Horror fans have known for decades that there is no other movie quite as delightfully crazy banana-pants as Pieces. With the infamous tagline, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre,” Pieces honestly attempts to be a straight-ahead horror film. It’s not.
Toronto residents! If you haven’t seen American Psycho in a while or if you’ve never seen it on the big screen, you’ll get your chance February 17 at the Carlton, where The MUFF Society is putting on a screening of the film at 9:00 p.m.
The quirky genius of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel, American Psycho, lies in the generic nature of its characters and its excoriation of the wretched Yuppie movement of the 1980s. The movie is infused with comedy as dark as motor oil, and social commentary so sharp that watching the movie could cut your retinas. For a certain level of society, this is the definitive Eighties flick, even more cynical and astute than Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
There is also an extended scene with a chainsaw, so that’s an automatic win.
The Mutilator is an oddity in the slasher genre, less for what it is and more for what it is not. If you’re looking for copious amounts of nudity, look elsewhere. There’s not even a lot of bad language. On that level, The Mutilator is more like a live-action Disney movie from the Sixties. You half expect Dean Jones and Don Knotts to show up.
It’s hard to imagine a world without YouTube. It’s even harder to comprehend that it hasn’t been around since the inception of the Internet, but the video-sharing site went live only 11 years ago, on this date. Created by three eBay employees, the company is worth somewhere in the vicinity of $40 billion dollars.
That’s a lot of funny cat videos.
Today marks the date of the murder of Sal Mineo, and if you remember who that guy is, I’m impressed with you. Yeah, you. Congratulations. Mineo remains a mysterious figure of ambiguous sexuality, a man who achieved great fame, lost it, and was on the verge of getting it back when the unthinkable happened.
As anyone will tell you, it’s hard to find a virgin these days. It’s not that I’m actively looking for a virgin or anything. These are the kinds of conversations we have around the house over dinner. Who wants some tea? Please pass the potatoes. When’s the last time you acknowledged the presence of a hymen?
I don’t even know what’s going on anymore. At this point, I feel like the reboot of The X-Files is rick-rolling me.
Never gonna solve this case.
Suck on this mythology.
By now, Mulder and Scully
Are boneheads.
Charlie Chaplin is one of those filmmakers that gets a lot of lip service. For someone who was once the most popular movie star in the world, Chaplin seems to have become the sole property of film schools and scholars, while the general public, the non-academe, have rarely seen a Chaplin movie.
Perhaps modern audiences don’t care about Chaplin because he’s become such a stereotype. His Little Tramp character, with his tiny mustache, cane and awkward waddle, has been played by others and included in cartoons. People see him as that character, not as an accomplished director or composer.
Although Criterion has released Chaplin movies before, perhaps their release of The Kid will be the one that gets regular film fans talking about Chaplin again as the multi-faceted artist he was.
“Dolls are for girls,” say the unenlightened ones, the people who don’t understand that fun has no gender, the folks who have no grasp of nuance in their playtoys. Not to put to fine a point on it, but it’s jerks who say that, usually men, trying to cover up their tiny penises or homosexual tendencies they can’t let the rest of the hunting club notice, lest they be called out and ostracized.
All this to say that, on this day in pop culture, in the year 1964, the G.I. Joe was invented, and it was not a doll. It was an action figure.
Movie studios are often thought of as being owned by faceless bastards, money men, and committees. The reason for that is because it’s true. That is how most studios are. There was a time when some folks set out to change that.