think of it this way gang - it's only one more week until 'che' opens! (denver premieres for 2/20/09)

Take - nay, drink - this photo of Natalie Portman in, and drink well, for she does not have a movie opening this weekend.

Rather than sell us their usual slate of big screen offerings this weekend, Hollywood has been busy instead attempting to sell us on the awesomeness of their televised prom this Sunday, aka the Academy Awards. And bless their little botoxed and coked-out hearts, for they obviously know not what they do; with a handful of exceptions, this is a pretty wretched Oscar year, even by the Academy's annually shitty standards. But don't take my word for it - Rodger Grossman certainly doesn't - if you're itching for something to see before Sunday's Hughpocalypse, you can wander on over to the Landmark Theater and Starz sites yourself for times and schedules of most of this year's Oscar-worthies.

Elsewhere, a large black man dressed as a woman is sent to prison for brandishing a weapon and proceeds to go on a rampage, terrorizing the other inmates, and two horny young men and cheerleaders and nude wackiness.

he's busy revvin' up the powerful blog 5: speed racer, lynch, mister foe

Christina Ricci's on the lookout for Dex's new reviews.

Speed Racer (2008) - With the massive success of the (possibly ripped-off) spacey-sci-fi-martial-arts trilogy of The Matrix and producing a super-slick but essentially slight adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (2006) (which gave us all the opportunity to hear Natalie Portman ask for tea and toast in an English accent...okay, gave me the opportunity to hear Natalie Portman ask for tea and toast in an English accent), one would think the Wachowski Brothers made an apparent turn away from attempting their previous serio-cinematic poses with this year's Speed Racer.

At least, one would think so: relentlessly grim and curiously uncinematic, Speed Racer is miles away from the kind of light-hearted fun that characterized the cartoon, and Emile Hirsch's brooding, boring Speed (closer to Keanu Reeves' channeling of the One than anything like a wide-eyed manga hero) is hardly the kind of main character kids (who I have to assume to be the film's intended audience) could possibly glom onto. Indeed, Speed Racer - with the obligatory, FX-amped kung-fu fight, jibber jabber about all-powerful corporate conglermates controlling the racing public's perception of reality, and pseudo-philosophical claptrap about breaking on through to the other side - is little more than a hodge podge of Matrix themes, sans the sleek Carrie Ann Moss' cat suits. Aside from the flash and bang of the races - which, to be fair, weren't really represented all that well on my tiny little Daewoo teevee - there isn't anything to recommend Speed Racer to anyone except die-hard Wachowski-heads who still mull over the restaurant scenes in Reloaded, and people (like me) who dig staring at Christina Ricci.

Lynch (2007) - A delicious slice of cherry pie from a member of David Lynch's production team offered to his boss, one of America's most important and cherished directorial talents, the eponymous doc tracks him through the preproduction and filming of the demon-to-some-angel-to-others Inland Empire (2006). Despite his willingness to discuss his artistic process in print and the overall openness of his smiling, shucky-darns-Montana-boy-made-good-persona, David Lynch - and to a much larger degree, his work, especially the aforementioned film - remain impenetrable to easy analysis, no doubt part of his appeal. Lynch takes some steps to rectifying that, or at least, how we might think of David-Lynch-the-director, who comes across (surprisingly) as salty and intense, but possessing a (not-so-surprisingly) sensitivity to and rapport with his actors and actresses like Laura Dern (who he cusses at, banters with, and lovingly calls "Bit").

Mister Foe ("Hallam Foe") (2008) - David McKenzie's latest is an often entertaining piece of twisted sex and Oedipal yearning wrapped around a coming-of-age tale in the tradition of British kitchen sink dramas, following a charmingly deranged Hallam Foe (Jamie Foster) who alternately lusts after and mourns his recently departed mother, peeping in on his stepmother or flirting heavily with his sister to stave off his morbid obsessions. Young Foe, after somehow managing to lose his virginity in his childhood treehouse (whoop! whoop! Freud alert!) to his father's slinky, ice-queen wife (Claire Forlani), flees his country home for Glasgow where - surprise surprise - he meets and falls for his mom's doppelganger, the too-sexy-by-a-mile (and former girlfriend to the 10th Doctor Who) Sophia Myles. Soon Young Hallam spends his days washing dishes in the hotel his not-mom works at and nights scampering up the side of her apartment building to look in on her fuck a married co-worker or cut her toenails. When Hallam manages to bed his fantasy girl/mom, he realizes there's a choice to be made - negotiate the urges attending real love and real life or continue (literally) hiding in the folds of his dead mom's dress and the sensual comforts of a childhood he won't let go of.

Somewhat like the culty Ewan MacGregor vehicle Young Adam Mckenzie helmed back in '03, (which, like Foe, also featured a couple of uniquely attractive English actresses - Emily Mortimer and Tilda Swinton - in various stages of brutal intimacy with the leading man), much of what Mister Foe has to say about relationshps isn't very nice (or realistic, depending on your own POV), and it doesn't nail the dark, closing-time-thoughtfulness of the MacGregor-Mortimer-Swinton flick (though that's probably the point). At any rate, Mister Foe's so skillfully rendered by MacKenzie and Co. that you not only find yourself in league with Hallam, despite the fact that he's almost completely out of his mind, but even when, at some point, you realize that so much of the movie could be interpreted as a series of episodes of post-adolescent wish fulfillment strung together. But it's got a great soundtrack, so fuck it (no pun intended).

(Okay, yes, I totally did intend that pun. Sorry.)

the best venice film festival ever

Ev-er.

i can haz portman now?

Midnight Matt makes our world a bit brighter this Friday and Saturday at the stroke of 12 with screenings of the Wachowski-produced V for Vendetta, starring Hugh Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt, Stephen Fry, and a certain actress whose hair I imagine smells something like a Saturday afternoon in May and a fine French shampoo that was not tested on animals.

Be at the Esquire, 6th and Downing, or be sucking, sucking suckheads.

a dex divided against himself, cannot stand

Err..gahh..must..look away from possible remake of splatterpunk classic..but..I can't! I can't do it! Oh, God, why?

Click here to see the rumor that if proven true, may break my heart. Break it in two.

chick habit

It's dress-up night at Dex's apartment!

Diva (1981) I think the reason that Jean-Jacques Beineix's stylish, neo-wavey thriller about bootlegged cassette tapes and the people who chase them is so easy to love is that nearly everyone in the movie is an obsessed fan (an obsessed music fan, to be precise), much in the same way and capacity the audience no doubt is - a little bit dreamy and a little bit bad, but for the best of reasons. Frédéric Andréi (who also starred in another classic from the early 80s, The Facts of Life Go to Paris) is Jules, who moons over opera diva Cynthia Hawkins (the elegant Wilhelmenia Fernandez) to the point that he snatches a dress during a premiere performance in gay Paree. One thing manages to lead to the next, of course, in the way that only things can and do in sweet little movies like this: a politically-explosive cassette is slipped into Jules' bag at the train station; the opera singer not only forgives her overeager fan but falls in love with him; and a chance encouter with a sexy teen shoplifter leads to another particularly advantageous meeting with a spacey, cigar-smoking artist. Chock full of fab music, even more fab loft apartments, and a chase through the Paris subway system, Diva is exactly what you thought the City of Light was like when you were 20.

Sorry, Haters (2005) While writer-Director Jeff Stanzler's gritty thriller meshes the cultural landscape of post-9/11 New York, the philosophy of collateral damage, and the secret shame of altruism in unexpected ways, it's still much more clumsy and less believable than it should be, especially when it becomes clear how Stanzler intends on bringing those themes together (and then the ick factor should be somewhere in Todd Solodnz territory). While what we get is daring, it never quite comes together like it should, but nevermind that - all of the film's shortcomings are picked up and sorted by Robin Wright Penn, who delievers one of the boldest performances I've seen from an actress in recent memory. If anything, you'll never hear Sonic Youth's 'Bull in the Heather' the same way again.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) Well, it's a story of love, deception, greed, lust, and unbridled enthusiasm: Scarlett Johannsen continues her slow upward arc towards being a real actress (she does just fine when she has something to do, but she just can't be still otherwise); Eric Bana, who has yet to recapture the spark that made everyone sit up and take notice in Chopper (2000), gets busy with the Boleyn girls, but then gets all broody. Natalie - sweet, sweet Natalie - pouts and flirts and cries and acts up a storm.

I didn't give a shit about Henry, King of the Whopper or the Boleyn Girls before I saw this, and I don't now. That said, the film isn't all that bad, and both Johannsen and (especially) Portman look fabulous throughout. What's important, after all, is that I see as many non-Star Wars and/or comic-book-related Natalie Portman movies as I can stand, so when I meet her - yes, when - we'll have lots and lots to talk about.

Wicked, Wicked (1973) A recent feature of Turner Classic Movie's always-incredible TCM Underground, Wicked, Wicked was screened in "duo-vision," or the split-screen shots that Brian DePalma deployed so skillfully in the early sequences of his culty hit Sisters. While DePalma's use of the technique exacerbated tension, Wicked, Wicked writer and director Richard Bare pushes "duo-vision" in this trashy story of hotel dicks, sleazy broads, and Z-grade Tony Perkins-eque sex slashers for an overlong 95 minutes - switching back to full screen for the gross-out scenes - and the gimmick only occasionaly makes up for the stockroom characters, dull plot, and awful script ("That manager of yours - are you makin' out with him?" "Good night, Rick! I don't have to listen to that jazz!"). But maybe that was the point. Even still, Wicked, Wicked is so brazenly, cheerfully dumb that there's at least 70 minutes of fun.

movie blogging to go

No toy?

Diary of the Dead. (2008.) There isn't a whole lot more I can say about Romero's newest zombie flick that Patrick hasn't already said better, but for whatever my two cents are worth: in spite of a shaky first five or ten minutes, Romero manages to not only dispatch once and for all the flock of witless no-no-but-in-this-one-they-run "of the Dead" remakes horror fans have been subjected to since 28 Days Later hit it big back a couple of years ago, but America's Best Horror Filmmaker also reinvents the NOTLD legacy for a whole new generation's neurosis, complete with an all new take-your-breath-away ending - they're dead, they're all messed up. If Land of the Dead was Georgie-Boy getting all relativistic and channelling Al Jazeera, Diary of the Dead is him doing 'The Daily Show': a brash, hilarious, and heartbreaking processing of the End of Days.

Drawing Restraint 9. (2005.) From everything I'd seen and heard, filmmaker Matthew Barney is a serious asshole, and I was expecting a right piece of ostentatious crap when I crawled out to the Esquire's Midnight Movie showing of the ninth offering in his continuing series of avant-chic movies. I was, however, pleasantly surprised: in #9, as he as done to some degree with most or all of the things in the Drawing Restraint series, Barney examines the tension in some very basic - primal? - imagery and feelings: things, living and otherwise, which organize into relationships, then decay, then pull apart, then organize anew. His aesthetic sense lends itself readily to medium of film, and even with a Japanese tea ceremony thrown into the middle of a movie I was watching at 1 A.M., I was intrigued and engaged the whole way through.

Goya's Ghosts. (2006.) I'm not sure what happened in this movie, really. Javier Bardem's an Inquisiton-era priest who likes art, and Francisco Goya in particular - who, just like everyone who has ever been in a Milos Forman movie, is hopelessly misunderstood by everybody - and then Natalie Portman is in it, and then she's not, and then Bardem gets chased away for being a heretic, and then Napoleon invades Spain, and Javier is back again, but he's all bummed out, 'cause he screwed Natalie Portman (who's insane now). And Stellan Skarsgard paints and goes deaf. Yeah, you know what? Don't see this. Rent The People vs. Larry Flynt instead.