The Barnesyard

As you all know, I neither watch television news nor read the newspapers, so I feel sufficiently unpolluted by the mainstream media cabal's propaganda machine to inform my readers that The Terrorists have officially gotten too big for their britches. I'm sure you all know that Barnesyard staff member Little Richard is our resident expert on anti-terrorism, which is why I've decided to once again make this week's Top 5 into an all-Little Richard Top 5. Enjoy, unless you're a terrorist.

5) Little Richard Song of the Week: "The Girl Can't Help It", from the Frank Tashlin film of the same name starring pneumatic 1950's sex goddess Jayne Mansfield. In the film, Little Richard got to show off his acting chops by playing the part of Little Richard, and performing three songs in the bargain. The song is typical propulsive Little Richard brilliance -- pounding beat, wailing sax, and brazenly sexual lyrics:

"If she mesmerizes every mother's son/if she smiles, beefsteak becomes well-done/if she make grandpa feel like twenty-one/she can't help it, the girl can't help it"

4) Little Richard Comparison of the Week: we all know that Bruce Springsteen and Little Richard are linked not only in their musical genius but also in their groundbreaking willingness to espouse anti-terrorism ideologies in their songs (e.g., Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" and Little Richard's entire catalogue). But how are else are they similar? Let's ask Bill House, The Georgia Peach's former guitar player, quoted in Charles White's interview book "The Life and Times of Little Richard":

"[Little Richard] would just play you into the ground, and then he's do on for another half-hour. Amazing. He'd lose about six pounds a show, just sweating. He worked so hard. The only artist who comes anywhere near him for working and not being afraid to move is Springsteen."

Inspiring stuff, but House continues: "Little Richard worked much harder."

Mr. Springsteen, the gauntlet has been officially thrown down (20-some years ago, but still) -- are you going to let yourself get out-hustled by The Quasar of Rock? Do you even have a choice?

3) Today is Cesar Chavez Day, and unlike me, state workers get the day off. So what's the Little Richard connection? Not many people know this, but Chavez actually played horns on many of Richard's early tracks, and even helped write a few of the Georgia Peach's classic hits. In fact, he wrote an early version of "Tutti Frutti" called "Tutti No Fruit", and the song was originally intended as a scathing rebuke of the unfair labor practices of California's table grape growers. You don't believe me, look it up.

2) Little Richard Morning Ritual of the Week -- for more information on this one, let's go to Hosea Wilson, The Georgia Peach's former road manager, again from Charles White's "The Life and Times of Little Richard":

"I used to get the money and give it to Richard, but he wasn't very quick about paying the guys [in his band]. I remember going to him in New York and saying, 'Hey, the guys wanna be paid,' and Richard saying, 'I haven't had my morning jack yet! Don't tell me I gotta pay them before I have my morning jack.'"

Hey, there's a reason the man loooks so good at 73.

1) This seems like a pure formality, but we'll at least go through the motions of announcing the top seed. May I have the envelope please? Ladies and gentlemen, the #1 spot on the Barnesyard Top 5 countdown goes to...BUDDY HOLLY?! What the hell is going on here? Wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen, I'm getting a message from offstage (whisperwhisperwhisper)...ladies and gentlemen, I've just been informed by our accountants at Price Waterhouse, who are authorized to inform us immediately of any voting irregularities, that we have been handed the wrong envelope (Terrorists, I'm looking in your direction). May I please have the right envelope with the right name? Ladies and gentlemen, the actual winner of this week's Barnesyard Top 5 is...well, ready ready Teddy, it's Sacramento's Own The Georgia Peach, Little Richard, The Quasar of Rock! That's a little more like it, Price Waterhouse.

Hopefully, that will keep The Terrorists at bay, at least through the weekend. See you all next week!

You might recall that several weeks ago, I pointed out that leggings had become the new NBA fashion statement du jour. Well, in their infinite and unquestionable wisdom, the NBA front office has decided that the league will probably outlaw the use of leggings starting next season. Many NBA players have risked league-wide derision by sporting the full-length tights underneath their shorts (many claim it helps keep "limbs warmer and looser"), including Sacramento King Bonzi Wells, as well as former Kings Chris Webber, Jason Williams, and Gerald Wallace, not to mention superstars like Kobe, LeBron, and Iverson. From the article: "Sources say that the league simply does not like the look of players wearing visible hose." I don't often agree with the decisions of David Stern's NBA, but I congratulate them for taking a bold and decisive stand on this issue.

Sacramento's Own The Georgia Peach is back with another helping of his homespun, Garrison Keillor-esque anecdotes about life in the heartland during simpler, gentler times.

Today: Volume 3 - "The Bloom of Love"

"There was this lady by the name of Fanny. I used to drive her around so I could watch people having sex with her. She'd be in the back of the car, the lights on, her legs open, and no panties on. I'd take her around so that the fellers could have sex with her. She didn't do it for money. She did it because I wanted her to do it. She wasn't very old. I used to enjoy seeing that.

Well, I got put in jail for it."

...and that's One to Grow On, by Little Richard

Thank you, Richard, for delivering another message of hope and perseverance against impossible odds to inspire our nation's youth. By the way, Peach, Betty in Administration still needs to get that social security number from you in order to keep our books above the board. Also, I talked to Toby down in Accounting about your request, and due to tax purposes, we will be unable to pay you in "sequins and ass". We're just going to have to cut you a check, and then you can spend it however you see fit.

Thanks again, Quasar, and we'll see you again later today in your usual perch atop the Barnesyard Weekly Top 5...or will we?

Thanks to everyone for all the positive response to the WTFFUWT? column? It's always exciting when there's a new Barnesyard feature that I can run full-bore into the ground until it becomes revoltingly tiresome -- I estimate this one's good for at least a few weeks before it wears down to a nub. Remember to send all your WTFFUWT? queries to thebarnesyard76@aol.com -- I already got another good question from DMZ over at Sac Rag, which Andy, the boys, and I will try to answer in full sometime next week.

I feel that my review for "Why We Fight" was one of the more unsatisfying pieces I've done -- I'm very stupid about politics, so I always sound like a buffoon whenever I get on the subject (the real world: not my cup of tea). Laying aside the details of the film's geopolitical civics lesson, I don't feel that I conveyed the entertainment value of Jarecki's documentary. "Why We Fight" is an electric compilation of images and ideas -- it moves like a jackrabbit, it's far-reaching yet ultimately humane, and several times as rewarding a night at the movies as anything else out there right now.

It's certainly more entertaining than "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" (look for a full review tomorrow morning, although it can be summed up in a word: "WINTERBOTTOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!"), which I saw last night at the Tower. Incidentally, the Tower smells a lot less like mold since the last time I was there. Congratulations to Reading Cinemas! As President Bush would say, we've definitely turned a corner...unfortunately, right into a fetid and broken urinal.

I would also like to address some anonymous negative remarks left on the comments page yesterday. I don't want to give the impression that I am discouraging negative comments about the Barnesyard; in fact, I have solicited harsh criticism from the very beginning. However, if your criticism could be phrased in a language that is at least a close approximation of English, that would be most helpful. My fans know that I have also long been a proponent of childish name-calling -- some suggested epithets to hurl at the Barnesyard include: douche; fat douche; The Douche-yard; big, fat douche; Ty Doucheington; Baron Douchewell von Douchenstein; and Jon Favreau. All of those cut equally as deep.

Check back on Friday for film reviews, the latest installment of Little Richard's One to Grow On, and the Weekly Top 5.

Today's question comes from Sacramento's own The Armeniac. He writes:

"So Barnesyard, 'The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift' is coming out soon. If the new lead in this film is the poor man's Paul Walker, than who is Paul Walker the poor man of? What the fucking fuck's up with that?"

Great question, Armeniac. Yes, it's true -- "The Fast and the Furious" has spawned a second sequel, this time starring Lucas Black (who had small parts in "Jarhead", "Friday Night Lights", and "Cold Mountain") as the new poor man's Paul Walker, a clean-cut but edgy American who moves to Japan and gets caught up in Tokyo's underground world of drift racing, whatever the fucking fuck that is. What can you say about a film that both Paul Walker and Tyrese elected to pass on, except that it's guaranteed to be fucking brilliant and totally worth your $9.50.

But back to your question, Armeniac -- as you know, I am both the poor man's McConaughey (in my mind) and the poor man's Jon Favreau (in my cursed reality), and therefore I like to consider myself something of an expert on poor men's men. So I took the elevator up to the 7th floor of the Barnesyard Strategic Compound to run this one by Andy and the boys down in Research and Development. The boys were elated to finally have something to work on besides devising new and original ways for me to drop the "f-bomb" (they do a brilliant job, but my regular readers can attest that it gets old fast).

We kicked around a few ideas -- I think the most obvious answer is that Paul Walker is the poor man's Keanu Reeves. They have the same breathy, surfer-dude voice, the same penchant for blank stares, the same board-flat, emotionally untouched acting style. But their look is so much different -- Keanu has that zen-retard aura about him, while Walker just exudes bottle-blonde himbo.

While the Reeves-Walker connection seems the easiest fit, I always encourage out-of-the-box thinking from my boys in R&D, so we rejected it. At any rate, calling Paul Walker the poor man's Keanu Reeves is almost giving too much credit to Paul Walker.

In terms of appearance, Paul Walker is much more similar to James Van Der Beek from "Dawson's Creek" and "The Rules of Attraction" (#83 on the Barnesyard Top 102, by the way). They're both blonde, blandly handsome, and monotone, and Walker attains the poor man's status by lacking Van Der Beek's emotional glimmer. Still, it's an awkward fit.

We briefly considered Cole Hauser, who played the villain in "2 Fast 2 Furious", but decided that being the poor man's Cole Hauser was a fate that no man deserved, except perhaps Cole Hauser.

Other stalwart sandy-haired types were considered, like Ewan McGregor, McConaughey, and pre-"Brokeback Mountain" Heath Ledger, but their level of occasional competence didn't begin to suggest Paul Walker's robotic mannerisms. He's outclassed even by Ryan Phillipe. We wondered if Paul Walker might be his own poor man, but realized that was a distinction reserved only for the great ones, such as Pacino, De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Marlon Brando (the all-time master of being his own poor man). I believe that Alec Baldwin has also reached this immortal stature of late -- he seems to be committing an act of self-parody every time he appears onscreen.

It appeared that we had hit a dead end, but then Andy remembered that several years back, Paul Walker was one of the rumored finalists for the then-coveted role of Anakin Skywalker in the last two Star Wars prequels. Suddenly, the answer became crystal clear: at heart, Paul Walker is the poor man's Hayden Christiansen. When one considers the utterly unmenacing ennui that Christiansen brought to the role of Darth Vader, it's almost staggering to imagine how insanely terrible Walker would have been in the role. Andy pulled out his graphing calculator and compass, and quickly concluded that a Paul-Walker-as-Anakin-Skywalker scenario would yield a performance 3.1 times as bad as Christiansen's, a number previously considered unthinkable (experts in the field have frequently talked about the mythical "3" barrier). Needless to say, the boys got pretty excited when they heard the news; we celebrated our discovery all through the night, and the weed and mushrooms flowed like...well, like weed and mushrooms. Andy also calculated that Walker's climactic cry of "Nooooooooo!" in Episode 3 would have gone on for over five minutes, never rising above a whisper.

So congratulations to Paul Walker, officially the "Poor Man's Hayden Christiansen" (capital letters and quote marks make it official).

Thanks for the question, Armeniac! I urge my readers to please send all of your What the Fucking Fuck's Up With That? queries to thebarnesyard76@aol.com -- they can be about anything having to do with film, from the utterly cerebral to the utterly trivial and hopefully nothing in between.

"Why We Fight" (2006 - Dir.: Eugene Jarecki)
Dizzying and discomforting documentary that attempts to uncover the underlying principles of America's addiction to global military fanaticism over the past six decades, and why it's currently led us to Iraq. Jarecki begins his search with Dwight Eisenhower's 1960 farewell address to the nation, in which he warned about the growing influence of the "military-industrial complex", a confluence of defense contractors, politicians, and military force. It's interesting to hear such a grave message about creeping military influence from a Republican president and WWII general, but the situation has grown significantly larger and more complex since Ike's day -- the obsession with runaway defense spending and violent assertion of America's global dominance crosses all party lines and evades all methods of accountability (thanks to the influence of neo-con think tanks, a new wrinkle in Ike's triangle). Jarecki employs an incredibly wide range of interview subjects, including a number of prominent neo-cons, Iraqi citizens, politicians, peace activists, and even the two men who deployed the first explosives in the second Iraq War (surprise, they're fucking stoked). There's a slight preaching-to-the-choir political element in Jarecki's film, but he is also attempting to paint a portrait of American society that feels increasingly detached from the actions and decisions of their leaders. I think "Why We Fight" is supposed to be leaving the Crest on Thursday, so GO SEE IT NOW!
GRADE: A-

"Pride and Prejudice" (2005 - Dir.: Joe Wright)
Visually sumptuous and incredibly well-cast adaptation of Jane Austen's classic high school reading curriculum fodder satisfies on almost every level. Keira Knightley gives a bona fide star performance as Elizabeth, the second oldest of five unmarried daughters in King George's England. The girls will receive no inheritance when their aging father dies (it goes instead to a distant male cousin), so the typical romantic dealings and class struggles are given an unusual urgency. The girls' mother works herself into seizures of hysteria attempting to pair off her daughters, but headstrong Elizabeth turns down proposals from multiple suitors, although she can't seem to shake the glum and misunderstood Mr. Darcy from her mind. If you can't stand costume films, this one won't convert you, but it's extremely beautiful to look at, it's lithe and funny, and it delivers an emotional satisfaction that has been missing from most costume films of the past decade.
GRADE: B+ (only the obligatory yet always unwelcome appearance of Dame Judi Dench keeps this one from getting an A- -- you'll be shocked to learn that she plays an imperious old bitch)

"The Professional" (1994 - Dir.: Luc Besson)
Way better than I remembered. Besson is an accomplished but socially retarded hitman who shelters (and possibly seduces) a precocious 12 year-old whose family has been killed by a rabid corrupt cop (Gary Oldman, chewing so much scenery he steals even the scenes he isn't in). In her first major role, Natalie Portman arrives fully formed as a film actress -- this is still her best performance, alternating between emotionally sympathetic and unsettlingly sensual. Jean Reno does serviceable work as the hitman (who is more childlike than Portman's character), although he's given at least two cutesy tics too many (he drinks nothing but milk, loves Gene Kelly movies, and dotes on a houseplant -- but he kills people for a living, get it?), and the supporting cast is brilliant. But the real star is Besson, who, for the first and last time in his career, displays a Sergio Leone-like penchant for scuzball mythology. Besson views the New York setting from the perspective of an outsider, and "The Professional" blazes with dreamlike seediness and beautiful violence. I was also struck by how similar the plots of "The Professional" and "The Fifth Element" are: trained killers on the fringes of society jeopardize their anonymity by sheltering and falling for a much younger girl-waif who is on the run from the law and menaced by Gary Oldman. "The Professional" is sloppy and imperfect, but more bold and thrilling than I realized when I last saw it in 1994.
GRADE: B+

Incidentally, I thought that Besson had been MIA since his Joan of Arc debacle (although he's had several dozen writing and producing credits over the past five years), but apparently he released a French-language film last year called "Angel-A". He is also working on some sort of motion-capture fantasy film called "Arthur and the Minimoys", due out sometime this year. I tried unsuccessfully to upload some pictures of the Minimoys that I found on imdb...you'll just have to take my word that they look fucking terrible.

So Jesse, you and your terrorist pals still aren't convinced about the supremacy and originality of America's own The Georgia Peach, the world's first and greatest rock-and-roller? Well, maybe these actual testimonials culled from Charles White's 1984 interview book "The Life and Times of Little Richard" (available for perusal at the Barnesyard Library) will help you see the light.

"Your music has inspired me -- you are the greatest." -ELVIS PRESLEY

"The new record was Little Richard's 'Long Tall Sally'. When I heard it, it was so great I couldn't speak." -JOHN LENNON

"I entered the music business because of Little Richard -- he is my inspiration." -OTIS REDDING

"Little Richard is my idol." -JAMES BROWN

"I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice." -JIMI HENDRIX

"Little Richard is the beginning of rock-and-roll." -SMOKEY ROBINSON

"Little Richard was one of a kind, a showbiz genius. He influenced so many people in the business, I was afraid to follow him onstage." -BO DIDDLEY

"Jerry Lee Lewis and I both rate ourselves pretty wild performers, but neither of us could keep up the excitement that Little Richard generates." -GENE VINCENT

"I'd go see Little Richard anywhere." -JANIS JOPLIN

"You can't keep still when you hear the great Little Richard." -BUDDY HOLLY

"Little Richard, man, was the God." -MARTY BALIN

"When I saw Little Richard standing on top of the piano, all lights, sequins, and energy, I decided there and then that I was going to be a rock 'n' roll piano player." -ELTON JOHN

"It was impossible to follow him. Richard is an original, and the songs that he's written and the songs that he's done and made famous are just one of a kind." -PHIL EVERLY

"When I was in high school I wanted to be Little Richard." -PAUL SIMON

"The first 45 I ever played was by Little Richard; even today I constantly listen to Little Richard." -RY COODER

"Little Richard is probably the father of rock 'n' roll." -EDWIN STARR

"After hearing Little Richard on record I bought a saxophone and came into the music business. Little Richard was my inspiration." -DAVID BOWIE

"Little Richard is king." -MICK JAGGER

"The first song I ever sang in public was 'Long Tall Sally'. Richard is one of the greatest kings of rock 'n' roll." -PAUL McCARTNEY

And finally, Jesse, I give you the most damning testimony of all...

"Little Richard is a great originator. He was right there at the start." -CHUCK BERRY

See, I told you Chuck Berry was on our side!!! Do you still think these terrorist friends of yours are all so all-fired fantastic? Or are you finally willing to admit that Little Richard invented rock 'n' roll, influenced everyone who came after him, and held the most awesome orgies since Caligula?

“White Noise” (2005 - Dir.: Geoffrey Sax)
Risible and utterly predictable chiller stars Michael Keaton as a successful architect who starts contacting his recently deceased wife via Electronic Voice Phenomenon, a method of communicating with the dead through radio and TV static. The film attempts to validate the subject by opening and closing with a solemn list of statistics about EVP, but everything in between is pure by-the-numbers melarkey. Keaton begins to see visions of people who are about to die, as well as a ominous trinity of dark figures who may be plotting the deaths from beyond the grave. The slow-building scares will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror film in the last five or six years, but it’s no more or less ridiculous than anything in “The Ring”. It might have even been a passable bad film if not for the conclusion, where the film manages to confound and contradict even its own meager logic. A dud.
GRADE: C-

“Blame It On Rio” (1984 - Dir.: Stanley Donen)
Fans of the golden-age Hollywood musical may be shocked to discover that the director of such gilded, immaculate classics as “Singin’ in the Rain”, “On the Town”, and “Funny Face” would close out his career directing Michael Caine and a young Demi Moore in a 1980's horndog sex farce. But Donen’s influence can be found in the film’s wall-to-wall soundtrack music (all of it terrible, but still), its lithe pace, and the barrage of rhythmic one-liners delivered by Caine and the cast. In many ways, “Blame It On Rio” is like a musical without musical numbers. Caine and Joseph Bologna star as middle-aged fathers acting out their midlife crises in a constantly shirtless Brazil (the location photography and ubiquitous nudity are the film’s best assets). Abandoned by his wife, Caine finds himself seduced by Bologna’s daughter (Michelle Johnson, an atrocious actress with amazing breasts) and remonstrated by his own (Moore). Harmless as it is, the film is flat-out ridiculous, filled with grating straight-to-camera narration, and amusing only in a time-capsule sense. Watchable.
GRADE: C+

“Elektra” (2005 - Dir.: Rob Bowman)
Jennifer Garner reprises her role from the “Daredevil” film (I never saw it, but it stars Affleck, so it has to be worse than this) in this soft and squishy comic book film. As the film opens, Elektra is a legendary assassin with a remarkable talent for pointless flashbacks (four in the first fifteen minutes by my count). She is assigned to kill a father and his daughter, but has a change of heart and ends up protecting them from an evil crime organization called The Hand. Mostly, she just has flashbacks to her childhood and cries and poses in front of a forest lake. The most frustrating thing about “Elektra” is that any potentially interesting ideas are disposed of as soon as they’re introduced (e.g., the quartet of mutant assassins who track the trio down; or Elektra’s red leather bustier, which makes only a cameo appearance), while the most uninteresting aspects are dwelled upon endlessly (especially Elektra’s childhood and her moral conversion, which happens too early in the story). In one scene that is particularly indicative of the film’s general insipidness, the main bad guy passes up several opportunities to kill Elektra, instead choosing to terrorize her with flying sheets. “Elektra” is little more than an (always welcome) excuse to stare at Jennifer Garner, for which it deserves at least a little credit.
GRADE: C

Up next on The Barnesyard: The Good Movies I Saw This Week, including Eugene Jarecki’s “Why We Fight”.

No nibbles yet for my What the Fucking Fuck's Up With That? column. Andy and the boys down in R&D will be crestfallen if they don't get something to do down there soon. Please send your questions to my mailbox at thebarnesyard76@aol.com.

The Barnesyard is finally over his bout with food poisoning and back to work. I watched several films while I was sick, and several more over the weekend, and I'll review those later tonight. I've also decided that the next Dare Daniel will be "It Runs in the Family", starring three generation of Douglas chin dimples -- Kirk, Michael, and young Cameron. Here's the Netflix description:

"The Gromberg family is one of the most powerful families in New York City -- but hidden beneath a veneer of perfection is a wealth of dysfunction. Three generations of Douglas thespians star in this touching drama about the ties that bind. Mitchell Gromberg (Kirk Douglas) is dying; his son, Alex (Michael Douglas), has spent his life trying to be different from dad; and his grandson, Asher (Cameron Douglas) longs to discover himself."

Sounds fucking terrible, no?

But the exciting news is that I'm starting a new feature here on The Barnesyard, called "What the Fucking Fuck's Up With That?" The idea was inspired by Sacramento Bee writer Lisa Heyamoto's "What's Up With That" column, in which she answers such burning questions as "Do the city buses run on time?" and "How inane can a major metropolitan newspaper get without spontaneously opening up a black hole in the middle of town?" My column will utilize the scrupulous and well-staffed Barnesyard Research and Development Department to answer any of your questions regarding a particular film or filmmaker, as well as questions about film criticism, film history, film theory, behind-the-scenes gossip, or anything else involving movies and the people who make them. Please submit all of your "What the Fucking Fuck's Up With That?" questions to thebarnesyard76@aol.com (NOT to the comments page), and YOU might be featured on an upcoming edition of the Barnesyard! That'll fix your wagon.

As you may have seen on CNN or read in The New York Times, local blogging sensation The Barnesyard has been levelled by a particularly nasty case of food poisoning. I'm not exactly sure what set it off, and considering The Barnesyard's diet, the list of suspects would put Clue to shame. Rest assured that Reverend Little Richard asked his entire congregation to pray for me, then nailed them all in a giant bisexual, pan-theological orgy. I'm over the worst of it by now, but I still feel weak as a kitten. Of course, that means I never got to see "Tristam Shandy" or "Three Burials", so you're on your own as far as those films are concerned. I did watch "The 400 Blows" for the first time on Monday, and without going into details, it's a brilliant film that should be seen by everyone immediately. Hopefully, I'll be back in action by the end of the week.

Here's what I did with my weekend, in capsule-review form:

"Proof" (2005 - Dir.: John Madden)

Emotionally charged but slight family drama, based on an acclaimed stage play, features Gwyneth Paltrow as the possibly insane daughter of a definitely insane mathematician who appears to be falling apart in the wake of his death. Anthony Hopkins is the dead father, Hope Davis is her uptight sister (Davis is such a pill, her performance feels almost parodic), and Jake Gyllenhaal is the young math whiz who idolized the father and loves Paltrow. In his last years, Hopkins filled hundreds of notebooks with gibberish and scrawl, but Gyllenhaal also finds evidence that he cracked a seemingly unsolvable math theorem. Was the theorem cracked because of his insanity or in spite of it? Paltrow claims credit for the proof, but is she lying? Is she insane? Is she just trying to protect her home from being sold? "Proof" has a decent math mystery in the middle of its emotional struggle, and the performances are all solid -- I just couldn't find much in it to engage my attention. John Madden of "Shakespeare in Love" fame directs, and his style may be a touch too genteel for my tastes. Certainly not a bad movie, and some of you out there will probably love it.

GRADE: B-

"Where the Truth Lies" (2005 - Dir.: Atom Egoyan)

Hitchcock-inspired, flashback-laden murder-mystery stars Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a 1950's Martin and Lewis-esque nightclub duo with an unsolved homicide in their past. Alison Lohman, in the film's one inspired performance, plays a reporter who idolized the duo as a child, and attempts to crack the mystery in a seedily sterile 1970's Los Angeles. The twist to the film is that both Firth (as the Dino stand-in) and Bacon (as the Jerry Lewis type) were in the same room as the murdered girl when she was killed, yet each seem to believe the other one did it. Are they trying to protect each other or implicate each other? This is Egoyan's best film of the decade, and a true return to form in many respects. "Where the Truth Lies" is extremely reminiscent of his 1995 "Exotica", another sexually and symbolically charged murder-mystery about long-buried secrets, emotional manipulation, and the relationship between redemption and perversion. "Exotica" was a near-classic, but this one falls short. I think the problem is that Firth and Bacon are merely satisfactory in the leads -- I wonder if the need to secure name-actors for such risky and explicit material forced Egoyan to make some casting compromises. It's still worth a look.

GRADE: B.

"V For Vendetta" (2006 - Dir.: James McTeigue)

Provocative but uninteresting and halfway ridiculous comic book film about a revenge-bent terrorist superhero (there you again, Holly-weird!) fighting against a fascist government in a near-future London. England has survived the spread of an apocalyptic virus, and the corrupt totalitarian government has assumed total control of the populace. The super-terrorist, known only as "V", wears a Harlequin-esque Guy Fawlkes mask, along with a cape, Emo Philip's bangless black haircut, and a wide-brimmed hat. It's pretty much the worst costume ever. Perhaps the Guy Fawlkes connection has more resonance in England, but it did nothing for me. "V For Vendetta" makes some timely references to the war in Iraq, religious fundamentalism, prosecution of homosexuals, and the demise of civil liberties. If you agree with the movie's political slant, you'll probably feel a bit pressured to like it -- but you can be excused for dismissing a film so stilted and dull. In the end, there's no excuse for boring. Natalie Portman gives a decent but thankless performance as Evie, the orphaned daughter of political activists who becomes V's hostage and ultimate inspiration. As they fall in love, we're supposed to feel the tragic-romantic pull of "The Phantom of the Opera" or "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" -- but since, as I mentioned before, V looks like a clown wearing a Zorro costume, it's too risible to register emotionally. Most disappointing is the "controversial" terrorist-attack conclusion, which the plot renders utterly pointless. The script is by the Wachowski Brothers, and there have been whisperings that they shadow-directed the picture. However, I have to assume that if the Wachowskis directed, the picture would not look quite so terrible. There's no action, little style, and finally, no point. I admire the attempt to make a mass-appeal film that touches on difficult and controversial subjects, but this one just ain't good.

GRADE: C.

**********

I'm probably going to go see "Tristam Shandy" tonight at the Tower, and I might also try to squeeze in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" -- I'll let you know how they are tomorrow.

While we're on the subject of award-winners, the DANNIE-award winning blockbuster smash hit film "The Squid and the Whale" is being released tomorrow on DVD. Here are some quotes from the critics:

"Humorous and incisive!" --The Barnesyard

"The lone great film of 2005!" --The Barnesyard

"Recalls the best work of Woody Allen!" --The Barnesyard

"If you like movies with no discernible beginning, middle, or end, this is for you." --Some jerk on Netflix

"In my opinion this was a Terrible Movie. There was no Whale...and no Squid." --Netflix Jerk #2

"Explosive! --Mark S. Allen (actually, that was about "16 Blocks")

"Thumbs up!" --Roger Ebert (actually, that was about every movie made in the last seven years)

"Cutting and confident!" --The Barnesyard

"Award-worthy!" --The Barnesyard

With such a wide variety of critical notices, how can you not rent "The Squid and the Whale" on DVD?

"Dirty Love" (2005 - Dir.: Jenny McCarthy's now ex-husband)
2005 RAZZIE WINNER:
-WORST PICTURE
-WORST ACTRESS (JENNY McCARTHY)
-WORST SCREENPLAY (JENNY McCARTHY)

The Razzies, like the Oscars, get it wrong so often because they play it too safe. They select easy targets -- for example, Rob Schneider won the this year's Worst Actor Razzie for "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo". Now, I've never seen the Deuce Bigalow duology, and with God's mercy I never will. But that's just so fucking easy! There's so much pretentious, self-important, hero-worshipping bullshit out there -- if they really want it to stick it to Hollywood, why not give it to Russell Crowe's relentless posturing in "Cinderella Man" or Sean Penn's "I-Am-Sam"-ish FBI agent in "The Interpreter". Or how about a lifetime achievement award to Penn just for having made "I Am Sam"?

But much like the Oscars (who at least rewarded "It Happened One Night", "The Apartment", and "The Godfather" with Best Picture), the Razzies sometimes get it exactly right. This year, they gave the Worst Picture prize to Jenny McCarthy's egomaniacal joyride, the barely released "Dirty Love". As I scan down my list of 2005 films that I've seen, I'll be goddamned if I can't find a more excruciating, worthless pile of shit on there. "Melinda and Melinda" looks like fucking "Manhattan" by comparison.

McCarthy wrote the film and stars as a Rebecca, a photographer who repeatedly humiliates and debases herself in the wake of getting dumped by her model-boyfriend. The running gag is that the ex-boyfriend and his new girl always show up wherever Rebecca goes at exactly the wrong time and place, and she ends up looking desperate and foolish. Meanwhile, Rebecca's shy, nebbishy friend John (Eddie Kaye Thomas) nurses an unrequited crush for her.

"Dirty Love" goes so wrong in so many ways, it's almost astounding. It's insanely busy -- within the first two minutes, we've already been given McCarthy's pointless narration, several flashbacks, possibly a flash-forward, at least five scene changes, and Kathy Griffin as a psychic. This is a terrible idea for a romantic comedy -- actually, I think that was the film's original tagline.

To give you another idea of how wrong-headed this movie is, allow me to quote a speech that Thomas' character recites to McCarthy:

"I have known you for so long, and every single day you teach me how to be a better person. But for whatever reason, you will not let someone love you the way you deserve to be loved."

Pretty sweet, you gotta admit -- unfortunately, the speech comes about a half hour into "Dirty Love", when we've already been given an avalanche of evidence suggesting that Rebecca is an unquestionably loathsome, stupid, shallow, hateful, worthless person. "Teach me how to be a better person???!!!" -- if anything, she's provided the first powerful argument in favor of the reinstatement of public crucifixions for at least the last two millenia.

McCarthy's schtick has always been that she's a "hot" chick who self-debases herself and wallows in gross-out gags. I'm not a fan of the bit -- it's that kind of thinking that leads to "The Sweetest Thing" -- but at least McCarthy was sort of the vanguard.

When critics slam "Dirty Love", they focus single-mindedly on the grossout bits, as though the film is depurified by the mere presence (or omnipresence, in this case) of scatology. But the problem with "Dirty Love" is that the scatology is merely present -- there's not even a joke to it. When McCarthy gets her period in the middle of a supermarket, she ends up in the middle of a Tarantino-size pool of blood. When she tries to escape into the bathroom, some farting sounds come from inside. It's all so obvious and easy.

Only one of the grossout scenes truly comes out of left field. Rebecca picks up a stranger in a cafe, and they head to his house. He gives her some drugs, leaves the room, and goes to the refrigerator. Feeling horny, she wanders into the bedroom, where she finds the man on all fours with a fish stuck halfway up his rectum, screaming, "Touch my bass!". You really don't see it coming. As I said before, I can't recall another scene of anal-fish penetration in the history of the cinema (although I understand many of D.W. Griffith's early films are lost forever, so who knows), which means we can chalk another point up for the good ol' USA. This really makes up for that World Baseball Classic bullshit. The capper to the scene is that Rebecca, instead of fleeing the scene, apparently engages in some sort of fish-related sexual congress, as she is seen later with fish marks on her back. Like many of the gags in "Dirty Love", it's gross but not funny, and mostly just confusing and sad.

Smack dab in the middle of this debacle is McCarthy -- she's a relentless camera mugger, which plays on MTV but comes off quite poorly in a narrative film. D.O.A. lines like "Brad Pitt's throbbing cock couldn't help me now!" are punctuated by dramatic camera swoops, as though they were cymbal crashes. Most scenes devolve into McCarthy throwing a hysterical fit. As Rebecca's body-waxer best friend, Carmen Electra wears several different hairstyles and speaks in a fake hip-hop patois -- considering the competition, I'm going to go ahead and count that as an acting performance. No one else in "Dirty Love" gets off so easily.

How bad is "Dirty Love"? Towards the end, the band Sum 41 shows up at a nightclub to play a song, and it's the unquestionable highlight of the film. I swear to God, it felt like Tylenol kicking in. But then McCarthy had to spoil everything by inexplicably jumping up on stage, yelping and kicking her legs, and humping the bandmembers. It really ruined the song.

GRADE: D-

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With that ugliness out of the way, I'm officially opening up the floor for Dare Daniel suggestions. Do your worst.

NEXT: The Barnesyard's Weekend Movie roundup, with reviews of Gwyneth Paltrow in "Proof", Atom Egoyan's "Where the Truth Lies", and Natalie Portman in the pro-terrorist (and thus anti-Little Richard) film "V for Vendetta".

Well, it doesn't look like there will be any Dare Daniel this week...it's all due to my crazy belief that watching movies and playing Grand Theft Auto is more fun than writing. Do I dare tease out my "Dirty Love" review for another whole week? You bet I do! Look for it Monday on the Barnesyard.

Also, there won't be an official new Top 5 this week, although the votes have been tabulated and Little Richard came out on top once again. Bruce Springsteen placed second, Buddy Holly third...in last place, for the 11,322nd week in a row -- terrorists. However, "terrorists" did once again win our alternate Barnesyard top 5 poll: Top 5 things most in need of a boot up their ass. Terrorists, please come down to the Barnesyard offices to accept your prize.

Another reason that I didn't have more time for writing this week is that I was watching and reviewing Jane Anderson's "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio", starring Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson. However, this review won't be printed on the Barnesyard, as it is the exclusive intellectual property of the Sacramento News and Review, and will be printed in an upcoming issue. Now, if a 135-word review doesn't slake your thirst, and you want the News and Review to feature the ol' Barnesyard more prominently and frequently (and for Chrissakes, why wouldn't you?), here's what you do:

Make a systematic list of the companies and products that advertise in the Sacramento News and Review. Then you'll have to go out and patronize these businesses and purchase these products (a small sacrifice). Additionally, just to drive the point home, you should all write long letters to these advertisers demanding that the News and Review turn over editorial control of the paper to me and Little Richard -- a local media arm will be a powerful propaganda tool, allowing us to amass power and eventually seize control of the city. Conversely, you should also mention in your letters that failure to meet our demands will result in mass boycotts, riots, and public burnings of the advertisers' products. Now if they call our bluff, you'll have to actually go out and commit these atrocities, just to show that we mean business. That will mean jail time for most of you, and perhaps even death for a few. But in the end, you'll be the greatest heroes of all, next to me and Little Richard (and maybe Buddy Holly). Sound like a plan? Great. Also, don't tell anyone that I told you to do it. OK, it's a deal.

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Me and Dub decided that our next Duelling Review will be on John Frankenheimer's "Seconds", starring Rock Hudson. Look for that around the end of next week.

Also, you should spend the weekend pondering Dare Daniel suggestions, because I will be asking for submissions on Monday morning.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

We're back with another edition of Dan and Dub's Duelling Review, where the two of the biggest film snobs I've ever met debate the relative merits of world cinema, and answer the question...do we really need the world? This week, we'll be reviewing Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak's "Infernal Affairs", a 2002 Hong Kong cop film currently being remade by Martin Scorsese as "The Departed". Dub, make like Antonio Banderas and take the lead...

DUB'S REVIEW

The opening sequence of “Infernal Affairs” is bursting with so much energy that I was worried the entire film was going to burn out before it even got to its title. The sequence is only about five or six minutes long, but writer/director team Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak are able to effectively fill in ten years’ worth of history of the two main characters, and they do it with a style and fervor that falls just short of MTV vapidity. Fortunately, the pace slows down after the prologue, though there are still a lot of scenes that move fast enough to lose your breath.

The movie concerns two men, Chan Wing Yan (Tony Leung) and Lau Kin Ming (Andy Lau). Chan is an undercover cop; he has worked his way up the chain of a mafia gang headed by Sam (played by Eric Tsang), to become Sam’s right hand man. Lau is an undercover gangster, so to speak; he has worked his way up the ranks of the police department, all the while a mole for Sam and his gang. Each organization figures out that they have a spy in their midst, and the bulk of the story takes place as the two men try to find out who the other one is, without blowing their own cover.

It is the kind of story that recalls the best of the early (pre-America) phase of John Woo, playing with the idea of identity. It uses its two characters as mirrors of each other, however, the movie does not allow for easy assignments of good twin and evil twin. In a terrific scene early in the film, we see Lau, the undercover gangster, draw out case-breaking evidence against a suspect during an interrogation. Soon after, we see Chan, the undercover cop, snort a line of cocaine to test its quality. They are both good at what they do, and to make things more complicated, they are both good at what they are pretending to do.

The filmmakers know that they are working on treaded ground here, and they work hard to distinguish this movie from so many other action/crime flicks. The direction is flashy and stylized, but generally not to the point of detracting from the scenes or the characters. And the film is certainly aided by the casting of the brilliant Tony Leung (who gave one of the finest performances of the current decade in “In the Mood for Love”), who delights in using his gritty, cynical, sad-sack image to the full benefit of his character here. And the film does something else too, something that is becoming increasingly antithetic to contemporary movie-making: it allows for the twists of the plot to arise out of the story, rather than machinate the plot to fit into the twists. Because we can see both sides of what is going on in the story, the revelations of the plot occur to the characters, instead of to the audience, allowing us to watch how the characters react, rather than being consumed by our own confusion and epiphany. It is the difference between Hitchcock and “Law and Order.” (not to suggest that “Infernal Affairs” is on par with Hitchcock)

It has been mentioned that the movie is currently being remade by Martin Scorsese, for which I have pretty high hopes. Personally, I am very excited to see him take a break from the grandiose epics that he has been making as of late and roll up his sleeves for a more intimate, gritty crime drama.

And Lau and Mak do leave plenty of room for improvement in one specific area: the female characters. There are two of them, both paper thin, given practically nothing to do. One of them, Lau’s girlfriend, is a novelist, and the most interesting, albeit the least annoying, thing we see her do is type. And the other is a psychiatrist, whose name Lee Sum Yee, is, according to IMDB, a homonym for “your psychiatrist.” And that’s about how complex her character is.

Overall, though, the film is tense, very fast-paced, and very fun to watch. The lead characters and performances are terrific, and the direction and story keep everything moving without anything feeling all that rushed. It’s not “The Killers,” but if you don’t try to make it be, it’s a pretty good movie on its own.

Final Grade: B+

DAN'S REVIEW

I have a bit of a checkered history with this film. Darcey took to me a restaurant in San Francisco called Foreign Cinema for my birthday last summer. The idea of the place is that they project films onto the wall of their courtyard at night. They select a rotating program of world and independent cinema, and post the dates and times on their website -- "Infernal Affairs" was the movie that was screening the night we went. When we arrived at the restaurant, we were seated inside and facing away from the courtyard. We asked if we could move into the courtyard when the movie started, and the waitress told us, as though I had just asked if I could take a crap in her hand, "Oh, no one actually watches the movie." So to recap, if you want some delicious seafood and a great oyster bar menu, by all means go to Foreign Cinema. If you want to watch the movie that forms the name as well as the central concept of the entire fucking restaurant...well, you're just a douchebag, aren't you?

But the movie itself -- it's OK. The opening sequence is some bravura work, and covers so much ground so quickly that I almost thought I was watching a preview for "Infernal Affairs". It sets up the story of two young criminals assigned by their gang lord to work as policemen -- one of them works against his old gang by rejoining them as an undercover cop, while the other rises up the ranks inside the force. The rest of the film is a cat-and-mouse struggle as both moles try to figure out who the other one is.

The story has moments of high intensity and style, the performances feel sincere, and the whole picture is fast and shiny, but I could never figure out why everyone didn't piece the mystery together in eleven seconds. The movie sets up the fact that they're all from the same youth gang, yet the crime lord and his cop-mole never recognize the undercover cop, and vice versa. I couldn't decide whether this was a genuine plot hole, a Bunuel-ian mind fuck, or if I was just an idiot. Let me make this clear -- I do not like movies that make me feel like an idiot (I'm talking to you, Peter Greenaway!).

The good news is that there is a solid basis for a great cop film here, and Scorsese is just the man to weed out the facile elements and develop the poorly sketched characters while maintaining the elements of extreme style and boldness that make "Infernal Affairs" interesting in the first place.

Lau and Mak's film is comparable in many ways to Sam Fuller's 1955 "House of Bamboo", a flashy, Technicolor film noir thriller about gang infiltration and moral relativism in post-war Japan. However, where Fuller's film is multilayered and smartly plotted, "Infernal Affairs" is mostly overblown chaos.

Grade: B-

"Elizabethtown" (2005 - Dir.: Cameron Crowe)

In a way, the unmitigated disaster of "Elizabethtown" makes me feel bad for Cameron Crowe fans. Obviously, I'm not one of them -- although I'll stand by "Almost Famous" as great, albeit compromised -- but "Elizabethtown", much like the Coen's "Hudsucker Proxy", Spielberg's "The Terminal", and Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut", seems to have been by made these great filmmakers only to provide an indefensible argument for their detractors.

"Elizabethtown" overexaggerates all of Crowe's worst tendencies -- his fortune-cookie dialogue, his glibness, his fetishization of saintly, redemptive blondes, the way he leans on pop soundtracks to supply emotion and move the story along. But even the most ardent Crowe fans must realize that he's spinning his wheels here.

Orlando Bloom, hardly the prototypical Crowe hero, is an inexcusable casting compromise as Drew, a shoe designer who sinks his corporation and contemplates suicide. As he's ready to plunge a knife into his stomach, Drew finds out that his father died while visiting relatives in his native Tennessee. Drew momentarily puts off suicide to retrieve his father's body.

Bloom is an uncomfortable fit in the role, and almost instantly unlikable -- he's a good-looking kid, but he has a flat, pallid acting style that suggests he's fit only for playing anal-retentive elves. On the plane to Elizabethtown, Drew meets Claire, a wry, flirty stewardess played by Kirsten Dunst -- Claire is essentially a steroidal version of the Kate Hudson character from "Almost Famous". Dunst is an OK actress, but she doesn't have a prayer saddled with Crowe's leaden dialogue. Claire does nothing but spout aphorisms and display cutesy tics -- she fairly assaults us charm.

In Tennessee, Drew meets some long-lost family and learns some lessons about...oh, let's say, family, tradition, and love. Mostly, he just trades banalities with Dunst and attempts to counsel his high-strung mother, played embarrassingly by Susan Sarandon. She eventually travels to Tennessee for the funeral service, where the film devolves into chaos and ineptitude. Try to guess which scene is more jaw-dropping insane -- Sarandon's tap dance homage to her dead husband, or her stand-up comedy homage to her dead husband. Give up? It's the same scene! The same terrible scene.

"Elizabethtown" is most interesting for Crowe's implied self-analysis as a filmmaker -- Drew is a successful young business tyro who is crushed by failure when he attempts something different (aka "Vanilla Sky"). Thus we are led to "Elizabethtown", which combines elements of past Crowe successes -- the semi-biographical quality of "Almost Famous", the business failure redeemed by faithful blonde storyline of "Jerry Maguire", the gawky young romance of "Say Anything" -- without a shred of inspiration or direction.

The famously endless road trip sequence that closes the film provides the perfect pointless coup de grace -- Drew follows a remarkably intricate itinerary that Claire whips up overnight, complete with soundtrack (it would have taken all night just burning the 41 hours worth of CDs!) and Crowe's patented button-cute cliches (e.g., "Sadness is easier because it's surrender. I say make time to dance alone with one hand waving free."). When it isn't boring, it's insulting...and when it isn't insulting, it's revolting. Actually, I think that was the film's original tagline.

Grade: D

I just got back from the Kings-Lakers game...it sure feels good to have another meaningful late-season matchup against the Lakers, even if the stakes are slightly lower this time around. Once again, the Kings turned it into a laugher late -- these guys are starting to take this basketball thing seriously. Hell, even Rick Adelman is starting to show signs of a pulse.

In the game program, there was a brief bio of the Kings mascot, Slamson -- apparently, he was discovered while sleeping underneath a park bench in Old Sacramento. In other words, Slamson is a self-made giant kitty, unlike that fancy-pants college boy Dinger (the River Cats mascot), with his degree from De Paws University. This new piece of information makes me appreciate Slamson even more, although it still doesn't explain why he rollerblades so much.

Speaking of bad ideas, it appears that modified body suits have become the new "high socks" in the NBA, as many players have taken to wearing ersatz leggings under their shorts. Kobe Bryant, always on the vanguard of evil, may have popularized the trend by wearing purple leggings underneath his Lakers uniform. But in tonight's game, Bonzi Wells sipped the stylistic Kool-Aid and wore white tights underneath his shorts. Anyone who knows my unwavering negative opinion about leggings can surmise how I feel about this dark and disturbing trend -- in a word: apocalypto.

I know I said I would have some new stuff up by now, but there's something about the rain and eating a lot of Popeye's chicken that makes me want to stay inside and play video games. So if you're chomping at the bit for the next edition of Dare Daniel, don't blame me -- blame precipitation and biscuits.

I want to extend my thanks to the employees of the Tower Theater, who let me shoehorn my way into their Popeye's Chicken feast last night. By the way, are there any biscuits left? Cause I could suuuuuure go for some right about now.

The Popeye's feast was in honor of outgoing Tower manager Michael Velasquez, who worked has final shift last night. Our old buddy Cody will be acting as interim manager, so please direct all your questions and complaints regarding poor sound quality, high concession prices, and the smell of the men's bathroom to him.

I had such a great weekend, I didn't have any time left over for writing. I slept until 11am both days, watched "The Big Lebowski" on DVD, watched the rejuvenated Kings grind out a win against the Dallas Mavericks last night, and tried that new self-serve frozen yogurt place on 36th and J -- I can't remember the name, but the place has literally an entire wall of toppings. Nicola knows what I'm talking about.

At any rate, while you all wait on the next editions of Dare Daniel and Dan and Dub's Duelling Reviews, Little Richard has returned to start your week right. Here with another patented tale of folksy, homespun wisdom, is our Bureau Chief of Rock and Roll, Bixesual Orgies, and Anti-Terrorism, with the second edition of:


Little Richard Presents: Little Richard's One to Grow On, By Little Richard

My first homosexual experience was with a friend of my family's who the local gay people called Madame Oop.

Madame Oop lived in our neighborhood. He worked on the railroad. He used to come to our house along with another gay guy called Sis Henry. My people had known them both for years. Well, when everybody was getting off work, Madame Oop would catch them and he would use his mouth on them and he would pay them....I just stared at him.

Madame Oop would french you. He'd suck you and tell you that he had a vagina and if you'd be nice he'd let you get some of it. You see, he'd been with so many men that his rectum had been torn out and was no use anymore, so they'd put a colostomy in his side and he used his rectum as a vagina.

The gay thing really came from me being with a guy called Bro Boy, who was a grocery boy. Bro Boy really laid me into that -- he and Hester. It started with them and it growed.

...and that's One to Grow On, by Little Richard

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Quasar, thanks again for delivering another inspirational, family-friendly tale of persevering against impossible odds. I can't wait until next week's edition. Also, if you get the chance, Georgia Peach, we really need to get that social security number and ID from you for tax purposes. Technically, you're working for us illegally at the moment. Just call the office and ask for Betty in admin.

Released last week, but it still counts: "The Prince and Me 2". Here's the Netflix summary:

"Picking up where The Prince & Me left off, this sequel focuses on the preparations for the royal nuptials between the Danish Prince Edvard (Luke Mably) and his all-American bride-to-be, Paige (Kam Heskin, stepping into the role played by Julia Stiles in the first movie). But the wedding is threatened when the couple discovers an antiquated law that requires the prince marry a woman with royal blood ... or give up his crown."

Apparently, this film is positioned as a true sequel, wich unknown Kam Heskin playing the same character that Julia Stiles did in the earlier version. As Dub has informed me, this is contrary to the tactic of many straight-to-video sequels, which begin as "original" productions, and are slapped and labelled as a quasi-sequel somewhere between the wrap and the release in order to recoup losses from a dud. A prime example is the sequel-by-association "8mm2", about which Dub has still not finished his long-awaited treatise, "'8mm' or '8mm2': Which One is Awesomer?"

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I'm heading home now, so you can look for the Dare Daniel this weekend or check it out on Monday morning. Let me just tease you with this:the film features the first instance of rectal fish penetration in the history of film (as usual, America is on the cinematic vanguard -- take that, rest of Earth!). See you next week, everyone!

First of all, to everyone who made it into the sold-out showing of "The Big Lebowski" at the UA Arden last night -- shame on you. You kept a quasi-professional critic from his rightful seat inside the auditorium. Classless. To ensure that this never happens again, I urge everyone to boycott the Thursday night screenings at the UA Arden, especially two weeks from now when they're showing the criminally underrated "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". Do your part, people.

And now without further ado, the top 5 things that happened in the world this week:

5) The return of Heckasac, the Capital City's last bastion of quality restaurant reviews, Shelley Duvall worship, and Lisa Heyamoto bashing. Of course, I'm directly responsible for Hecka's return to the blogosphere -- we talked about it for just under two or three minutes on Sunday night, and whammo...she's back to work Monday morning. Or was that just an wildly insane coincidence? No, I saved Heckasac, despite the fact that she routinely kills me in the ratings! Sacramento, you're welcome.

4) Ugly trend of the week -- the media smear campaign directed at the great Barry Bonds. A co-worker told me today that his dreams were "crushed because Barry Bonds turned out to be a liar." (I'm not sure if he was dreaming that Barry wasn't on steroids or dreaming that Barry wasn't a liar...the latter seems twice as surreal). Let me just say this to all you would-be moral crusaders out there -- Mickey Mantle took speed to cover the effects of his hangover, Babe Ruth was a legendary womanizing gluttonous drunk, Ty Cobb was a racist savage, and the greatest play in the history of baseball, New York Giant Bobby Thomson's 1954 "Shot Heard Round the World", was the result of stolen signs. Being a drug-taking, lying, no-good, cheating,scumbag piece-of-shit is a key part of our great baseball heritage, and Bonds is once again joining the ranks of the immortals. Bonds should be celebrated for his steroid-taking, cheating, assholery, not demonized. If there's one thing I am dead sick of, it's unregulated media types shoving their way into the spotlight by conducting warrantless moral crusades like this one.

3) Moral crusade of the week -- My noble and thoroughly justified quest to end the terrible east coast bias of weather-predicting rodents. On Feb. 2, Pennsylvania-based Punxsatawney Phil crawled out his hole and saw his shadow, thus predicting a long winter. The next week, the east coast was slammed with blizzards, while the west coast experienced a period of unseasonable warmth. This is more clear-cut evidence of an east coast bias, the same east coast bias that forces our Oscars to start at 5, our Super Bowls to start at 3, thinks Biggie was better than Tupac (in your dreams, East Coast!), and insists that an annual Mets-Yankees World Series would be good for baseball. I propose the implementation of a new, west coast-based groundhog (Petaluma Phil?), fully licensed and bonded by the state, so that we may properly harness the awesome powers of these creatures for the benefit of our crops and smokehouse meats. As for that vust cultural sinkhole/superchurch known as "the rest of the country", you're on your own, bub.

2) iPod "Shuffle Songs" option song combo of the week -- The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" followed by The Four Eyes' "Hat Nerd". God bless you, iPod "Shuffle Songs" option.

1) As stated earlier, Little Richard is ineligible for the Top 5 now that he is an official Barnesyard staffmember, so that means the field for the top slot is wide open. I will now open the envelope revealing the winner....well, Good Golly, Miss Molly, it's our own The Georgia Peach, Little Richard, aka The Quasar of Rock. Little Richard would be here to accept his award, but I don't believe he's actually even shown up to the offices yet. Quasar, if you're reading this, please give me a call -- Betty in administration needs to get your home address and social.

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

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Up next: Dare Daniel - "Dirty Love"

Also -- Dan and Dub's Duelling Reviews will return next week with the Hong Kong cop film "Infernal Affairs".

Courtesy of Barnesyard field correspondent Mike Dub, here is a compilation of Netflix member quotes about Martin Scorsese's brilliant, passionate, and reverent 1989 film "The Last Temptation of Christ". Enjoy, and marvel at how much Christians love the idea of burning things.


"It is probably on the shelf of every ACLU member, but should remain in the garbage from whence it came."

"If you want to trash Christianity, come up with something better, Babylon!"

"should have been called "The last Temptation of Joe-Shmoe" for all it has to do with the historical Jesus."

"I think we all need to be open minded regarding tolerance of thoughts and beliefs. We don't however, need to be forced to watch horrific acting!"

"Of course the critics loved it - it is a stab at the very heart of Christianity."

"This film needs to be burned because of the fools out there who will take it as the gospel in lieu of reading the bible or some other such text."

"Go rent The Life of Brian, if you want silly. Go rent The Greatest Story Ever Told if you want reality in the Christian Biblical sense."

"No well meaning Italian would ever portray Jesus as a sinner and a wimp."

"This film should be burned. What was the director thinking. I think he only wanted to piss off Christians, well, job well done!"

"I mean no one questions that Jesus felt all the temptations that men feel.However, to say that he sinned as this movie implies is just anti-Christian pro-propoganda."

"Martin Scorsese claims that this is a work of fiction based upon a fictional novel. I wonder what he would think if I made a movie where the lead charcter just so happens be be named "Martin Scorsese" who works in the film industry and has intimate relations with an actor named "Dafoe" who is likes to kick puppies and another actor name "Keitel" who enjoys commiting arsen. Well, I think I would get my pants sued off for defamation of character (rightfully so)."

"I just don't think jesus would have been as wishy-washy as he was portrayed."

"I was not always a christian, but even before I was I still would have found the movie repulsive."

"We chose this movie because it was mentioned in the book The Da Vinci Code."

"This movie is heresy. Those involved in this project shall suffer eternal damnation. Jesus is Lord and the only road to Salvation. This movie should only be watched by leftists, communists and atheists. No God-fearing Christian should ever, ever watch this movie and open their mind to this type of dangerous dogma."

"We had to repent after seeing it."

"This film leads one to the conclusion that Jesus was mentally ill."

"There is no "interpretting" the life of Christ."

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Check back this afternoon for the Weekly Top 5 -- according to the official Top 5 rulebook, Little Richard is technically ineligible now that he is an official Barnesyard staffmember, but can that keep him from retaining his spot atop the countdown? Tune in and find out...I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005 - Dir.: Alex Gibney)

A large part of the outrage at corporate corruption is caused by the fact that the guys at the top don't lose. Investors get screwed, mid-level employees lose their pensions, and the little guys lose their jobs, but the big boys allot themselves enormous bonuses, steal away with company money, and receive insanely light prison sentences for their crimes. Alex Gibney's glib documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" seeks to rectify this unjustice by blaming Enron's bankruptcy and the California energy crisis on 2 or 3 people.

In Gibney's atonal documentary, everyone gets off scot-free except for the CEO's of Enron, who are alternately likened to Jim Jones, the rats on the Titanic, Nazi commandants, and perhaps even some sort of were-vampire by former Enron employees (though they get credit for not comparing them to Pol Pot or Idi Amin). Apparently, none of these employees feel any complicity in the unethical actions of their company (they're the ones being force-fed the Kool-Aid, remember), although most indicate that they knew it was crooked from the get-go. Since everyone is allowed to reduce everything to a soundbite, actual insight is lost in a series of tangled metaphors attempting to explain why decent people would allow evil corrupters to force them into a life of venality merely by giving them inflated salaries, as well as benefits, stocks, options, and endless perks.

The film comes to life in one sequence detailing the California energy crisis of 2001, when Enron induced power plants to manufacture energy shortages by manually shutting off the juice. This caused a series of rolling blackouts, which resulted in high energy prices and big profits for Enron. It's a great piece of filmmaking, making excellent use of archival materials. However, even Gray Davis is let off the hook by Gibney -- he was merely the victim of a Republican conspiracy and that's that.

I can recommend the film only slightly -- it's timely and important stuff that everyone should know about, but it's just not a very good film. As this case goes to trial, we can only hope that one day someone will make the definitive Enron documentary.

GRADE: B-

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Tomorrow on the Barnesyard --

Dare Daniel: "Dirty Love", as well as the Top 5 of the Week.

"Oliver Twist" (2005 - Dir.: Roman Polanski)

The most shocking thing about Roman Polanski's take on "Oliver Twist" is that there's nothing shocking about it. He has used his clout from his award-winning "The Pianist" to mount a very good-looking, smart, straightforward adaptation of Dickens' serialized novel about the chance encounters of a guileless orphan.

The atmosphere in Polanski's "Oliver Twist" is more pitiless and lived-in than in other adaptations, and the brutality is a little less kid-friendly, while still toned-down enough to earn a PG rating. Additionally, the implied anti-Semitism of the Fagin character has been barely diminished -- Ben Kingsley gleefully overplays the kid-thief ringleader as a gnarled, unseemly gargoyle with only fleeting moments of decency.

It's a very entertaining film if you're not too sick of the story, although it seems stuck in that 130-minute running time netherworld, where either cutting 15 minutes would move the story along more adroitly, or adding 15 minutes would develop sketchy characters and give the movie the weight of an epic.

Barney Clark does an admirable job as Oliver -- he has the perfect innocent yet glum demeanor, though he seems to have been cast largely for his resemblance to a young Polanski. The early scenes of "Oliver Twist" are the most personal -- Oliver's orphanage has the look and feel of a concentration camp -- and Polanski seems to take more time on the pre-London sections of the story than earlier adaptations.

The performances are generally good, the parts cast mostly with unknowns (Kingsley is the only name in the cast), although no one ever quite owns the part. My one major quibble is with Jamie Foreman, a little too unthreatening as the amoral murderer Bill Sykes, although it's hard to match Oliver Reed glare for glare in that part.

All in all, while Polanski's take on "Oliver Twist" was unjustly overlooked when it was released last fall -- the direction, cinematography, art direction, and score are all top-shelf -- it too often feels like a merely perfunctory take on the story. If you're interested, it's worth a look...if not, there's nothing here that will surprise you.

GRADE: B

The Barnesyard has been up for only a week, and I'm already three days behind in my posts. Rest assured that I've been watching movies, compiling lists, and sticking my boot up the asses of terrorists, and not wasting time.

I watched the Oscar-nominated documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and Roman Polanski's "Oliver Twist", so check back later today for reviews of those films.

I also rented (with my own money, mind you!) Jenny McCarthy's "Dirty Love", the subject of the upcoming Dare Daniel. Look for that tomorrow, along with a brand-new Top 5 list.

I'm also probably going to watch "The Big Lebowski" on the big screen at the Arden Fair tonight -- I haven't seen the Coen Brothers' flaky melding of Raymond Chandler film noir and stoned ex-hippie diaspora in the theater since I skipped school to watch it back in 1998. My reaction was mixed at the time, but it's a movie that seems to keep getting better every time I see it. Tickets are only 5 bucks and the show starts at 10 p.m.

"A Door in the Floor" (2004 - Dir.: Tod Williams)

Me and Darcey caught this one on HBO a few minutes after it had started. I didn't watch it in 2004 when it played at the Tower because it looked like a dud. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the film -- it's intelligently written, extremely well-acted (especially by Jeff Bridges as a manipulative and destructive, yet oddly likable children's book writer and illustrator), and directed with empathy and restraint.

The film is adapted from the opening section of John Irving's "A Widow For One Year". I've never read that Irving novel, but "A Door in the Floor" is the only Irving adaptation I've ever seen that is remotely faithful to his style. Movies made from Irving's books tend to over-emphasize the quirkiness, instead of playing it straight and letting the quirks shock you.

Jeff Bridges gives a towering performance as the writer, a demanding and sexually liberated writer living in relative seclusion on the New England coast. Bridges gives an inimitably Bridges-esque performance, purring and preening and demanding attention -- he even gets a giant, floppy hat to wear. It has occurred to me that Bridges may be one of the great actors of his generation -- he has strung together a largely under-appreciated string of classic and near-classic performances over the past thirty years (e.g., The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Bad Company, Star Man, Tucker, Fearless, The Big Lebowski, and now this one). Lots of hambone bullshit in there, to be sure, but you gotta accept that.

The writer and his wife, played by Kim Basinger in an example of good casting triumphant over a mediocre performance, are still reeling from the death of their two beloved children in a freak accident for which they feel vaguely responsible. They act out in different ways -- Bridges makes endless nude sketches with a variety of local models/sexual partners in a series of relationships that inevitably turn exploitative.

Meanwhile, Basinger has her eye on the clean-cut college kid who is spending the summer making minute revisions on Bridges' new 150-word project. The kid has little to do with himself, and his eye wanders over to the lonely Basinger. As their sexual relationship blooms, there are scenes in "A Door in the Floor" that evoke "The Graduate" a bit too closely, and some fairly heavy-handed symbolic elements as well. But I was compelled by "A Door in the Floor" almost all the way through -- it's worth a look.

GRADE: B+

"Cache" (2005 - Dir.: Michael Haneke)

Haneke's film won the Best Director prize at Cannes, and it's an often difficult film that requires a great deal of patience. The lack of outburst and solid resolution will put some off -- it's the kind of film that would star Michael Douglas or Harrison Ford in the American remake, only with 150 percent more fistfights and scenes of people jumping off balconies.

"Cache" is a reserved and insinuating anti-thriller starring French A-listers Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as a bourgeouis married couple whose routine is disrupted when they start receiving anonymous videotapes on their doorstep. The tape shows their house under surveillance from across the street -- the camera appears to be shooting the house from an artificially high angle that should be conspicuous to everyone, yet no one on the street appears to notice. They go to the cops, who are no help; more videotapes come, followed by anonymous phone calls, as well as a series of cards and letters with ghoulish, childlike drawings depicting mutilated faces and severed chicken necks on them.

The husband, a fairly successful public television host, starts to piece together the clues, which point to an unresolved incident from his childhood. As he seems to come closer to the truth, the meaning and resolution become more and more obfuscated. Another videotape arrives in which the camera appears to be in the same room as the husband. The film brings up issues of racism and class dominance in France's history, and it could be argued that the videotapes are almost entirely symbolic -- the unresolved guilt that undermines the husband's safe, bourgeouis family life.

Haneke's direction is restrained throughout, almost agonizingly so at times, but it pays off in a culminating scene of violence that was one of the most shocking film moments I've seen in a while. He also finds marvelous tension in the use of confined spaces, particularly in a silent yet confrontational scene in an elevator towards the end of the film. Auteuil does his best work in years; Binoche is as beautiful as ever, but feels underused in the part.

"Cache" isn't for everyone, but its high-concept plot and restrained style provide a genuine tension that is strangely effective and original.

GRADE: B+

Volume 1 - The Mysteries of Childhood:

Me and my cousin, Bertha May, we used to run together. We were a little team. A little evil, devilish team. I used to call her Boodlum.

We were always looking for things to do. I did my no-manners in a jar. I don't know why. I used to like to do things in jars and boxes and stuff. I did some in a jelly jar, and I did it very neatly, and I closed up the jar and put it up in the cabinet with Mother's preserves. As soon as she found it she hollered "RICHARD!" She didn't call for anyone else. She knew it was me.

...and that's One to Grow On, By Little Richard.

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Thanks a lot, Little Richard, can't wait for the next edition of this heartwarming and informative series. For my inaugural Dare Daniel, Darcey suggested that I watch whatever film won the Razzie Award for Worst Picture. I liked the idea, so I will screening and reviewing the multi-Razzie winning opus from Jenny McCarthy, "Dirty Love". Look for that one by the end of the week.

Also, Dub has agreed to rejoin the Barnesyard staff by collaborating with me another one of our patented Duelling Reviews. This time, we will be tackling the Hong Kong cop flick "Infernal Affairs", which Martin Scorsese is currently remaking as "The Departed", starring Leo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson. Look for the 1st Duelling Review of 2006 next Monday.

I'll work on my reviews for "A Door in the Floor" and "Cache" later tonight.

Oscars, fuck you.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you up the ass with a chicken dinner!

Oscars, you've been obsolete since the late 1930's. You're a professional self-stroking organization. You do nothing but reward the wrong people for the right reasons and the right people for the wrong reasons. You have now de-balled and de-funnied David Letterman, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart, probably the three most bold and original comedians of the past quarter century. You have given Ben Affleck an award for writing, you've given Robert Redford and Mel Gibson awards for directing, and you've given Robin Williams more Oscars (one) than Cary Grant, Gene Kelly, Rita Hayworth, Kim Novak, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Nick Ray, Otto Preminger, and Anthony Mann combined (a cumulative zero, not counting you-might-die-soon "honorary" Oscars). You almost single-handedly created Bruce Vilanch. Last night, your Oscars telecast reached its peak at negative-seven minutes, when Jessica Alba was caught on camera bending over during the interminable red carpet countdown (another pre-show highlight -- an onscreen graphic that identified Paul Giamatti as having "also starred in 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Big Momma's House'"). To paraphrase Clarence from "True Romance", you deify unwatchable movies made from unreadable books. And now you've anointed "Crash", a film so shrill, stupid, and monstrously self-indulgent that Sandra Bullock gave the best performance in the picture just by not being onscreen all that much.

Please, Oscar, once and for all, do the entire planet a favor and just fucking die!!!

To make it clear, I'm only awarding based on the eighty-four films from 2005 that I've seen; and once the awards are released, they're engraved in stone and never changed.

Best Art Direction/Set Decoration

Batman Begins
King Kong
Munich
Walk the Line
War of the Worlds
WINNER: MUNICH (Production Design: RICK CARTER; Art Direction: INO BONELLO, ANDREW MENZIES, and TONY FANNING)

Best Cinematography:

Brokeback Mountain
Jarhead
March of the Penguins
Munich
The New World
WINNER: MUNICH (JANUSZ KIMINSKI)

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Brokeback Mountain
Jarhead
Munich
Mysterious Skin
North Country
WINNER: MYSTERIOUS SKIN (by GREGG ARAKI)

Best Original Screenplay:

5X2
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
Hustle and Flow
Last Days
The Squid and the Whale
WINNER: THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (by NOAH BAUMBACH)

Best Supporting Actor:

Wiliam Baldwin, "The Squid and the Whale"
Brady Corbet, "Mysterious Skin"
Jesse Eisenberg, "The Squid and the Whale"
Jamie Foxx, "Jarhead"
Jake Gyllenhaal, "Brokeback Mountain"
WINNER: JESSE EISENBERG, "THE SQUID AND THE WHALE"

Best Supporting Actress:

Amy Adams, "Junebug"
Anne Hathaway, "Brokeback Mountain"
Frances McDormand, "North Country"
Anna Paquin, "The Squid and the Whale"
Michelle Williams, "Brokeback Mountain"
WINNER: ANNE HATHAWAY, "BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN"

Best Actor:

Steve Carell, "The 40 Year-Old Virgin"
Stephane Freiss, "5X2"
Jeff Daniels, "The Squid and the Whale"
Terence Howard, "Hustle and Flow"
Heath Ledger, "Brokeback Mountain"
WINNER: JEFF DANIELS, "THE SQUID AND THE WHALE"

Best Actress:

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, "5X2"
Q'Orianka Kilcher, "The New World"
Laura Linney, "The Squid and the Whale"
Charlize Theron, "North Country"
Reese Witherspoon, "Walk the Line"
WINNER: LAURA LINNEY, "THE SQUID AND THE WHALE"

Best Documentary Film:

Grizzly Man
Murderball
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
WINNER: NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (Director: MARTIN SCORSESE)

Best Director:

Gregg Araki, "Mysterious Skin"
Noah Baumbach, "The Squid and the Whale"
Craig Brewer, "Hustle and Flow"
Sam Mendes, "Jarhead"
Francois Ozon, "5X2"
WINNER: NOAH BAUMBACH, "THE SQUID AND THE WHALE"

Best Feature Film:

5X2
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
Hustle and Flow
Jarhead
The Squid and the Whale
WINNER: THE SQUID AND THE WHALE

So there you go..."The Squid and the Whale" sets new DANNIES records with 8 nominations and 6 awards, taking home prizes for Director, Picture, 3 of the acting categories, and Screenplay. Does that mean it's the best film in the history of the DANNIES? No, but it's the only film released this year that I feel was unquestionably great, and therefore took advantage of its soft-as-shit competition with a near-sweep of the major awards. I felt that Supporting Actress was the weakest category of all -- I didn't feel passionate about any of the nominees, so I used a coinflip to decide the winner. Sorry, Amy Adams, you should have picked tails (t.s. for everyone who had Adams in the DANNIES pool at the office). Thanks for tuning in to the 14th Annual DANNIES -- see you next year!

Die-hard Barnesyard fans may remember a short-lived bit from the last days called Comcast A-Z. The essential concept was that I would take an alphabetical trek through the bafflingly diverse selection of Comcast OnDemand's free movies. I only got two letters into the bit before I pulled the plug on The Barnesyard, but that didn't stop me from dialing up free, bad movie after free, bad movie. The results to date:

-Agnes of God :D+
-Blind Fury: B+
-Cliffhanger: B-

And that was where we left off. However, I'm already up to the letter "L", so let me bring you all up to speed with some of my patented capsule reviews...


Dark Days (2000 - Dir.: Marc Singer)

Beautifully shot documentary about New York City homeless living relatively domestic shantytown lives in unlit, abandoned train tunnels underneath the city's surface. This is probably the most intimate portrait of homelessness I've ever seen, as Singer's camera ingratiates itself into situations both intense (he films his subjects smoking crack and watching silently as one of the shacks burns to the ground) and mundane. The mundane aspects are the most entertaining, as the homeless people play with their dogs, chat with the neighbors, cook dinner, and talk about how they got to where they are. The most interesting thing about "Dark Days" is that the documentary's homeless subjects gravitate toward the dark tunnels in a strange attempt to better themselves -- there are no cops to fuck with them, no rain to soak them, and a few clapboard walls to provide privacy and time for contemplation. It's all very compelling stuff, with gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, if you can get past the faint whiff of bullshit.
GRADE: B+


Emperor of the North (1973 - Dir.: Robert Aldrich)

Extremely entertaining Depression-era action film pits King of the Hobos Lee Marvin against Ernest Borgnine as a resolutely sadistic train conductor famed for never letting a hobo hop a ride on his train. As usual, Robert Aldrich directs with a punchdrunk mixture of elegiac grace and bare-knuckles violence. Putting this film alongside "The Dirty Dozen", "Vera Cruz", and "The Longest Yard" makes Aldrich a prime candidate for the title of Best Action Director of the pre-Bruckheimer era. Only Keith Carradine, as a greenhorn hobo riding on Marvin's coattails, and a little too much dawdling in the middle, keeps this one from becoming a classic. However, Marvin's final send-off to Carradine provides a memorable finale, and Borgnine's uncut venality make this one a must-see for action fans.
GRADE: B+


Fifth Element (1997 - Dir.: Luc Besson)

WAY better than I remembered. I pretty much dismissed this film as entertaining piffle when I saw it in the theaters in 1997, but after seeing it again, I realized that it's actually extremely entertaining piffle. Bruce Willis does great, wry work as a former soldier turned cabbie in the 23rd century who lucks into protecting a "perfect being" (the last line of defense against an interstellar wall of evil threatening the planet) from evil business magnate Gary Oldman. Oldman and Ian Holm do good supporting work, Chris Tucker is less of a show-stopping dud than I recalled, and Besson peppers the picture with enticing and clever design aspects (e.g., cigarettes that are 90 percent filter, an abandoned city surface enshrouded in fog, etc.). The movie keeps moving fast enough that I barely realized how pointless it would be without Jean-Paul Gaultier's costume design and Milla Jovovich's sublime, barely clothed body.
GRADE: B+


Green Card (1990 - Dir.: Peter Weir)

16 years later, it's no less of a shock that the director of "Witness", "Gallipoli", and "The Truman Show" would direct such a wafer-thin romantic comedy (of course, this film was made right after the ungodly "Dead Poet's Society", so perhaps it was just a phase Peter Weir went through). However, this film is significantly more watchable and entertaining than reputation and common sense would suggest. Andie MacDowell, stiff as ever, plays a plant-enthusiast who enters into a marriage-of-convenience with expatriate Frenchman Gerard Depardieu (in his English-language debut) -- Depardieu gets his green card, while MacDowell gets to keep her rent-controlled garden apartment. They wed and part ways, but when the INS comes knocking, they are forced to live together and learn about each others lives. This film caught Depardieu right before he devolved into De Niro-esque self-parody, and his performance is heartfelt and surprisingly charming -- he has a scene in which he is pressured into playing the piano that shocked me into laughter. However, MacDowell brings nothing to the party, and too many scenes break the cute barrier.
GRADE: B-


Happy New Year (1987 - Dir.: John G. Avildsen)

Insane. This film is an American remake of a Claude LeLouch film starring Peter Falk and Charles During as ladykiller jewel thieves (great casting, right?) who are pulling off the biggest job of their lives. The film is really a showcase for Falk, who spends the entire film squeezing himself in and out of layers of prosthetic makeup -- his numerous scenes in drag might make you long for the documentary-like realism of "Mrs. Doubtfire". "Happy New Year" feels like a bold attempt at making a French New Wave-style film in an American setting that was thoroughly undermined by studio interference (Durning's obviously tacked-on narration reeks of post-production desperation). Watchable only as novelty, and as a bizarre vehicle for Falk.
GRADE: C


It Could Happen to You (1994 - Dir.: Andrew Bergman)

Here's a film that was significantly worse than I remembered -- when I saw it in the theater at the age of 18, it seemed like a harmless enough ear of Capra-corn. 12 years and enough cynicism to crush a lesser man later, I realize that this is the worst example of nostalgic sentimentality possible. This is one of those films that would like to exemplify "classic Hollywood values", but only advances the theory that classic Hollywood movies are boring, stupid, and morally austere. This was Nic Cage's first attempt at playing a squishy-soft decent guy, and boy is he fucking terrible. He plays an outlandishly decent cop (he won't cut in line, plays stickball with the neighborhood kids, but still foils armed robberies on a daily basis) whose life is upheaved when he and his wife win the lottery. However, he promised half the winnings to a down-on-her-luck waitress (in lieu of a tip for a meal he never ate...what a guy!), which sends his wife, Rosie Perez, into a trademark frothing fit. I would explain the torturous plot machinations and nauseating characterizations, but then I would have to punch my computer.
GRADE: D


I skipped the letter "J" so that I wouldn't have to watch "Jerry Maguire" again.


Kuffs (1992 - Dir.: Bruce Evans)

The opening scene of the film, which is supposed to be set in Sacramento, features Milla Jovovich dancing around the living room in her underwear. While this might initially lead one to believe that "Kuffs" is the greatest film of all time, perhaps rivalling "Citizen Kane" for sublimity, it's actually a steaming pile of shit. Christian Slater plays the title role, the no-account younger brother of a San Francisco quasi-police force captain who inherits the business when his brother is murdered by thugs looking to take over the city. The film scores points for making their lead, who periodically talks to the camera like we're all best buds, into the smarmiest, most uncharming and contemptible human being possible, but loses points for everything else. One semi-clever moment: a thug robs a paint store wearing both a mask over his face and a t-shirt with his unmasked face on it.
GRADE: C-

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OK, that brings us up to the present day. There aren't too many exciting Comcast OnDemand choices for the letter "L", but I haven't seen "La Bamba" in ages, so I'll probably go that route.

Up next: My reviews of Bridges and Basinger in "A Door in the Floor", and Binoche and Auteuil in the French thriller "Cache".

I almost forgot that I wanted to post my award nominations before the weekend. Since I was 16 years old, I have been compiling my own list of film awards and nominations called the DANNIES. This is the 14th year that I will be handing out these awards, usually released around the time of the Oscars in order to show those bastards up.

The 1st Annual DANNIES had only 8 categories overall, with Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" walking away the big winnner with 3 awards. The number of categories was expanded to 12 the following year, then an unwieldly 14 the year after that, before settling into the current 10-category format -- Art Direction; Cinematography; Original/Adapted Screenplay; Supporting Actor/Actress; Actor/Actress; Director; Picture. Originally, the DANNIES had a sister award called the DON'TIES, which gave recognition for the worst films and performances of the year, but I figured that was too much time to waste on negativity, and discontinued them in 1994.

In 2003, when it appeared that a documentary would win the Best Picture prize for the second year in a row, a brief, personal crisis about the future of narrative filmmaking ensued, which led me to create a separate category for documentary films.

The most lauded performer in the history of the DANNIES is Jennifer Jason Leigh, with 5 nominations and 2 wins (for "Single White Female" in 1992, and in 1997 for "Washington Square"). PT Anderson and Steven Spielberg are tied with the most Best Director awards, with 2 each. The films with the single most awards -- 5 apiece for "Saving Private Ryan", "Fight Club", and "Requiem For a Dream".

Before I announce this year's nominees and winners, a brief comparison of the Best Picture winners from the Academy Awards and the DANNIES over the past 13 years:

1992 - Oscars: Unforgiven; DANNIES: Malcolm X
1993 - Oscars: Schindler's List; DANNIES: Schindler's List
1994 - Oscars: Forrest Gump; DANNIES: Pulp Fiction
1995 - Oscars: Braveheart; DANNIES: Smoke
1996 - Oscars: The English Patient; DANNIES: Fargo
1997 - Oscars: Titanic; DANNIES: Boogie Nights
1998 - Oscars: Shakespeare in Love; DANNIES: Saving Private Ryan
1999 - Oscars: American Beauty; DANNIES: Fight Club
2000 - Oscars: Gladiator; DANNIES: Requiem For a Dream
2001 - Oscars: A Beautiful Mind; DANNIES: Memento
2002 - Oscars: Chicago; DANNIES: Bowling For Columbine
2003 - Oscars: The Return of the King; DANNIES: The Secret Lives of Dentists
2004 - Oscars: Million Dollar Baby; DANNIES: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

All in all, I would have to say my picks are better and bolder than the Academy's (although in retrospect, "Secret Lives of Dentists" besting "Return of the King" seems crazy even to me...I think it just disturbed me how many times Peter Jackson insisted on ending the film before actually ending it...I don't see why Steven Spielberg should get criticized for mutilating his own films while Peter Jackson gets a free pass).

OK, up next: The 14th Annual DANNIES

For the inaugural Top 5 list of the Barnesyard relaunch, I thought about compiling a list of the top 5 things that happened during my nearly 3-month hiatus. However, the way things have been going of late, I feel I would be hard-pressed to come up with a decent 5, and would thus be forced to pad the list with minutiae and mediocrity. What can I say when one of the highlights of my winter was having a solid block of fluid in my ear that didn't drain for 3 1/2 weeks?

So I decided instead that I would just make up a list of things I WISH had happened over the past few months. Enjoy, and dream of what could have been were the world not a fetid armpit of hopelessness, ignorance, and desperation.

5) Remember when Geoff Petrie invented an operable time machine and travelled back to the month of October, when pulling off a trade for Ron Artest was actually able to make a bloody bit of difference for the Kings? I know we were all stoked when Petrie's bold mid-season move elevated the Kings from lottery team to slightly better lottery team, but when he actually conquered the space-time continuum to make the trade before the season began instead of just staring dreamily into Peja's eyes throughout the month of October, that really turned things around! Unfortunately, even in an alternate reality, the man still would not fire Rick Adelman.

4) And how about Little Richard being awarded an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar after the original recipient, Robert Altman, generously stepped aside. "Without Little Richard, there would be no cinema." With these words, Altman bequeathed his honorary Oscar to the man who inspired him to become a filmmaker, The Georgia Peach (aka The Quasar of Rock). Little Richard's cinematic resume runs the gamut from his role as Little Richard in 1956's "The Girl Can't Help It", to his performance as a Little Richard-esque rock star in 1987's "Down and Out in Beverly Hills", to his part as...well, that's pretty much it. But the range and variety of his roles, his ability to maintain popularity through multiple decades (specifically, the 50's, the 80's, and that's it), and his enduring inspiration to America's youth, make him an ideal recipient for this long overdue award.

3) The Library of Congress inducting mine and Dub's lists of the top 100 films of all time into the institution's permanent archives. That was honor enough, but when the president of the American Film Institute admitted that the AFI's Top 100 list from last decade was "not fit to wipe the ass" of our lists, that touched me deep inside. I've been saying the same thing for years, but validation is always satisfying.

2) Headline from the Denver Post, January 7, 2006 --

"Doctors Amazed By Speedy Ear Drainage; New Stage of Human Evolution?"

By Kenny Wayne Phelpsingtonson

Top scientists and physicians were stunned Friday when a Sacramento-area man's ear drained itself of a solid wall of fluid in record time. Instead of taking several weeks to slowly evaporate out of a pinhole leak in the ear canal, the viscous, yellowy fluid simply flushed itself dry in a matter of seconds.

Scientists claim that the unnamed man, a local blogger who is being described by doctors as "a biological miracle" and "Jon Favreau-esque", may hold the key to unlock the mysteries of human evolution.

However, several prominent religious organizations are claiming that the man's speedy recovery is proof of the guiding hand of a higher power, and have began to worship him as their new God..."

Blah blah blah, it goes on like that for several pages (in reality, the ear flushed so slowly that my doctor could tell it was draining by the demarcation points in the canal -- yes folks, I literally had tub rings of wax inside of my ear).

1) And the #1 thing that I wish happened over the past few months...everything OK, no one hurt, everybody happy, nothing wrong, God sitting in his nest on top of the sun, social buddy system in working order, and all the world bursting into song and dance.

You know, I think that with a little bit of effort, a positive attitude, and a fresh coat of paint, we can make that last fantasy come true...together.

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I know what you're thinking...Little Richard placing #4 on the Top 5 list? Are rats chewing at my brain stem? Is love officially dead?

No my friends, love is alive and well (although you want have to your brain stem checked just to be sure) -- in fact, it's so strong and vibrant that our old buddy Little Richard has decided to end his decades of silence, put aside his overwhelming contempt for yours truly, and join the staff of the Barnesyard. I am proud to announce that The Georgia Peach will be my new Bureau Chief on Rock and Roll, Bisexual Orgies, and Anti-Terrorism.

To this end, The Quasar of Rock has graciously agreed to contribute a new, semi-regular column for the site entitled "Little Richard Presents: Little Richard's One to Grow On, By Little Richard". Look for the first installment next Monday, only on The Barnesyard.

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Up next: Old Business, Part 2 - Comcast A-Z

Before we move forward, I figured I should clean off my shelves and take care of all my unfinished business from 2005.

"Uptown Girls" (Dir.: Boaz Yakin -- 2003)

Also known as the movie that killed the Barnesyard. Well, to paraphrase Adam Sandler in "Little Nicky", Boaz Yakin's "Uptown Girls", with its unholy pairing of Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning, didn't kill the Barnesyard, it just really hurt a lot.

At the very least, "Uptown Girls" set a new Dare Daniel record for shortest running time before fast-forwarding, at 4 1/2 minutes. The record was set when Murphy's rock-star puppy-dog boyfriend first breaks into song -- it would not be the last unlistenable song in the movie, and certainly not the last instance of gratuitous fast-forwarding on my part.

Murphy plays the insufferable trust fund daughter of a famous dead rocker -- when the money runs dry, she gets a job as a nanny for Fanning, the equally insufferable daughter of a music industry bigwig. The gag is that Murphy is an adult who acts like a child while Fanning is a child who acts too grown up, but since you'd rather see either one of them run over by a tractor than say, watch them star in a romantic comedy-drama, the tension goes a bit limp.

Oh, and did I mention that there are wall-to-wall songs, and that they're all terrible, folksy, AOR-lite tripe that make James Blunt look like Tom Waits? The film is full of terrible lines, baffling plot developments, and unimaginably embarrassing moments, but thankfully I can't remember a single damn one of them.

The official running time for "Uptown Girls" is 93 minutes, but I found that with some clever editing, I was able to cut it down to a lean 45. Even then...

Grade: F.

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OK, the floor is officially open for Dare Daniel submissions. I promise not to fast-forward this time.

Up next: Old Business, Part 2 - Comcast A-Z