Xanadu

Mostly, I like to watch good movies, or movies that I think I will like. Sometimes, I like to watch bad movies, too, but only the ones that still provide some kind of weird entertainment value to them. Surely you guys know what I'm talking about. So bad it's funny. I especially enjoy bad movies like Xanadu, bizarre artifacts from a forgotten time. Movies you can show somebody and say "See, Timmy? (His name is Timmy) This is what a bad idea looked like in 1980."

Xanadu is the only Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra Rollerskating Disco Musical Dance Showcase ever made, and for that reason, it is a unique jewel of crappiness that deserves our respect. We are never going to get another movie like this.

Kira (Olivia Newton-John) is one of the Greek Muses, released with her sisters from a painting on a building to go out and inspire. After dancing around, she runs into Sonny, an aspiring artist, who has all of the talent but none of the inspiration. At the start of the film, he is returning to his job at a company that paints album covers, after attempting and failing to embark on his own path. Not long after, he recognizes the same mysterious girl in a photograph that he is assigned to paint and decides to track her down.

I'm a little confused about the record album cover painting job. They already had photographs, why was he painting photoreal copies of them? Was there something I was missing?

Anyway, in his search for Kira, she guides him to Gene Kelly, playing a former song-and-dance man and club owner, also being inspired by the Muse. Together Sonny and Gene Kelly hatch a plan to open Xanadu, a new club that combines the Big Bands of the 1940's with the Rock and Roll Bands of the 1980's. And also roller skates. This is demonstrated in an painfully long dance musical number where a stage with a goofy rock band and a stage with a goofy Big Band combine and form SOMETHING ENTIRELY NEW!

So Sonny and Kira fall in love, but once the inspiration is given, she must move on. He follows her into the painting on the building, which is the most disappointing portrayal of Olympus in movie history and plead with Zeus and Hera to let her return.

It's ridiculous, I know. It's also totally innocent and in earnest, which is, in my mind, better than those bad movies that stink of cynicism and exploitation and making a buck. There were even a couple things about it that I genuinely liked. ELO was a good band, and there are one or two songs in there that I enjoyed, including the title song at the end. There's also a pretty great musical number, beautifully animated by the legendary Don Bluth. It reminded me a lot of the transformation sequences in The Sword in the Stone, which Bluth also worked on.

I felt the worst for Gene Kelly. The guy proves in the movie that he still has the skills. It's too bad that in his old age, he had to demonstrate his moves in a movie like this. They put him in some pretty embarrassing outfits and stuff. I hope he at least had fun and I'm not just projecting my embarrassment onto him.

So, I guess I could say that Xanadu is the best Olivia Newton-John/Electric Light Orchestra Rollerskating Disco Musical Dance Showcase I've ever seen. I'm glad to have finally seen it, in the way that it's kind of a pop cultural touchstone. But it doesn't even come close to the level of amazing badness of another disco musical I know of: The Apple. If you are the type who enjoys watching shitty movies with your friends, skip right past Xanadu and watch The Apple. Xanadu is a curiosity at best. The Apple is a hilarious crime against humanity.

Zardoz

Hey, everyone! My friend Kent and I wrote another one of our occasional back-and-forth reviews. You can read his other reviews on this site here. Enjoy! I'm the one in sexy italics!

Jim and I recently decided it was time for another cross-over. This time we took a look at “Zardoz” starring Sean Connery! If you’re like me you probably didn’t know what the fuck Zardoz was until about 2 years ago when you came across this picture of Sean Connery on the internet


And that image haunted me for YEARS afterwards. Looking in to the film it has a really strong cult following and there also seems to be a lot of hate out there for this film.

Well, I don’t know where I stand, because I just don’t know what to make of it. It was a bunch of nonsense, but I was unable to turn away. It was the 1970’s, everyone! Drugs!

I’d like to interject here for a moment and say, watching this movie kinda made me feel the same way when my friends tried to introduce me to Stanley Kubrick in high school. completely confused, like I wasn’t in on what was going on. Basically, I agree with Jim I should’ve watched this stoned. It starts off with just a floating head, telling us his name is Arthur Frayn, and he sometimes goes by Zardoz, he’s a god of sorts.

You’re forgetting to mention that he has a goatee and a curly mustache painted onto his face. And the “floating head” technique is him wearing black in front of a black backdrop and them cutting him out and moving him around the frame.

Really that is the highlight of the movie, its kinda all downhill from there, I mean Zardoz or Art as his friends call him was by far my favorite part of this movie. He’s barely in it, but he’s SO hammy and I kinda feel like everyone else was really serious going in to this. Arthur seems to be the only one who REALLY enjoyed his role and had fun with it.

I think his character was supposed to be a “performer” or an “artiste” or something, so naturally, he acted like the worst Shakespearean actor ever would. I wonder if it was scripted that way, or John Boorman was just like “yeah, do that” when the actor brought it up. I get a sense there were a lot of “yeah, do thats” in this movie. After making Deliverance, nobody was around to tell Boorman, “maybe don’t do that”.

I could see that, but moving on to the actual..........plot...of this movie. After we get passed the floating head we have a bunch of men in red masks ride horses and making noise. They don’t appear to be making any sense they just kinda are mumbling loudly. At this point they see the giant floating head of Zardoz, which is some stone head that speaks to them and tells them probably the greatest line in cinematic history. “The Penis is evil!”

Also that guns are good. Then the stone Zardoz head vomits guns all over the place and the barbarian men scramble to pick them up. That’s when we get our first glimpse of Connery, as he turns around and shoots the camera with his gun. See that? It’s a James Bond thing! He did it in this too! I wish Finding Forrester had started out that way.

Every Connery movie should’ve start out like that. Sean Connery then climbs out of a pile of wheat that’s apparently inside the giant stone head of Zardoz. Seriously at this point we’re probably what 15 minutes in? it’s already had floating heads, barbarians being told their peni are evil and gun vomiting.

Well let’s add one more: Inside the floating heads are bunch of sleeping naked people wrapped in cellophane! We could keep adding stuff all night. Every new minute of the movie there’s something inexplicable going on on camera, and it all adds up to... umm...

I couldn’t agree more, my favorite part about inside the floating head wasn’t even the people wrapped in cellophane, it was how 70’s everything looked, but like “future 70’s” they mine as well have put a lava lamp in the middle of the room below a disco ball and all the actors should’ve been wearing roller skates through the entire movie, and if they had, it wouldn’t have been the least bit out of place.

I can’t believe we’ve written so much and we’re still at the beginning of the movie. I swear, I took copious notes for the first half, until finally, I wrote “I fucking give up” and let the weird wash over me. We better get moving on this: The Arthur Frayn/Zardoz/floating head mustache man jumps out at him and Connery shoots him and he falls to his death, and Connery takes the head back to its home, some future paradise place where people are immortal. I skipped like 30 things or more there.

That’s what makes this such a hard movie to review really, I mean not much actually happens as far as “plot” but so much is constantly going on. Regardless, this is where you meet the rest of the main characters, a woman named Consuella, a man named Friend, and another woman who’s called May. If Zardoz hadn’t been in this movie, Friend would’ve been my favorite, he’s a complete asshole and he acts the part well. May and Conseulla just have a little battle over whether to kill Connery’s character.........I can’t actually remember his name, or to study Connery.

ZED! His name’s Zed. Also, we find out that they are in “The Vortex” and Zed is from the “Outlands” and we knew they worship Zardoz, but did you catch that he refers to a unit of time called “Zardays”? I’m going to start measuring my life in Zardays.

it only makes sense to measure your units of time in Zardays or Zarweeks, Zaryears, etc. There’s also two specific “races” I guess you’d call them apart from the eternals?of people, those are the apathetics and, some other group who’s name escapes both of us. They’re basically immortals that have lived too long and have kinda gone a bit nuts.

Yeah, I think apathy is a disease that they can’t cure, so they just put them all in a cave where they stand around and don’t care about things. And the old people were eternally young people, who have been punished by being aged to the point of senility but still not allowed to die.

It’s not exactly they weren’t allowed to die, it’s that they didn’t know how to die. If you died the Tabernacle, which is some sort of sentient being that talks to the eternals through their giant crystal rings, would just bring them back to life as a baby. This is where I think we should kinda leave it. because we’re hitting page 3 and I could probably easily write another 2 pages, if I don’t cut myself off soon. Any closing thoughts?

In the end, we find out Zardoz’s master plan, and see in flashback how he executed it, and that scene’s a doozy, with the book and all. I won’t ruin that because it was hilarious. But basically Zed was sent to The Vortex to bring back humanity and the life cycle to people who had forgotten to live and be human. It just goes a looooooooong way to say that.

So, Zardoz is a big, druggy, jumbled mess of a movie, but it’s pretty watchable in that car-wreck kind of way. I know I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I think everybody who loves film should watch it, both as an oddity and a rite of passage. It came out in 1974, the year that Coppola released The Godfather Part II and The Conversation, Mel Brooks released Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and Polanski released Chinatown. In one of the best movie years ever, there was still room on the table for this insane bit of sci-fi overindulgence. You’ve got to admit, it was pretty original, right?

It was definately orginal! I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like this movie! My closest comparison would be something like “Barbarella” yet it’s absolutely nothing like that at all, I can safely say if there are other films like this, I’m not sure I’d want to see them. It was fun and would be good for a night with friends where there’s not much else to do. Don’t watch it on a laptop though.

No, don’t watch anything on a laptop unless you have to. Good night, everybody! Penises are evil!

Hey, me again! If you like this one, here another review I wrote with Kent: Mac and Me.

30 Minutes or Less

30 Minutes or Less is a new action comedy by Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer that could have gone either way. Luckily, it went the right way. It's fast-paced and silly, with well-drawn characters and a simple, clever premise that leaves lots of room for the performers to bounce off of each other.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, a slacker who delivers pizzas for a living while his friends are moving up in the world. Aziz Ansari plays his roommate and best friend, Chet. Danny McBride and Nick Swardson play Dwayne and Travis, two more slackers who are even more slackery than Eisenberg, who hatch a scheme to get someone else to rob a bank for them, so they can secure the funds to hire a hitman to knock off McBride's lottery winning dad. They do this by ordering a pizza and strapping a bomb to Nick and telling him he has 12 hours to rob the bank.

That's it. From there on out, it's just the actors bouncing off of each other and having fun. The dialogue sounds pretty largely ad-libbed by the actors, but it's a testament to the screenwriter that I couldn't always tell what was scripted and what wasn't.

I should also point out that the four leads aren't the only funny ones. Michael Pena is hilarious as the hitman McBride is hiring. Though normally a serious actor, he's proven himself a great comedic performer with bizarre turns in Jody Hill's work, like Observe and Report and a scene stealing role in the second season of Eastbound and Down, HBO's pitch-black comedy starring the king scene-stealer himself, Danny McBride.

Ruben Fleischer seems to be a pretty competent director. Zombieland was not only funny, but a really well made film. In 30 Minutes or Less, he seems to know his job is largely to step back and let his cast do their thing. The action is pretty well done, too.

The movie is probably easiest to compare to Pineapple Express, which, while I laughed a lot at it, didn't really work for me in the end. I thought the third act was a mess, and it abandoned the comedy for action and violence. I also thought Gary Cole was poorly used as the villain, who was really given nothing to do. Also, I'm just not too into the stoner thing. 30 Minutes or Less is a lot more successful for me. It keeps the action and the laughs properly coming all the way to the end.

Mac and Me

Hey, everyone! My friend Kent and I decided to try something new and write a review together! The result wound up being pretty long, but we had a lot of fun writing it, and I think it shows. Anyway, if you like what you read, check out his blog here. His review for this is the same as mine, but he has a lot of other stuff on there too.

J: If friendly aliens ever really do come to earth with the intention to share their knowledge with us, I would do my best to make sure they never learned about 1988's Mac and Me. It's not that it's the worst movie I've ever seen (oh, I've seen worse), it's that the intentions behind it are so transparently crass and corporate. I would just be really embarrassed if the aliens ever saw it.

K: Calling this movie corporate doesn't even begin to sum up HOW awful the product placement is in this movie, it was almost painful at times. At one point Coke LITERALLY saves characters lives, there is a dance sequence at a McDonalds that lasts a good 10 minutes, and there are constant references to skittles and Big Macs. I remember LOVING this movie when I was a kid and that made me sad.

J: You missed a great "I'm Lovin' It" opportunity there. I think McDonalds was trying to create a new corporate mascot with Mac. A bunch of companies must have been pissed off for missing the boat on E.T. and decided to make one of their own. So, tell me, Kent, what is Mac and Me about?

K: They had the perfect opportunity to make the same movie about this guy!
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8BSNlaDXn7Bt-OCyoIR6UqSp0HPANctlosRQ5yNUrRd8F8E8XTVOcFg_TDc-6Izzb2IlYCQZKrEdxFQL6hcH3owRu2_WNNfuLEEzAByM7L73EeokTheEyaazk_M0UTdiViq11w0cBfct4/s1600/mactonight.png

I'd much rather watch the same movie about a guy with a moon face who sang and played piano.

But what is Mac and Me about? Aliens, who drink water from straws on the moon......I think, get picked up by a lunar lander, you know from those famous moon landings back in 1988.

J: I thought it was a Mars lander? From the landscape, I thought it was Mars. Also, was it water they were drinking, or was it Mars Coke? If it was, Mars and Mars Coke, then let's assume they lived a Mars-Coke-less existence for the entire year-long transit back to earth. This family of aliens (a mom, a dad, an older kid and Mac) freak out at the government facility they arrive at and escape. This stuff was all pretty unclear. I didn't even realize there were two kids until the end of the movie.

Anyway, the youngest, Mac, gets hit by a car driven by a father and son. Did this father and son take the alien in and then hijinx ensue? No, we never see them again, but it sure felt like they were more important at the time. Instead, Mac sneaks into another car and goes home with a wheelchair kid.

K: It was actually just another part of California, seriously you could tell from landscape, so I guess what was actually going on was immigrants who need coke to live snuck in to California and got picked up by a Mars lander that the military was testing for some reason in southern California. I heard this is in the directors cut but I can't yet confirm that.

My favorite part about the first car that Mac hits, is the kid's reaction. He's not like "Holy crap we just hit some weird alien thing" he's like "dad you're driving like an idiot." which is the logical thing the say at that point. Either way, the handi-capable child, his brother, and Mom move in to a house. Mac moves in with them since he's a young migrant worker on the run from the law. This is where hilarity ensues, see the only people who have seen Mac are the little neighbor girl with the hot older sister and the handi-capable one, I believe his name was Eric. So when Mac decides he wants to turn on all the power tools and allow them to ruin the house ERIC GETS BLAMED! when Mac from some reason moves a bunch of stuff from outside, inside ERIC GETS BLAMED AGAIN! When Mac tries to kill Eric by making him fall off a cliff, oh that goofy eric always trying to kill himself to prove there's an alien in the house.

J: One of my favorite scenes was when Eric and the little girl are trying to catch Mac. They lure him into his bedroom with Coke and Skittles, where Eric tells the girl, "here, strap this vacuum cleaner to your back. We're going to suck him up!" It's really weird that a kid his age would think something like that would even work. Even weirder, it was already established that this is EXACTLY what works. They were vacuumed up by the Mars lander that took them to earth in the first place, which is something that Eric would have no inkling of.

They vacuum Mac up and he causes such a ruckus inside the vacuum bag that the little girl with the vacuum cleaner strapped to her back gets yanked up the wall and across the ceiling like a ragdoll. I have this rule about violence towards children in movies: As long as the kid doesn't cry or show any adverse effects, it is the funniest thing in the world. This movie might have some of the greatest kid violence I've ever seen, with the wheelchair falling off a cliff and the girl getting flung around by a MACuum cleaner. Here is the point where Mac becomes friends with the kids, and they proceed to hide him from the government spooks that come after him.

K: That's the point when Mac get's something like small pox, they never really explain what happened, but they just keep saying he's sick and he looks different he's got some skin lesions or something, so they put him in a Teddy bear outfit and tell everyone it's a toy, that seems to cure him cause this is NEVER mentioned again. ALTHOUGH, this does lead to the BEST scene in the entire movie, it's a long dance scene led by Teddy Bear Mac, followed by a chase scene where FBI agents can't catch a kid in a wheel chair simply because he's going down hill. There's a chase scene in a Steven Seagal movie called "Hard to Kill" where he's being chased in a hospital bed, this is better! the only reason they can't catch this kid is because they're going DOWN A HILL! had he gotten to the bottom 2 minutes before his brother shows up with a Van they would've easily caught him.

J: Let's stop on that McDonalds scene for a minute, it is clearly the centerpiece the entire movie is built around. They take Teddy Bear Mac to a birthday party at McDonalds, which is clearly the most amazing place on earth. There are kids dancing around outside when they get there. And then when they get inside, there are more kids dancing around. When Mac jumps on the counter and starts dancing along, he transforms from a creepy alien puppet into what is clearly a child in a teddy bear suit. The dance number is quite simply the most amazing thing ever put to film.

The thing that struck me about the wheelchair race was that the kid was careening out of control through speeding traffic, and he was smiling and laughing like he was having the time of his life!

I think around this time, there's also a flashback to the alien family's life on Mars. It's played with a sense of Spielbergian wonder, but it really feels kind of weird and unsettling. Something about the aliens' droopy cheeks and permanently puckered lips gives me the willies.

K: Oh yeah McDonalds is clearly one of the greatest wonders of the world. The kids there are all amazed all the time. Mac at one point grabs a McDonald's cup from some kids and the kids just stare in amazement, even before anything's happened! The Teddy bear suit dance scene, the thing that drives me a little crazy about it, is it kinda seems like they couldn't get the Mac puppet to behave how they wanted it to, so they were just like "Grab a kid a throw him in a teddy bear suit" And as the FBI agents come in Eric I believe says "Just keep him dancing" the suit was probably good enough to fool 8 year olds, but the FBI? is that why it took them so long to find Osama Bin Laden? was he just in a McDonald's dancing in a teddy bear suit?

As far as the flashbacks go, what really creeped me out was the aliens legs, none of them bent at all, they had clear knee joints and everything else seemed human enough to expect the knees to bend, but they just walked straight legged all the time.

Moving on Mac leads Eric and his friends to a cave, where he finds his family on the brink of death, sine they've been in a cave and can't get Mars-Coke through straws like they've been able to do for most of their lives.

J: Wow, by now, it seems like this movie should be over. Can't they just find a spaceship home or something? No, instead we get a scene where the Mac Daddy accidentally robs a grocery store at gunpoint. And it goes on from there. I'm not sure if I want to spoil anymore. Kent? Do you want to spoil anymore? Even better, do you have anything GOOD to say about Mac and Me?

K: Well if we spoil any more they'll have no reason to watch the rest. So without saying to much there is a small explosion that makes this movie kinda hilariously awesome toward the end here. The movie was full of hilariously bad moments, but a lot of that is dulled when you realize how EVIL the movie is. The acting's bad, because it's a movie filled with kids who can't act. If you take out the scenes of just pointless product placement it's probably a 45 minute movie. Anything I'm leaving out Jim?

J: The score is by the guy who did the Back to the Future trilogy. He's clearly doing a John Williams impression, but I thought the music was actually pretty good. It sometimes felt out of place against the ridiculous things happening on the screen.

Hey, this was fun. Let's do it again sometime.