There is no Questionable Taste Theatre this week, since the only movie I can think about at the moment is Lorna Doone, and it was so screamingly awful that I'm making an Abridged Classic out of it for Defenestration.

How bad is it? Well, at one point I said, "This is the slowest two hours of my life so far! How long is this?"

Turns out I was half an hour into it.

This week I am in love with Not Bakula and enjoying the endorphins from discovering something new and amazing. I can't even bring myself to be snarky about a movie this week; I'm filled with that much love. Today, I am 85% love. (And 15% dorkosity.)

So this week in Questionable Taste Theatre, I present SOAPDISH. Soapdish is more or less the soundtrack to my life; not one day goes by wherein I can't quote this movie. Having a family of performers, way more theatre experience than is healthy, and a work history that includes working next to soap-opera writers convinced me that this movie, while it may seem to be a comedy, is in fact exactly like life.

Nutshell: There's a soap opera, which is hilariously bad. Everyone involved? Hilariously bad. Dialogue? Best ever.



Join us for some of my favorite quotes from this movie, partly because the plot defies description, so I won't bother, and partly because, no joke, some of the funniest lines I've ever heard.

( I like the word Peppy, and the word Cheap. Peppy and Cheap. )

You would think that Il Fantasma dell'Opera>would be the first time in a person's life when she would have seen a man getting it on with an animal.

Well, guess what!

Nutshell: An adaptation of Honore Balzac's short story, Passion in the Desert centers around a French officer who gets separated from his regiment and ends up forming a bond with a female leopard who helps to keep him alive. And, uh...other things.



Yeah, those things.

( I almost can't believe I saw this years ago, mostly because you'd think it would have inured me to ratsex. But nope! )

Okay, whatever I do to this movie? IT DESERVES.





ETA: Holy crap, EVERY TIME she says, "I love only Lorenzo!" with her head shaking like a dashboard puppy, I crack up.

ETA 2: This is a film adaptation of "The Decameron." We're boned.

So coming up on Questionable Taste Theatre is a random spate of period dramas. I'm a costume whore, what can I say?

We begin Ye Olde Monthe with the 14th century mystery The Reckoning. (The link goes to the trailer, which is worth seeing.)

Nutshell: Disgraced priest Paul Bettany falls in with a group of traveling actors, led by the MOST SINEWY PERSON IN THE WORLD, Willem Dafoe. When they hit a town that's less interested in morality plays than in convicting the local deaf woman for the murder of a young boy, the troupe ends up caught up in history's first-ever episode of Law & Order: Swyved Victimmes Unit. Which I spoil, so, you know, spoilers.



( She couldn't have done it! SHE COULDN'T HAVE DONE IT! )

An unexpected casualty of Questionable Taste Theatre is going through YouTube for any relevant clips, and then getting lost in a maze of hilarious music videos. Or, worse, someone's funky fetish video collection. (If your usename contains "padded cell" and you have a bunch of clips of women in straightjackets, please, never contact me, okay?)

SO. No video clips of today's film, The Linguini Incident, and almost no pictures, because this movie is so rare that I am the only person who remembers it was ever made.

What this movie has: Roseanna Arquette as a failed escape artist, David Bowie as a bartender on the run from the law, Eszter Balint as a defensive-lingerie designer, and Marlee Matlin as a cashier with a pretzel hairdo and a silver lame uniform.



( The simple plan is, no one in this room is going to have sex with anyone else in this room. We'll be platonic... like our parents. )

I have a review column up at Fantasy magazine, tackling DARK KINGDOM, the Sci-Fi miniseries bastardization of the Volsunga Saga/Niebelungenlied. (They seriously take random elements from each one and smoosh them together like a peanut butter and anchovy sandwich. It's hilarious.)

You guys, it was terrible. It was SO terrible that Julian Sands was in it.

And you know what? If you, as a filmmaker, hire Julian Sands for something, you should just know now that I'm going to come after you.

Also, please everyone marvel at Tempest's coding, of which I dreamed for a brief moment and rejected as impossible before I submitted. I woke this morning to the realization that she was made of win and could pull my innermost hopes directly through my brain.

This week I celebrate my fat-kid-cakeness love of Thunderheart. It has Val Kilmer before he got crazy, Graham Greene before he couldn't get work any more, and EIGHT POUNDS OF PWN.


Enjoy this beautifully-composed shot...right before this dude is killed-ass.

( Who the hell are you, man? )

Never has Emma Thompson's judgemental glare been so painful to me.

Yes, it's Her Alibi. The movie with a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. FIFTEEN PERCENT.

Sure, the majority of it is a stinkfest, but there is not a day that goes by without at least one line from this movie being directly relevant to my own life.

( I love that character of yours, that Peter...Swine? )

This week's movie is Strange Days, the near-future sci-fi flick from 1995. When it came out it polarized audiences, meaning that I loved it and everyone else in the world thought it was awful. In my defense, I was still so young that I had to be driven to the theatre. And also, I just thought it was awesome, okay? I'll never forget the first time I saw it.

WITH MY GRANDMOTHER HAHAHAHAHAHAH oh god. Sorry, Grandma. I didn't know.

(She liked Ralph Fiennes, I liked the trailer, we thought it was gonna be a cool little noir whatever. I DIDN'T KNOW.)

Nutshell: On the eve of the year 2000, ex-cop Lenny navigates the underworld selling two-bit memories and pretending he's on the cutting edge instead of washed up. When one of his contacts is brutally murdered and the killer sends the experience straight to Lenny, Lenny realizes he's in over his head, and he and his limo-driving pistol-whipping friend Mace have to, you know, save the world. Whatever.


In the future, the leading cause of death is confetti-strike.

( By clicking this tag, you will be going back in time to when I was fourteen and I thought this movie was the shit. )

Il Fantasma. Long and winding road blah blah blah blah blah this thing is nearly eight minutes long, and that's because of the editing I gave the ratsex. I'm not sorry.


Part One: here.

Part Two: here.

Part Three: here.

That's right; while other people were holding vigil for religious things, I was worshipping at the altar of Cinema. And of Windows Movie Maker, which, let's face it, is only slightly more useful than a stick when it comes to editing.

By now, everyone knows about Il Fantasma.

Part One of the review is here.

Part Two? Right here.

Okay, so, not content with making a vid showing how much Fantasma sucks, I found some pictures that reinforce how much The Other Boleyn Girl sucks.



( It's an unforgivable crime. Anne Boleyn will hang for this wardrobe! )

Okay.

Abridged Classics: Il Fantasma dell'opera. Part One.


Just remember, this hurts me a lot more than it hurts you. Until the rat sex. Then it probably hurts you more. (My soul is already dead, so it can't be hurt again.)

Of the many horrible things one deals with while watching this movie, you'd think that a terrible script, lack of acting, and lack of general coherence are some of your biggest hurdles. Sadly, you would be wrong.

Asia Argento is a very special young lady (who, at 18, let her father cast her in a movie that required full nudity and included non-consensual sex, which, have some therapy, maybe!).

You know what else she is? The world's WORST LIP-SYNCHER.



The middle portion (she's in the blue suit) might be half-a-second lagged on my version, but I honestly don't remember, because the lip-synching is SO AWFUL that it's impossible to tell.

Maybe they spent all their money on that pipe organ and could only afford one take of all the singing stuff. I don't know. They clearly couldn't afford any video footage of people actually singing opera. Or singing, period.

DAMN YOU, prohibitively expensive underground pipe organ! DAMN YOU.

So we know that the Fantasm de Nastypants is amazingly bad in terms of special effects, convincing screaming, and poolfights.

You know what else is awful about this movie?

The script.



These lines are not dubbed, so it's not even like they're lame because the dubbers had to match lip movements. They're lame because someone seriously wrote down "the river of time and space" and someone else approved it and then someone else SAID IT. ON PURPOSE.

Today's Fantasmgasm is an example of how this movie fails, not just on a "decent storytelling" level, but on some deeper, more frightening "minimal coherence" level.

In yesterday's clip we saw a flaming rat trap filled with babies, and right aftwerwards, some Asia Argento action. It made no sense, sure, but at least we knew that the Phantom was having some visions, that he was thinking about some things that upset or motivated him, and that probably he was going to do something about those things. Maybe not good or even understandable things, but things. The scene was there for a reason.

This scene, which gets no such honors, takes place after Christine has given Raoul the brush-off so she can go make the two-backed beast with the Wigmeister, and his brother takes him someplace to cheer him up.




I would just like you to note that nothing in this scene has any bearing whatsoever on anything else that happens for the remaining 90 minutes of the movie. These poets had a waterfight for nothing, and now I know: this is what it feels like when doves cry.

PS. Check out the dubbing. The dubbing in this movie is AWFUL. And all the scenes with the Phantom are in English; they just shot everything else in Italian and dubbed it in later with the SAME FOUR PEOPLE. DAMN, do I love this movie.

So I've been trying to impress upon everyone I know (and strangers on the subway) that Il Fantasma dell'opera is a crazy movie. As if the making out with rats hadn't convinced you.

While compiling the Review of Doom, I ran across this clip and realized, I don't have to try any more. This does all my work for me.

PS. THE WIG OH GOD THE WIG.

Nothing says "I didn't sleep well" like flailing around Livejournal before noon.

But the sleep deprivation was for the sake of productivity: polishing two short stories*, nerves about dancing tonight, and working on my video proof that Julian Sands eats kittens.

It's beginning to look like a THIRTY-MINUTE REVIEW, which seems like more than this movie deserves, but I have a three-minute sequence just detailing this guy's obsession with whimpering women, and there's hours more where that came from. (Oh, just FYI, the uncut footage of whimpering, where I just slapped it all up to see how long it would be if I let it run? Over TEN MINUTES.)

Also, I vacillate wildly between thinking this movie is a huge failure as a horror/drama or a huge success as a camp comedy. Part of this is the music, which is so much better than this movie deserves that it's sort of painful. Dear Ennio Morricone, if you don't want me to be invested, cease being awesome!

See, just writing this entry I changed my mind from "Man, he has issues with women up the wazoo" to, "But it's SO HILARIOUS we can't possibly be meant to take it seriously," to, "I just DON'T KNOW."

I'm afraid he's totally serious. He seems like he's really into his "art", you know? One of his soundbites about this movie talked about how rats and insects really are telepathic. I'm just saying.


*And some word count on the novel, but man, that's not REMOTELY polished. That's shoving the plot-boulder forward by inches.

I intended to use these hours between my writing group meeting and going dancing to put together my thoughts on The Phantom of the Opera but you know what? Just words are not going to do it justice. I slated it for "Abridged Classics" treatment.

But that's not enough, because an Abridged Classic is five minutes.

So I'll be making teeny clips and using them to illustrate my review of this movie, which is shaping up to be truly massive. I mean, there's a moment where a woman screams, and you realize two things: first, the lady is all gums, and second, she's not screaming so much as she is loosing a water-buffalo mating cry. How can I convey the horror without video? I can't. You guys have to hear this.

Plus, Julian Sands draws out single-syllable words to four, five, sometimes even eighteen syllables. Montage? I THINK SO.

Basically this has become a serious project. I gave it its own icon, because I am that serious.

I have a clipping software; fear me.