Paranoia Preview

“I don’t think that’s what the phrase ‘An Eye for an Eye’ means,” Kyle chimes in. Patrick shakes his head ruefully at what a fool Kyle is. “It does in this case, Kyle,” he says smugly, an extremely smug smirk on his face. “Because he will give us the apple of our eye (the reboot of the century, Fresh Horses) in exchange for the irreplaceable eye of one of us for his other major motion picture he’s got in the pipeline.” Kyle assumes that Patrick must be referring to his own special eye for the art of mise-en-scène or Jamie’s perfect eye for 80’s style muscle montages. He’s shocked to find both Patrick and Jamie staring intently at him instead. “Who? Little ol’ me? I don’t think so. The only film I’d be any good at would be a sequel of…” he gasps. He doesn’t dare say what his heart and brain (and not, to be crude, but his loins) could hope for at this moment. He croaks something incomprehensible and Jamie and Patrick embrace him as he weeps like a small child. “It’s true, Kyle,” Patrick says tenderly. “Marty is making Mannequin 3: Movin’ and Groovin’. And he’s using your script.” Jamie nods along, having remembered that they had sent the script around town ages ago, but you know, these things can take a while. “He says he only put Fresh Horses ahead of it on his schedule because he heard you were busy with the Platonic Solids Series. I assume you want to do it?” Patrick asks and Kyle nods, still blubbering like a child. “So it’s settled, we’re directing Fresh Horses!” Jamie says gleefully. But another strange look has crossed Patrick’s face. “What is it?” Jamie asks. Patrick purses his lips. “It all just seems strangely… convenient.” That’s right! Patrick is getting a little paranoid and so are we as we watch Paranoia. Both Patrick and I have independently seen this film before. Why? Neither of us can remember. Good sign. Let’s go!

Paranoia (2013) – BMeTric: 44.2; Notability: 24

StreetCreditReport.com – BMeTric: top 8.8%; Notability: top 3.6%; Rotten Tomatoes: top 2.5%; Higher BMeT: Scary Movie 5, Movie 43, The Starving Games, After Earth, Getaway, Texas Chainsaw 3D, A Good Day to Die Hard, A Haunted House, Tarzan, Grown Ups 2, The Smurfs 2, The Colony, The Counselor, The Green Inferno, Killing Season, R.I.P.D., The Last Days on Mars, Machete Kills, Runner Runner, The Big Wedding, and 2 more; Higher Notability: Movie 43, The Lone Ranger, Gangster Squad, Kick-Ass 2, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, A Good Day to Die Hard, Scary Movie 5, After Earth, Texas Chainsaw 3D; Lower RT: I Spit on Your Grave 2, The Starving Games, Getaway, Scary Movie 5, Movie 43, The Big Wedding; Notes: It is hard to tell because 2013 was one of those years where I was watching bad movies outside of BMT in a weird way. Like, I’ve seen Smurfs 2, but it isn’t BMT. Machete Kills I’ve seen, but I can’t remember if we did it officially. Texas Chainsaw 3D I think is the one we haven’t done for BMT, but it might have been. See, confusing. I think we’ve seen 11 of the top 20 BMeTs though. This gets closer than I would think.

RogerEbert.com – 1 star –  The last time that Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman shared the screen together, the former was politely but firmly imploring the latter to get off of his plane in the somber 1997 docudrama “Air Force One.” Now, after all these years, the two have reunited for the slightly less plausible “Paranoia” and once again find themselves going down in flames, this time inadvertently. Here is a film that clearly wants to be a gripping techno-thriller but feels as if it was designed both by and for people who still have not quite figured out how to get their Kindles to work.

(Huge zinger, and also 100% correct. It is a completely braindead movie which can’t even figure out how to make Liam Hemsworth look like a nerd. It is a very weird film.)

Trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bdZWrW6HnA/

(That trailer is legit the entire movie. And yeah, can you tell it is super terrible.)

Directors – Robert Luketic – ( Known For: Legally Blonde; Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!; Titsiana Booberini; The Wedding Year; Future BMT: Monster-in-Law; The Ugly Truth; 21; BMT: Killers; Paranoia; Notes: Austrailian. Has kind of bounced around doing television since this film.)

Writers – Joseph Finder – ( Future BMT: High Crimes; BMT: Paranoia; Notes: Wrote the novel. High Crimes with Ashley Judd being another of his novels is amusing.)

Barry Levy – ( Known For: Wolves of Wall Street; The Brotherhood; Future BMT: Vantage Point; BMT: Paranoia; Notes: Also mostly just wrote television since. Has some television movie which claims is completed directed by a Mexican actress.)

Jason Hall – ( Known For: Thank You for Your Service; American Sniper; Gran Turismo; Spread; Spread; BMT: Paranoia; Notes: Nominated for an Oscar for American Sniper. Honestly, an untitled Navy Seal project is the most interesting probably-fake upcoming project for this guy.)

Actors – Liam Hemsworth – ( Known For: Triangle; The Hunger Games; The Expendables 2; The Hunger Games: Catching Fire; Love and Honor; The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2; The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Empire State; Lonely Planet; Land of Bad; Poker Face; Cut Bank; The Dressmaker; The Duel; Isn’t It Romantic; Killerman; Arkansas; F1; Future BMT: The Last Song; Knowing; BMT: Paranoia; Independence Day: Resurgence; Notes: Nominated for an Emmy … for a short form series called Most Dangerous Game? Oh I forgot he’s the new Witcher in what apparently is a terrible recent season of that show.)

Harrison Ford – ( Known For: Star Wars; Apocalypse Now; Blade Runner; Raiders of the Lost Ark; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; The Empire Strikes Back; Return of the Jedi; Working Girl; Frantic; What Lies Beneath; The Fugitive; Presumed Innocent; The Mosquito Coast; Regarding Henry; Six Days Seven Nights; Sabrina; K-19: The Widowmaker; Witness; Future BMT: The Devil’s Own; Extraordinary Measures; Jimmy Hollywood; BMT: Hollywood Homicide; Random Hearts; Firewall; Paranoia; The Expendables 3; Notes: The quintessential old man Harrison Ford film. Notably only ever nominated for Witness. Look at that filmography though. Ridic.)

Gary Oldman – ( Known For: The Fifth Element; Léon: The Professional; The Dark Knight; Batman Begins; True Romance; Basquiat; Romeo Is Bleeding; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; State of Grace; JFK; Jesus; Interstate 60; The Book of Eli; The Contender; Murder in the First; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2; Air Force One; The Backwoods; Future BMT: Hannibal; The Unborn; Criminal Law; Planet 51; Criminal; BMT: Lost in Space; The Scarlet Letter; Tiptoes; Red Riding Hood; Paranoia; The Space Between Us; Hunter Killer; Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard; Notes: Nominated for an Oscar twice (Mank, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and won once (Darkest Hour). He has a very fun career as indicated by the perfect mix of BMT and amazing non-BMT films. But then also just really fun films (Air Force One, The Fifth Element).)

Budget/Gross – $35,000,000 / Domestic: $7,388,654 (Worldwide: $17,056,265)

(Huge disaster. But I guess just renting the cars and filming in some mansion on Long Island is going to bump that budget. Oh, and the two huge stars.)

Rotten Tomatoes – 8% (8/105): Clichéd and unoriginal, Paranoia is a middling techno-thriller with indifferent performances and a shortage of thrills.

(Yeah this was chosen for being <10% on RT. And indeed, the performances are very middling.)

Reviewer Highlight: Fixates on the perils and panic of our modern surveillance culture while itself proving to be borderline unwatchable. – Nick Schager, Time Out

Poster – Pair, Annoying

(I like that little pun I put there even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense. A classically bad poster. It is in fact what I would call, and excuse the technical jargon, “very bad.” The only positive here is that it’s not doing too much. It’s very clean. D)

Tagline(s) – In a war between kings even a pawn can change the game. (C+)

(You know, I don’t think I like this. It’s actually more of a classic style tagline than I think I would have expected. Kind of long and telling you more of the story than you really need. At least it’s a metaphor, so not entirely boring. Trying something.)

Keyword(s) – imdb-keyword-based-on-novel;based-on-book

Top 10: Fight Club (1999), Forrest Gump (1994), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Shutter Island (2010), Schindler’s List (1993), The Prestige (2006)

Future BMT: 74.9 The Turning (2020), 72.6 Zoom (2006), 70.3 London Fields (2018), 69.6 Gulliver’s Travels (2010), 67.3 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), 66.3 102 Dalmatians (2000), 65.5 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (2017), 64.3 Valentine (2001), 59.5 The Big Bounce (2004), 58.1 Best Defense (1984), 58.0 The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), 55.5 Hanging Up (2000), 55.4 Eye of the Beholder (1999), 55.2 Snow Dogs (2002), 54.3 The Divorce (2003), 53.9 Abandon (2002), 53.4 The Stepford Wives (2004), 52.5 Addicted (2014), 50.8 Freedomland (2006), 50.1 Kull: The Conqueror (1997)

BMT: Battlefield Earth (2000), Dragonball Evolution (2009), Cats (2019), Left Behind (2014), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Jaws 3-D (1983), One Missed Call (2008), Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), The Bye Bye Man (2017), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), Striptease (1996), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Firestarter (2022), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011), Tarot (2024), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Haunting (1999), Fair Game (1995), Eragon (2006), After We Fell (2021), North (1994), Monkeybone (2001), The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Conan the Barbarian (2011), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), An American Haunting (2005), The Snowman (2017), The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007), Sliver (1993), Pinocchio (2002), The Musketeer (2001), After Ever Happy (2022), Shanghai Surprise (1986), Get Carter (2000), Exit to Eden (1994), After (2019), Alex Cross (2012), Queen of the Damned (2002), Congo (1995), …

Best Options (rt <10): 72.6 Zoom (2006), 70.3 London Fields (2018), 58.1 Best Defense (1984), 55.4 Eye of the Beholder (1999), 52.5 Addicted (2014), 50.0 King Solomon’s Mines (1985), 48.5 Blood and Chocolate (2007), 46.0 Surviving Christmas (2004), 44.2 Paranoia (2013), 38.9 When Time Ran Out… (1980), 38.9 Intersection (1994), 34.9 Hero and the Terror (1988), 33.4 The Awakening (1980), 27.7 The Lonely Lady (1983), 25.1 King David (1985), 21.9 Wired (1989), 16.2 Worth Winning (1989), 13.6 That Was Then… This Is Now (1985)

(So many, but a lot are kind of borderline in reality. You should see the Now a Major Motion Picture for this thing. It is glorious.)

Welcome to Earf (HoE Number 8) – The shortest path through The Movie Database cast lists using only BMT films is: Harrison Ford is No. 2 billed in Paranoia and No. 1 billed in Hollywood Homicide, which also stars Josh Hartnett (No. 2 billed) who is in Here on Earth (No. 3 billed) => (2 + 1) + (2 + 3) = 8. There is no shorter path at the moment.

Eye for an Eye Recap

Jamie

It took me just about two chapters of Eye for an Eye to be like “ah, alright. I think I’m good.” The book is insane. Just a pure injection of Death Wish fanaticism. Now you aren’t even safe in the suburbs. And when the teen nogoodniks come a-knockin’, guess what? You aren’t even gonna get justice because the system will just let them go. Now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Jamie, this is just what the books were like back then. The movies followed. What’s the big whoop?’ You don’t understand. Not only do these nogoodniks kill the main character’s daughter (sparing her granddaughter), but then her surviving son-in-law kills himself and the baby right after that. He is so jaded by the world and the only way he knows to protect his daughter is to kill her. At that point I threw the book out a window. No thank you. As my own child would say, “Pee-yew.” Maybe this is just a product of the book coming out in 1993… kind of the tail of the urban crime hysteria of the 80’s and 90’s… you gotta step it up. Does she really need so much motivation to take up vigilante justice? I guess the author thought so.

To recap, Karen is a housewife with two great daughters and a loving husband. One day, chatting with her daughter on the way back from work, she is horrified to hear a man break into her house and kill her! My word! Horrible. Karen is shocked and has trouble grieving. It seems like things are turning around when the clear culprit, a horrible delivery man named Robert Doob, is apprehended with DNA evidence in spades. However, things go from bad to worse when he is released on a technicality. Karen begins to attend a survivor’s group and catches wind of a group that helps people like her get justice. They will set the plan in motion, get her a weapon and the rest is up to her. She starts preparing, all the while also following Robert Doob around. She even catches him scoping his next victim, but the police, who are sympathetic, still can’t do anything. When it’s revealed that a friend from the group is an undercover FBI agent (and kind of sort of knows what she’s up to) and Doob starts following her surviving child around school, she decides to drop it all. That is until Doob strikes again. Plan back in motion! She tricks her family into leaving town without her and breaks into Doob’s apartment. Doob knows it’s her and goes to her house that night for the big climactic confrontation. Well you know how that goes. Doob is donzo and the police and her family arrive only in time to reluctantly agree that they will chalk it all up to self defense and let it lie. THE END.

It’s a little hard to be jokey with this type of material, but let’s just be clear that this film does in fact have one of the funniest scenes ever put to film. Our boy Kiefer Sutherland has a scene that focuses on his drumming along intensely to a music video, becoming bored, throwing his drumsticks to the side in favor of some ice cream (or ‘scream as the kids call it), which he eats from his apartment’s balcony. The purpose of the scene? I guess to make us laugh. Not sure. Anyway, this actually is exploitative garbage riding on the high of the OJ Simpson trial. They even show footage of the trial as part of the film. It’s really brazen and bad. I usually kind of brush off critics getting all stuffy about this stuff, but really… this is no bueno. Belongs on the paperback book stands and not really in a big theatrical release (at least not one that doesn’t at least hedge a little on the ethics of it all… things turn out pretty great for her). Anyway, thank god for the absolutely stacked cast of this garbage film. The acting is actually at times out of this world. Too bad it’s in service of Death Wish 6.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me drumming manically while watching a music video in my flophouse.* Let’s go!

The Good? The cast is pretty incredible. That is maybe the only good thing you can really say about the film which was (1) late to the game to harp on super criminals and indulge in vigilante justice garbage, (2) not even particularly interesting while doing it.

The Bad? Everything else, but honestly mostly Kiefer. Kiefer is not fun. Kiefer is gross and upsetting in this film. And I get that that is the point, but you really should just channel Lithgow in Ricochet when you are doing stuff like this. More phone book prison gladiators, and less extremely graphic rape scenes please.

The BMT? This is a bad movie. I never want to watch it again. It is a relic of the time it was made, which I suppose makes it of interest when I start my Media Studies PhD on the evolution of the Super Criminal phenomenon as seen through newspaper, film, and television. Otherwise I have no interest in this weirdness. Ebert said it best: one star, “Eye for an Eye is a particularly nasty little example of audience manipulation”.

The Rewatchables? What’s aged the worst? I think, as usual with films like this, the entire “super criminal” vibe the film has going. By the time this film comes out crime would have already started falling in the US. The “That Guy” Award for Angela Paton who leads the support group in this film, but is also the innkeeper in Groundhog Day. The Overacting Award has to go to Kiefer … seriously go watch the drumming scene. It is insane. And we get a wild Needle Drop in the middle of the film for the Macarena, which I suppose is appropriate given when the movie was released (January, 1996).

I’m going to start recording some great giffable moments. Cliche Gif – Ed Harris is sitting in the dark and turns on the light when she walks in the room. Best Gif – I think for like a celebratory thing at around 28 minutes the detective says “we got him” which I would change to “we got it”. A muted celebration, but it works. Craziest gif – at 48 minutes Kiefer says “pull the fucking trigger”, although the gif truly could not do justice to how weird he says it.

Love a Cameo (Who?) for Cynthia Rothrock as the self-defence instructor. And a true blue Product Placement (What?) for I think maybe like 14 times where someone drinks a Pepsi, or has a Pepsi at a party, or you see a Pepsi machine. A Setting as a Character (Where?) for Los Angeles. And Crazy Setting (When?) for the Macarena blasting during a scene setting this almost certainly 1995 or 1996. This movie is straight unpleasant and Bad.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Eye for an Eye Preview

“I don’t understand, how have I not heard of this till now?” Jamie asks, absolutely baffled by the mock up poster adorning the cover of Patrick’s advance copy of Fresh Horses. Instead of Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald (as we all know and love), the poster now featured… Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy. “And now they’re older?” Jamie asks, even more baffled. “Sure, I mean I think the movie is more like a legacy sequel, but obviously the original play is unchanged. I’ll explain it all in the introduction. Boy, Dick Computer is really gonna hate that we’re working on this,” Patrick explains with delight. First up, research. Kyle pops some popping corn. Jamie grabs their well worn DVD copy of Fresh Horses (the Funky is implied). Patrick distributes the cable knit sweaters, although they all know that’s a mistake. Things are gonna heat up once they get their Funk on. Turns out that’s an understatement. By the time Matt watches Jewel walk away, tears in his eyes, they are fully funkified. Jamie asks what they’re all thinking. “Why aren’t we doing this movie?” His words are soft, but the weight they carry is heavy. Here they were thinking they were pulling a fast one on Dick Computer and turns out they pulled a fast one on themselves. “You’re right,” Patrick says resolutely, “We have to do this. Put the Platonic Solids on ice cubes. We’re directing a movie.” Turns out that’s easier said than done. When Patrick gets off the phone with the producer he’s got a strange look on his face. “Unbelievable.” Patrick explains. “He says they already have their director. Marty is all in on it. He says Marty will only let us have it for a little quid pro quo. A little eye for an eye.” That’s right! We’re watching the Sally Field classic Eye for an Eye. The one annoyance here is that the book actually just says “Now a Major Motion Picture” on it, but doesn’t have the dignity to put Sally Field on the cover or the credits on the back. For shame. Let’s go!

Eye for an Eye (1996) – BMeTric: 23.5; Notability: 20

StreetCreditReport.com – BMeTric: top 22.8%; Notability: top 8.4%; Rotten Tomatoes: top 2.1%; Higher BMeT: Barb Wire, Kazaam, Bio-Dome, Striptease, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, The Crow: City of Angels, Ed, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Spy Hard, Poison Ivy 2: Lily, The Glimmer Man, Eddie, D3: The Mighty Ducks, Bordello of Blood, First Kid, Celtic Pride, Dunston Checks In, The Quest, Chain Reaction, and 37 more; Higher Notability: Bed of Roses, Chain Reaction, Spy Hard, The Fan, The Associate, Down Periscope, Jingle All the Way, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, D3: The Mighty Ducks, Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, Bordello of Blood, Before and After, Up Close & Personal, Barb Wire, Space Truckers, The Sunchaser, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Glimmer Man, Daylight, Maximum Risk, and 1 more; Lower RT: The Dentist, Bio-Dome, Kazaam, Ed, Spy Hard; Notes: Wow, we’ve seen 13 of the top 20 BMeTs for 1996. For a while we were really not doing ‘90s films, but in the past few years we’ve managed to claw our way to decent coverage.

RogerEbert.com – 1.0 stars – “Eye for an Eye” is a particularly nasty little example of audience manipulation leading to a conclusion that, had I accepted it, would have left me feeling unclean. It’s about an ordinary woman who is led to seek blood revenge, in a plot where the deck is stacked so blatantly it’s shameless. It’s ironic that this movie is being released at the same time as “Dead Man Walking.” Both are about killers and their victims, and both are, in a way, about the death penalty. “Dead Man Walking” challenges us to deal with a wide range of ethical and moral issues. “Eye for an Eye” cynically blinkers us, excluding morality as much as it can, to service an exploitation plot.

(Yuuuuup. I wonder, if I gathered together all of the vigilante justice films together, how many Ebert would have panned. I just checked the very weird film The Star Chamber. He gave it two stars, but mainly because it just became a routine thriller in the end. It is an intriguing question.)

Trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY56N6irNCk/

(Jesus, they kind of go for it with this trailer. They put Kiefer’s weirdo performance front and center and dare you to go and see this ridiculous film. For me this is a terrible trailer for the exact reason Ebert suggests: it is manipulative.)

Directors – John Schlesinger – ( Known For: Pacific Heights; Marathon Man; Midnight Cowboy; Far from the Madding Crowd; Yanks; The Day of the Locust; Darling; A Kind of Loving; Cold Comfort Farm; Billy Liar; The Falcon and the Snowman; Sunday Bloody Sunday; Terminus; Honky Tonk Freeway; Visions of Eight; The Innocent; An Englishman Abroad; A Question of Attribution; Madame Sousatzka; The Tale of Sweeney Todd; Future BMT: The Believers; BMT: The Next Best Thing; Eye for an Eye; Notes: won and Oscar for Midnight Cowboy, and was nominated for Darling and Sunday Bloody Sunday. We already saw his last ever feature film (The Next Best Thing). He died in 2003.)

Writers – Erika Holzer – ( BMT: Eye for an Eye; Notes: Wrote the book.)

Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver – ( Known For: Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Jurassic World; Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes; Jurassic World; In the Heart of the Sea; Avatar: The Way of Water; Avatar: The Way of Water; Avatar: Fire and Ash; Avatar: Fire and Ash; War for the Planet of the Apes; Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; Mulan; Avatar 4; Avatar 5; Future BMT: The Relic; BMT: Eye for an Eye; Notes: They’re like … huge writers. Wrote Jurassic World, and the second and third Avatar films, a bunch of the Planet of the Apes films. What the heck? Basically, hugely commercially and critically successful after their first two films qualified.)

Actors – Sally Field – ( Known For: Forrest Gump; Spoiler Alert; 80 for Brady; Mrs. Doubtfire; Steel Magnolias; Stay Hungry; Smokey and the Bandit; Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey; Home for the Holidays; Beyond the Poseidon Adventure; Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco; Soapdish; Not Without My Daughter; Murphy’s Romance; The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning; Places in the Heart; Punchline; Norma Rae; The End; The Way West; Future BMT: Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde; Surrender; Where the Heart Is; BMT: Say It Isn’t So; Smokey and the Bandit II; Eye for an Eye; Notes: Won two Oscars for Norma Rae and Places in the Heart (which had the famous “You really like me!” speech). Was also nominated for Lincoln. She’s unbelievably attractive in the Smokey and the Bandit series.)

Kiefer Sutherland – ( Known For: Paradise Found; Stand by Me; A Few Good Men; Desert Saints; The Lost Boys; Flatliners; The Vanishing; A Time to Kill; To End All Wars; Max Dugan Returns; Phone Booth; Beat; Dark City; Dead Heat; The Last Days of Frankie the Fly; Freeway; Truth or Consequences, N.M.; River Queen; Young Guns; The Killing Time; Future BMT: Renegades; Taking Lives; The Sentinel; Mirrors; The Nutcracker Prince; The Cowboy Way; The Wild; BMT: The Three Musketeers; Young Guns II; Eye for an Eye; Pompeii; Marmaduke; Zoolander 2; Flatliners; Notes: Won two Emmy for 24. It is genuinely the one and only time people watched him act and were like … this guy is good at acting. There is something insanely magnetic about his performances though. Like movies warp around him.)

Ed Harris – ( Known For: A History of Violence; Absolute Power; Enemy at the Gates; A Beautiful Mind; Apollo 13; The Hours; Copying Beethoven; State of Grace; The Abyss; The Human Stain; Gone Baby Gone; Nixon; Knightriders; Long Day’s Journey into Night; Masked and Anonymous; Borderline; Stepmom; China Moon; Glengarry Glen Ross; Buffalo Soldiers; Future BMT: Needful Things; National Treasure: Book of Secrets; Milk Money; Just Cause; Radio; Man on a Ledge; Phantom; BMT: Eye for an Eye; Geostorm; Notes: Nominated for four Oscars (Apollo 13, The Truman Show, Pollock, and The Hours). Kind of crazy he won’t get it in the end. As much as a wish I could believe it, he’s 75 now, and the last few performances I saw him do he was looking a little old to go for an awards play.)

Budget/Gross – $20 million / Domestic: $26,877,589 (Worldwide: $26,877,589)

(That’s a disaster, but also I’m not sure I really believe the budget. In 1996 we were giving rote thrillers $20 million? Maybe because of the cast.)

Rotten Tomatoes – 7% (3/41): Overwrought, thinly written, and all-around unpleasant, Eye for an Eye crudely exploits every parent’s nightmare with deeply offensive results.

(Whoa! That’s low. Like … real low. Like lower than Paranoia which we chose because it was so poorly received. All-around unpleasant just about describes it.)

Reviewer Highlight: A B movie that somehow won the lottery and got an A-movie cast and director. – Joe Leydon, Variety

Poster – Sklog for a Sklog

(It’s amazing that there was a time where this poster made sense. That you could see it in a theater and be like ‘oh, sure.’ It’s like a joke poster now. What if justice fails? Obviously you have to blow away the perps, you middle-aged housewife, you. Anyway, it’s not even all that interesting. But at least it’s blue. C-.)

Tagline(s) – What do you do when justice fails? (C)

(Insane. Certainly I can see why this is considered the kind of grabby statement that would be the tagline for your movie. But it’s still insane.)

Keyword(s) – imdb-keyword-based-on-novel;based-on-book

Top 10: Fight Club (1999), Forrest Gump (1994), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Shutter Island (2010), Schindler’s List (1993), The Prestige (2006)

Future BMT: 74.9 The Turning (2020), 72.6 Zoom (2006), 70.2 London Fields (2018), 69.6 Gulliver’s Travels (2010), 67.3 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), 66.3 102 Dalmatians (2000), 65.4 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (2017), 64.2 Valentine (2001), 59.5 The Big Bounce (2004), 58.1 Best Defense (1984), 57.9 The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), 55.5 Hanging Up (2000), 55.4 Eye of the Beholder (1999), 55.2 Snow Dogs (2002), 54.3 The Divorce (2003), 53.9 Abandon (2002), 53.3 The Stepford Wives (2004), 52.5 Addicted (2014), 50.8 Freedomland (2006), 50.0 Kull: The Conqueror (1997)

BMT: Battlefield Earth (2000), Dragonball Evolution (2009), Cats (2019), Left Behind (2014), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Jaws 3-D (1983), One Missed Call (2008), Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), The Bye Bye Man (2017), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), Striptease (1996), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Firestarter (2022), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011), Tarot (2024), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Haunting (1999), Fair Game (1995), Eragon (2006), After We Fell (2021), North (1994), Monkeybone (2001), The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Conan the Barbarian (2011), After Ever Happy (2022), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), An American Haunting (2005), The Snowman (2017), The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007), Sliver (1993), Pinocchio (2002), The Musketeer (2001), Shanghai Surprise (1986), Get Carter (2000), Exit to Eden (1994), After (2019), Alex Cross (2012), Queen of the Damned (2002), Congo (1995), …

Best Options (Sneaks): 50.8 Freedomland (2006), 42.2 What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (2001), 37.3 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), 30.0 What’s Your Number? (2011)

(David  Keith plays O.G. in Sneaks and is in Eye for an Eye, but the TMDB ordering is wonky on weirdo films like Sneaks so he’s very low billed. The other solid option was What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, but I think it ended up as a blind spot since it was originally the comedy option. Possibly you couldn’t get to cycle #2 as well, but I can’t remember.)

Welcome to Earf (HoE Number 8) – The shortest path through The Movie Database cast lists using only BMT films is: Sally Field is No. 1 billed in Eye for an Eye and No. 4 billed in Say It Isn’t So, which also stars Chris Klein (No. 1 billed) who is in Here on Earth (No. 2 billed) => (1 + 4) + (1 + 2) = 8. There is no shorter path at the moment.

All the Pretty Horses Recap

Jamie

A lot of the books we are “reading” for this cycle are more trash than treasure. And when we get a classic like The Three Musketeers, it’s more of a joke that Kiefer Sutherland is staring at me from the cover as I read it. All the Pretty Horses is a real outlier. Not only is the book amazing (controversial opinion alert), but the cover is actually not all that embarrassing to have staring back at you. It’s a serious take at the adaptation, although Billy Bob Thornton and Matt Damon seem to disagree. As for my memory of this film in BMT lore… I actually don’t have any. I don’t really recall this movie coming out. Probably with the bad press a-swirling and being recut to resemble a romance western film, we took a look at it and passed hard in favor of What Women Want, a true Christmas classic.

To recap, our boy John Grady Cole is sad. Sad because his family ranch is being sold off by his absentee mother. His dad is traumatized by the war and his Grandpa has died and everything is terrible. Time to head down to Mexico with his friend Rawlins to find the old cowboy way. They pick up a crazy kid, Blevins, on the way and work their way towards the ranching area. Blevins ends up losing his horse and gun during a thunderstorm and goes a bit crazy when he realizes they were sold off in a nearby town. He steals back his horse and makes a run for it, leaving Cole and Rawlins to continue onto the ranch on their own. After arriving and getting some low level jobs, Cole decides they should show their chops by breaking a group of wild horses. The boss is impressed and moves Cole into the horse business and uses him to help breed a stallion he bought. Meanwhile Cole finds himself falling for the boss’s daughter, Alejandra. The boss and his aunt don’t like this and ultimately give Cole and Rawlins over to the Mexican police, who are looking for them in connection to Blevins. Ultimately, they are sent to jail and Blevins is murdered. Both Rawlins and Cole barely survive attacks in the prison before the aunt helps free them. Returning for Alejandra, Cole confronts the aunt who admits she only freed them on the condition that they leave and claims Alejandra has agreed not to see him. Cole scoffs like a scoffer and contacts Alejandra and meets her at a train station where they make sweet, sweet love. He thinks they are gonna run away together given the lovemaking and such, but she’s like “I can’t” and leaves him. Jaded, Cole returns to the Mexican police to get their horses back and does so by taking the corrupt captain hostage. In the process he’s injured and barely survives his return to the US. There he returns Rawlins’s horse. THE END.

I mean, come on. I kinda love that this movie ended up qualifying and we are here watching it for BMT, because it is simply not that bad of a movie. In fact I would say it’s a pretty good movie. Not even really that bad of an adaptation, despite what Thornton and Damon say. I can see their point, that the book does not have a particularly romantic tone, so having a producer try to cut your film up to be something it’s not is probably pretty annoying. But it doesn’t really mean the movie actually is bad. This definitely seems influenced largely by just how beloved the book is. I also think the bad press by Thornton and Damon probably wasn’t helping, nor was the involvement of Weinstein, who was deep in his Oscar campaign shenanigans at the time. But I very much enjoyed watching this movie. I also think this is some of the finest work Damon has done. Showing some real acting chops. Henry Thomas is also pretty great. I liked it!

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me working haaaard on the ranch when Penelope Cruz rides by and my eyes bug out like a cartoon character, and then my head turns into a wolf’s head and I howl and my tongue rolls out on the ground.* Let’s go!

The Good? I actually liked this movie quite a bit. It is a faithful adaptation of what is something of a revisionist western. I do think the back third is a mess, but the first third especially does a lot to translate what makes the book great into a movie. Specifically, the thing I like about the book (which shares a lot of DNA with some of McMurtry’s westerns) is the idea of the “true cowboy” in post-WWII America and the question of whether the cowboy can or should exist. The image of a cowboy riding along a highway basically. I also think Damon and Henry Thomas were much better than expected. I had figured going in the acting was going to be a sore spot, but it really isn’t the issue.

The Bad? The only major issue is that every so often you can see the “indulgent” version of the movie leaking through, especially in the back third. There is a moment where a guy is just like dancing while Damon is on the phone and then it is suggested it is all in Damon’s head. And then soon after there is a slow motion shot at the train platform of a man picking up a little girl in his arms. Both shots are absurd. Amateurish, almost. I have a feeling that the version Billy Bob Thornton showed to the executives which got a bee in their bonnet was the version with like 60 other weird artsy nonsense shots like that. The edit is likely just stripping all of that stuff out. The back third suffers for it, it feels incredibly rushed and if you hadn’t read the books I can’t imagine it makes any sense whatsoever.

The BMT? Nope, I think this movie is good. As far as the difference between critical receptions then and now this is a decent example. The movie might not be the best film in the world, but it would get like 60-70% on RT now. It is a very nice looking western and a faithful adaptation of a beloved book. The idea that it would get trounced by critics is just impossible.

The Rewatchable? What aged the worst? Just giving Penelope Cruz nothing to do in the movie, seemed to genuinely derail her American career a bit. The that guy award kind of goes to Henry Thomas, Elliott from E.T., who I thought had basically retired from acting in the ‘80s, but nope. Still acts. Out of left field, the overacting award? Billy Bob Thornton gets a rare Overdirecting nod. The occasional directorial flourish he threw into the film never failed to make it worse.

I do like this for a Setting as a Character (Where?) for Mexico, it is a very Mexico film in the end. I actually don’t think the twist (that Penelope Cruz decides to never see Damon again as per her agreement with her father) is bad, genuinely quite good. It being a “revisionist romance” would be one of my hot takes. The movie is Good, through and through.

Cheers,

The Sklogs

All the Pretty Horses Preview

“That book was amazing,” Kyle says breathlessly as they leave Dick Computer’s office. “Can I read it?” The look of hope and wonder breaks Patrick’s heart. He explains that the book isn’t real. A classic delay tactic so that by the time they can deliver Platonic Solids Series Part III: Cubey or Not Cubey it will be long forgotten in the cascade of money and fame that the best entry in the series will bring. “Right… the best entry,” Jamie says, a nervous note entering his voice. Patrick isn’t ready to face even the idea of writer’s block, let alone the actual block itself. He’s never encountered such a thing, churning out several books a year under a variety of pen names. Suddenly that gives him an idea. Maybe working on something like Bad Movie Tribe was just the trick. Not Bad Movie Tribe itself, of course. He wouldn’t give Dick Computer the satisfaction. He huffs out loud as he recalls his demand that they shorten the imaginary book. Jamie was right. The perfect length for a book was 400 pages with 25 page chapters. You hit Chapter 13 and you know you’re sliding in for a good time. Jamie huffs in agreement as he is also at that moment remembering the insult. No, they wouldn’t give Dick Computer the satisfaction. In fact… “Jamie, can you bring up the list of books I’ve taken advances for in the last 18 months?” Patrick asks as they return to their apartment. Jamie pulls open the filing cabinet marked with a dollar sign and leafs through it. “What’s the smallest one?” Patrick asks. Jamie looks for a moment. “Uh, you got $4000 to write the introduction to a new media tie-in edition of a play for an upcoming remake of… Fresh Horses!?” That’s right! I know no prettier horse than our beloved Funky Fresh Horses. But alas, we have to watch All the Pretty Horses itself this week. It’s shocking that it qualifies given the pedigree, but the star and director both trashed the film after Miramax recut it. Recut a beloved book adaptation to make it more commercial? What could go wrong? Let’s go!

All the Pretty Horses (2000) – BMeTric: 32.8; Notability: 25

StreetCreditReport.com – BMeTric: top 22.4%; Notability: top 6.4%; Rotten Tomatoes: top 27.7%; Higher BMeT: Battlefield Earth, Dungeons & Dragons, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Urban Legends: Final Cut, Baise-moi, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, Cruel Intentions 2, Highlander: Endgame, 102 Dalmatians, Dracula 2000, Leprechaun in the Hood, Supernova, Little Nicky, The Next Best Thing, Big Momma’s House, From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter, Get Carter, Beethoven’s 3rd, and 36 more; Higher Notability: Gone in Sixty Seconds, The 6th Day, Little Nicky, Get Carter, Dracula 2000, Next Friday, Dude, Where’s My Car?, Mission to Mars, Bless the Child, Pay It Forward, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Loser, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Romeo Must Die, Rules of Engagement, 28 Days; Lower RT: Beethoven’s 3rd, Fortress 2, Battlefield Earth, Down to You, Bless the Child, Lost Souls, Heavy Metal 2000, Dungeons & Dragons, Eye of the Beholder, The Skulls, Supernova, Get Carter, The Watcher, Boys and Girls, Highlander: Endgame, The Ladies Man, Urban Legends: Final Cut, Hanging Up, Red Planet, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, and 45 more; Notes: We’ve seen 11 of 20 of the top BMeT for 2000 which is pretty good. I think the next on the docket should be Nutty Professor 2, but you could convince me to watch the entire Beethoven series obviously.

RogerEbert.com – 3.5 stars – This is the kind of movie that’s best to see on a big screen, where the size of the sky and the colors of the land can do their work. It’s as if the events are bigger than the people–as if John Grady Cole will never again be such a reckless damn fool kid as he was during this year and will always sort of regret that.

(I do love when we get to do films that Ebert genuinely seemed to love. I can see it though. The book is amazing, and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that if you vibe with it you genuinely like the adaptation.)

Trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygkQ8SjjQk/

(What is this music!? What the fuck haha? The film being advertised as a romance is kind of crazy. You have to know the book as almost being an anti-western anti-romance to know this is either an interesting adaptation or an absurd ad campaign. “Accused of a crime he didn’t commit” … didn’t he?)

Directors – Billy Bob Thornton – ( Known For: Sling Blade; Daddy and Them; Jayne Mansfield’s Car; BMT: All the Pretty Horses; Notes: Won an Oscar for writing Sling Blade, as was nominated for acting twice (A Simple Plan, and Sling Blade). This seemed to somewhat end his major directing career, but that’s possibly because he got pretty famous as an actor soon after.)

Writers – Ted Tally – ( Known For: The Silence of the Lambs; Red Dragon; The Father Clements Story; White Palace; 12 Strong; Shrek 2; Future BMT: The Juror; Before and After; BMT: All the Pretty Horses; Notes: Won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs. 12 Strong was the only thing he’s done recently, probably retired.)

Cormac McCarthy – ( Known For: The Road; The Sunset Limited; Child of God; The Gardener’s Son; No Country for Old Men; The Sunset Limited; Future BMT: The Counselor; BMT: All the Pretty Horses; Notes: Y’all know Cormac. He died only a few years ago. I need to read his other books though, this one was amazing.)

Actors – Matt Damon – ( Known For: Ocean’s Eleven; Ocean’s Twelve; Syriana; Ocean’s Thirteen; Saving Private Ryan; Good Will Hunting; The Talented Mr. Ripley; The Good Shepherd; The Departed; Rounders; Chasing Amy; Stuck on You; Dogma; The Bourne Supremacy; The Bourne Ultimatum; Gerry; Courage Under Fire; The Third Wheel; The Legend of Bagger Vance; Mystic Pizza; Future BMT: The Brothers Grimm; The Monuments Men; The Great Wall; Suburbicon; BMT: All the Pretty Horses; Notes: This being our first Damon seems crazy, but it is crazier he’s only been in four qualifying films. He really has just an incredible career, winding along into and out of A-list status. He now seems to do what he wants. He’s been nominated three times for acting (Good Will Hunting, Invictus, The Martian))

Henry Thomas – ( Known For: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; Desperation; Gangs of New York; Suicide Kings; Legends of the Fall; I’m with Lucy; Frog Dreaming; 11:14; The Last Sin Eater; Psycho IV: The Beginning; Valmont; Fire in the Sky; I Capture the Castle; Cloak & Dagger; The Quickie; Misfire: The Rise and Fall of the Shooting Gallery; Dead Birds; Suffering Man’s Charity; Niagara, Niagara; Misunderstood; Future BMT: Dear John; BMT: All the Pretty Horses; Notes: I have to be honest, I didn’t know he was in so much stuff. He’s still acting. He’s always been acting. He’s most recently been in the Fall of the House of Usher series.)

Lucas Black – ( Known For: Jarhead; The Miracle Worker; Cold Mountain; Killer Diller; Sling Blade; Friday Night Lights; Deepwater; Get Low; Unsung Hero; Seven Days in Utopia; 42; Promised Land; Our Friend, Martin; Furious 7; Ghosts of Mississippi; The X-Files; Flash; F9; Future BMT: Legion; Crazy in Alabama; The War; BMT: All the Pretty Horses; The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift; Notes: I guess semi-discovered by Billy Bob Thornton for Sling Blade. Again, him not being in more BMT films is the surprise. Ended up back in the Fast & Furious series finally, the third one is surprisingly fun.)

Budget/Gross – $57,000,000 / Domestic: $15,540,353 (Worldwide: $18,133,495)

(This is a huge disaster. The budget isn’t a surprise. Period piece with a lot of horse wrangling seems like a recipe for a flop.)

Rotten Tomatoes – 32% (32/100): This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel comes off as rather flat and uninvolving. Scenes feel rushed and done in shorthand, and the romance between Damon and Cruz has no sparks.

(Well, again, the romance in the book is a little like that. There isn’t much as far as indicating they have the grand romance you think of in books like this. I do think if that was an intentional adaptation choice it is a mistake. You either ignore or lean into the romance, making it the way the book does makes it feel half-assed.)

Reviewer Highlight: Whether you’re familiar with the story or not, you’ll have trouble feeling connected to it. – Steven Rosen, Denver Post

Poster – All the Funky Fresh Horses

(A little too classic and, honestly, pretty to stir much emotion in me. I like the overall orange tone to it, but it’s just a very safe poster. It’s not bad. B)

Tagline(s) – Some passions can never be tamed. (A)

(Hmmm, interesting. I like it. I can definitely see how the marketing for the book probably rubbed people the wrong way. Make it into a teen love story essentially. But I like that this is working in the horses and love, etc. Ignoring the book, I think this is quite good.)

Keyword(s) – imdb-keyword-based-on-novel;based-on-book

Top 10: Fight Club (1999), Forrest Gump (1994), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Shutter Island (2010), Schindler’s List (1993), The Prestige (2006)

Future BMT: 74.9 The Turning (2020), 72.6 Zoom (2006), 70.2 London Fields (2018), 69.6 Gulliver’s Travels (2010), 67.3 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), 66.3 102 Dalmatians (2000), 65.4 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (2017), 64.2 Valentine (2001), 59.5 The Big Bounce (2004), 58.1 Best Defense (1984), 57.9 The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), 55.5 Hanging Up (2000), 55.4 Eye of the Beholder (1999), 55.2 Snow Dogs (2002), 54.3 The Divorce (2003), 53.9 Abandon (2002), 53.3 The Stepford Wives (2004), 52.5 Addicted (2014), 50.8 Freedomland (2006), 50.0 Kull: The Conqueror (1997)

BMT: Battlefield Earth (2000), Dragonball Evolution (2009), Cats (2019), Left Behind (2014), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Jaws 3-D (1983), One Missed Call (2008), Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), The Bye Bye Man (2017), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), Striptease (1996), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Firestarter (2022), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011), Tarot (2024), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Haunting (1999), Fair Game (1995), Eragon (2006), After We Fell (2021), North (1994), Monkeybone (2001), The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Conan the Barbarian (2011), After Ever Happy (2022), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), An American Haunting (2005), The Snowman (2017), The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007), Sliver (1993), Pinocchio (2002), The Musketeer (2001), Shanghai Surprise (1986), Get Carter (2000), Exit to Eden (1994), After (2019), Alex Cross (2012), Queen of the Damned (2002), Congo (1995), …

Best Options (Romance): 54.3 The Divorce (2003), 53.9 Abandon (2002), 52.5 Addicted (2014), 46.0 Surviving Christmas (2004), 45.1 King Ralph (1991), 40.5 Admission (2013), 39.5 Stroker Ace (1983), 38.9 Intersection (1994), 36.6 The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004), 34.8 Drive Me Crazy (1999), 34.4 How to Deal (2003), 33.8 Must Love Dogs (2005), 33.3 The Last Song (2010), 32.9 Mary Reilly (1996), 32.8 All the Pretty Horses (2000), 30.1 Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), 30.0 What’s Your Number? (2011), 29.8 Nights in Rodanthe (2008), 28.8 The Love Letter (1999), 27.8 Dying Young (1991), 26.7 The Saint (1997), 26.5 The Nanny Diaries (2007), 24.6 Up Close & Personal (1996), 24.6 Dear John (2010), 23.8 Tulip Fever (2017), 22.3 Year of the Gun (1991), 21.7 The Giver (2014), 21.6 The Evening Star (1996), 21.6 The Lucky One (2012), 21.0 Charlie St. Cloud (2010), 18.9 Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), 18.3 2 Hearts (2020), 17.0 The Beach (2000), 16.2 Worth Winning (1989), 15.7 Feast of Love (2007), 15.3 Stanley & Iris (1990), 14.7 Not Easily Broken (2009), 14.2 The Best of Me (2014), 13.4 Where the Heart Is (2000), 12.5 Stella (1990), 11.5 Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), 10.7 Bicentennial Man (1999), 10.7 A Good Year (2006), 10.5 Redeeming Love (2022), 10.3 Labor Day (2013), 9.3 P.S. I Love You (2007), 9.2 One Day (2011), 7.8 The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), 6.5 The Phantom of the Opera (2004), 5.5 Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), 4.7 The Ultimate Gift (2006)

(A lot of these are borderline. The one we probably had the best bet of getting “Now a Major Motion Picture” versions of the book would be Must Love Dogs. King Ralph being based on a book is reeeeeeeal borderline.)

Welcome to Earf (HoE Number 15) – The shortest path through The Movie Database cast lists using only BMT films is: Penélope Cruz is No. 4 billed in All the Pretty Horses and No. 2 billed in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which also stars Nicolas Cage (No. 1 billed) who is in The Wicker Man (No. 1 billed) which also stars Leelee Sobieski (No. 6 billed) who is in Here on Earth (No. 1 billed) => (4 + 2) + (1 + 1) + (6 + 1) = 15. If we were to watch Sahara, and Two for the Money we can get the HoE Number down to 15.

Notes – In 2014, Billy Bob Thornton told Entertainment Weekly that the rumors of his original cut being somewhere in between 3 to 4h long were incorrect, but that his cut was 2:42h. He also mentioned that he still is in possession of his original version.

Jesse Plemons, who was cast as the younger version of John Grady Cole, didn’t know all his scenes had been removed from the final cut until he actually saw the film with friends and family.

Some attempts have been made to release a director’s cut DVD, but arrangements cannot be reached with the composer of the film’s music, Daniel Lanois. As part of the re-cut, Harvey Weinstein scrapped the original score and hired Marty Stuart. Lanois felt insulted, and has steadfastly refused to license his score (which, unusually, he owns) to any release of the film.

Cormac McCarthy visited the set during the making of the film. The author apparently spent little time fraternizing with the main cast and crew. He instead spent much of his visit discussing firearms with the prop master.

An assembly cut, which ran around 3 hours and 40 minutes, was shown to producers before the final edit was finished. They were told they were viewing an unfinished movie and not to make judgments. Billy Bob Thornton was still working on his final edit, but the studio wanted to see something. Thornton agreed to it, but regrets it to this day. Former Miramax marketing head Dennis Rice had this to say: “It was the most self-indulgent director’s cut I’d ever seen. It was like torture to watch that movie.” Thornton’s eventual edit ran around 2hrs 42m. Matt Damon and others that saw this final version thought it was a masterpiece. Wanting it even shorter, the studio took it away from Thornton, and cut to it’s final length of 1hr 56m. They also replaced a beautiful haunting music score by legendary music producer Daniel Lanois with a soundtrack by Marty Stewart. It broke everyone’s heart that had put so much love into the project. Thornton’s version has never been seen or released to the public.

Thinner Recap

Jamie

I am an unabashed Stephen King super fan. I have read, by my count, twenty-six of what is listed as novels in his bibliography (some are pretty borderline, but they count!). I’ve read a few of his collections as well. So when you get a chance to read lucky number twenty-slevin AND get to have that be a beautiful media tie-in version with the stunning poster on the cover… well… you do it. My conclusion? The book is weird. I kind of like it in the Cujo or Pet Semetary kind of way. The difference with those really dark books is that this also has The Shining style main character who is a giant piece of shit and gets driven crazy by his circumstances. So that’s a bit unusual for a book and you can dig into that. But it’s also all about a gypsy curse… and no one really bats an eye at the idea that this group of Romani are winding their way around New England. Was this a thing that happened in the 70’s that no one talks about? This is Stephen King before he kicked the habit kind of stuff.

To recap, Billy Halleck is a kind of scuzzy small town lawyer. He occasionally gets mobsters off. He occasionally ogles the Romani gals that pass through his Connecticut town (naturally). He very very occasionally eats. And his family loves him for it. One night his wife decides to get a little handsy in the automobile (if you know what I mean) and our boy Billy, being distracted, totally smashes into an old Romani woman. Despite manslaughtering this old lady, Billy gets off due to his connections to the judge and police chief. While leaving court, an even older Romani man who leads the group touches him and curses him with the word “Thinner.” And boy howdy, does he. He starts dropping weight like crazy. At first he’s like “dope.” Then it starts to feel less and less dope as the weight keeps coming off and he has to eat and eat just to slow the decline (and he looks crazy doing it). Eventually the local doctor and his wife insist he go to a clinic for treatment. Knowing it’s a gypsy curse, he declines. He goes and sees the judge and lawyer and they are also being totally owned by curses. So he goes in search of the Romani. He tracks them down and confronts them but they not-so-politely decline to remove the curse. Billy then recruits his mobster friend to help and after terrorizing them for a while they agree to remove the curse. This is done by putting the curse in a pie (not joking) and feeding the pie to someone who will take on the curse. Now, you have to understand that Billy at this point has become unreasonably focused on the culpability of his wife in the whole affair. He is absolutely convinced that she should have gotten cursed because she got up in his business in the car. So that’s why ultimately he feeds the pie to his wife, but is shocked and horrified to find that his daughter ate it too and he done fudged up bad because he’s a huge piece of shit. THE END.

There are aspects of Thinner that I enjoyed. Some of the makeup and effects, particularly one dream sequence involving the cursed judge driving a car into a semi, are pretty good. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of the film that has the production quality of a TV movie. Which kind of makes sense given the director also directed a TV movie adaptation of a Stephen King short story, The Langoliers. The really glaring issue with the film is the performance by the main actor Robert John Burke. You always want an actor willing to go for it… but maybe not this much. His performance is unintentionally quite funny as he makes crazy silly faces in his fat suit. Most of the actors are willing to treat the material in a soapy fun way, which is good, but his performance falls just over the line and really messes with the tone. As for the adaptation, my only quibble is an extraneous addition to the film where Billy imagines that his wife is having an affair with their doctor. Which I don’t think is needed. Works better if he’s just a bad person and slowly driven insane. 

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me admiring my super thin body as an old man looks on confused. He mouths “thinner?” and I look at him and mouth “don’t mind if I do” much to his horror* Let’s go!

The Book? One of the rare ones I read prior to watching the film. The book is about twice as long as it needs to be, but that is par for the course for King. I love King, but his best books are the ones that use their length well. It. The Shining. To some extent ‘salem’s Lot. This felt more like a short story that had an extra 100 pages stuck into the middle of it. The middle really really sags. But beyond the fact that the storyline would now be consider very very racist, the idea I kind of dug, and the “twist” ending is fun. Again, though, I like the books of his which go for the happy-ish ending more than the “ooo the good guy kind of sucked the whole time!” endings he sometimes pulls out. Anyways, mid-tier King for me as far as the book goes.

The Good? Hmmm, the only good stuff in the movie is the good stuff they pulled from the book I think. The fact that it kind of ends up looking more like a revenge tale, the fact that the main character haaaaaaates his wife by the end of it, the off-the-beaten-track New England of it all. The good stuff is the story which is why they adapt King books in the first place.

The Bad? It looks like a TV Movie. The acting is abominable. The middle of the movie also sags. Did I mention the acting is terrible? The main character, I don’t know … he probably had gone insane from the application of all the fat make-up during the course of filming, but he looks absurd 95% of the time. The whole thing now looks like amateur hour, but that is maybe what happens when you try and do a full body fat suit movie five years before you could even do a bad version like Big Momma’s House. Honestly, what it really needed was commitment from a crazy actor willing to gain and lose a crazy amount of weight. The guy never actually looks as thin as the book suggests he is. He is supposed to be a walking skeleton. With CGI I bet they could do a real creepy version of this film now.

The BMT? I mean you have to collect them all. And by “all” I mean all Stephen King adaptations. This is just a shade above the truly dire of his though, but it has cred to make it worthwhile to watch.

Rewatchable? For what’s aged the worst, it is obviously the gypsy storyline. You actually genuinely couldn’t get away with it these days. The “that guy” award goes to Michael Constantine, who you might remember from the My Big Fat Greek Wedding series, he plays the king gypsy in this and he’s the father in that. And finally obviously Joe Mantegna gets the overacting award, but that can be forgiven since the character is written that way in the book too.

A good Setting as a Character (Where?) for Maine as the ultimate setting of the climax of the film. I’ve been to the lighthouse where the final confrontation happens. And Worst Twist (How?) for the ultimate conclusion that he kills himself and his entire family with the curse in the end because he sucks. The film is Bad, merely by not being bad enough to be a fun Stephen King adaptation.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs

Thinner Preview

The book is in fact a dramatic,and lightly fictionalized, recounting of Patrick, Jamie and Kyle’s time as judges for People Magazine’s 2022 Sexiest Man of the Year Issue. (“Ha! The gosh darn Three Musketeers! You guys picked Guy Fieri. Amazing.”) But it’s steampunk. 1840. Austria. (“So that’s why there is a Frankenstein’s monster! Perfect.”) We have to decide who is the sexiest. Dr. Victor Frankenstein (“Pretty sexy”), Frankenstein’s monster (“Getting warmer”), a wolfman (“Can’t get sexier than that”), or United States President Martin Van Buren (“Oh snap. You got sexier. LL Cool Chops himself.”). As you can imagine there is a lot of political pressure to choose Dr. Victor Frankenstein. So we do the only thing you can do, hold a steampunk gala and see who wins a dance off. (“MVB wins that in a landslide.”) But wait, our brilliant idea is backfiring. People are wondering why we can’t be the Sexiest Men of the Year. It’s a good question, but the problem is our professional dance background. (“Naturally.”) We know if we get on that dance floor we will absolutely embarrass Martin Van Buren. He will literally split his pants trying to out dance us and blow his shot in the 1940 election, which in the steampunk version of history he wins and there is no Civil War. (“Of course.”) Ultimately we choose the only path that can save history: we crown local chef celebrity and host Guy Thaddeus Farrier the winner and even Martin Van Buren is like ‘Yeah, I get it.’ (“I get it, too”). And that’s it. 

Dick Computer is beaming. “Just one last thing, how long is it?” Jamie quickly says 400 pages, the perfect length for a book. Mr. Computer thinks for a moment. “Make it thinner and we have a book.” That’s right! We did make it Thinner and are watching the Stephen King adaptation for the week. I’ve been reading a ton of King in the last year and so it was just a matter of course to read this book (even though I unfortunately haven’t typically gotten the privilege to read the media tie-in editions of his other books). Let’s go!

Thinner (1996) – BMeTric: 37.2; Notability: 33

StreetCreditReport.com – BMeTric: top 16.0%; Notability: top 20.4%; Rotten Tomatoes: top 18.7%; Higher BMeT: Barb Wire, Kazaam, Bio-Dome, Striptease, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Crow: City of Angels, Ed, Hellraiser: Bloodline, The Stupids, Mr. Wrong, Spy Hard, Solo, Adrenalin: Fear the Rush, The Glimmer Man, Eddie, D3: The Mighty Ducks, Big Bully, Bordello of Blood, First Kid, Celtic Pride, and 20 more; Higher Notability: Spy Hard, The Fan, Jingle All the Way, Eddie, Dear God, The Associate, Up Close & Personal, Bogus, Chain Reaction, Eye for an Eye, Girl 6, Mulholland Falls, Daylight, Mary Reilly, Joe’s Apartment, Before and After, Surviving Picasso, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Sgt. Bilko, Dunston Checks In, and 31 more; Lower RT: The Dentist, Big Bully, Adrenalin: Fear the Rush, Getting Away with Murder, Bio-Dome, Kazaam, Ed, Mr. Wrong, Faithful, Spy Hard, Eye for an Eye, Bulletproof, Solo, House Arrest, Curdled, The Glimmer Man, In Love and War, Larger Than Life, Striptease, Down Periscope, and 26 more; Notes: For BMeT we’ve seen 13 of the top 20, which is solid. We are starting to really hit up a lot of the top films from the ‘90s. Amazingly, it seems like this film never played on television in the late-’90s? Seems impossible, but maybe it was just that big of a catastrophe?

New York Times – But as such ventures go, this Halloween handout is more treat than trick, if your tastes run to dripping blood and repellent skin ailments. The production is slick, the Maine scenery is bracing, the characters are well-acted, and in a mumbo-jumbo movie with a few loose ends, the makeup central to the plot and applied by Greg Cannom and Bob Laden to Robert John Burke in the leading role is most admirable.

(I genuinely do not agree. The film is fun in its own way. But the main character (and all the actors really) are quite bad and it looks bad too. But to each their own.)

Trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN4NcET1R-k/

(The tone is all over the place!! Hilarious, the music. It is insane. The new shape of terror *shot of an old man cackling” lol. This looks like garbage. So funny. I love this trailer, given what the movie actually is, this is ridiculous.)

Directors – Tom Holland – ( Known For: Child’s Play; Fright Night; Rock, Paper, Scissors; Future BMT: Fatal Beauty; The Temp; BMT: Thinner; Notes: A horror director almost exclusively, except for Fatal Beauty is kind of a cop drama? Seems nuts, has Whoopi Goldberg and for some reason I thought it was based on a book, but I don’t think so.)

Writers – Stephen King – ( Known For: The Shawshank Redemption; The Green Mile; The Shining; It; Stand by Me; The Mist; It: Chapter Two; 1408; Misery; Doctor Sleep; Carrie; Secret Window; The Running Man; Carrie; Gerald’s Game; Pet Sematary; Pet Sematary; Christine; The Long Walk; The Monkey; Future BMT: Creepshow 2; Needful Things; The Mangler; Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice; BMT: The Dark Tower; Dreamcatcher; Children of the Corn; The Lawnmower Man; Maximum Overdrive; Firestarter; Thinner; Sleepwalkers; Firestarter; The Rage: Carrie 2; Graveyard Shift; Notes: Only four to go! That would be amazing. To be able to say that I’ve seen all of the bad Stephen King adaptations. I’ve maybe seen 20 films based on Stephen King books which is crazy.)

Michael McDowell – ( Known For: Beetlejuice; The Nightmare Before Christmas; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; Tales from the Darkside: The Movie; Cold Moon; BMT: Thinner; Notes: Did this kill his career? He legit has some incredible films / adaptations here, and then after Thinner it just is nothing but “based on characters by”.)

Tom Holland – ( Known For: Child’s Play; Fright Night; Fright Night; Psycho II; Fright Night Part 2; Class of 1984; Cloak & Dagger; The Beast Within; Scream for Help; BMT: Thinner; Notes: Wall to wall horror film. I do love when horror people are just horror people, you know? Helped define an era of horror.)

Actors – Robert John Burke – ( Known For: Limitless; Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; BlacKkKlansman; Munich; 2 Guns; Tombstone; Safe; Cop Land; Good Night, and Good Luck.; Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; True Story; Brooklyn’s Finest; Boston Strangler; Speak; Intrusion; Heaven & Earth; Connie and Carla; The Unbelievable Truth; The Oh in Ohio; Dust Devil; Future BMT: Hide and Seek; Miracle at St. Anna; The Ex; Fled; If Lucy Fell; BMT: RoboCop 3; Thinner; Notes: I was like, where do I know this guy from. He’s played the IA asshole in SVU 30 times, and I watched an inordinate number of SVU episodes over the years. I was so confused, I thought the main guy was Jeffery Combs. Nope. Crazy, the make up in this film makes him look totally different in my opinion.)

Joe Mantegna – ( Known For: The Godfather Part III; The Simpsons Movie; Three Amigos!; The Money Pit; Searching for Bobby Fischer; Bugsy; Celebrity; House of Games; Redbelt; Alice; Forget Paris; Edmond; Suspect; Albino Alligator; Homicide; Nine Lives; Liberty Heights; Elvis and Anabelle; Things Change; Critical Condition; Future BMT: Cars 2; Baby’s Day Out; Airheads; Eye for an Eye; Up Close & Personal; Witless Protection; BMT: Valentine’s Day; Thinner; Body of Evidence; Notes: Hell yeah. Nominated for three Emmy for The Rat Pack, The Last Dawn, and The Starter Wife, all in the miniseries category. Took over the lead in Criminal Minds and then was ultimately in over 300 episodes of that.)

Lucinda Jenney – ( Known For: Rain Man; Remember the Titans; Thelma & Louise; S.W.A.T.; Leaving Las Vegas; Born on the Fourth of July; What Dreams May Come; G.I. Jane; The Mothman Prophecies; Thirteen Days; Peggy Sue Got Married; Crazy/Beautiful; The Deep End of the Ocean; 3 from Hell; Matinee; Mr. Jones; Grace of My Heart; American Heart; How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog; Crime + Punishment in Suburbia; Future BMT: Practical Magic; Mad City; The Final Season; Wired; BMT: Thinner; Notes: She’s been working very steadily since the 90s, but I’m going to be honest. I really don’t remember her in anything. I’ve seen so many of her movies!)

Budget/Gross – $8-17 million / Domestic: $15,315,484 (Worldwide: $15,315,484)

(I kind of figured. The weird thing is I don’t think the film is such a bomb that it would be effectively worthless for television. So I don’t get it. It isn’t very violent, you can cut out some of the racier things. So why did this movie never play on television? I guess my last idea is that the poster/VHS cover is so enticing that the home video sales were gangbusters and so they didn’t want to risk that? Doesn’t make much sense. Oh … I wonder if King specifically didn’t allow it to play on television. That could make sense.)

Rotten Tomatoes – 19% (5/26): A bland, weightless horror film that seems to want to mock itself as the proceedings drag on.

(Weightless. Get it? I don’t think it is mocking itself. It just runs like a TV movie and that just comes across as not taking itself seriously. I’m willing to bet it is taking itself deathly serious.)

Reviewer Highlight: Reduced to some raw-boned ideas, the film version of “Stephen King’s Thinner” is horror lite. This is a meat and potatoes genre outing rich on starch but short in providing the basic requirements for nutritional scare fare. It’s one of the more pedestrian translations of the shockmeister’s books, and is headed for the video remainders pile after a brief, lackluster theatrical run. – Leonard Klady, Variety

Poster – Thinner Thinner Chicken Dinner

(I mean… this is horrible right. As bad as a poster can be that tries to do something with the font and has a bold purple color scheme. It looks like something you’d see today for some Tubi original film. No offense. I love Tubi. But this is bad. Still, they tried kinda, so I’ll be nice. C-.)

Tagline(s) – Let The Curse Fit The Crime. (A)

(Hmmm, you know this is actually good even if it didn’t necessarily sound like it when I first read it. A little twist on a phrase. Short and sweet and tells you what’s up. It’s not just good. But very good.)

Keyword(s) – imdb-keyword-based-on-novel;based-on-book

Top 10: Fight Club (1999), Forrest Gump (1994), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Shutter Island (2010), Schindler’s List (1993), The Prestige (2006)

Future BMT: 74.9 The Turning (2020), 72.6 Zoom (2006), 69.6 Gulliver’s Travels (2010), 67.3 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), 66.3 102 Dalmatians (2000), 65.3 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (2017), 64.2 Valentine (2001), 57.9 The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), 55.5 Hanging Up (2000), 55.4 Eye of the Beholder (1999), 55.2 Snow Dogs (2002), 54.3 The Divorce (2003), 53.9 Abandon (2002), 53.3 The Stepford Wives (2004), 52.4 Addicted (2014), 50.8 Freedomland (2006), 50.0 Kull: The Conqueror (1997), 49.9 King Solomon’s Mines (1985), 49.5 Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000), 48.7 The Jungle Book 2 (2003)

BMT: Battlefield Earth (2000), Dragonball Evolution (2009), Cats (2019), Left Behind (2014), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Jaws 3-D (1983), One Missed Call (2008), Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), The Bye Bye Man (2017), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), Striptease (1996), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Firestarter (2022), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011), Tarot (2024), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Haunting (1999), Fair Game (1995), Eragon (2006), After We Fell (2021), North (1994), Monkeybone (2001), The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Conan the Barbarian (2011), After Ever Happy (2022), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), An American Haunting (2005), The Snowman (2017), The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007), Sliver (1993), Pinocchio (2002), The Musketeer (2001), Shanghai Surprise (1986), Get Carter (2000), Exit to Eden (1994), After (2019), Alex Cross (2012), Queen of the Damned (2002), Congo (1995), …

Best Options (Horror): 74.9 The Turning (2020), 64.2 Valentine (2001), 53.3 The Stepford Wives (2004), 48.4 Blood and Chocolate (2007), 41.4 Diabolique (1996), 40.4 Village of the Damned (1995), 40.2 In Dreams (1999), 39.2 Hideaway (1995), 37.3 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), 37.2 Thinner (1996), 37.0 The Amityville Horror (2005), 36.7 The Relic (1997), 33.3 The Awakening (1980), 32.9 Mary Reilly (1996), 32.5 Victor Frankenstein (2015), 30.1 The Night Listener (2006), 28.9 Bad Moon (1996), 28.9 The Phantom of the Opera (1989), 27.0 The Puppet Masters (1994), 21.4 The Believers (1987), 18.0 Ghost Story (1981)

(Again, we were really going for the ones where you could get the “now a major motion picture” covers. This was also enticing just because we both like reading Stephen King books (although, honestly, I find a lot of them junky, and (spoiler) this was no exception).)

Welcome to Earf (HoE Number 19) – The shortest path through The Movie Database cast lists using only BMT films is: Robert John Burke is No. 1 billed in Thinner and No. 1 billed in RoboCop 3, which also stars Rip Torn (No. 3 billed) who is in Senseless (No. 4 billed) which also stars Matthew Lillard (No. 3 billed) who is in Wicker Park (No. 3 billed) which also stars Josh Hartnett (No. 1 billed) who is in Here on Earth (No. 3 billed) => (1 + 1) + (3 + 4) + (3 + 3) + (1 + 3) = 19. If we were to watch Fled, and Biker Boyz we can get the HoE Number down to 17.

Notes – While in production, cowriter/director Tom Holland was stricken with Bell’s Palsy, a virus that paralyzed one side of his face. The effects could have been minimized had he gotten a steroid shot immediately, but the producers insisted he keep working, so it was 36 hours before he got to a doctor. It took more than a year and a half for him to fully recover.

Robert John Burke lost 20 pounds to play the role.

At his thinnest, Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) weighed 120 pounds which was a challenge for the FX crew, as the actor weighed 160 pounds at the time of production.

Originally the crew planned to do a more gruesome FX makeup which would have had Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke)’s flesh dangling off his protruding jaw and cheekbones. Partway into filming they decided that this look was too horrific.

Depending upon the stage of his character’s deterioration, Robert John Burke had to spend four to six hours each day in the makeup chair.

The Three Musketeers (1993) Recap

Jamie

The Three Musketeers was my personal favorite of the picks for this Now a Major Motion Picture cycle. There are three keys to getting a perfect Now a Major Motion Picture media tie-in edition of a book. First, it has to say something like “Now a Major Motion Picture” on the front cover. Second, it has to have a picture of the actors on the cover (or at the very least a version of the poster for the film). Third, and potentially most important, it has to have the credits for the film on the back cover. If you get those three things you have a perfect media tie-in. The Three Musketeers had all three of these (so as I read I could gander at Keifer Sutherland’s beautiful face) while also being the unabridged version of a classic. A classic from which the adaptation depicted on the cover deviates significantly. My short review of the book: it’s fun! Like an old school adventure novel. Has the feel of almost improvisation at times which is probably because, like the Bad Movie Twins story, it was being written as a serial. Really fun. 

To recap, our boy D’Artagnan is heading on to grand Paris to join up with the Musketeers. Unbeknownst to him Cardinal Richelieu has used his influence over the young King Louis XIII to disband the Musketeers… all but three (but which three, I wonder). Arriving in Paris he immediately gets into it with Athos, Porthos and Aramis and finds himself in a duel with them. This is rudely interrupted by the Cardinal’s guards and D’Artagnan acquits himself quite well dueling them. Unfortunately he is captured as more guards arrive. After escaping his cell, D’Artagnan overhears a plan by the Cardinal to form a treaty with the Duke of Buckingham with the ultimate goal to supplant the King. After being sentenced to death, D’Artagnan is rescued by the Three Musketeers, who boldly ride off in a big ol’ action set piece. They agree that they should intercept the treaty and save the day. When they are attacked by the Cardinal’s forces, the gang splits up and eventually D’Artagnan falls into the clutches of Milady. Bum bum bum. He is smitten because she is so beautiful and evil. Eventually the Three Musketeers capture her and the treaty and she reveals the Cardinal’s plot to assassinate the King before throwing herself from a cliff. Athos is devastated because she was so beautiful and evil. They all rally the Musketeers across the land and arrive at the King’s birthday celebration just in time to interrupt the assassination. They fight a whole bunch. They kill people left and right and are almost killed themselves. Eventually they win and D’Artagnan becomes a Musketeer and wins the heart of his beautiful and good lady love. THE END.

I can’t change who I am. This movie is fun and all them critics are a bunch of Debby Downers wanting us to watch The Remains of the Day or whatever. “Why do we need another Three Musketeers adaptation?” they cry. I’ll tell you why. Fun. The book is a gosh darn adventure classic and you’re like, ‘nah’? Get out of here with that. Now, is this a perfect movie? Alas, no. The cadre of actors they got for these parts are not exactly suited to the King’s English. The lines flow like molasses as they work their way through them. Rebecca De Morney has been good in some things (Never Talk to Strangers, anyone?). This is not one of them. Kill two birds with one stone and update the language, my guys. Then you’d have an answer for the reason the adaptation exists (besides being fun). You make it cool because the book is cool and it deserved a cool 90’s blockbuster adaptation. Anyway, I’ll leave you with this little hot take: I think Chris O’Donnell is actually very well cast in this. In fact the casting is great. It’s just that they didn’t do anyone any favors by trying to make they speak all old fashioned.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me swashbuckling around and wenching haaaaard* let’s go!

The Good? C’mon now, that cast! How did this movie claim a $30 million budget and that cast! The downside is Platt and Curry appear to be the only ones who know what movie they are in. The upside being Oliver Platt! Just wall the wall clowning around. This walked so Marvel could run. Sutherland appears to think he’s in a deathly serious adaptation of a classic piece of literature. Platt knows he’s doing a bit of buffoonery. The movie is just fun. It is genuinely like Pirate of the Caribbean. It seems it just took a while for the critics to get on the same wavelength.

The Bad? I guess, some might call the accent work non-existent because it is, and thus as an adaptation of one of our great works of literature it is an abomination. I would not be that person. I would be a person who would say Tim Curry, love the guy, but hooooo boy, it is maybe just a little too over the top for me. And De Mornay is something of a charisma black hole (although something tells me they hired her as Milady for a different reason…). This is tough because I liked the film, but I do see why in the early ‘90s critics would be like, “No no no! This is not how it is done!”

The BMT? In previous years there were basically two axes on which to judge BMT. Horribleness and Ridiculousness. A ridiculous movie would be something like Battlefield Earth. And a horrible movie would be something like Gods and Generals. Now Gods and Generals isn’t really considered BMT, it is considered Bad. So what is the equivalent for Good? Well, that’s the new category: gifability. This film is good, but it is also amazingly gifable at the same time. Porthos in particular is a gif machine. It is something you have to see to believe.

Rewatchable? For what’s aged the best I think just letting the actors use their own accents is an underrated choice. It is something maybe people should consider revisiting. It probably makes making the movie cheaper as well. Let Kiefer Kiefer, you know? The heat check in the movie I think is Julie Delphy, it is a bit jarring to realize she’s in it. The “that guy” award goes to Michael Wincott who has been in several BMT and BMT adjacent films from that era, like 1492, The Crow, and Along Came a Spider. And finally obviously Tim Curry gets the overacting award.

Amazingly we do not get a Planchet award. The character doesn’t even appear. I think he was replaced by the rando who keeps trying to duel D’Artagnan and mostly just looks pale and laughs dumbly at him before being embarrassed. Setting as a Character (Where?) sure, for Paris. And I guess for the time we have a Secret Holiday Film (When?) for the king’s birthday which, at least in England, would certainly be considered a holiday. But that is it. The film is Good and I’ll duel anyone who dares suggest otherwise.

Cheers,

The Sklogs

The Three Musketeers (1993) Preview

“So it’s like the Bad Movie Twins meets Frankenstein and the Wolfman?” Patrick’s new publisher Richard Computer says, a look of intense concentration on his face. Uncertain about how his improvised pitch is going, Jamie takes off his glasses and sighs deeply, hoping to lend an air of gravitas to everything he’s saying. “Frankenstein’s monster actually,” he corrects. Richard turns and looks out the window, saying with a tone of disappointment in his voice, “Yes, well, unfortunately Frankenstein’s monster is out this season. If it were Frankenstein I might be more interested. As for Wolfmen, well they haven’t been in since 1994.” At that Richard laughs heartily and Jamie curses his bad luck. Patrick jumps in, annoyed at Jamie’s gaffe. “Yes, well really the monsters are only a minor aspect of the story. In fact, I think my co-author here forgot that we removed them entirely in the latest draft,” Patrick really gives Jamie the stink eye as he says that. Richard looks skeptical, but eventually leans back in his chair, “continue.” Jamie launches into a jazz-like riff on the exact length of the novel and how the chapters are laid out. “The chapters are exactly the length for optimal satisfaction. Not too long. Not too short. Bee-dee-doo-bah-doo-bop.” Patrick is aghast. “Mannequins,” Kyle says suddenly while spinning a globe idly in the corner. “Excuse me?” Richard asks, now truly confused. “Patrick, who are these people? Where is your book? You do have a book, don’t you? Because we gave you a pretty hefty advance on this.” The vibes in the room are not good and Patrick has to think fast. “I’m sorry, Richard,” Patrick starts as Jamie holds his breath, “I think you misunderstand what is happening here. We are The Three Musketeers.” And with that, he begins. That’s right! We’re are watching the 1993 mousterpiece The Three Musketeers. I only know this from the dope cover of my media tie-in edition of a stone cold classic. My beautiful boys looking up at me while I read. It’s perfect. Let’s go!

The Three Musketeers (1993) – BMeTric: 20.9; Notability: 46

StreetCreditReport.com – BMeTric: top 22.4%; Notability: top 3.6%; Rotten Tomatoes: top 21.6%; Higher BMeT: Super Mario Bros., RoboCop 3, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Look Who’s Talking Now, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, Mr. Nanny, Body of Evidence, Cop & ½, Beethoven’s 2nd, Sliver, Weekend at Bernie’s II, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Boxing Helena, Son of the Pink Panther, The Beverly Hillbillies, Made in America, Carnosaur, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, Surf Ninjas, Boiling Point, and 36 more; Higher Notability: Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, Rising Sun, Life with Mikey, The Meteor Man, Loaded Weapon 1, Son of the Pink Panther, RoboCop 3, For Love or Money, Super Mario Bros.; Lower RT: Look Who’s Talking Now, Warlock: The Armageddon, Mr. Nanny, Son of the Pink Panther, Body of Evidence, RoboCop 3, Hexed, Best of the Best II, Ghost in the Machine, Father Hood, Calendar Girl, Weekend at Bernie’s II, My Boyfriend’s Back, Only the Strong, Fatal Instinct, Cop & ½, Ernest Rides Again, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Another Stakeout, Boxing Helena, and 32 more; Notes: We have a perfect split, 10/20 top BMeT films watched. But I’m really quite enamored with the idea of eventually doing Sister Act 2. That had the highest Notability? That feels really crazy. Only played 13 times on television in the ‘90s, mostly on the Disney channel (naturally), probably because it was somewhat violent and a full throated 2 hours long.

RogerEbert.com – 2 stars –  Is there a compelling need for another version of “The Three Musketeers?” The first task of the new version would be to convince us the answer is yes – and this new “Musketeers” never does. It must have been great fun to make it (what young actor doesn’t want to dash around on horseback and engage in swashbuckling swordfights?), but it’s not that much fun to watch. It’s all sound and energy, without plan or meaning.

(I mean, sure. A little like the Ben-Hur film from 2016 I guess. My counter? The film is just fun! And I think making a “Disney” version of a major swashbuckling novel, a novel children can and could not read for the most part, is argument enough. I think the question is actually inverted. Have we made a children’s version of The Three Musketeers yet? No? Then let’s do it.)

Trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMy1TFRF8Lk/

(YES, A VHS TRAILER. There is certainly a lot of killing and smooching in this Disney film. If I’m not mistaken they are using the Goonies theme in the background? At least something really close to it. I really really remember the Platt waxing his sword around … was this on some clamshell VHS we owned?)

Directors – Stephen Herek – ( Known For: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure; 101 Dalmatians; Rock Star; Mr. Holland’s Opus; Critters; Our Little Secret; Afterlife of the Party; Dog Gone; The Great Gilly Hopkins; The Chaperone; Future BMT: Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead; Life or Something Like It; Man of the House; Holy Man; BMT: The Mighty Ducks; The Three Musketeers; Notes: Wow, he did The Mighty Ducks as well. He was churning out Disney hits. If anything him directing Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure makes him a legend.)

Writers – Alexandre Dumas – ( Known For: The Count of Monte Cristo; The Count of Monte-Cristo; The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan; The Three Musketeers; Queen Margot; The Four Musketeers; The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady; The Three Musketeers; The Return of the Musketeers; The Count of Monte Cristo; The Black Tulip; The Man in the Iron Mask; Black Magic; The Iron Mask; The Count of Monte Cristo; The Three Musketeers; The Son of Monte Cristo; The Fifth Musketeer; The Corsican Brothers; The Return of the Musketeers, or The Treasures of Cardinal Mazarin; Future BMT: The Man in the Iron Mask; BMT: The Three Musketeers; The Three Musketeers; The Musketeer; Notes: HA. Well, we are almost done with the Musketeer series. A wonder if it the only series to produce a bad film I suppose.)

David Loughery – ( Known For: Lakeview Terrace; Dreamscape; Fatale; Nurse; End of the Road; Shattered; Blindsided; Flashback; Future BMT: Passenger 57; Obsessed; Tom and Huck; BMT: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier; The Three Musketeers; The Intruder; Notes: Flashback is funny because I’ve been annotating adverts in the New York Times and you see the craziest films you’ve never heard of with full page advertisements. That was one of them. Another Kiefer naturally. Also funny to see connections. He wrote three episodes of Time Trax, an obscure Australian show from 1993. They also produced the Bill & Ted series in 1992. Could that be why Herek hired him? This is their only overlap in general though.)

Actors – Charlie Sheen – ( Known For: Platoon; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Being John Malkovich; Wall Street; Hot Shots!; Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; Hot Shots! Part Deux; Badlands; Major League; Young Guns; Red Dawn; The Arrival; Eight Men Out; The Chase; The Wraith; Lucas; Foodfight!; Beyond the Law; Good Advice; Cadence; Future BMT: Due Date; Scary Movie 3; Scary Movie 4; Machete Kills; Loaded Weapon 1; Money Talks; The Rookie; Men at Work; The Big Bounce; Madea’s Witness Protection; All Dogs Go to Heaven 2; Shadow Conspiracy; BMT: Scary Movie 5; The Three Musketeers; Major League II; Navy Seals; Terminal Velocity; Notes: Nominated for four Emmys for Two and a Half Men. Yeah we have a ton of his films to go. Too bad The Chase isn’t one of them, it is at 43% on Rotten Tomatoes.)

Kiefer Sutherland – ( Known For: Stand by Me; A Few Good Men; Phone Booth; Dark City; Melancholia; A Time to Kill; Monsters vs. Aliens; The Lost Boys; Juror #2; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me; Flatliners; Young Guns; They Cloned Tyrone; The Contractor; Freeway; The Vanishing; At Close Range; Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces; The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Forsaken; Future BMT: Mirrors; Taking Lives; The Sentinel; The Wild; Eye for an Eye; The Cowboy Way; Renegades; The Nutcracker Prince; BMT: Pompeii; Zoolander 2; The Three Musketeers; Flatliners; Young Guns II; Marmaduke; Notes: Nominated 11 times for Emmys for acting and producing 24. For the fifth season they won both lead actor and best series. Which seems crazy. I watched all those. I suppose that was probably the Itzin year which was indeed probably the best end-to-end season they had.)

Chris O’Donnell – ( Known For: Scent of a Woman; Fried Green Tomatoes; Vertical Limit; Kinsey; School Ties; Cookie’s Fortune; Circle of Friends; Blue Sky; Kit Kittredge: An American Girl; A Little Help; Men Don’t Leave; 29 Palms; The Sisters; Future BMT: The Bachelor; Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore; Mad Love; BMT: Batman & Robin; Batman Forever; Max Payne; The Three Musketeers; The Chamber; In Love and War; Notes: Strange actor. Definitively a leading man in the ‘90s, and eventually just settled into 323 episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles. The funniest part being in the cross-over soft pilot for NCIS: Los Angeles he’s basically killed at the end. Naturally he comes back, but they clearly anticipated maybe having to recast with a different lead.)

Budget/Gross – $30 million / Domestic: $53,898,845 (Worldwide: $53,898,845)

(Hooooooooooooooo doggie. First of all, that budget? I don’t believe you. Have you seen this cast? That’s absurd and insulting. But my god that box office take? How doesn’t this get a worldwide release? What are we doing here Disney? What are you thinking? This is truly mind exploding. Wikipedia claims it just creeped over $100 million worldwide based off a Variety article from 1994 which I do not have access to. Curious.)

Rotten Tomatoes – 31% (9/29): Its starry trio of do-gooders may promise to fight “one for all, all for one,” but this Three Musketeers is a slickly unmemorable update bound to satisfy very few.

(That isn’t unfair. I do think by being a mismash of ideas mostly from other adaptations (and not the book) you do end up with something that isn’t memorable beyond a series of insane gifs generated by Platt’s antics.)

Reviewer Highlight: All this nonsense would be news to Dumas, whose grave is surely spinning as his musketeers – sucked dry of high drama and low wit – go kicking and screaming into the wonderful world of Disney. – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Poster – The Two Sklogsketeers

(Hey that’s the cover of my book. Like Krippendorf’s Tribe’s all white poster, there are general color schemes that I’m not super into. A mostly black poster is one of them. I want something a little more interesting. And speaking along those lines, this is just too generic to get excited about. Sure the layout is fine, but where’s the zazz, you know? C)

Tagline(s) – All for one and one for all! (C)

A place of betrayal. The fate of a king. A time for heroes. (B+)

(The first one is more of a requirement than a tagline. The second I’m more into. A set of three. I like the second and third. Could use a little wordplay. I also am bumping up against the first one a little. A place of betrayal… I’m not sure I know what they are going for there. But I applaud the effort.)

Keyword(s) – imdb-keyword-based-on-novel;based-on-book

Top 10: Fight Club (1999), Forrest Gump (1994), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Shutter Island (2010), Schindler’s List (1993), The Prestige (2006)

Future BMT: 74.9 The Turning (2020), 72.6 Zoom (2006), 69.6 Gulliver’s Travels (2010), 67.3 Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), 66.3 102 Dalmatians (2000), 65.3 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (2017), 64.2 Valentine (2001), 57.9 The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), 55.5 Hanging Up (2000), 55.4 Eye of the Beholder (1999), 55.2 Snow Dogs (2002), 54.3 The Divorce (2003), 53.9 Abandon (2002), 53.3 The Stepford Wives (2004), 52.4 Addicted (2014), 50.8 Freedomland (2006), 50.0 Kull: The Conqueror (1997), 49.9 King Solomon’s Mines (1985), 49.5 Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000), 48.7 The Jungle Book 2 (2003)

BMT: Battlefield Earth (2000), Dragonball Evolution (2009), Cats (2019), Left Behind (2014), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Jaws 3-D (1983), One Missed Call (2008), Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), The Bye Bye Man (2017), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), Striptease (1996), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), Firestarter (2022), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011), Tarot (2024), Meg 2: The Trench (2023), The Haunting (1999), Fair Game (1995), Eragon (2006), After We Fell (2021), North (1994), Monkeybone (2001), The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Conan the Barbarian (2011), After Ever Happy (2022), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), An American Haunting (2005), The Snowman (2017), The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007), Sliver (1993), Pinocchio (2002), The Musketeer (2001), Shanghai Surprise (1986), Get Carter (2000), Exit to Eden (1994), After (2019), Alex Cross (2012), Queen of the Damned (2002), Congo (1995), One for the Money (2012), The Ring Two (2005), The Circle (2017), Return to the Blue Lagoon (1991), Bless the Child (2000), Dreamcatcher (2003), Babylon A.D. (2008), I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009), Seventh Son (2014), Beastly (2011), Mortdecai (2015), Endless Love (1981), …

Best Options (Action): 72.6 Zoom (2006), 50.0 Kull: The Conqueror (1997), 49.9 King Solomon’s Mines (1985), 46.5 The Rhythm Section (2020), 44.4 That Darn Cat (1997), 44.2 The Divergent Series: Allegiant (2016), 44.1 Boiling Point (1993), 42.9 Yor: The Hunter from the Future (1983), 42.8 Pan (2015), 41.1 V.I. Warshawski (1991), 41.0 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), 40.7 The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), 39.4 Stroker Ace (1983), 38.9 When Time Ran Out… (1980), 38.4 Desperate Hours (1990), 38.4 Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009), 37.3 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), 36.6 Air America (1990), 35.3 The Fan (1996), 34.9 Hero and the Terror (1988), 33.8 The Time Machine (2002), 31.5 The Getaway (1994), 31.0 Van Helsing (2004), 30.6 Mortal Engines (2018), 30.3 Sahara (2005), 29.2 The Sentinel (2006), 29.1 The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2018), 27.8 The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015), 27.7 Inferno (2016), 27.7 The Legend of Tarzan (2016), 27.6 Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), 27.6 Next (2007), 27.1 American Assassin (2017), 26.9 Trapped (2002), 26.7 The Eagle (2011), 26.7 The Saint (1997), 25.6 Miracle at St. Anna (2008), 24.6 King Arthur (2004), 23.8 The November Man (2014), 23.5 Revenge (1990), 23.5 Proof of Life (2000), 22.3 Year of the Gun (1991), 21.7 The Jackal (1997), 21.0 Malone (1987), 20.9 The Three Musketeers (1993), …

(Sahara was on the radar, but as far as Dirk novels go it is kind of in the middle of the series. Same with Reacher. A lot of these are borderline (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), or wouldn’t have a “Now a Major Motion Picture” book available. This one did though and is a classic in its own way.)

Welcome to Earf (HoE Number 16) – The shortest path through The Movie Database cast lists using only BMT films is: Chris O’Donnell is No. 1 billed in The Three Musketeers and No. 2 billed in In Love and War, which also stars Sandra Bullock (No. 1 billed) who is in Demolition Man (No. 3 billed) which also stars Sylvester Stallone (No. 1 billed) who is in The Expendables 3 (No. 1 billed) which also stars Jason Statham (No. 2 billed) who is in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (No. 1 billed) which also stars Leelee Sobieski (No. 3 billed) who is in Here on Earth (No. 1 billed) => (1 + 2) + (1 + 3) + (1 + 1) + (2 + 1) + (3 + 1) = 16. If we were to watch Eye for an Eye we can get the HoE Number down to 12.

Notes – Kiefer Sutherland, Chris O’Donnell, and Oliver Platt all endured six weeks of fencing and riding lessons. Charlie Sheen missed out on all of this, as he was then embroiled in the filming of Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993).

The dungeon scenes were filmed at Seegrotte, Austria, an old mine which was flooded early in 1900s due to an underground water source and was later used by the Nazi’s during World War II to conduct military research. The site is now open to the public and famous for its underground lake. The scene decoration of one of the prison cells, as well as the dragon-head boat are still kept intact at Seegrotte and can be visited.

After filming, Chris O’Donnell kept his sword. He jokingly claims this was by accident.

Mostly shot in Perchtoldsdorf, Austria, where Rebecca De Mornay attended high school and college.

Gabrielle Anwar was pregnant during filming and had to have her costumes let out.

Awards – Nominee for the Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor (Chris O’Donnell)

Krippendorf’s Tribe Recap

Jamie

A book cycle! A book cycle after the website has been a disaster area for like a year! What a mistake. We’ll see how long I actually am able to keep up with the reading of the books. Krippendorf’s Tribe was pretty easy. It’s a fantastically short satire of academia. I started it and I found it unpleasant. Mostly because the main character kind of sucked. But guess what? That was kind of the point. So as the book went on and got darker and darker I started to surprise myself by actually digging it. By the time the family is committing cannibalism and our “hero” is fleeing the country with his kids-turned-savages to presumably live out their days in the Amazonian jungle, I understood how it was that someone, somewhere felt like it would make a great movie. Why that movie had to be a heart warming tale starring Richard Dreyfuss? Not sure I understand that part yet.

To recap, James Krippendorf is a respected anthropologist and member of an all-star husband-wife team who have integrated the lives of their three kids into their explorations. After his wife dies, though, Krippendorf is lost. So lost that he spends the rest of their grant money on just keeping his family afloat. When the chickens come home to roost and he is expected to present the work he never completed on a lost tribe of New Guinea he never found, he does what any self respecting academic would do: make it all up. The showman to his wife’s brilliant researcher, he soon has everyone enraptured. Unfortunately they are too enraptured, as he gets roped into more lectures and a rising faculty member (and unabashed fan of his), Veronica, gets him tied up with a science-as-entertainment TV producer. So he finds himself having to produce more and more fake tribe content, including dressing his kids up in brownface and (hold onto your hats) having sex with Veronica on video to show off the mating rituals of the tribe… eeeeesh. Meanwhile a colleague of his sets out to expose the lie. This all culminates in his appearance on a TV dressed as the Chief of the Shelmikedmu and his subsequent winning of a large grant where both he and the Chief will appear. Veronica, peeved by the sex video, nonetheless agrees to help in exchange for half of the grant and helps keep up the ruse long enough for Krippendorf’s colleague to excitedly fax from New Guinea that there is no tribe. Everything falls apart… that is, until the colleague calls back and acknowledges that in fact she did find the Shelmikedmu. This was of course set up by Krippendorf’s daughter who pulled some favors with a nearby tribe who she had close ties to. THE END.

I feel like my opinion of this is painted a little by my unexpected love of the book. It’s just so much darker and I kind of wish that they went that way with it. You can even see it a little in other Dreyfuss performances. What About Bob? is a great example of Dreyfuss as insane person. I think he could have played that great. Chaos all around him while he pedantically explains it all away and people lap it up. But this is a pretty broad comedy that ended up kind of making a joke of the original satire. Is that why it got bad reviews? Because reviewers were angry that it didn’t live up to the biting satire of the source material. No. They didn’t like that it was racist mostly. And they seemed upset that Dreyfuss would do it. I will say that the fact that Elfman and Dreyfuss said yes to this insanity certainly elevated it. Dreyfuss is pretty physical as a comedian in this and so maybe that’s what attracted him to it. He got to act wild. Surprisingly middling for a film I presumed would be horrific.

Patrick?

Patrick

‘Ello everyone! *gif of me dancing around in blackface in a major motion picture in 1998* Let’s go!

The Good? The film is a little more heartwarming and the characters a little more quirky that one would initially give it credit for I think. Specifically, the whole family dynamic I think is quite nicely underplayed but also fairly nice how things get worked through in the end. And Elfman’s character in particular is just the right level of weird anthropologist groupie (?) / kind of game for the hoax and a publicity hungry crazy person that the romance works a lot better than you could ever think it could. These days she’d definitely be a buttoned-up person who only lets loose in the end.

The Bad? Uh … the blackface. I mentioned it in my intro. Five separate people dress in blackface. There is a whole section which is deeply offensive. It is only slightly saved by also having a real New Guinea tribe they are friends with that they are mostly just riffing on. Still though, hard to get past. Oh, and the rape scene. We’ll get to that in a second.

The BMT? I mean, yeah, one of the weirdest films ever made. And obviously deeply problematic and not funny. There isn’t really any other way to describe it but as an ultra weird film I watched as a kid. What do you think our parents thought watching this film? I wonder. I bet they have zero recollection of watching this film.

The Rewatchables? Might as well steal from the best. What’s aged the worst? The rape scene duh! They have a whole scene where Dreyfuss gets a woman drunk and then secretly films having sex with her. Whooooooops! The “That Guy” Award for Mac’s mother from It’s Always Sunny. Also Happy Gilmore’s grandmother as well. The Overacting Award goes to Elfman for the scene where she is pretending to be drunk (rough). And we get a wild Needle Drop in the middle of the film and over the credits for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

I took an extended break from my AI explorations, but I’m going to get back to it soon. The current key will probably focus on embeddings. In particular, there are a few huggingface models (models–google–vit-base-patch16-224 and models–openai–clip-vit-base-patch32 in particular) which I think I can get working a bit to try and see what I can see as far as one of my main goals in this cycle: Embed a bunch of movie posters and then try and find ones that match a specific but hard-to-articulate concept. Namely, can I find posters that utilize the same conceit as the For Your Eyes Only poster: you are looking through a woman’s legs. This one would be close, for example. Stay tuned.

Let’s go Early Role (Who?) for Mila Kunis who pops up as a girl at the science fair who is participating in the son’s tribal demonstration. Best Product Placement (What?) THERE IS AN ENTIRE SCENE IN McDONALD’S AAAAAND AN ENTIRE SCENE IN BEST BUY. Stop the presses. This is an unprecedented level of product placement. This film must have made bank. Setting as a Character (Where?) I’m pretty sure they are supposed to be in New York based on a few flags that are around, a choice I’m guessing was solely based on Natasha Lyonne’s crazy thick New York accent. We have an Exact Date (When?) of April 7, 1997 when the film starts. And Worst Twist (How?) for the inevitable conclusion that the daughter got the tribe they are friends with to pretend to be the Shelmikedmu Tribe to save them in the end. The film is BMT through and through, just wild and crazy stuff.

Cheerios,

The Sklogs