something greater -- in this sense, "Newsies" resembles Disney's animated "Aladdin", except instead of magic lamp there's labor union strife, and instead of a genie there's pre-pubescent boys walking around with their shirts off. "Newsies" is tolerable entertainment for fans of musicals, and rat poison for non-fans, but the biggest problem is that the story lacks urgency or interest -- not to mention that it features the always unwelcome presence of Bill Pullman (doing his own singing, unfortunately). Grade: C.

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Incidentally, this is a 4-star review of "Newsies" posted by a member on the Netflix website and reprinted verbatim:

"i'm a kevin smith fan, for crying out loud! what am i doing even watching a disney musical? "Newsies" is wonderfully entertaining, you get the 1930's mobster feel out of a gang of kids trying to band together like no group of youngsters since "The Mighty Ducks". Wonderfully spirit-lifting with all kinds of catchy tunes...high school drama classes: get ready!"

Here's another great blurb from a 5-star review of "Newsies":

"I don't why the HECK people say that this movie has a boring plot. What's boring about it? The charming newsies change the world! Well, at least their world. It's a great story."

There are dozens more just like this.

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Up next: The Good Stuff!

I've watched about a dozen movies in the past week, and while I've admired most of them on some level, very few ranked above the level of an interesting mediocrity. Maybe I was just made wistful and dissatisfied by the changing weather or perhaps it was just dumb luck, but only one film was able to penetrate all the way to my heart.

Certainly it wasn't "WALK THE LINE" (2005 - Director: James Mangold), a Johnny Cash biopic that features an unexpectedly accomplished performance from Joaquin Phoenix (ably impersonating Cash, but never quite becoming him) and an even better one from Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. However, despite a warts-and-all attempt, the film was scattershot and contrived in all the wrong places, and the characterizations seem oversimplified. At one point, a drug-addicted Cash is seen crashed out in a dingy apartment with Waylon Jennings, yet somehow this is depicted as a LOW POINT in the singer's life! What's that about? Grade: B-.

Just as conflicted was "PARADISE NOW" (2005 - Director: Hany Abu-Assad), a strenuously humanistic drama about the emotional and psychological conflicts of a pair of best friends and Palestinian suicide bombers that never even scratches their emotional or psychological surface. The film is urgent and well shot and slyly humorous (the friends initially seem like aimless slackers with no political inclinations), but ultimately goes nowhere, getting too wrapped up in polemicizing the issues and not enough in the characters. Grade: B-.

"KISS KISS BANG BANG" has been strangely overpraised by critics who seem to be confusing incoherence for satire. Writer-director Shane Black's story of a petty thief-cum-actor and a gay private detective solving a series of murders in Hollywood would like to be "Kiss Me Deadly" crossed with ""True Romance", but it hues a lot closer to the Black-scripted "A Long Kiss Goodnight", in that it blurs the line between the satirization of hack filmmaking and actual hack filmmaking. Good work by Downey and Kilmer, and some true laugh-out-loud moments, but a bit too unbalanced to fully recommend. Grade: B-.

Friday and Saturday were reserved for films from some of the foreign masters, all of which engaged and disappointed by nearly equal margins. Visconti's "WHITE NIGHTS" (1957) was a lushly morose, studio-bound romance that reminded me of Coppola's "One From the Heart" (a personal favorite), except that Coppola used the banality of his central love story as a springboard for ecstatic filmmaking, while Visconti uses it as the gateway to more banality. Bunuel's "VIRIDIANA" (1961) was similar in that it was exceptionally well-shot and yet uninvolving, although with one brilliant sequence in which a group of transients inhabiting a makeshift homeless shelter destroy the home of their benefactor in a bacchanalian orgy. Fassbinder's "VERONIKIA VOSS" (1982), one of his last films, tells the story of a faded actress who was huge during the Third Reich, but now is a prisoner of morphine addiction. As she captures a rumpled sports reporter into her orbit, the film takes on the melodramatic glare of a German "Sunset Boulevard", but the story only grows less interesting as it goes along. GRADES FOR ALL: B-.

Even more admirable yet icy was Bresson's "DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST" (1950), the story of a callow, sickly priest who fails to inspire or save his parishioners, and of his tortured faith. This film might have more significance for people of faith, but I was simply left cold, despite a number of striking scenes and performances. Bresson's film has the gauzy posturing and self-seriousness of a silent film, but only a fraction of the power of Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc". Grade: C+.

Of course, I couldn't resist leavening my load with some OnDemand tripe, so I watched Woody Allen and Bette Midler as a seemingly contented married couple who separate and reconcile in a public setting in "SCENES FROM A MALL" (1991 - Director: Paul Mazursky). The movie isn't as unwatchable as its reputation would suggest, but it gets pretty difficult at times, especially in the numerous mime-baiting scenes, and during a scene where Woody goes down on Bette during a screening of "Salaam Bombay". Most interesting is that Woody plays an L.A. schmoozer with a ponytail, while still fitting him snugly into his pantheon of neurotic schlubs. Grade: C-.

As those of you who grew up in Sacramento may remember, there was a local UHF channel that used to run a 5-day John Belushi film fest at least twice a year. Now, John Belushi only made about five movies, so they just showed the same ones in the same order over and over and over again -- it was "Animal House", "The Blues Brothers", "1941", his dreadful romantic comedy "Continental Divide", and John G. Avildsen's "NEIGHBORS" (1981). However, OnDemand provided me with my first opportunity to see "Neighbors" in its uncut form (the film isn't even listed on Netflix). The movie is a darkly comic, fable-like story of a repressed middle class suburbanite (Belushi) who is flummoxed, foiled, and fascinated by his insane new neighbors (Dan Aykroyd and a delicious-looking Cathy Moriarity). There is a lot of leaden slapstick and wilted satire punctuated with needless, overbearing laugh-line music on the soundtrack -- and yet the film also holds a strange fascination, with a commited performance from Aykroyd and a memorably apocalyptic finale. Grade: C+.

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Alright, this post is looking long enough for now. I'll review the rest of the movies I watched this past week in the next post.

Available for rental tomorrow on Netflix:

"The Mangler Reborn"

"In this gory follow-up to Tobe Hooper's The Mangler (based on a short story by Stephen King), a man obsessed with the deadly machine's powers (Weston Blakesley) scraps the original parts and decides to build a new contraption. But his sinister plan backfires when the cursed apparatus decides to eat him … and then spits him back out. Now, the only way to keep his flesh from decomposing is to feed the evil engine new blood."

I find it interesting that you don't need a successful, liked, or even known movie in order to fashion a tenuously related, quasi-remake, straight-to-video sequel out of it. For those who don't remember, the original film came out in 1995 and starred Robert Englund of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. This is actually the second straight-to-video sequel to "The Mangler" -- the first one was called "The Mangler 2" and was released in 2001.

If you have Comcast cable, you might know about OnDemand. If not, I'll explain -- it's a feature that allows you to access certain shows (some in their entirety, some clips), free movies, pay-per-view movies, sports and music content instantly through your cable remote. There is also a feature called RipeTV that showcases Hawaiian Tropic bikini girls and supermodels, although in recent months they have drastically downgraded their free content and switched the majority of it to a pay format. I call bullshit on you, RipeTV! You tease!

But I digress -- the real meat for me is the vast array of free movies available through OnDemand. You can find a real bizarre mix of movies, everything from genuine classics (Dr. Strangelove), minor classics (Lifeboat), notorious duds (Hudson Hawk), forgotten duds (Roommates with Peter Falk and D.B. Sweeney), and everything in between. OnDemand's free movies make me feel nostalgic for the pay cable I knew from 10-15 years ago, when you could find a non-sequiter-like assemblage of movies representing all manners of genre, era, acclaim, and quality.

Therefore, I have decided that theme for the next month will be OnDemand From A-Z -- I will go through the Free Movies list alphabetically, selecting one film that begins with each letter, and will review them all on the blog. In the end, we should have an unusual and fascinating mix of films. First up, the letter "a" and the 1985 drama "Agnes of God", starring Jane Fonda as a psychiatrist and Meg Tilly as what I assume will be the hottest movie nun since Audrey Hepburn. I'll watch it tonight and review it sometime tomorrow.

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Next up: what I watched this weekend.

I will post a recap of all of my movie-watching activity from the past week later this afternoon. I will also be introducing a new feature to the Barnesyard that will no doubt bring you personal fulfillment and add two inches to your height. But I don't want to make any outrageous claims, so I'll just leave it right there for now.

In the meantime, I need some help with another feature that will be popping up on The Barnesyard throughout the month of December. Me and Darcey have decided to watch at least one classic Christmas film per week leading up to Christmas, and I wanted to solicit suggestions for holiday films. If anyone has a movie to add to this list, please shout it out...

It's a Wonderful Life
Miracle on 34th Street
A Christmas Story
Christmas in Connecticut
Elf
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
A Christmas Carol
Holiday Inn/White Christmas
Santa Claus: The Movie
Santa Claus Conquers the Martian
Surviving Christmas
Christmas With the Kranks
The Santa Clause

That's all I can think of for now....anyone else got a suggestion?

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Dub already sent me his review of De Sica's "Two Women", but I haven't watched the movie yet, so look for that sometime later in the week. I have decided that, in order to preserve the specialness of it, Dare Daniel will be a semi-regular feature rather than a weekly feature. I know, I know, it's a warming light in the vast cultural wasteland, but self-denial is the cornerstone of personal growth, so let's all grow together. Plus, it's driving me bonkers. So save up some suggestions and I will start soliciting later this week. The Top 5 list will continue to be an every-Friday feature.

There's so much to talk about I don't even know where to begin. I spent the holiday weekend contemplating where I wanted the blog to go in the coming months, and I think I've come up with some ideas that will no doubt enrich your lives and make you all better, happier people. But just don't get your expectations up.

In the sports world, poor Jesse spent the entire weekend being wrong about nearly everything. He got off to an early start on Wednesday afternoon, when he stopped by my desk to gravely inform me that "none of the football experts" were picking Denver to beat Dallas on Thanksgiving. Make that none of the football experts and YOU, Jesse!

Of course, Denver went on to beat the Cowboys by a field goal in overtime, my man Champ Bailey returned an interception for a touchdown (I begged Drew Bledsoe not to throw to Champ's side of the field...I implored him!), and Denver has both a 9-2 record and the inside track on a first-round bye in the AFC.

Now I'm no "football expert", but I did guarantee the Broncos would win the game, and thanks to Jesse's baffling decision to guarantee a Cowboys victory, I now have a dominant 12-point lead in the office football pool. At this point, my lead is so robust and unquestionable, I almost feel that I've crossed over from being the poor man's McCounaughey to becoming the poor man's Al Pacino. But then I remember that there is already a poor man's Al Pacino out there...sadly, it's Al Pacino.

Let's see, what else was Jesse wrong about? Ah yes, Peja's poor widdle piggy-wiggy. If you'll recall from last week, Jesse claimed that it was not Peja's "slightly sprained" (the words of the Kings' team doctor, not mine) little finger that was keeping him out of the lineup. Well, just read any article written about Peja in the last week, and you'll see his pinky finger mentioned within the first two paragraphs. So who's making it up, Jesse? Me or the entire world?

Peja's hurt pinky finger continued to make news over the weekend, with a seemingly loaded quote from Bonzi Wells (who is also suffering from a hurt finger, but who has continued to play hard and well) in the Bee, and two unnamed Kings players claiming that Peja and Bonzi got into a verbal scuffle and had to be separated. This was followed the next day by claims from Kings players that the entire ordeal was fabricated, although to my knowledge, the two unnamed sources never publicly retracted their stories.

This horseshit will continue to fester until the Kings get rid of Peja. He's a good player, but he's soft and makes everyone around him soft. We have tough players now that don't complement him particularly well, and the team has proven that they can score points without him. We should be looking to trade him for role players that can expand our bench and add more toughness. Of course, if we did add tough role players, Adelman probably wouldn't play them anyway, just as he is ignoring Corliss and Brian Skinner to give starter's minutes to Francisco Garcia, who does nothing but jack up 3-pointers and commit idiotic turnovers. He might be something special some day, but I can't see how he gives us a better chance to win right now. Nearly every Kings fan has come to realize that Adelman's day has passed in Sacramento, so why is he still coaching this team? We needed a change two years ago...by this point, it's just become ridiculous.

The Kings had a couple of good wins over the weekend (although that Toronto game was disturbingly close) and if they beat Charlotte tomorrow like they should, they'll be back at the .500 mark. But that's not impressive. Their next dozen games include road trips to Golden State, Seattle, Minnesota, Detroit, and San Antonio, as well as home games against Miami, Minnesota, Cleveland, Houston, and Dallas. If they're at .500 after that stretch, then I'll be impressed.

Mike Dub has accepted my challenge to watch the straight-to-video sequel to "8mm", the algebraically named "8mm2". He plans to write a compare/contrast review entitled. "The Original or the Sequel: Which One is Awesomer?" You can look forward to that sometime next week.

That's all the blogging I have time for today. I am taking a half day, so I had to pound through my surprisingly heavy workload in order to get out of here at a decent time. The Barnesyard will be on hiatus until Monday, but I'll return with a new Duelling Review (of Vittorio De Sica's "Two Women" starring Sophia Loren), a new Dare Daniel, a new top 5, movie reviews, Kings talk, football talk, etc.etc.etc.

When I return next week, that will mark the 3-month anniversary of The Barnesyard. Hard to believe it's only been 3 months...do you remember what your life was like before The Barnesyard's existence? It was a black, bottomless tar pit of misery and despair (trust me on this one, you were a wreck). So that's one more thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. I personally want to thank everyone who reads the blogs, and a special thank you to Jesse and Mike Dub, who have made fantastic contributions and are consistently met with derision and scorn by yours truly. The fact is that The Barnesyard wouldn't be the same without them. Thanks, guys.

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving weekend and I will see you all next week!

1) I will never do any research.

2) I will never fact-check information.

3) I will always print rumor as truth.

4) Little Richard is always right.

5) Jesse is always wrong.

6) Dub is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

These promises will be kept.

Sincerely,

Charles Foster Barnes
Owner and Publisher, The Barnesyard

Becky is back from her trip to the East coast, and I am too busy and too tired to write, so why don't you all go catch up with Heckasac for a while.

I just found out that StateNet is closing the office on the day after Thanksgiving. We didn't get that holiday last year...of course, everyone took the day off anyway, but I was still in my first month so I had to work a full shift. But this year, I can use the sick day I was going to use on Friday for today and/or tomorrow, so posts will be scarce on the Barnesyard this week.

I saw "Paradise Now" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" last night, and while I still plan to write proper reviews of each, I will just say for now that both films are entertaining in spots, but not enough for me to wholeheartedly recommend either one. Ill give a B- to both of them.

If you're jonesing for movie reviews, I suggest checking out this guy's blog. He is watching one movie per day, mostly classics, and while his reviews may not be as irreverent as mine, they are much more thorough.

For some reason, I am not feeling the movie review vibe today, so I will put off my weekend reviews for one more day, and reveal the identity of the First Great Movie of 2005 in a very undramatic fashion -- it's "The Squid and the Whale" with Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney. It's playing at the Crest, so go check it out while you have the opportunity -- I will write a proper review of it tomorrow.

Just so you don't think I'm not committed to this enterprise, I am planning to power-watch two movies tonight (I can't bear to watch the Kings tonight anyway). I'm heading back to the Crest to see "Paradise Now", then I'm driving directly to the Century Laguna to see "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang". Reviews of both plus my review of Hawks' "Man's Favorite Sport?" will all be included in tomorrow's version of The Barnesyard. See you then, and go see "The Squid and the Whale".

I've got civil rights groups, grassroots organizations, and the Department of Homeland Security halfway up my ass about all the Little Richard hate speech that Jesse has been spreading on my blog of late. I allowed it to stand for a little while so that I could display the ugliness of hate in its most unvarnished form. But enough is enough. From now on, any hateful comments made about Little Richard will be deleted immediately. When informed of this, Jesse apparently appealed to the ACLU and other free speech groups, but all of them refused to take his case and have officially condemned him in the press. Congratulations, Jesse, you're officially a pariah in this town. I hope you're happy.

For some reason, the good Lord made a benevolent, near-obsessive attempt to win over Mike Dub this weekend (God: gay?). Not only did the Bears cripple the ostensible Super Bowl contending Carolina Panthers yesterday to bring their record to 7-3, but I found out that a straight-to-video sequel to the Nic Cage thriller "8mm" is being released on Netflix tomorrow. The synopsis:

"J.S. Cardone helmed this slick sequel to the star-studded 8MM. Up-and-coming politician David Huxley (Johnathon Schaech) gets unexpectedly derailed by a blackmailer who possesses film of the steamy three-way affair he had with his fiancée (Lori Heuring) and a pretty young model (Zita Görög). But Huxley finds more than his career on the line when he steps into the sleazy realm of pornography to pin down the extortionist."

Interesting that they refer to the original "8mm" as star-studded, while the biggest star in the sequel is Bruce Davison (the Senator from "X-Men"). Could this film qualify as a "Dare Dub"? I think it could.

It sure was one hell of a weekend...I pulled even further ahead in the football pool, the Kings took one step forward and two steps back, the old Chinese lady who lives downstairs almost attacked me with a rake at 8:30 in the morning, and I finally saw the first great movie of 2005 (more on that later).

But let's start with basketball -- last night, the Kings squandered a chance to put the Sonics' recent domination behind them (they've now beat us 8 out of the last 10 times we've played them) by falling apart in the closing minutes. Peja added new levels to the legend of his softness by excusing himself from making an effort after he "suffered" a "slight sprain" to his pinky. Not broken, not fractured, but a "slight sprain"...TO HIS PINKY FINGER! So Peja scores zero points in the second half, quits trying to fight through screens or play defense, and passes the ball away as soon as he touches it -- all this after owning the Sonics throughout the first half. Like the man says, there is a difference between being injured and being hurt. Every single player in the league is playing through some kind of pain, and it's an insult to your teammates who are toughing it out to quit on them because you have a slightly sprained pinky finger. Peja is garbage, pure and simple.

Also garbage: Rick Adelman's inconceivable reluctance to call a timeout to set up a play in crucial game situations. Last night, the Kings had the ball down 2 points with 15 seconds left in the game and one timeout in their pocket. But just as he did last year in the playoffs, Adelman refused to call a timeout and simply waved the team down the floor. Naturally, the team was disoriented and confused, with Abdur-Rahim handling the ball on the perimeter, and they ended up getting a bad shot, this time a fadeaway 3-pointer from Bibby (despite the fact that they only needed two to tie!). The Kings media cabal never stops blathering on about what an "offensive genius" Rick Adelman is, but if that is so, why not stop the clock and set up a "genius" play? The Kings need to fire this man, the sooner the better.

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More positively, my team (Denver), Jesse's team (Dallas), and Dub's team (Chicago) all took great steps toward becoming viable Super Bowl contenders with big victories over the weekend. This sets up a huge Thanksgiving game with the Broncos playing in Dallas, but I feel confident that the Cowboys will wilt like hothouse flowers against the punishing Denver defense(another pick for Champ Bailey yesterday) and their unstoppable offensive attack. Conway's team (Cincy) lost to the unbeaten Colts, but they gained a lot of legitimacy by keeping it close all the way to the end. But does it make sense to anyone that the Colts-Bengals game was not shown in favor of the Buffalo-San Diego contest?

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OK, I should probably do some work, but I will be back later to talk about the first great movie of 2005, and to review Howard Hawks' "Man's Favorite Sport?", starring Rock Hudson.

"A Walk in the Clouds" (1995 - Director: Alfonso Arau)

What can you say about Keanu Reeves that hasn't been said already? He's a stiff, obviously, but there have been stiff actors in every generation who have managed to occasionally convey SOMETHING simmering below the surface besides more stiffness -- Gary Cooper and Richard Widmark come to mind. Mr. Reeves simply does not seem to understand the emotional nuances of us humans.

The robotic boredom of Keanu's acting is on full display in Alfonso Arau's bathed-in-syrup romantic froth "A Walk in the Clouds". The film is supposedly based on a 1945 Italian film that was co-written by Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter of "The Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D.", but I have strong doubts that the films are any more than tangentially related. The dialogue is filled with quasi-earnest howlers -- "She is the air that I breathe", etc. -- delivered with the fiery passion of a public address announcement.

Reeves plays a battle-scarred soldier returning home to California after the close of World War II -- he returns to the wife he barely had time to meet and marry before shipping out (she's played by Debra Messing of "Will and Grace", looking shockingly delicious), but they don't click. Reeves is distraught that she didn't read all of his letters from the front (there are literally hundreds of them), and so he bangs her and takes off. On his way to Sacramento, he gets sidetracked by a bus fight in which he protects the honor of a pregnant Mexican woman. He sympathizes with her plight -- she is unmarried and returning home to the family vineyard and an autocratic father who will surely disown her -- so he decides to play the part of her husband and then take off after one night.

Problemo -- we are forced to believe that Keanu's character would have the passion to write hundreds of love letters, the callousness to leave his wife after one night of love making, the courage and valor to defend a woman's honor, and the playful generosity to derail his post-war plans in order to make pretend with a strange woman and her family. But Reeves can't muster the facial muscles needed to convey qualities like passion, callousness, courage, and generosity -- it is quite simply out of his range. As the ruse deepens in scope and Reeves and the girl begin to fall in love for real, she repeatedly turns to him to communicate emotions and intentions through a look or an expression, and is repeatedly met with that same constipated stare. It is anybody's guess what he's attempting to convey.

The pregnant girl is played by Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, and she matches Reeves monotone for monotone. There must have been literally hundreds of drop-dead gorgeous Hispanic and Latina actresses available for the part, but the producers of "A Walk in the Clouds" seem to have gone out of their way to find the palest, plainest, most wooden one on the planet. Old pros Giancarlo Giannini and Anthony Quinn don't fare much better as the family patriarchs -- they are encouraged to overact greedily.

"A Walk in the Clouds" is shot with a lot of ambition -- the family vineyard is sumptuously beautiful, but to an almost cartoonish degree (the film was shot on various vineyards in Napa Valley, then augmented with garish computer effects). The skies are bathed in a golden glow, the fields are shrouded in a romantic mist, and the hills roll on into the heavens. If the movie had more balls, it could have been an overheated, Vincente Minnelli-esque old school romantic fantasy, but the dialogue, plot, and acting are all so flatfooted and dull, it's simply ridiculous. A scene of Reeves and Gianninni facing off in the forest is shot through with color until they resemble a pair of squabbling wood nymphs. And let's not get started on the scene where they combat late-night frost by donning butterfly wings and gently flapping heat on to the tender grapes. Or Reeves' nightmares of war, which make the soldier-sex fantasy sequences in "Eyes Wide Shut" look like masterpieces of surrealist cinema.

Movies like "A Walk in the Clouds" (or "Cinderella Man" and "The Majestic", for that matter) always get tagged as "old-fashioned", but I resent that label since it implies that old movies are all stupid and terrible and morally simplistic. Classic Hollywood films had brilliant writers, actors with personality to spare, and more harsh social critiques and moral complexities than most people realize -- this is just greeting-card sentiment with gooey nostalgia drizzled over it, shot by and starring hacks.

As Reeves and Gijon grow closer, her father becomes more and more suspicious and disapproving. Eventually, Reeves decides to do the "right thing" and return to his wife, who gives him an annulment. Gijon tells her father the truth, which crushes him. In a fit of drunken rage, he hurls a lantern at Reeves, which ignites the vines and burns down the entire farm. Reeves wins the family back over and saves the day after he pulls the one unscarred vine tree out of the ground by its roots (no, seriously). It's quite a sight to behold -- just pray that you never have to behold it.

Grade: D+.

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I'm still standing, motherfuckers! I'm still strong! So you know what that means...it's time to submit your suggestions for the next Dare Daniel! I will pick a winner by Monday evening, so you have the whole weekend to work on it. See you all next week!

My preternatural ability to predict the outcomes of professional football games has led many people to call me the poor man's Matthew McConaughey -- and since I have the led the office football pool wire to wire entering the twelth week of the season, I would say I have definitely wrested that title away from Josh Lucas.

Seeing as how People Magazine has selected Mr. McConaughey as their new Sexiest Man Alive, I believe that puts me in line for the title of Sexiest Poor Man Alive. I am the perfect second option for McConaughey's blonde, blue-eyed, drawling Texan, chiseled-ab version of "sexiness", subtracting only the blonde hair, blue eyes, Texas drawl, and chiseled anything.

I proudly accept the title on behalf of poor man's men the world over.

Am I the only person bothered by the souped-up, motorized wheelchairs that senior citizens are driving with increasing reckless abandon? It is a wonderful technology in the sense that it allows enfeebled people a measure of self-reliance, but some of these vehicles are so gigantic and so fast (at least as fast as a bicycle if not faster) that it is beginning to look dangerous. It has gotten to the point that we have essentially given octogenarians free rein to drive mini-cars on our city sidewalks.

I saw an incident this morning walking back to get coffee that perfectly captures this dichotomy between feel-good empowerment and frightening disregard for public safety. There was an extremely shrivelled old woman driving her cart down the sidewalk across from me...as she passed by a mother and her small child sitting on a stoop, she honked the horn playfully for the child, who seemed delighted. Less than half a black down, that same child got to hear the old woman literally screaming profanity at a car when she tried to hurl herself into the street at top speed. On my back to work, I passed this woman on the sidewalk, and she was barreling down on me like she was driving a 1968 Pontiac GTO in a demolition derby.

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OK, I stayed up late to watch "A Walk in the Clouds" last night (the things I do for you people), so I'll do a little bit of work and then write my review. In the meantime, here is another 5-star review from Netflix to keep you sated:

"A Walk in the Clouds is most beautiful movie, I ever saw. It touches the heart and mind. Keanu Reeves plays a young G.I. who meets a daughter of a wealthy vineyard played by Aitana Sanchez-Gijon. She is terrified of her father because of being pregnant and unmarried. The young G.I. posing as her husband for her family only a night. Something happens that could change everything."

How could a vineyard, even a wealthy one, produce human children, you ask? Tune in later for Dare Daniel and find out.

After some back-room wheel-greasing, Serbia-Montenegro has dropped the charges against Vlade Divac. Don't think we're not keeping an eye on you, though, Mr. Divac. You're in America now, buddy...even Elvis had to do his time, and you, sir, are no Elvis.

You didn't ask for it...you DEMANDED it! Little Richard has become such a ubiquitous figure at the tip-top of the Barnesyard Weekly Top 5 (over 400 weeks now!), that he has earned the right to a Top 5 list all his known. He is easily the most beloved figure in the history of Sacramento (and that's counting John Sutter, dude!), especially now that we know Vlade Divac is a no-good, draft-dodging coward (there, I said it). So without further ado, the greatest top list ever:

5) Little Richard Song of the Week -- "Lucille", co-written by ol' Dickie Penniman himself. The Georgia Peach wails over an airtight rhythm section, a blaring saxophone, and his own impassioned piano playing about a lover who runs off to get married but still owns his heart. The classic line: "I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight, I asked my friends about her but all their lips were tight." This 1950's anthem is so perfect that rock-and-roll could have called it quits right then and there and still validated itself as an art form (instead of droning on and on for the next five or six decades).

4) Little Richard Cover Medley of the Week -- Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band covering three Little Richard hits ("Long Tall Sally", "Keep A'Knockin'", and "Jenny Jenny Jenny") during their 1975 show at the HammerSmith Odeon in London. Fast and fun, innocent yet brazenly sexual, Bruce and the boys' versions capture the spiritual essence of early rock-and-roll, and do The Georgia Peach proud. You can check out the performances on a new live DVD attached to the 30th anniversary reissue of "Born to Run" (the discs are also separately available for rental on Netflix).

3) Little Richard Hate Crime of the Week -- Jesse's drunken, spiteful take on The Georgia Peach: "Little Richard was overrated even in the 1950's, much less today." Hard to believe this kind of infantile hate speech still exists in the year 2005, but that's Jesse for you. It's all out there on the public record now, Jesse, so unless you want angry, pitchfork-wielding mobs camped out on your lawn, I suggest issuing a formal retraction. My fellow freedom-loving Americans...this injustice will not stand! Please contact your local congressperson and demand that offical sanctions are brought against Jesse today!

2) Little Richard Nickname of the Week -- Richard Penniman was such a flamboyant personality, he couldn't help but acquire a stable full of brilliant nicknames. The Georgia Peach, Little Richard, Sacramento's Favorite Son. They're all great, but none of them is as qualitatively evocative as The Quasar of Rock. Rock and roll has produced plenty of memorable nicknames -- the Boss, the Queen of Soul, the Lizard King, etc. -- but when you're accurately named after a starlike extra-galactic body that is one of the most distant and brightest objects in the entire fucking universe, you know you're doing something right.

1) And the winner is...why, it's none other than The Georgia Peach, Little Richard, Sacramento's Favorite Son and The Quasar of Rock! You know, a lot of people, mostly terrorists, come up to me on the street and ask, "Why Little Richard? I just don't get it....why do Americans love Little Richard so fiercely? To answer that question, allow me to read for you a passage from the Buddy Holly biography by Ellis Amburn in which the author describes Little Richard's 1957 orgy with Buddy:

"According to Richard, Buddy appeared in his dressing room while 'I was jacking off,' said Little Richard, adding that a girl was 'sucking my titty.' Instead of leaving, Buddy stayed and quickly became aroused. After watching Richard and the girl for a few minutes, Buddy unzipped his pants. 'He was ready,' Richard remembered. 'She opened up her legs and he put it in her.' While Buddy and the girl had intercourse, she 'was sucking me,' Richard continued. Suddenly, with all of them at the height of passion, they heard Buddy's name announced from the stage. Had Buddy been less determined, the tryst would have turned into a case of coitus interruptus, but Buddy went for a spectacular finish and 'he made it, too,' Richard said. 'He came and he went!'"

He came and he went...THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS WHY AMERICANS LOVE LITTLE RICHARD SO DAMN FIERCELY!

There have been rumors that Peja is demanding a trade to the Chicago Bulls. This was started by an uncredited rumor printed in the Arlington Daily Herald.

Peja's agent denied the rumors. I'm all for trading Peja (and have been for the last two years), but unless we get Luol Deng or Ben Gordon from the Bulls, what is the point of adding more salary when Peja's contract expires at the end of the season anyway?

OK, I finally have a little time to write about the Spoon show. I always sound like an ass whenever I write about music, so I will keep my comments relatively brief.

As a live band, Spoon is all business and no bullshit. They came out on stage, picked up their instruments, and quite simply committed themselves to rocking the crowd's socks off for an hour and a half or so. They were probably 6-8 songs into the set before the lead singer even addressed the crowd. It wasn't that they were aloof or uncharming or that they weren't having fun...it's just that they had a job to do (i.e., fucking rock) and they were going to do it come hell or high water. There are quite a few Sacto bands that could take a lesson from Spoon, because every time I go to a show, it's yackety yak yak yak for half the set.

At this point, I would like to personally thank whoever's idea it was to literally hotbox the entire Warfield Theatre. There was some weed-smoking going on front row center that went way beyond the merely recreational...these guys were committed as fuck! It was just puffwhoosh! puffwhoosh! puffwhoosh! for what seemed like an hour straight, until the entire auditorium was sufficiently hazy. It really made the show just that little bit better...whoever you are, you're the fifth member of Spoon in my eyes. Of course, this occasionally made it difficult to lift my feet up off the ground, and I could barely remember any of the song titles after the show, but that's a small price to pay.

It was a great crowd on the whole -- not a single Ugg or boot-tucked jeans leg in sight.

If you've never heard Spoon's music, they're sort of a New York dance rock band crossed with classic British Invasion and psychedelic influences (Jesse could probably describe them more accurately than this) -- their songs are catchy as hell, alternately playful, spacey, and intense, and the lead singer has a wonderfully malleable voice on record that doesn't suffer a single bit live.

It is difficult to pull out highlights from the show, since it was essentially one sustained highlight, but I remember losing my mind during "My Mathematical Mind", "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine", and "Back to the Life". If you don't have 2002's "Kill the Moonlight", I would suggest picking it up.

The "It's the Bunk!" quote at the top of the page is taken from Preston Sturges' manically brilliant 1942 comedy "Christmas in July". Sturges made about half a dozen classic films in the span of a few years, but "Christmas in July" might just be my favorite. It's about a simple, pie-eyed office drone who enters the phrase quoted above in a hotly contested coffee slogan contest. A few of his co-workers trick him into thinking that he won the contest, and he gets caught up in a whirlwind of unexpected promotions, conspicuous consumption, and non-sequiter phrases repeated so often they achieve the level of a mantra or incantation. "Christmas in July" isn't as scathing or socially relevant as "Sullivan's Travels", "Hail the Conquering Hero", or "Miracle of Morgan's Creek", but it is probably Sturges' funniest pure comedy. Sadly, this film has not yet been released on DVD, so you will have to look for it on video or TCM.

But what about my readers? Have you seen anything in the past few weeks that has moved you? Go ahead and sing its praises.

Apparently, the story about Vlade being charged with draft evasion by the Serbian government was not b.s. enough to prevent the Sacramento Bee from printing it on the front page of the Sports section.

I will talk about last night's Spoon show after I do a little bit of work. Also, I am getting "A Walk in the Clouds" in the mail today, so hopefully there will be enough time to watch it tonight and review it tomorrow. And don't forget that tomorrow is Friday, which means a brand-new, very special episode of the Weekly Top 5 list. For the first time ever: the all Little Richard Top 5. You won't want to miss it.

Ex-King Vlade Divac is wanted by Serbia-Montenegro for evading the country's mandatory six-month military service. This is a huge story in that country since Vlade is one of their most popular celebrities -- his wedding was televised in Serbia and there was even brief speculation back in 2000 that he might attempt a presidential run after the ouster of Milosevic.

"Mysterious Skin" (2005 - Director: Gregg Araki)

Araki made his name through a series of bratty-raunchy comedies and road films about sexually avaricious youths that most people find unbearable (e.g., "The Doom Generation", "Nowhere", "Totally Fucked Up"). I enjoy audacious filmmaking in any form, so I appreciated him on a non-critical level, but it was obvious that his joke was running desperately thin. After a five-year hiatus, Araki has returned with "Mysterious Skin", a surprisinly layered and mature film about two small-town Kansans who were sexually molested as children and whose lives took two wildly differnt paths. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of "3rd Rock From the Sun" fame) plays Neil, a homosexual who becomes consumed by sexual activity, turning into a petty hustler with a hollow heart who looks back on his childhood relationship with his Marlboro Man-esque Little League coach with disturbing nostalgia. Even more disturbing is the character of Brian (played brilliantly by Brady Corbet), who blanked out the molestation incident and has become convinced that he was abducted by the aliens who haunt his dreams. His embellished memories of aliens are merely a coping mechanism for the asexual Brian, but as he begins to investigate the incident, he is led closer and closer to Neil, and to a truth more unsettling than any he could have ever imagined. Araki directs the film with a newfound emotional maturity, and the details that are teasingly left vague -- the role of Brian's absentee father in the molestation, or the truth behind another "abduction" victim played with possessed tenderness by Mary Lynn Rajskub -- add to the layers of buried memories and distorted personality that form the heart of "Mysterious Skin". Araki still can't help but include some truly terrible scenes, and occasionally the film is so pornographically gruesome I wasn't even sure what I was watching anymore. But on the whole, it's an emotionally scabrous and surprisingly poignant film about an extremely difficult subject.

Grade: B+.

NOTE: THIS FILM IS INTENSELY VIOLENT AND SEXUALLY NEAR-PORNOGRAPHIC, WITH GRAPHIC AND UNSETTLING DEPICTIONS OF RAPE, CHILD MOLESTATION, TORTURE, AND PROSTITUTION. IF THIS IS NOT YOUR BAG, DON'T WATCH IT AND THEN TELL ME LATER WHAT A SICK BASTARD I AM FOR RECOMMENDING IT TO YOU. IF YOU KNOW THAT THIS FILM IS NOT FOR YOU, JUST DON'T WATCH IT! NO ONE WILL THINK THE LESS OF YOU -- THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS THAT CERTAIN PEOPLE FIND UNWATCHABLY DISTURBING IN MOVIES...FOR ME, IT'S MATTHEW MODINE, BUT FOR SANE PEOPLE, IT MIGHT BE THE THINGS LISTED ABOVE. BEWARE.

"Zathura" (2005 - Director: Jon Favreau)

Don't let the trailers advertising this space adventure as "from the world of 'Jumanji' fool you -- "Zathura" contains neither unwatchable digital animal effects or Robin Williams (all of a sudden, you're intrigued). Like "Jumanji", it tells the story of a squabbling family that is forced to band together when they begin playing a board game that comes to life and consumes their world. Unlike "Jumanji", the film is entertaining and spry and elicits a palpable sense of wonder in its design. Once the two bickering brothers start playing the deceptively retro board game, their creaky old house is yanked into outer space, and they are forced to play the game to its conclusion, despite the threats of killer robots, meteor showers, and human-eating space lizards. The child actors are mostly irritating (although in a realistic way, not a movie-cute way), and the resolution is both obvious and pointless, but I have to admit that the film's breathless pace and keen sense of fantasy consumed my senses, even if it failed to capture my heart.

Grade: B-.

"Wake Up, Ron Burgundy!" (2005 - Director: Adam McKay)

This is one of the strangest movie ideas in recent memory -- the makers of the comedy near-classic "Anchorman" compiled unused footage from the original film (including an entirely separate story line involving SLA-esque bank robber/revolutionaries that apparently tested worse than the panda bear birth plot used in "Anchorman") and attempted to fashion it into entirely new story, a sort of quasi-sequel laced together with new narration. There are plenty of laughs, including a great bit where Brick (Steve Carell) eats a used coffee filter that he believes is "one of those new pitas with cinnamon and hot dogs", but there is also a bizarre disconnect with the narrative, since we're watching scenes from the original film with new dialogue and a different implied significance. The bank robber schtick (with Kevin Corrigan, Maya Rudolph, and Chuck D as the bumbling revolutionaries) isn't particularly funny, but it does lead to an amusing sequence in which Ron Burgundy and crew attempt to become in-your-face journalists by producing a news feature called "Blow the Lid Off It!" (Ron, after their target flees the scene and steals their news van: "Wow, we really blew the lid off of it!"). The finished product is only intermittently amusing, but it's fairly indispensable for "Anchorman" fanatics.

Grade: B-

I am seeing Spoon tonight in SF with Jesse, Brian, and the gang (this will give me a chance to thank Brian for selecting "A Walk in the Clouds" as the next Dare Daniel -- thank him with extreme prejudice!). Jesse claims that Spoon is one of the best live bands he has ever seen, so if the show fails to dazzle my senses, I've already got a fall guy lined up.
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I am falling behind in my movie reviews, so I will follow this post up with one of my famous Movie Roundups.

I had five quality entries for this week's Dare Daniel competition. Five is an oblong number for a coin flip tournament, so instead I wrote the movie titles down on scraps of paper and had Jesse pick the winner from my coffee cup. And the winner is...

Brian's cruel, cruel entry "A Walk in the Clouds", starring Keanu Reeves, Anthony Quinn, and Keanu Reeves' blank stare. This widely reviled 1995 romantic drama is going straight to the top of my Netflix queue, and I will have the review posted on the Barnesyard by Friday.

Here's a quote from a 5-star review of "A Walk in the Clouds" posted on Netflix.

"This is my favorite film! It is a poignant romance with beautiful visuals and a stellar cast. This film always leaves me with a wonderful feeling. This is the epitome of romance and a good reminder of what family is or should be about. Keanu Reeves managed to win me over with his ability to be completely different in his performance from the other actors, and make that work with the film in a way that suggests it was his intention."

Sold!

The Bruce Springsteen concert documentary at the Regal Natomas theater turned out brilliantly. The first part was a facile but well-made talking-head retrospective about the making of Bruce's seminal 1975 album "Born to Run". And by "seminal", of course, I mean that I pretty much cream my pants every time I hear the opening to "Backstreets". There is a lot of great footage of Bruce in the studio, working overtime to will the album into being a classic (he had already released two poor-selling albums, and viewed this as his last chance in the music business) -- the production of the title track alone took nearly a year, with sounds and instruments added on and stripped away until Bruce got exactly what he wanted. If you have never heard "Born to Run", you're probably a terrorist, so check it out and hear what freedom sounds like. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

The second half of the film was an edited live performance by Bruce and the E Street Band at the HammerSmith Odeon in London in 1975. With the Dolby theater sound system reverberating through the theater, it felt like we were in the middle of the concert hall -- the band was so tight, fast, loud, and energetic, I felt almost guilty sitting down with my legs crossed. Bruce's performances from this era are legendary, and it's easy to see why -- the band attempted to be the loudest, most tender, wildest, funniest, most serious, and most explosive band all at the same time, and pulled it off. Bruce prowled the stage in a stocking cap eleven sizes too big, Clarence Clemmons played Bruce's foil in a sharp all-white suit/hat combo, and Miami Steve looked very Miami Steve-ish with a wide-lapelled orange suit, fedora, and white carnation.

The highlight, of course, was the band's full-power medley of rock-and-roll/rhythm-and-blues classics, including several selections from the Little Richard catalog ("Good Golly Miss Molly", "Jenny Jenny Jenny", and "I Hear You Knocking"). It's been a long time coming, but Little Richard is finally starting to get his due -- leave it to me and Bruce to lead the charge (as usual!). This only cemented my belief that Bruce should run for President on the Democratic ticket in 2008. He has it all: looks, charm, brains, public respect, and to top it off, he is decidedly pro-Little Richard. If that doesn't capture the hearts and minds of the red states, nothing will. I also think he should make me his vice-Presidential running mate, or at least award me a cabinet position (Department of Little Richard Affairs?) for all my tireless efforts.

Major league baseball is finally attempting to add some teeth to its anti-steroid policies. Even more important in my eyes: they will finally be testing for amphetamines (although the penalties are significantly lower than for steroids).

Rampant amphetamine use has been baseball's dirty little secret for more than five decades -- it first came to light in the early 1970's with the publication of ex-pitcher Jim Bouton's expose "Ball Four", but nothing has ever been done to curtail its use. The recent amplification of penalties for steroid use was entirely hypocritical without a policy for punishing amphetamine use, especially since amphetamines are a genuine threat to the fabric of society.

I liked the book "Ball Four" and always respected Bouton for stepping on some toes (he was pretty much unofficially banned from baseball for embarrassing the game), but I lost all that respect last year when he appeared on an ESPN talk show and claimed that steroid users should be instantly banned from baseball. When the host mentioned the players' amphetamine use (including frequent abuser Mickey Mantle), Bouton moved into apologist mode for his generation, claiming that amphetamines aren't as bad because "players in those days just used amphetamines to counteract a hangover...it was a performance-enabling drug, not a performance-enhancing drug." So in other words: using steroids to augment your workout routine = disgraceful; taking speed to counteract the effects of last night's drinking binge: American hero.

This reminds me of a recent visit to the Crest, in which I shared the theater with the assemblage of an adjourned nurses' conference that had met in the building. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you suddenly realize you're the only person in the entire room who isn't cranked out on speed? Oh, that's right, you've all been to Sacramento, of course you have.

I am extending the deadline for Dare Daniel submissions until tomorrow (Tuesday) at 3:00 p.m. I will still be able to watch it and review it by the end of the week, don't you worry.

The Kings were fined $30,000 by the NBA for the pre-game video screen incident.

An article ripping on Sacramento for taunting the city of Detroit. Harsh stuff, although it is interesting to note that the man who claimed responsibility for the incident was not fired.

You might have to sign up for the website to read the article.

"Krippendorf's Tribe" (1998 - Director: Todd Holland)

Tim Conway's legendary Dorf character was a bumbling Germanic midget who waddled his way through a series of faux-sports instructional videos in the 1980's (e.g., Dorf On Golf, Dorf On Fishing, etc.). The heart of the bit was the understanding that there is nothing funnier than a guy who puts shoes on his knees and pretends to be a midget when he really isn't. The character of Krippendorf is a bumbling American anthropology professor (he's not quite a midget, although Richard Dreyfuss is at least a foot shorter than his comparatively Amazonian co-star Jenna Elfman) who starred in only one film, which posited the idea that nothing is funnier than a menstruating 12 year-old locked in a cage and willingly anointed with pig urine. "Krippendorf's Tribe" isn't quite the laugh riot that Dorf was, but the film is no less instructional. For example, we get...


KRIPPENDORF ON...CHILDREARING

As the film opens, Krippendorf's family is still reeling from the death of his wife. The household is a disaster, his daughter treats him with disdain, the older son is acting out, and the youngest son refuses to speak to him. I know, hilarious, right? It gets better. When Krippendorf learns that his university is ready to pull his grant money, he delivers an impromptu lecture in which he claims to have discovered a lost New Guinean tribe. Despite the fact that his children are present at the lecture, Krippendorf forgoes minor matters such as shame, shame, and shame and attempts to pass off his child's mangled plastic toy as a primitivist dildo. Naturally, the faculty is delighted with his findings (who wouldn't be?) and presses him for more info. on the tribe. His back up against the wall, Krippendorf decides to fake tribal footage by dressing up his own children, filming them, and splicing the footage in with previously shot film of actual natives.

KRIPPENDORF ON...CIRCUMCISION

Krippendorf's first order of business involves faking a circumcision ritual using his 4 year-old son as bait. The "comic" sequence is so prolonged and atonally disturbing that I wished I could go back in time to assassinate D.W. Griffith and make sure that narrative film could never happen. Unfortunately, time-travelling technology is still in its infancy, so I was stuck watching the rest of the movie. When Krippendorf shows his circumcision footage to the public, it causes a huge sensation that has network execs clamoring at his door for more footage. It makes sense, because we all know how popular penis mutilation is with the general public these days.

KRIPPENDORF ON...MENSTRUATION

As the deception deepens in scope, Krippendorf's children begin to reflect his corruption -- in the film's least family-friendly sequence, Krippendorf's middle child gives a show-and-tell presentation to his class in which he claims that his father's lost tribe performs a ritual in which they take a newly menstruating girl, lock her in a thatched hut, and anoint her with pig urine. For good measure, he has found a willing pre-teen classmate to participate in the exercise (she is unmistakably played by Mila Kunis from That 70's Show). The capper to the scene: a close-up shot of the pig's nether-regions, which cuts to a close-up of the 12 year-old girl opening her mouth wide for the quasi-baptism. You'd think that trapping a child and spraying her with pig piss would cause the school officials to call in Homeland Security (at the very least), but Krippendorf simply assures the principal that it won't happen again and that's all there is to it.

KRIPPENDORF ON...SELLING YOUR SEX TAPE

But that's not all there is to it. Krippendorf is squeezed by the imminent foreclosure of his house, so he agrees to sell sex footage of his phony tribe to a Discovery Channel-esque network. He doesn't have any sex footage, of course, so he gets Jenna Elfman (as a hero-worshipping young professor who promotes the tribe) drunk, dresses her up in native garb, films the two of them having sex, and airs the film on national television. This would be unassailable grounds for murder in the first, but Elfman is only mildly perturbed, and eventually helps Krippendorf further his deception by dressing up as the tribal chief at a gala dinner. At this point, the film took on the tone of a waking nightmare, culminating in a scene where Krippendorf (in full tribal regalia) humps Tom Poston's leg for no discernible reason.

KRIPPENDORF ON...HAPPY ENDINGS

Krippendorf is clearly one of the most hateful characters in modern film, but the film naturally lets him off the hook when the youngest son finally speaks up, imploring his father to continue the deception in one of those the-lie-makes-us-feel-better-about-the-truth speeches that have been so popular ever since "Life is Beautiful". Through a series of pained contrivances, the faculty decides to embrace Krippendorf and to write off his faked footage as a practical joke (no, seriously, they do).

"Kripendorf's Tribe" gets credit for being a rare family film that brazenly despises people of all races, creeds, and genders. The only thing that could have made it funnier would have been Krippendorf sticking moccasins on his knees and crawling around in his backyard, passing himself off as a lost midget tribal chief. I guess they're saving that one for the sequel.

Grade: D-

*******

Alright kids, it's time to start submitting suggestions for the next Dare Daniel...if I get a good one within the next day or so, I can stick it at the top of my Netflix queue and probably watch and review it by Friday. Two Dare Daniels in one week? Pinch yourself, you're not dreaming.

Up next: my review of "Mysterious Skin".

My regular readers may have noticed the scarcity of movie reviews this past week....the honest truth is that I finally said what-the-fuck and bought myself an XBox. So besides acquiring a dull, dairy-cow glazed stare where a glimmer of personality used to be, I also have allotted myself precious little time for intellectual pursuits like reading, writing, watching films, and brushing my teeth. But Darcey has promised to occasionally drag me out of my rut and culture me up, so it's all on her now.

We start tonight by heading out to the Regal Natomas Theater to watch a Bruce Springsteen concert film from the 1970's...the Regal occasionally shows concert documentaries on their big screens for slightly larger admission prices ($10 or $12.50 the day of), but they usually showcase shit music like Keith Urban or Bon Jovi. We saw a preview of the Bruce concert film last time we were at a Regal theater, and it appears to be a compilation of "Born to Run"-era live footage mixed with backstage interviews. I'll review it for you tomorrow morning.

In other music news, I am also going to San Francisco on Wednesday night to see Spoon at the Warfield with Jesse. It's only a rock concert, so how will Jesse possibly find a way to cheat me? It seems impossible, but he's a slippery Texas bastard, so I'll let you know on Thursday.

Additionally, I finally bought a Little Richard CD from the Beat this weekend. While I was making my purchase, I asked the girl at the counter if she noticed a gigantic upsurge in Little Richard's sales in recent weeks. She assured that she had, and that I deserved all the credit. I told her that it's a shame how underappreciated Little Richard was in his own home town before I rescued his legacy, and she agreed. The fact that this conversation never happened does not diminish its relevance one bit.

I felt personally ashamed when I realized that I had been stumping so hard for Little Richard and yet didn't own one single album or CD of his. But now I'm covered and can get back to the real issue: shaming all of you. SHAAAAAAMMMMMMMME!!!! Little Richard gave his blood and semen (mostly semen) for the cause of freedom, and this is how you repay him? Disgusting.

Incidentally, if you have never seen Little Richard performing the opening title song in the 1956 rock-and-roll comedy "The Girl Can't Help It", I suggest you try tracking it down. Frank Tashlin's film is an intermittently amusing 1950's pastel slapstick, but it achieves must-see status through the superhuman gifts of Jayne Mansfield in the title role, and the plentiful performances from a stable of early rock-n-roll greats such as Fats Domino, The Platters, and Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. Shockingly, this movie is not available on Netflix, but it plays occasionally on TCM, so keep an eye out if you're interested. If you have ever seen the Bertolucci film "The Dreamers", you may recognize "The Girl Can't Help It" as the film that Michael Pitt and Eva Green attend on a date in one rapturous scene.

Well, if you were wondering what the Kings would do during the opponents' introductions on Friday night to top their ghetto-on-fire routine in honor of the Detroit Pistons, the answer is: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The opponent introductions of the Denver Nuggets flew right by in about 5 seconds...they didn't even let the Denver players run out and slap each other five. Just throw the names up on the board and move along, nothing to see here.

Of course, the Maloofs never lay down when it comes to offensiveness, so the Sacramento Kings Dance Team, which has already been turned into a quasi-stripper act, were introduced thusly by the P.A. announcer: "To honor America, please welcome the Sacramento Kings Dance Team, with their salute to American Pie". Cue up a sped-up dance remix of Madonna's cover of Don McLean's "American Pie". Another victory for the terrorists.

The game against the Nuggets went a lot smoother than the Kings' previous efforts, but they handed back any momentum or growth that might have resulted from that victory with an effortless effort last night against the previously 0-5 Knicks. Is it just me, or does it seem as though the Kings are never quite prepared to play? It's like they rolled out of bed and into a layup line. Of course, Rick Adelman's feckless coaching performances play a huge role, but there seems to be a team-wide lack of accountability, from the very top on down. And perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but did Bonzi already look disgruntled that Adelman went with Jason Hart down the stretch instead of him? People have claimed that Bonzi blew up on his previous two teams ONLY because of the irregular playing time he received...even if that is true, my big fear about Bonzi is that this is more of a loaded threat: Play me or fuck you. Time will tell.

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It was a defensive week in the football pool...with a lot of clear favorites to choose from, there was only game with any disagreement, which I lost (special prosecutors are investigating this game to determine exactly how Jesse cheated). However, I'm sure Jesse will agree my lead is still more than safe.

**********

Up next: Dare Daniel - "Krippendorf's Tribe" and my review of Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin".

In the interests of filling more space, I thought I would publish the latest installment of Sacramento's local Netflix favorites -- these are films and TV shows that Netflix subscribers from the Sacramento area are renting significantly more often than the rest of the country. Still no Nick Ray, Yasujiro Ozu, Howard Hawks, or Otto Preminger films to be found, but there is one noteworthy new addition to the top 10 -- treasured Barnesyard punching bag "Finding Forrester". That film is best known not only for its immortal catchphrase, but also for destroying several decades of good will built up towards Sean Connery...no mean feat considering the man survived getting wrapped up in a diaper and knee-high boots in "Zardoz". Here is the rest of the list:

1. SpongeBob SquarePants: Halloween
2. Horatio Hornblower: The New Adventures (2-Disc Series)
3. Ballykissangel: Series 2 (2-Disc Series)
4. Iron Jawed Angels
5. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Girl in Gold Boots
6. Justice League Unlimited: Joining Forces
7. Love's Enduring Promise
8. A Life Less Ordinary
9. Deadwood: Season 1 (6-Disc Series)
10. Finding Forrester
11. A Walk in the Clouds
12. Mulan 2
13. The Towering Inferno
14. The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons (3-Disc Series)
15. Foxfire

It's been another relatively busy day, so instead of rushing out the Dare Daniel review, I will prolong the suspsense through the weekend and deliver it on Monday morning (I PROMISE). There, now you have a reason to wake up Monday morning.

In the interests of filling space, however, I thought I would make another Great Director Top 10 list. Since we have been talking about the Coen Brother's "Miller's Crossing", why not go ahead and rank every single Coen Bros. movie ever made (they've only made 11 films, although their latest, "Hail Caesar", is currently in pre-production)? My picks...

1) The Man Who Wasn't There
2) Fargo
3) Miller's Crossing
4) Raising Arizona
5) Barton Fink
6) Blood Simple
7) The Big Lebowski
8) The Ladykillers
9) Intolerable Cruelty
10) The Hudsucker Proxy
11) O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The top 6 are all bona fide classics (although my nostalgic affection for "Raising Arizona" bumps it up a couple notches more than it probably deserves), "Lebowski" is great fun, the next three are mediocre at best, and "O Brother" is still one of the most disspiriting cinematic experiences I've ever had (leavened only slightly by its brilliant soundtrack).

Anyone else got a take?

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I've got a busy weekend planned -- I'm going to the Kings game tonight, the Raiders game on Sunday, and hopefully a couple of movies squeezed in between. I'll tell you all about it on Monday morning. Have a great weekend and go see something good!

Conscientious Californians headed to the polls on Tuesday to vote with their hearts on a number of crucial issues, and the result was a sweeping validation of the policies of Little Richard. But was it enough to place him at the top of this week's Top 5 list? Let's find out...

5) Moral crusade of the week -- my quest to topple the Maloof empire by refusing to let go of this UNCONSCIONABLE incident involving the Arco Arena video board and the Detroit Pistons. I'm not usually the one to get his feathers ruffled by moral indignation, but what the hell, everyone's doing it. Besides, I'll do anything it takes to stick it to the Maloofs. Speaking of the Lebanese mafia, has anyone ever seen this show "Party at the Palms" on the E! Channel? It is a Jenny McCarthy-hosted frat-boy travelogue that centers around the Maloofs' palatial casino in Las Vegas. A few weeks back, several of the Kings cheerleaders were on the show, lounging around in a hot tub and instructing a dance team hopeful in the fine art of Kings-girl choreography (roughly translated: bend over, flip hair, kick, repeat). Now, I'm all for ogling the shapely female form, but it's kind of difficult to enjoy the show when you realize that all the women you're objectifying -- casino workers, cheerleaders, dancers, etc. -- have most likely given head to one of the Maloofs. That, my friends, is what is known in the industry as a boner-kill.

4) Song of the week -- "The Maker" by Willie Nelson. The Daniel Lanois-produced "Teatro" is the great, unrecognized cold-weather soundtracks of all-time, and this centerpiece performance of a soulful Lanois original layers the aching tremolo voices of Nelson and Emmylou Harris (Lord, if I ever have to argue my way into Heaven, I want Emmylou Harris there singing backup) over a beautiful, searching song of mortality and religious visions. Pop this one in next time it rains.

3) Fashion trend of the week -- I may be the least fashion-conscious man in town, so I wouldn't have the foggiest idea about good fashion trends. But I'll tell you what is NOT the fashion trend of the week -- those big, clunky, fur-lined shoes popular with girls that look like an 8 year-old's moon boots. What the fuck is that supposed to achieve? Another Barnesyard fashion don't: girls who tuck the legs of their jeans into their boots. I'm sorry, is this supposed to give me a boner? Well, let's check the evidence...nope, limp as a twelve-dollar bill.

2) Mea culpa of the week -- this honor goes to Mr. Buddy Holly, who went the classy route and took out a full-page ad in the Sacramento Bee to apologize for his offensive comments about Sacramento's favorite son, Little Richard, the Georgia Peach. The text of the ad: "Buddy Holly embraces his responsibility to represent the Sacramento region throughout the world. He made a mistake during his top 5 campaign that he takes very seriously. Buddy Holly sincerely apologizes. He has expressed his deepest apologies to the Little Richard organization, his fans, and the people of the great city of Sacramento. The truth is that Buddy Holly had group sex with Little Richard backstage at our concert in 1957, and it was a beautiful experience. He would do it again in a heartbeat, and sincerely apologizes for suggesting otherwise." That shows a lot of maturity on your part, Buddy Holly, but it's still not enough to dethrone the champ...

1) Why, it's none other than Sacrameto's favorite son, Little Richard, the Georgia Peach, making it an even 400 straight weeks at the top of our countdown. We had a huge ceremony planned for the occasion, with a gala catered dinner, celebrity guest speakers, and a parade down J Street, but we got word last night that Little Richard would not be able to attend, due to an extreme lack of interest on his part. Oh well, maybe hell come around in a hundred more weeks.

Thanks again to everyone who entered our little contest, and better luck next week!

********

Up next: The Dare Daniel review of "Krippendorf's Tribe", or as I like to call it, "More Offensive Than 'She Hate Me'".

"Miller's Crossing" (1990 - Director: Joel Coen)

I watched this film several times in my youth, but I don't think I fully appreciated it until I saw it last week. Some of my more astute readers may have noticed that this week's Barnesyard title (i.e., the description at the top of the screen, which I change every week) is a quote from "Miller's Crossing", which provides a cornucopia of quotable dialogue, much of it in a thorougly fictitious gangster-slang patois that gives the film the feeling of a mythical alternate universe, as though the Coens scraped the meat out of every gangster film and blended it into a stylish concoction that is uniquely their own.

The film is a series of double-crosses, triple-crosses, and quadruple-crosses, and theatrical violence for its own sake, with Gabriel Byrne (playing neither a priest nor the devil...who knew he had such range?) as a loyal second-in-command who betrays his gangland boss in order to save him. The film is rife with twists and ambiguities, both moral and sexual, the majority of which I will leave for the uninitiated to discover on their own.

Byrne's Tom Reagan is one of the most conflicted and conflicting anti-heroes in the history of film. He is constantly placed in a position of vulnerability, getting pummelled and losing his hat with striking regularity, but he is the one who always remains in control of the situation, pushing all the right buttons. The tantalizing mystery of "Miller's Crossing" is trying to figure out where Tom's coldhearted plan begins and where his actual vulnerability ends.

Much has been made of the homosexual characters in "Miller's Crossing"...this led to charges of homophobia against the Coens, but I feel that this is merely an extension of the quasi-sexual relationships that form the crux of so many film noirs and gangster pics. They are merely taking something that lurks below the surface in most films and placing it right up front. However, this is the first time I considered the likely possibility that Tom himself is a homosexual.

Oh, pardon me, did I just blow your freaking mind? We see Tom allow himself to beat up, nearly killed, and publicly disgraced in order to further his plan, so why wouldn't he conceal his homosexual desire for the Albert Finney big boss character and seduce Marcia Gay Harden's manipulative moll in order to discredit her? At the end of the film, Tom refuses an offer to return to Finney's gang, despite his titanic efforts to preserve his empire. I began to wonder if Tom simply could not bear to work alongside Finney's character if he could not have him for his own. Part of the thrill and intrigue of "Miller's Crossing" is that character motivations are left open-ended enough to allow for such conjecture and debate. A must-see.

Grade: A.

It's another busy day at the 'Net, so there isn't much time for blogging today. Michigan is going into a brief Thanksgiving recess, so their legislation is blowing up all over the place. Oh, Michigan...why can't you be more like your sweet little sister Vermont? She never gives me any trouble.

It has recently come to my attention that a lot more people read The Barnesyard than I had realized, so my onset of creative paralysis should strike with quick, viral debilitation any moment now. I usually get so nervous when people read my work that I'm surprised I can still remember snatches of the alphabet -- it goes a, b, 14, asterisk, right?

If people are actually reading my blog, does that mean I'll have to start fact-checking my information? Will I have to start including facts in the first place? Will I have to stop beginning sentences with "and" and "but"? Should I start looking up the words I use to make sure they're actual words? Terrifying thoughts, all.

Of course, my loyal readers know that this would contradict the famous Barnesyard promise -- to print rumors as truth, to never fact-check information, and to lie as often as I please. Never fear, loyal readers, I would never break that commitment to mediocrity.

Hopefully, I will have some time this afternoon to work on my "Krippendorf's Tribe" review -- I'll just tease you by mentioning that the film contains a scene where a menstruating 12 year-old girl is placed in a makeshift cage and opens her mouth wide to receive a blast of pig urine. There, you're officially intrigued. Don't worry, if it's not up by the end of the day, it will be up tomorrow morning, right along with the always mendacious weekly top five list.

The Maloofs took out a full-page ad in the Bee Sports section today to apologize for the pictures shown during the Detroit introductions on Tuesday (although the ad is completely vague and makes no mention of what happened). The text claims that they "made a mistake", although the incident was obviously preplanned with musical accompaniment. The article I linked yesterday mentioned that the Kings had plans to do a similar sort of montage for every team in the league, but I can only assume those plans have been tabled for now. But I'm going to the game tomorrow night, so I will let you know. They are playing the Denver Nuggets, so perhaps they could show some pictures of the Columbine massacre while the team is being introduced? You know, to be funny.

I would love to accept Heckasac's claim that I broke this story, but I finally looked at the Wednesday Bee sports section late yesterday evening, and they had a brief mention of it (albeit buried as a bullet point in the middle of page 5). But every great ideologue needs a moral crusade, so I'm happy to be the point man on this one.

Kings lost again last night, although it was hardly as ignoble as some of their earlier defeats. Drawing Denver on the second half of back-to-back games is always tough because the visiting team doesn't get time to acclimate themselves to the high altitude and generally run out of steam at the end.

Even worse, though, is that Peja's dirty little secret about taking naptime every single fourth quarter has been officially outed nationwide. That was all that Brent Musberger could talk about last night! But Peja showed him -- the "greatest shooter in the world" scored four points in the decisive final quarter, to bring his season total up to 7. No, not an average of 7 per game, but a GRAND TOTAL OF 7TH FOURTH QUARTER POINTS IN FIVE GAMES!!!! Rick Adelman's response: Hey, he's not Larry Bird, so let's not try to turn him into something he's not. In other words, he sucks, so why bother to try to stop him from sucking? I long for the day when both of these pathetic jokers are ridden out of Sacramento on a rail. With their 1-4 start and generally uninspired play, it may not be long in coming.

"5 X 2" (2005 - Director: Francois Ozon)

French filmmaker Francois Ozon has been building up to a classic for quite a while now. He started out making highly regarded short films, and with "Under the Sand", "8 Women", and "Swimming Pool", he has been building a repertoire of measured and cryptic modern noirs about the unspeakable emotions festering below the surface of placid human behavior. "5 X 2", a nonlinear portrait of marital decay and strange emotional reaction, may be his breakthrough film.

The film opens with the dry details of a divorce proceeding. The couple is nearly middle-aged and mostly nondescript, and as the lawyers rattle off the terms of their separation, we get hardly a glimpse of what tore them apart. As the film continues in backwards progression, moving from a socially awkward dinner party to the birth of their child to their wedding night to their first meeting, Ozon pulls back layers of this cinematic onion only to find deeper and darker layers of emotion and betrayal that would seem almost unthinkable at first glance.

"5 X 2" treats the concept of sexual interaction, marriage, and child-rearing as giant human puzzles, institutions entered into dutifully that can chew you up send you out the other side with wisdom, self-awareness, and an understanding of your partner that may make no sense whatsoever.

In every sequence, we see a fairly familiar event given new and oddly profound significance by the emotional illogic of the characters' reactions. In "5 X 2", there is no single "moment" where things go wrong, but there are a lot of opportunities for personal disaster that are indulged fully by the protagonists, with odd and compelling conclusions -- the couples finish divorce proceedings and immediately check into a hotel for a pre-planned erotic tryst; the husband tells an inappropriate story, with many potential half-truths, yet it is he and not his wife who is sullen and neglectful at the end of the sequence.

As the film winds back through time, Ozon keeps piling on the emotional ambiguities and inexplicably rotten behavior -- so why, during the final sequence when the couple (played with literal and figurative nakedness by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Stephane Freiss) meet and nearly miss each other at a Caribbean resort, did I find myself rooting for them to get together? Watching "5 X 2", you may find your reactions to it as bewildering as the reactions of the characters to each other's transgressions.

My reaction to "5 X 2": it's one of the best films of the year.

Grade: A-.

NOTE: "5 X 2" contains some graphic sexual content, including a very rough sex scene, so avoid it if that is not your cup of tea.

**********

I'll be back tomorrow with my Dare Daniel review of "Krippendorf's Tribe".

Just as I surmised, the Detroit Pistons noticed the images of Motor City urban decay that the Kings placed up on the giant video screen during their introduction, and were duly offended. Here is a link to one of many articles written on the subject. I like the line, "One can only imagine the sensitivity they'll show when the New Orleans Hornets come to town." The strange thing about the incident is that wasn't even an attempt to mock any of the Detroit players...it was just a snobbish attempt to mock their home city for its rampant poverty.

Pathetic.

If you are disgusted at this as I am, I suggest you follow my lead and place a call to Leland Patton, Director of Event Programming for Arco Arena, at 916-928-3615 to complain.

Well, all the counties have been counted and California voters have rejected every single proposition placed on the ballot in this special election. That was certainly worth several hundred million, wasn't it?

There's a political lesson to be learned here -- scapegoating illegal immigrants and trial lawyers works SOOOOO much better than scapegoating nurses, teachers, and state workers. Hopefully, we'll get our values back on track before the next pointless election.

NFL analyst John Clayton listed the Denver Broncos as one of the three teams with a realistic shot at signing Terrell Owens when he becomes a free agent (Minnesota and Atlanta were the other two). I have always loved T.O. (maybe because everyone else hates him so vehemently and irrationally), so naturally I would welcome him with open arms and be the first one in line to buy his new jersey. Mike Shanahan is an offensive genius who is always willing to take a risk, and in Denver he would have a healthy quarterback who could get him the ball, so I believe Owens would be the last piece to the championship puzzle for the Broncos.

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- there are literal drug dealers and addicts, rapists, and murderers playing in the NFL, and T.O. is the most despised man in sports because he's not a "team player". Let the rest of the world hate on him...he can come to Denver and win Super Bowls, I won't mind.

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Back to work...it has been a busy week at StateNet, and will only get busier when the states go back in session in early January. However, I am looking into purchasing a newer, more powerful computer so I can start blogging before and after work from home. I only have one state in session right now, but another girl in my section covers Louisiana, and they're meeting in special session right now -- the devastation caused by these hurricanes isn't going to just fix itself in a day, you know...it's going to take all damn week -- so I am helping her out with that.

In the meantime, you can always check out my old mentor Heckasac (or Pappy, as I like to call her) at www.heckasac.blogspot.com. She is always able to take time out from her brain studies to post interesting and educational material. How are those studies disproving marijuana's long-term effects on human memory going, Becks? Great? Or just good?

Well, the Kings game last night was a thorough embarrassment. About three minutes into the game, I figured out that the Pistons were looking to run the floor every time they got the ball. My brother figured it out, my parents figured it out, all 17,000 fans in Arco Arena figured it out...hell, I bet even Slamson figured it out. The only people who didn't figure it out were the Kings, and they got ran out of the building.

Once again, Bonzi and Shareef played like long-time Sacramento veterans, while Bibby and Peja acted like Rick Adelman had just handed them a playbook right before the game. Memo to Peja: You're 6-foot-10. You can stand on your fucking tippytoes and dunk a basketball. Failing to do this indicates a complete lack of effort and interest on your part. All we ask is that you pretend to try. It's not a tall order, but you are, so dunk the damn ball.

Of course, part of me actually wanted the Pistons to murder the Kings after seeing what the Arco Arena folks put up on the big screen during the Detroit introductions -- for some bewildering reason, shots of Detroit ghettoes and decaying inner-Motor City buildings were shown while the Pistons were being introduced. What is the point of that? Are we trying to stick it to the Pistons because many of their fans are mired in poverty? Utterly classless move by the organization.

I woke up this morning with one hell of a sore throat (felt like I had a tangerine lodged in my windpipe), so I probably won't get much blogging done tonight. I watched "Krippendorf's Tribe" with DP last night, and it is fucking amazing. Hopefully, that will get done later today.

Has anyone heard about this NFL cheerleader story that is blowing up all over the news wires? Apparently, a couple of Carolina Panthers cheerleaders were having sex with each other in a nightclub bathroom. The female patrons complained, and the cheerleaders were arrested. This story concerns me, because it means that my dreams are starting to leak out of my subconscious and are influencing the real world. Obviously, this is a mixed blessing, but it has gotten to the point that I except to see Warren Beatty every time I look in the mirror.

My good friends Cody and Allen recently watched John Ford's "The Searchers" for the first time. This John Wayne-starring western is my favorite film of all-time, an unbelievably entertaining blend of visual poetry, difficult and disturbing subject matter, and compelling anti-heroes, shot through with action, humor, colorful landscapes, and acute social commentary. Most people I know have not seen "The Searchers", so I was interested in getting Allen and Cody's respective critical takes on the film. They were both generous enough to accept my invitation....

*******

Cody's take:

When Mr. Barnes first asked me to review his favorite movie, I was both
honored and mortified. Honored that he would think such an unskilled novice of a
writer and movie goer as myself worthy of such a task. And scared shitless not
only because I know my review cannot stand up next to anyone's (save maybe a
certain fellow Scotsman...) but also because I felt that if I didn't think John
Ford's film was the masterpiece I've been expecting that I would no longer be
respected. Well, if there's one thing I'm good at it's making a fool of myself,
so here goes nothing.

The Searchers is John Ford's 1956 classic that tells a somewhat epic tale of Ethan Edwards, a Civil War vet who has come home, only to find himself (along
with his adopted nephew Martin) on a mission under the orders of the local
Preacher/Law Enforcer to recover a neighbor's stolen cattle. It turns out this
was a diversion created by a wandering tribe of Comanche Indians who are out to
murder or kidnap the families left defenseless at home. What follows is a search
for his two nieces that spans years. He is accompanied by Martin on his mission,
and though Martin is eager to do whatever it takes to find his sisters, Ethan shows
no tenderness towards the young man.

From the opening shot looking through a lone cabin's doorway out to the
beautiful Monument Valley, I knew everything I've heard about Ford's legendary
vast landscapes were true. Much of the movie is almost like watching a play
where the backdrop is just as wonderful to watch as the actors and the story.
Some of this may be attributed to to the cinematography of Winton C. Hoch, who
has worked with Ford on numerous occasions.

John Wayne was always great at playing the bad-ass with a heart of gold, but what I liked about this movie is after awhile his motivations become unclear and
you begin to wonder how golden his heart may be. There are numerous occasions
when his gruffness is obviosly uncalled for, and even I start to think he's more
of a jerk than a hero. There are a couple instances when it seems he is done
with Martin for good (and vice-versa), and in the next scene everything seems
swell between them without ever explaining the character's change of heart.

The storyline is mostly basic and predictable, but altogether entertaining. I feel the movie could have gone without the love story between Martin and Laurie, thrown in for about a third into the movie, a subject that brings the film down at numerous points, the worst of which is a comedic fight between Martin and Laurie's would-be husband that borders on slapstick. Though the scene is very funny it brings a bit of inconsistency to the film.

The Searchers is also a great example of Hollywood's negative portrayal of
American Indians, showing them at best as slack-jawed primitives and at worst as
blood-thirsty savages that kill for scalps and kidnap girls to raise as their
own kind, then marry. I can't blame Ford for this, I know this was just the was
things were back then, but it is a little embarrassing (as if Hollywood, or even
America didn't have enough to be embarrased about.)

All in all, my faults were few and forgivable, and The Searchers was highly entertaining and visually stunning film.

Grade: B.

*******

Allen's take:


The Searchers is Dan Barnes all-time favorite movie and, dammit, I can see why. The film is wildly entertaining and fun (which I'm sure is why Cody hates it), stacked with memorable performances, and leaves the viewer with something to gnaw on. Well, at least I thought so. But hey, I'm no Mike Dub and I'm no Dan Barnes, so I will exclude the technical mumbo-jumbo and film student jargon. My real point is that I'm also no Cody Scott, meaning I know how to have a good time, hence "sticking it to Cody" while drinking light-beer and watching John Wayne drawl and kick some ass. True, Cody's dad is a real rancher while my dad is a PE teacher who harbors Country Western fantasies, so he may trump me in that department, but I assure you, in every OTHER way, I'm am the reader's choice for the Barnesyard's favorite Scotsman.

The Seachers is about a bunch of dudes and gals who live in the state of mind known as "The Old West", where they ride horses, fight in Tex-Mex bars, sing coyote-love songs to woo wild haired prairie women, marry stray Indian Gals unexpectedly, shoot the hell out of each other for thieven' and cattle ranchin', and get raped and killed by unruly Injuns (Native Americans, apologies to Jay Baker). Think The Firefly movie without spaceships and lasers.

As the movie begins, Ethan (John Wayne) returns to his brother's ranch to raise hell, eyeball his bro's wife, upstage his bro as a masculine role-model, and to give us hints about his mysterious past as a Confederate Soldier/Scout/Lone Horseman of the West. This is exactly the type of movie character that Cody hates -- well rounded, terrifically acted, charming in his "I'm a bastard and I don't give a damn attitude" and looking gooooood in some high ridin' Southy Grey slacks. And, no, Cody, Ethan is not filmed without a gunbelt and a pistol.

Ethan, of course, hates Injuns, and even appears to hold a grudge against a handsome half-bread named Martin (Jeff "Heart-throb" Hunter) who hangs around the house as an adopted, well-meaning ranch hand. One of the great scenes in the film is when Martin is introduced, leaping off his horse with a shit-eating grin, enabling the audience to understand that he is Ethan's opposite: young, green, well meaning, and a slight dumbass. Of course, as the movie develops, so does the characters of Martin and Ethan, much to Cooter's detriment.

Well, the shit hits the fan in the old West as a bunch of the Boys go tearing out into the wilderness, chasing Injuns only to return home to find that Ethan's bro's ranch has been ransacked, the women raped and kidnapped, and their ponies defiled. The scene of the family locking up before the Indian attack is truly terrorizing, and levels the movie into a mood of realism, namely that the Old West was an F'd up place where ranchers/Indians/trades etc. lived in fear. Everybody was out to get everyone else and the small relations between Native Americans and White settlers were tempermental at best. Lawlessness is not for everyone, Cody, but it certainly is for Ethan, who decides to hunt down the Indians in revenge. Along for the ride are a couple of the young bucks, including Martin and some red-headed dude who is in love with one of the kidnapped women. The differences between Ethan and Martin become more explicit, as Ethan plans to kill all in his path (including the young girls -- since it is assumed that they have been raped and are ruined as women) and Martin only wants to save his sisters. The fact that they are not his blood-sisters contrasts Ethan and Martin's motives even more sharply. Heady stuff if you look for it, which I'm sure Cody didn't, because he was too busy patting himself on the back for being young, successful and capable of growing a sweet beard. Pay attention, Cooter! Class is in session.

The movie toggles between a mood of bloody realism (as mentioned somewhat inadequately above) and lighthearted cinematic ballyhoo. Five years pass as Martin and Ethan stumble around looking for the Shitbag Injun named "Scar" who possesses Debbie (Natalie Wood), the last of the kidnapped women (the other was raped an left dead in a canyon), and also what passes before us (watch that sentence structure, Maxwell) is a slew of comedic, heartbreaking, riveting, genius scenes which Cody probably slept through. I'm not sure whether the "director" of the film is responsible for where someone puts a camera, or for setting up a scene to perfection, or for being able to make an audience think twice about their favorite idealistic young greenhorn Martin, as he kicks his accidental Indian wife out of bed with unforseen violent fury (rewind, Cody!), but if he is, then this John Ford guy has a future ahead of him.

Of course, I'm not gonna ruin the movie, Baltake style, by giving away the end and busting your nuts -- thats Cody's job. I'm just gonna tell you that the fight scene between Martin and a well meaning guitfiddle player over the love of a woman, no doubt, is worth the price of the rental.

With that said, I give "The Searchers" a Big, Fat Freakin' A super plus.

Love, Allen "heckamax" Maxwell

PS Cody also hates Christmas Vacation. What's wrong with this guy?

Some of you may already know this, but there is another biopic being made about Truman Capote's experiences researching and writing "In Cold Blood". The film is called "Have You Heard?" and it is based on a book by George Plimpton with writer-director Douglas McGrath (who co-wrote "Bullets Over Broadway" and directed "Emma", "Company Man", and "Nicholas Nickleby") at the helm.

"Have You Heard?" -- which has also gone by the title "Every Word Is True" -- stars unknown British actor Toby Jones as Capote. Jones, whose most significant film performance to date has been voicing Dobby the House Elf in the second Harry Potter film, is joined by Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee and new James Bond Daniel Craig as Perry Miller.

"Capote" is generating a lot of Oscar buzz, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance is so lifelike, that most people will probably dismiss this film out of hand...poor Toby Jones has some huge shoes to fill. However, I felt that "Capote", while relatively well-made, never fully realized the potential of its story. The film was too modest and reserved, too reverent of its subject, too trapped in the conventions of movie biographies. The cast of "Have You Heard?" seems to pale in comparison to "Capote", but McGrath and his crew might have a smarter, wittier take on the same material. The film is due to be released sometime in 2006.

********

OK, back to work...but I'll be back tomorrow with the latest installment of Dare Daniel, as well as more film reviews and Kings talk. See you then.

Once again, I have fallen way behind in my reviews, so I will knock these out fairly quick.

"Jarhead" (2005 - Director: Sam Mendes)

Visually splendid story of war-obsessed Marine youths who serve in Iraq in the first Gulf War has plenty of remarkable setpieces, but little connecting it together. Sam Mendes indulges in too many quasi-music video sequences, but the film also captures the boredom, madness, and inertia of modern warfare, as the soldiers are primed for blood and glory and receive nothing but downtime in the desert and inhuman assignments shovelling excrement, playing football in gas masks, and guarding burning oil fields. Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard are decent, if barely developed, as the leads, seemingly decent soldiers with a taste for murder, but Jamie Foxx steals the film as their staff sergeant, a Marine lifer who initially seems a dutiful cliche but becomes more ambiguous and strangely soulful as the movie goes on. Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles pile on the ambiguities -- "Jarhead" is a war movie without battles (the protagonists never even fire their guns), and an apolitical political commentary. The film struggles toward the end, but the scenes in the eerily beautiful yet morally and physically toxic oil fields are visually surreal and nearly sublime, worthy of comparisons to "Apocalypse Now" (which the recruits watch to hype themselves for battle in one disturbing scene).

Grade: B+.

********

"The Night of the Iguana" (1965 - Director: John Huston)

Overheated and insane Tennessee Williams adaptation (is there any other kind?) casts Richard Burton is an alcoholic ex-priest reduced to guiding a tour bus full of uptight American tourists through Mexico. The opening scene of Burton chasing his parishioners out of his church is a doozy, but little of the rest of the film consistenly lives up to it. However, there is excellent supporting work from Ava Gardner, playing the crass owner of a beachside resort that Burton hides out in, and Sue Lyon as the oversexed teen who tries to seduce him (Deborah Kerr, as the free-spirit spinster who counsels him, doesn't fare as well). Huston directs with the appropriate feverishness, and includes a handful of shocking scenes and weird stylistic flourishes (including a pair of pleasure-bot "beach boys" who speak only through their maracas), but this one is probably for Tennessee Williams fans only.

Grade: B.

*******

Up next: My reviews of "Miller's Crossing" and Francois Ozon's "5X2", one of my new favorite films of 2005.

Grade: B+.

I have to leave work at a decent time today in order to make the Kings game tonight, so pardon me if this is a light posting day. Hopefully, the bench will have a breakthrough night in the home opener and the Kings can handle the Detroit Pistons. If the first few games of the season have proved anything, it's that there will not be a single easy road win the entire season, so establishing dominance at home is an absolute must if Sacramento wants to win their division.

In the meantime, Mssrs. Cody and Allen have finished their reviews of "The Searchers" (well, to be fair, Cody finished his last Thursday and Allen just sent me is...you'd crush your students for such flagrant tardiness, Heckamax, but I'll let you off with a warning), which I will post in a few minutes. They both did a great job, so be sure to check it out.

Congratulations to Huston Street for becoming the second consecutive Oakland Athletic to win the Rookie of the Year award. Oakland's nucleus of young, talented players should place them squarely in the middle of the championship hunt next season -- they just need to add one big, proven slugger (Adam Dunn, with his high on-base percentage, would be the ideal fit) to complete the puzzle.

In other news, Terrell Owens has been suspended by the Philadelphia Eagles and will not play for them again this season. I understand that T.O. probably crossed the line with his latest antics, but it is interesting that while actual rapists and murderers are playing the game, a mouthy black prima donna is the most hated man in sports. During yesterday's telecast, Randy Cross claimed that any general manager who would give T.O. a contract is a "disgrace" to the league. Meanwhile, Jamal Lewis, who actually served jail time for his role in a murder, is also playing for a contract this offseason and would presumably be less of a disgrace if signed. I hate to throw the "r" word around at the drop of a hat, but let's make a quick comparitive analogy. Three or four years ago, Chris Webber told the press that he might not want to return the team after his contract expired and it became a media maelstrom centered around demonic depictions of Webber that many Kings fans found unforgivable. Two years later, Peja flat-out demanded to be traded in the middle of his contract, and there was barely a ripple of public repercussion. Maybe it isn't racism, per se, but it seems that there is nothing more despised in the sports world than a man who is rich, black, and ungrateful.

********

Looks like I've got some work to do this afternoon, so I will save the rest of the reviews for later.

I watched a lot of movies this weekend, so I shall once again take a page from my great, bearded mentor Lenny "I gave 'Taxi Driver' two stars" Maltin with a series of capsule reviews.

**********

"Last Days" (2005 - Director: Gus Van Sant)

Van Sant furthers his anti-narrative studies of entropy and disaffection (is he doing penance for "Finding Forrester"? It's as though he feels no one will ever be "the man now, dog" again) with this portrait of a Cobain-esque rocker puttering purposelessly around his decrept Pacific Northwest mansion. Van Sant eschews sensation by never mentioning words like "Cobain", "Nirvana", or "heroin" (the character is called Blake), instead focusing on a man who has lost all connection to humanity and all interest in life. Michael Pitt plays the lead, shot mostly from behind, in long shot, or behind his scruffy blond hair (the only moment of emotional clarity comes right before his suicide). He gives a mesmerizing, pitch-perfect zombie performance, and it occurred to me that Pitt may be the Montgomery Clift of our generation -- a beautiful man who overcomes the delicacy of his features by the sincerity and commitment of his performances. As Blake shuffles aimlessly through the house and the surrounding woods, avoiding detectives and bandmembers and barely acknowledging the presence of a shambling group of fellow addicts who share the house, alternately protecting and exploiting him, we realize he has become so disconnected from identity and experience that suicide is inevitable. Scenes are played out and then replayed with slight differences...are we watching simultaneous action from multiple perspectives or are the characters caught in the same druggy loop as Blake? The film is willfully slow and inert and certainly not for everyone's taste, but I was generally fascinated by it.

Grade: B+.

Up next: Weekend Movie Roundup Part 2 - "Jarhead"

We have already made top ten lists for Hitchcock and Woody Allen, so I will continue the theme and give you all something to mull over while I work on my movie reviews. There are plenty of good candidates, but this week I will rank the works of a man who is as responsible as anyone for my passionate interest in film, Mr. Martin Scorsese. According to IMDB, Scorsese is in his usual prolonged post-production on "The Departed" (his remake of the Hong Kong cop thriller "Infernal Affairs" starring DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson) and is in pre-production on a collaborative documentary about the making of AirBus jets. My 10 favorite Scorsese films to date:

1) Taxi Driver
2) Goodfellas
3) The King of Comedy
4) Raging Bull
5) Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
6) Mean Streets
7) The Last Temptation of Christ
8) After Hours
9) Casino
10) The Aviator

Anyone else got a take?

Incidentally, Darcey took me to a restaurant in San Francisco called Foreign Cinema for my birthday that projects movies onto the wall in its courtyard. The film showing the night that we attended was "Infernal Affairs"...we were seated inside and facing away from the screen, but when we asked our waitress if we could move closer when the film started, she stated disdainfully, "No one really watches the film." This brought up a number of questions...among them: "Why even show the film?" and "Why name your restaurant Foreign Cinema?" and "Why post show times?" and plain old "WHY???" The restaurant had some great seafood and a copious oyster bar menu, but our minds were left as bewildered as our stomachs were satiated.

"Capote" (2005 - Director: Bennett Miller)

I'll say it straight off -- Philip Seymour Hoffman is currently the best actor working in film. He seems like a large man, loud and active and gregarious, but he can transform himself and assume a character as thoroughly as any performer since the heyday of Robert De Niro. He has gotten so good that I will watch him in any vehicle, no matter how mediocre, just to revel in the hypnotic purity of his performance. My favorite Hoffman performance is in "Owning Mahowny", where he assumed the zombie-nerd singularity of a gambling addict so transfixed on the next card that he willfully destroys his own life to see it turned over. It was a good film made sublime by Hoffman's performance.

His latest mediocrity is "Capote", Bennett Miller's perfunctory biopic about the legendary writer's experiences researching and writing his non-fiction classic "In Cold Blood". Despite his burly frame and thick voice, Hoffman turns in a brilliant, mimetic performance as the reedy-voiced, diminutive writer. The film is too reserved by half, never catching up to Hoffman's pace, but for most of the way this is a paltry matter.

When the film opens, Capote is a New York writer-celeb as renowned for his alcohol-soaked party anecdotes as he is for his writing. He reads a story in the New York Times about the unsolved slaying of a Kansas heartland family, and travels there with his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, good but underused) to do some research.

Arriving in town with his neat blond haircut bundled under a designer scarf and hunter's hat, Capote looks like Peter Billingsley in "A Christmas Story", and sticks out like a sore thumb. But he cajoles, charms, and bribes his way into people's homes in order to extract information, including the emotionally reticent police chief, well played as usual by Chris Cooper.

When the killers are caught, Capote becomes fascinated by the more sensitive and reserved of the pair, a John Garfield-esque soulful thug named Perry Miller. Capote appears to fall in love with Miller, and organizes legal representation for the pair that places him at a moral crossroads. Capote realizes that the book he is writing is destined to become a classic (a perception sealed by his enthusiastically received public reading), but despite identifying and empathizing with Miller, he acknowledges to himself that the book won't be completed until the legal process plays out (and perhaps understands that their deaths by hanging would make the best ending).

The film is too bloodless and drags unforgivably in the final third, as Capote waits out the trials and appeals, and watches Harper Lee's star surpass his own with the release of "To Kill a Mockingbird". Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman fall into the shorthand traps of the biopic genre, softening Capote's character and compressing time in ridiculous fashion. The film actually seems to suggest that Capote spent three years lying in bed depressed, and the implication of the ending is that Capote stopped writing and became an alcoholic because Perry's death tortured his soul. Maybe this is true, but it seems more likely (if less convenient) that Capote experienced the paralysis of all artists who create a masterwork and are unable to conceive of an acceptable follow-up.

Along the way, we get some dutiful and pointless party scenes of Capote holding court, and a bevy of underexplored supporting characters, including Capote's writer-lover. The film is well-shot and made with class, but it is Hoffman's performance that carries the material. See it for him.

Grade: B.

********

Up next: Capsule reviews of "Last Days", "Jarhead", "Miller's Crossing", and "Night of the Iguana".

Also, I'll be getting "Krippendorf's Tribe" in the mail tomorrow, so I will watch that after I get home from the Kings-Pistons game at Arco Arena and post my Dare Daniel review on Wednesday morning. It is a heartwarming family film that involves ritual circumcision, defrauding a university for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Jenna Elfman's tush, so it may just be the best Dare Daniel movie ever.

Additionally, Allen told me he will need until Wednesday to complete his review of "The Searchers", so look for his and Cody's first-look takes on my favorite movie later this week.

There's a lot of things to talk about from the weekend. I saw a lot of movies, watched a lot of sports, and punched a lot of bicyclists who were riding the wrong way on the sidewalk.

But congratulations are due to Jesse, who, no doubt shamed by my righteous accusations of impropriety, played it fair and square in the office football pool this weekend and placed a distant second (and I mean DISTANT!) to the Barnesyard. I went 12-1 yesterday, and after Indianapolis lays the hammer of God down on the New England Patriots tonight, my lead will be nearly insurmountable. Jesse, doesn't it feel better to lose honestly by a lot than to lose disreputably by a little?

Congratulations also to Conway, whose Bengals improved to an unbelievable 7-2 on the season. Could a division playoff matchup with my Denver Broncos loom in the future? Speaking of the Broncos, me and DP are going to see them play in Oakland against the Raiders next Sunday. I am too much of a pussy to get decked out in Broncos gear and cheer for them demonstrably (when I was 15 years old, I was safe from the Oakland maniacs, but I'm all growed up and fair game for pummeling now), but the Broncos will be up 28-0 by the end of the first quarter, so that should take the wind out of their sails.

In other sports new, the Kings played the game of the season last night beating the Suns in Phoenix. It wasn't a perfect game, and the bench still looks like a joke, but it was a lot of fun and any road win against a good team is welcome. A few observations:

1) Shareef Abdur-Rahim -- this is a guy you can build a team around. He takes it to the hole, gobbles up the boards, plays hard and smart, and finds open teammates. My new favorite King.

2) Bonzi Wells -- this guy has been amazing in his first few games, and if he keeps rebounding and scoring inside the paint like he has been, he will become an overnight fan favorite. The question about Bonzi has always been consistency, attitude, and effort, but he is off to a brilliant start.

3) Peja -- I don't want to come down too hard on Peja, since he did lead all scorers and his 3-point barrage in the third quarter turned the tide of the game, but it was also classic a Peja performance. 33 points in the game, 3 in the fourth quarter, none when it mattered. The man simply cannot deliver in the fourth quarter, which is why any team that throws a maximum contract at this guy is certifiably insane. He becomes a free agent in the offseason, and it seems the best course of action for now is to ride his shooting for the rest of the year, and then let him go without compensation to a desperate team like Atlanta, Charlotte, or Utah that will willingly overpay him. Why didn't we trade him 2 seasons ago, when every team in the league hadn't figured out what a joke he is? He does this disappearing act in every fourth quarter, and will continue to do so every single game this season, mark my words.

*****

Up next: Movie reviews galore -- "Capote", Gus Van Sant's "Last Days", "Miller's Crossing", "Jarhead", and John Huston's "The Night of the Iguana".

A barrage of work this morning and early afternoon has forced me to work through my lunch and break times, so I am taking off early. I will work on my "Capote" review at home, but if you need a shorthand review for the weekend, it can be summed up as, "Brilliant, mimetic performance; so-so vehicle." I am also still waiting on Allen's review of "The Searchers" (don't make me take points away from Gryffindor House, Mr. Maxwell), so that will be featured next week along with the usual football talk, Kings talk, and weekend movie roundup. Until then, go see something good!

Love, Daniel

I am getting killed at work today, so in lieu in posting, I am opening the floor to my readers. What movies have you seen lately? What moved you to tears and laughter or outrage and indignance? New or old or in between, I want to know what my readers have been watching.

What a huge week for the world! Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination, the European Union investigates CIA detainee prison abuses, the Scooter Libby indictments, anti-Bush protests at the Americas summit in Argentina! Compelling stuff, and yet they all failed to make the cut. They simply palied in comparison to these, the top 5 things that happened in the world this week:

5) Comeback of the week -- NBA fuckin' basketball! Yeah, the Kings look like they couldn't beat Tennessee Valley State University right now, much less the Lakers and Spurs, but it's good to have the professional roundball back in business. It's almost poetic how these things work -- the NBA season starts up just as the World Series ends and the NFL season reaches its midpoint. Like the saying goes, "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, and then the Lord goeth back to sleep in his celestial hammock and ignoreth the genuine troubles and wailing sorrows of billions." Big Guy, I owe you one.

4) Steak of the week -- the blackened Angus rib-eye at 33rd Street Bistro. Because if you know anything about The Barnesyard, you know that I like my beer cold, my steak bloody, and my smooth jazz FUCKING LOUD. Especially if that steak comes with gorgonzola cheese relish, savory whole potatoes, and steamed and seasoned spinach. My great test of the quality of a steak is whether or not you have to make an effort to cut through it...if you do, something's wrong. I could have cut through the steak at 33rd Bistro with my pinky finger if I felt like it. Great food, always inexpensive, and some banging smooth jazz...what more could you ask for?

3) Song of the week -- "Mainstreet" by Bob Seger. I listened to it yesterday, and the nostalgic tone and wistful lyrics about watching a club dancer and "her body softly swaying to that smoky beat" made me think about that scene in Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America" where De Niro sees the poster of a dancer in a train station and flashes back to watching his friend's sister dance through a peephole in the bathroom. This made me remember that I had just read that Tonino Delli Colli, Leone's long-time cinematographer, died a couple of months back. "Once Upon a Time in America" may be the most poetic and beautifully shot film in the history of movies, and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and "Once Upon a Time in the West" aren't far behind. Delli Colli also shot films for Fellini, Polanski, and Lina Wertmuller, and lensed most of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films, including the infamous "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom". He was a remarkable filmmaking talent.

2) Ugly trend of the week -- negative campaigning. No, I'm not referring to Schwarzenegger's ballot initiative fiasco (although Jill Stewart had a great piece in last week's News and Review that claimed Californians "appear to like" the proposals, even though they have been way behind in every credible public opinion poll from their initial conception to the present moment -- although they are all somehow succeeding wildly in polls conducted by the ultra-conservative Hoover Institute). I am referring instead to the scare tactics of one Mr. Buddy Holly, who has gone relentlessly negative in his smear campaign against Sacramento's favorite son, Little Richard, The Georgia Peach. I'm afraid that the city of Sacramento does not cotton to the antics of bigwig outsiders from Lubbock, Texas, Mr. Holly, and that's why the number one slot in this week's countdown goes to...

1) Why it's none other than Sacramento's favorite son, Little Richard, The Georgia Peach! 399 weeks in a row at the top, what a ride! Little Richard sealed the victory by securing the female vote, so I guess you could say..."the girls can't help it". Eh? Eh? Anyone? Oh well, come on up here and accept your award, Mr. Richard! No? Not moving? How about just a glance so I know you're listening? Mr...Mr. Richard? Annnnnnnnnnd he's out the door.

Well, join us again next week as Little Richard tries to make it an even 400 weeks at the top. Thanks again to everyone who entered our little contest and better luck next week!

*********

Up next: my review of "Capote".

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 - Director: Don Siegel)

I just looked up Kevin McCarthy, the star of Don Siegel's Cold War paranoid fantasia "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", on IMDB -- "Invasion" is McCarthy's most memorable role, but he is probably best known to our generation as the villain in "Innerspace". He also played Biff in the 1951 version of "Death of a Salesman", had parts in "The Misfits", "The Best Man", and "The Twilight Zone: The Movie", and apparently is still alive and making movies at 91 years of age!

In "Body Snatchers", McCarthy plays a divorced small-town doctor who returns to his sleepy California hamlet of Santa Rita to find the townspeople suffering from a seeming outbreak of mass hysteria -- people who believe that their loved ones have been replaced somehow. Same face, same voice, same memories...but somehow hollow and soulless. As the doctor digs deeper, he discovers that these aren't hallucinations or hysteria -- alien pods are growing throughout the town that flower and replicate their human hosts as they sleep.

"Body Snatchers" is the perfect Communist-era sci-fi film, as it creates tension through a noir-like use of shadows and close-ups (Siegel was one of the great film noir directors) rather than gross-out effects, and the enemy is emotionally distant, unseen and unknowable...indeed, the enemy is all around us, infiltrating society, law, and family.

As the film opens, McCarthy desperately tells his story from an insane asylum, manic and frustrated that his tale seems so unbelievable. As the story develops and McCarthy watches the human population of Santa Rita dwindle to nothing, realizing that there is no one left to trust, the film takes on the queasy illogic of a nightmare. The character's inability to sleep (his lover is usurped by the alien personality after dozing off for only a few moments) only adds to the paranoid haze.

Siegel constructs a number of chilling scenes -- an unformed pod coming to life on a pool table; McCarthy screaming bloody hell in the middle of a busy highway; McCarthy hearing music and hoping they might be saved (the aliens have no interest in culture or leisure, only proliferation) but finding a giant greenhouse full of pods instead.

However, the final scene is too abrupt and tacked-on, unworthy of a such a sly, smart film. Additionally, a few key scenes are slapdash and ill-formed, such as our first view of the pods. But "Invasion" is still a discomforting look at conformity and the unseen fear of the 1950's.

Grade: B+.

I will be back with my "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" review later this afternoon (I am also seeing "Capote" tonight, so look for that review tomorrow), but I just wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow is Top 5 countdown day at the Barnesyard.

I understand that Buddy Holly has been making the rounds of the local right-wing radio shows, trashing Little Richard at every opportunity in a brutal attempt to influence voters and take over the top spot in the countdown. Buddy has been calling Little Richard "an absentee rocker" and has been spreading nasty rumors that he isn't a bisexual after all. Holly even claims that Little Richard NEVER held backstage orgies at their concerts. Ugly stuff, this political game, when the mud starts flying. Of course, the more aloof and insultingly hermetic Little Richard gets, the more the populace loves him, so we'll have to see if this gamble pays off for Buddy.

Congratulations are due to Mike Dub, the winner of this week's Dare Daniel contest (as usual, I am the loser). He submitted the winning entry of Richard Dreyfuss as an anthropologist who creates a fictitious lost tribe using his family members in the 1998 release "Krippendorf's Tribe". I am forgoing the usual coin flip tournament on this one because several weeks ago I actually thought to myself that if someone picked "Krippendorf's Tribe" for Dare Daniel I would be forced to select it right off. It just looks too offensive to pass up. There is one other film out there that fits this criteria, but I can't tell you what it is...it could mean the end of Dare Daniel forever. My review of "Krippendorf's Tribe" will be featured in next Wednesday's edition of The Barnesyard.

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Up next: my review of Don Siegel's 1956 sci-fi noir chiller "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".

Rockets 98, Kings 89

Well, the boys in purple did not pull a repeat of Tuesday night and get embarrassed last night against the Rockets...they merely lost by a substantial margin. That's a huge step up for this team. Sure, they failed to score 90 points in consecutive games despite the fact that offensive firepower is supposed to be their nominal strength, but these problems will work themselves out. And remember...you can't spell 0 and 2 without 2 and 0. Think about it.

OK, enough with this ridiculous Grant-and-Jerry cheerleading...are these Sacramento Kings bums or what? You don't want to put too much emphasis on two individual games played by a developing team at the beginning of the season, but they are still sleepwalking through games like it is the preseason.

Once again, the bright spots were the new guys -- Bonzi Wells and Shareef Abdur-Rahim took the ball to the hole, pounded the boards, and looked to set up their teammates. But other than Brad Miller, the Sacramento mainstays looked like they had never played in this offense before. Meanwhile, the bench play is simply putrid, and Kevin Martin and Francisco Garcia look freshmen playing on the varsity team.

But the lion's share of the blame for this terrible start to the season should fall on Peja and Bibby, the team "leaders". Once again, they were simply not prepared to play basketball last night. The thing I've noticed about those two is that if their offensive game is suffering, their whole game suffers. If they aren't hitting their shots, they have to make up for it grabbing rebounds, playing gritty defense, driving the ball to the basket, and looking to set up their teammates. But Peja just disappears into the woodwork while Mike Bibby jacks it up every time he gets the ball and pouts when it doesn't go.

Last night provided a great example of this -- Brad Miller was murdering Houston in the first quarter, scoring whenever he wanted. But in the second half, he barely touched the ball. Bibby decided he needed to get his game going, so he stopped looking for his teammates. This is a fatal move for a point guard because it infects the whole team -- no one shares the ball and the offense becomes stagnant.

Entering the season, Bibby and Peja have been given every opportunity to snatch the reins of this team and assume a leadership role, despite the fact that they've never shown any capacity for it. But great leaders lead by example, and I have yet to see one positive example from either Peja or Bibby this season.

********

Speaking of Grant and Jerry, are these two taking their hometown rooting to new levels of ridiculousness or what? On Tuesday, they provided a litany of excuses for the Kings blowout loss to a terrible Hornets team -- their flight got in late, the Oklahoma City crowd willed the Hornets to victory, the Kings weren't familiar with the shooting background (yeah, that's why they lost by 26 points to a lottery team...the fucking shooting background!). They were in form again last night, claiming in the pregame show that the Kings "couldn't possibly" play poorly in back-to-back games. "They just have too much pride". They have also adopted the irritating habit of whining about every single call that goes against the Kings...hey, Jerry, that's my job! Jerry has also taken to flat-out lying on occasion...last night, when Grant questioned whether the Kings could succeed without ANY help from the bench, Jerry replied, "No team has ever won a championship with a deep bench, despite what you've heard." (So it doesn't matter that we'll have to play all our starters for 40 minutes a game just to have a chance at winning...we're still in the championship hunt!) That's a patently absurd statement...I can't think of a single team that has won an NBA championship without contributions from their bench. Rooting is one thing, but don't lie, Jerry.

"Malibu's Most Wanted" (2003 - Director: John Whitesell)

I have to give John Whitesell and Jamie Kennedy's "Malibu's Most Wanted" some credit -- as a feckless and ignoble Hollywood comedy about the clash between hip-hop culture and uptight white folks, it surpasses "Marci X" in every way, and breathes hot on the heels of Chris Rock's "Head of State". Congratulations, gentlemen, you are not the worst of your kind, but merely one of the worst.

WB star Jamie Kennedy has a unique comedy gift -- he can transform himself into any character type from any background and yet always manage to come across as boring and unfunny. He puts that talent to execrable use in "Malibu's Most Wanted", a mercilessly extended MadTV sketch about Bradley (hip-hop nom de guerre: B-Rad...disturbingly, this is one of the best jokes in the film), the rich son of a Republican gubernatorial candidate who embarrasses his father and derails his campaign with his relentless milk chicken antics.

The father's campaign manager hatches a scheme to hire black actors to portray gangbangers to kidnap the kid and take him to the ghetto in order to "scare the black out of him." This is clearly an offensive premise, but the film never has the courage to wallow in it. Instead, we just get Jamie Kennedy's endless privileged-white-kid-embracing-black-culture schtick.

For some reason, Kennedy takes the Adam Sandler route and tries to make his character a cuddly-lovable nitwit instead of a contemptible-spastic nitwit. One slight problem: Kennedy is neither cuddly nor lovable, and without the audience's contempt no one would even remember who he is. The gag at the center of "Malibu's Most Wanted" is that Kennedy's character is so genuinely immersed in black culture that he is no longer fronting -- like Eminem in "8 Mile", he is who he is.

The film's one true laugh occurs in the first five minutes (Ryan O'Neal, playing Kennedy's candidate father, dunks a basketball in a political commerical and hangs on the rim to for emphasis), so "Malibu's Most Wanted" quickly becomes an extended game of Who's Slumming the Hardest? (keep in mind that everyone involved in this ersatz contest is playing a secondary role to Jamie Kennedy, so they're all technically slumming).

It could be Ryan O'Neal, who used to act in Peter Bogdonavich and Stanley Kubrick films, but is now playing fifth fiddle to a WB outcast; or it could be his movie wife Bo Derek, who still looks hot in her late forties but has nothing to do but hang around proving it; or it could be Regina King, the beautiful actress who was in "Boyz N the Hood", "Friday", and "Ray", and certainly deserves better than this.

But my vote will go to Anthony Andersen (who once co-starred in a Frankie Muniz film, so is no stranger to slumming)and Taye Diggs as the actors hired to kidnap Kennedy. The big twist: they're both classically trained actors (and possibly gay lovers) who have trouble finding the character of a ghetto-raised gangbanger. Clearly the studio did some focus-group testing and found that if there's one thing funnier than white guy acting black, it's a black guy acting white.

"Malibu's Most Wanted" is the perfect Dare Daniel film in that it's a putrid and embarrassing spectacle, but it's also a difficult draw in that it's barely memorable or offensive enough to warrant your hatred. The only time the film slips over into the realm of jaw-dropping offensiveness is a scene where B-Rad takes the stage at a South Central hip-hop club and accidentally drops the n-bomb. Kennedy's relatively nonplussed reaction to this horrible transgression made me realize that our generation has no equivalent to Jerry Lewis, who could have sold the bit with his spastic paranoia. As is, you're only left musing on what a bizarre and uncomfortable shooting day it must have been for the hundreds of African-American extras who had to watch Jamie Kennedy shout out the n-word for twenty takes.

The silver lining to the debacle of "Malibu's Most Wanted" is that it probably killed Jamie Kennedy's moviestar career before it even got off the ground.

Grade: D-.

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Another Dare Daniel in the books, and so I recast my line into the blogosphere for the next challenger. Think you can take me down? If Jamie Kennedy and Cuba Gooding, Jr. couldn't do it, then who can? Submit your Dare Daniel suggestions now and I will choose a winner by the end of the week.

Michelle, we appear to be diametrically opposed to each other not only on the quality of "Melinda and Melinda", but on whether or not Woody Allen, who will turn 70 next month, should conquer his greatest fear and accept his mortality. But we are also both huge fans of his incomparable body of work...there is no other post-studio system American filmmaker who put out quality films on such a regular basis (one film a year for almost four decades, folks). So let me ask you: what are your top 10 Woody Allen films of all time? Here's my list:

1) Purple Rose of Cairo
2) Annie Hall
3) Crimes and Misdemeanors
4) Radio Days (also the best film to show someone who thinks they hate Woody Allen)
5) Hannah and Her Sisters
6) Manhattan
7) Bananas
8) Husbands and Wives
9) Bullets Over Broadway
10) Broadway Danny Rose

That's a tough cut to make, as I was forced to leave off "Deconstructing Harry", "Zelig", "Love and Death", "Sleeper", "Another Woman", "Sweet and Lowdown", "Interiors", and "Stardust Memories", all of them excellent pictures.

My good friends Heckamax and Cody recently borrowed and watched my favorite film of all-time, John Ford's "The Searchers", for the first time. I asked them both if they would be interested in doing a Dan-and-Dub style showdown where they would both review the movie, and they have graciously agreed. Hopefully, their reviews will be up by the end of the week. I don't know if you've ever seen two Scots get in an argument before, but it can get pretty heated -- the Scottish people have blood with pretty much everyone, including themselves.

I am interested in their reactions because "The Searchers" has been my favorite movie for many years, and most people I know have never seen it or even heard of it. At any rate, it should be a nice change of pace from mine and Dub's blathering. As I have stated many times, I would like for the Barnesyard to be a forum for everyone to talk to each other about movies, to share ideas and opinions without worrying that someone is going to bite their face off (Dub and Jesse excluded -- they're always fair game for face-biting).

Today looks like a slow day, so I will time this afternoon to write my Dare Daniel review of "Malibu's Most Wanted". Darcey is taking me out to dinner tonight at 33rd Street Bistro to celebrate my 1-year anniversary at the Net. 33rd St. Bistro is my favorite breakfast spot in the city, but I haven't been there for dinner yet, so I will let you know how it is. I love getting breakfast there because they have a fantastic selection of fish-related dishes, like scrambled eggs and crab meat, or trout hash. I have found that seafood is a superior breakfast meat to pork or beef, since it gives you energy rather than sapping it. Passionate rebuttal, anyone?

Now don't get me wrong...I looooove the smell of male ejaculate. It makes me feel manly as hell. But I don't need to get hit with a giant cumshot in the face every time I step outside the door. That's why I'm pleased to report that today is the first day in months that all of Midtown does not smell like a battalion of cave trolls strolled through the city jizzing on every street corner. This leads me to believe that Sacramento's infamous cum trees may finally be going out of season. Of course, it hasn't helped that StateNet is situated like a witches' cottage, smack dab in the middle of a veritable forest of cum trees...the parking lot smells like a 1975 Times Square grind house theatre. But today I walked outside for my morning coffee and all I could smell was air. It actually made me feel surprisingly nostalgic...is that a drop of semen on my face or am I starting to cry?

What say we reach our hands back into the maw of madness and obsession with another installment of Reverend Dan and Rabbi Dub's Duelling Reviews. This week we take on Samuel Fuller's 1957 western "Forty Guns", starring Barbara Stanwyck. I'll go first this time:


Sam Fuller only made a handful of westerns in his long career, and it's a damn shame -- the logistic and thematic possibilities of the genre give Fuller the perfect opportunity to indulge in his penchants for violent romanticism, romantic violence, and pure cinematic flights of fancy.

The story revolves around a trio of bounty-hunter brothers, led by Barry Sullivan as a surprisingly scrupulous, infamous gunman who has coasted a long time on his reputation. The second brother is the Marshall's second gun, covering him from the back, while the youngest itches to get into the fray, and is prevented from doing so by his brothers.

It turns out that the Marshall has inflated his reputation for a reason -- he has grown distasteful of killing, and the moral cloud that hangs over him. When he is forced to face down a violent drunkard, he does it without even firing his gun...the fear ofthe Marshall's retribution is enough to freeze the surly young man.

It turns out the young man is the beloved brother of self-appointed cattle baroness Barbara Stanwyck, who rules the territory with her forty sidemen. She has the governor and the town sheriff in her pocket, and frees her brother through a kangaroo trial. The Marshall follows her to the ranch to capture his quarry, and he and Stanwyck begin a tentative romance.

"Forty Guns" is full of Fuller's wild cinematic flourishes -- there is a scene of Sullivan and Stanwyck suddenly getting caught in a prarie tornado that is absolutely bonkers yet brilliantly executed. A point-of-view shot from the barrel of a gun brings to mind a certain James Bond opening image; a violent wedding-day murder is shot like a gangland slaying; and a marvellously contrived musical scene at the subsequent funeral is shocking in its emotional sincerity.

Fuller also builds one of the most thrilling sequences I've ever seen in a western --the Marshall walks into a trap set up by Stanwyck's assistant, a conniving tax collector who also holds a fatal torch for her, while the man hired to serve as bait can barely call out the Marshall's name before fainting from terror. As the Marshall takes the bait and steps into a sniper's line of fire, his younger brother creeps up behind and shoots the man in the head. The scene is constructed with fear and intrigue, but it is Sullivan's reaction that makes the scene sublime: "You killed," he says with grave disappointment, realizing that his brother is now forever tainted by blood.

"Forty Guns" isn't a perfect film -- Sullivan is serviceable in the lead, but not much more, while Stanwyck's character barely skirts the edges of camp. Marlene Dietrich would fare much better playing a similar character in Nick Ray's "Johnny Guitar" a few years earlier. Additionally, the ending feels tacked on, especially for a gutter poet like Sam Fuller.

As David Thomson wrote about Fuller: "From the Civil War to the Vietnam War, Fuller has dealt with every major phase of American experience and returned with the conclusion that the world is a madhouse where ferocity alone survives." This statement could be accurately applied to the majority of "Forty Guns", a western of definite ferocity and madness.

Grade: B+

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A perfectly argued and brilliantly reasoned review, I agree. Applause, applause, applause...and now for Dub's take:


Oh, what a movie this could have been, if it had been given to us in an intelligible, cohesive fashion, instead of providing us with little more than the unorganized scraps of a jigsaw puzzle put together hastily by a small child.

Samuel Fuller was never really one to concern himself too much with structure - aside from his most famous (and best) work “Pickup on South Street,” his movies seem to distance themselves from the standard form of plot - meaning, he directs a movie full of individual scenes and then fastens them together with an overall atmosphere that concentrates the film into a single, consistent unit. “The Big Red One” is a perfect example of how well Fuller can perform that task in that way. “Forty Guns” is an example of how easily it can all fall apart.

The movie follows three Earp-like brothers who arrive in a Tombstone-ish town in Arizona in the late 1800’s. The town is run by ranch baroness Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyk, in the only performance in the film) and her gang of forty ruffians. The brothers, headed by oldest brother and former US Marshal Griff Bondell (Barry Sullivan), are just passing through on their way west, until Drummond’s little brother (I think) kills an old marshal friend of Girff’s, and the other brothers are made aware of the evil doings of the wild, rampant townsfolk. Of course, in trying to bring law and order into the town, Griff falls in love with Drummond, and the second oldest brother takes on the job of local US Marshal (I guess) of the town.

The plot is not all that new, but that’s okay. It’s a western, and, like with most genre pictures, there is a forgivable redundancy that goes along with this movie. The plot is not the main problem. The problem is that, although Fuller wrote, directed, and produced the movie himself, it feels like it was made by four different people who each had a different idea of how the movie was going to be handled - like four separate people went out to direct a quarter of the movie each, without any communication among themselves. I wonder if the original intention of the movie was to be shown on television, with commercials, as that would account for some of the incompatibility of conjoined scenes.

The entire film is an erratic, jarring, disconnected mess that forms no rhythm, no consistency, refuses to establish characters, and shotguns plot points and conflicts all over the place without even any determination to want to deal with them. It’s like a story being told to you by a friend, where you already know everyone involved and all of their situations, and the guy telling the story is really bad at telling stories.

With all that, though, Fuller cannot avoid sneaking in some truly brilliant work. There are maybe six or seven scenes in the film that are absolutely amazing - despite the dreadful performances that are laced throughout the whole movie. In these scenes, we can see what Fuller was going for - a dark, moody, meditative western, balanced on the relationship between Griff and Drummond, complicated by their respective brothers’ pursuit of each other. The best of the scenes involve Fuller’s deliberate attempt to shock the audience with his gritty, cigar-chewing sensibilities of violence and death. One of the best moments involves one gunman who has just been shot and is about to die: he coughs and mumbles, and while he tries to speak, a large stream of saliva mixed with blood runs down his chin from his mouth. It’s disgusting and perfectly effective. The problem: I cannot tell you who that guy is or why he was where he was, though I think I know who shot him and why (kind of).

There is another great scene that finishes with a shot of a dead body hanging, swinging on a rope. There is dead silence, except for the sound of his boot heels clicking against the wall. Terrific, and again, wonderfully handled and very moving and powerful. The problem: from that, the film cuts (not even fades or dissolves, but cuts) to a shot of several men in several different baths, out back of the saloon, happy and smiling and cracking jokes, and, yes, even singing. We go from dead body on a rope to happy, smiling bathers. It kills any momentum that the film had built with the previous scene.

So, not an altogether awful movie, this “Forty Guns.” At times, we can even see how really great it could have been. As it stands though, there is not too much separating this Sam Fuller movie from a pretty standard episode of a western TV show of the time. Boy, I never thought I’d say that.

Final Grade: C-


More of Dub's patented gibberish, I agree. But what can you do? I will comment on this later this afternoon to point out all of Dub's errors and inconsistencies. Late as it is, there isn't time enough for them all.

After last night's debacle in Oklahoma City, the question is whether the Kings are really that bad or are the Hornets really that good? Let me put this way: the Hornets are NOT really that good.

In fact, they're terrible, and Sacramento's performance was absolutely inexcusable. Let's face it: Bibby, Peja, and Brad Miller were simply not prepared to play basketball. Since these guys are supposed to be the new team leaders, it is cause for alarm when they sleepwalk through the first game of the season against a vastly inferior team.

Additionally, the bench was completely flat and convoluted, and couldn't get anything done at either end. The depth of the bench is purportedly one of the Kings' strengths this season, so that is more cause for alarm. And the Hornets' utter lack of an interior presence outside of PJ Brown didn't prevent them from dominating the Kings on the board, which probably every team in the NBA believes they can do by now.

The really bad news is that the Kings play again tonight in Houston...the second game of back-to-back road games is always twice as hard, and tonight's opponent is about ten times as good as the Hornets. My big question mark coming into this season was the leadership vacuum, and how the Kings would handle adversity without their veteran leaders. Well, it looks like the test will come early, as the Kings will likely begin the season 0-2.

If anyone is looking for a review of a particular movie on The Barnesyard, you can just type the title into the search engine at the top of the screen and click "Search this blog". That way, you don't have to scan through a few months worth of posts to find the one that you want. I'm going to lunch now, but I'll be back this afternoon with mine and Dub's duelling review. Also, I am watching "Malibu's Most Wanted" tonight after basketball, so look for the next installment of Dare Daniel tomorrow.

"Pumpkinhead" (1989 - Director: Stan Winston)

Cheese-filled but surprisingly accomplished low-budget horror film about grieving single father Lance Henriksen, who calls upon a legendary demonic entity nicknamed Pumpkinhead to take revenge against the motorcycle-riding teens who killed his son. Director Winston is best known for his creature creations and makeup effects for films like "Jurassic Park", "The Thing", and the last 2 Terminator films, but his debut films employs classic, unseen monster scare tactics and an appropriately spooky backwoods locale (which morphs into a desert, a forest, or a swamp depending on the needs of the scene). The film is undoubtedly stupid, with eye-rolling music score punctuations and a creature who appears to be barely mobile, but it works for the most part, with a cool scene in a rotted-out church and a neat revelation at the end where Henriksen realizes that the head-chewing monstrosity in the room is himself. Worth a look for fans of the low-budget horror genre.

Grade: B-.

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"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974 - Director: Tobe Hooper)

With its relentless pursuit structure, industrial noise soundtrack, scarcity of closeups, and final scene of Leatherface merrily swinging his chainsaw about in the middle of a highway, Tobe Hooper's low-budget drive-in classic is one of the few films I've seen with the authentic dread of a nightmare. The story is familiar -- oversexed teens are slaughtered by a family of redneck killers -- but Hooper brings in elements of class-war satire, outsider artistry, and the prison of familial obligations, and the innovative camerawork remains impressive to this day. A classic of the genre.

Grade: A-.

OK, now I have to do some work.

It was a busy weekend and I am already a day behind, so once again I will take a page out of my bearded buddy Leonard Maltin's book with a series of capsule reviews.

"Melinda and Melinda" (2005 - Director: Woody Allen)

Woody Allen is perhaps my favorite filmmaker of all time, so it pains me to say this, but: STOP. Woody, please, just stop making movies. Or die, either one. Like Spielberg, the Coen Bros., and Spike Lee, Allen is a once-talented and perceptive filmmaker who seems intent on making movies that validate every negative argument ever made against him. His previous effort, "Anything Else", was an attempt to remake "Annie Hall" as unwatchable tripe, and now he is pilfering and defiling the comedy-drama structure and infidelity themes of "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors". "Melinda and Melinda" is a two-headed story about a neurotic woman who crashes a dinner party and affects the lives of her guests. The framework involves two writers telling her story two different ways, one as a comedy, one a drama. Slight problemo: Both stories are terribly written!! The drama is stillborn and false, and the comedy is embarrassing and unfunny, with Will Ferrell the latest talented actor to be trapped in the Woody Allen surrogate role. Perhaps the point of the film is that both the comedian and dramatist are inveterate hacks, but I have a feeling the only hack in the room this time around is Mr. Allen himself. The critically lauded "Match Point" is your final shot, Woody, so it damn well better be good.

Grade: D.

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"Party Girl" (1958 - Director: Nicholas Ray)

Lesser Nick Ray effort squanders colorful widescreen photography and promising story of reformed showgirl Cyd Charisse falling for crippled mob lawyer Robert Taylor, whose involvement with brutish ganglord Lee J. Cobb threatens both of their lives. Unlike the lightning intensity psychosexual intrigue of Ray's best pictures (e.g., "In a Lonely Place", "They Drive By Night", "The Lusty Men"), "Party Girl" is surprisingly enervated and perfunctory, coming to life only during Cobb's slovenly tirades and Charisse's slinky musical numbers. This film inspired the baseball bat scene in "The Untouchables", as a gangland stoolie is presented with an award at a banquet and is then bludgeoned with it (the weapon is a miniature metal pool cue here). Not a complete waste, but Charisse's legendary legs are the only element in "Party Girl" with any meat attached.

Grade: C+.

Up next: Weekend Movie Roundup, Part 2

Well, tonight is the beginning of the new NBA season. The Kings play against the New Orleans Hornets in their temporary home in Oklahoma City. For this occasion, I have asked Jesse to submit his playoff picks for the upcoming season. Naturally, he didn't take it very seriously and sent me more of a wishlist than an actual list of predictions. So for a counterpoint based in reality, I am posting my picks as well. Remember, the top 3 spots in each conference are reserved for the three division winners, regardless of record. So without further ado, our outlook for the next 8 months of professional basketball.

JESSE'S PICKS:

Western Conference

1) San Antonio Spurs
2) Sacramento Kings
3) Denver Nuggets
4) Houston Rockets
5) Dallas Mavericks
6) Phoenix Suns
7) Utah Jazz
8) Golden State Warriors

Eastern Conference

1) Miami Heat
2) Indiana Pacers
3) New Jersey Nets
4) Detroit Pistons
5) Cleveland Cavaliers
6) Philadelphia 76ers
7) Milwaukee Bucks
8) New York Knicks

Western Conference Finals: Spurs over Kings
Eastern Conference Finals: Heat over Pacers
NBA Finals: Spurs over Heat

Great job, Jesse...I'm just wondering, while you were at it, why you didn't have the Kings winning the championship, finding a cure for cancer, and colonizing the rings of Saturn. Of course, Jesse has also fallen into the trap of making "sexy" picks like Golden State, Milwaukee, and the Knicks while ignoring meat-and-potato squads like Seattle and Chicago. So let's all try to wash that bitter taste out of our mouths and take a look at the REAL story:

DAN'S PICKS:

Western Conference

1) San Antonio Spurs
2) Denver Nuggets
3) Sacramento Kings
4) Houston Rockets
5) Dallas Mavericks
6) Seattle Supersonics
7) Phoenix Suns
8) LA Clippers

Eastern Conference

1) Miami Heat
2) Detroit Pistons
3) New Jersey Nets
4) Indiana Pacers
5) Chicago Bulls
6) Cleveland Cavaliers
7) Philadelphia 76ers
8) Washington Wizards

Western Conference Finals: San Antonio over Denver
Eastern Conference Finals: Pistons over Heat
NBA Finals: Spurs over Pistons

*******

So there you have it...it should be an exciting NBA season with a very familiar result...despite all the postseason movement, the Spurs and Pistons are still the toughest, deepest, and most complete teams in the league. If anything, the moves they made in the offseason (Spurs grabbing Michael Finley and Nick Van Exel, the Pistons losing the Larry Brown distraction and acquiring Mo Evans) should make them even more formidable. Jesse's picks are decent, but as with the office football pool, his prognostication abilities remain a close second to the Barnesyard.

*******

Up next on The Barnesyard: the weekend movie roundup; also, Dan and Dub's Duelling Review on Sam Fuller's "Forty Guns". Our opinions are night and day on this one, so it should get interesting.