Moxie's Movie Review

This week:
Moxie’s movie review

- Cloverfield (boooo!)
- The Principal (starring James Belushi and Lou Gossett, Jr.)
- Robocop (the first one, which was the only one justifiable)


Ok, so no one was looking forward more to Cloverfield than me. Monster? Check. Mass destruction? Check. Unique and appealing marketing/advertising strategy? Double check. The first trailer of this movie (which, enjoyably, has nothing to do with clover or a field) was shown before Transformers, and it had no known title until about a month before the actual release date. That’s like a year of wondering. Couldn’t wait. Even the word “cloverfield” made me tingly over the holidays.



Finally, I saw it. When a stranger accidentally sits on your leg during the previews and doesn’t even apologize, that’s a sign you aren’t about to have an enjoyable movie experience. Plus, we were too poor to buy popcorn and we weren’t at the Alamo, so there was no beer. I won’t ruin the super-cool (not) ending of the movie but let’s just say about halfway through the movie, I began to root for the monster so this horrible cinematic abortion could end. Go, monster, kill the hipster party-goers. My eyes began water and my head started pounding after an hour of bounciness, swerviness, and sidewaysality, even though I didn’t get sick after watching Blair Witch. Maybe I’m just getting old. Cloverfield=predictable, not scary, not impressive monster-making. When are we going to get some monsters who make noises other than the traditional Godzilla roar? SPOILER – it looks like a fucking dinosaur.

THE PRINCIPAL—part of the lovely CW Saturday afternoon lineup. This movie is kind of a cheap knock-off of Lean on Me. Badass (sort of) principal who rides a motorcycle (of course) comes in to clean up the gang-infested, racially charged high school on the east side of Compton or some similar city. To be fair, I didn’t see the first half of the movie. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll forgive Belushi for not being his brother, but it’s asking a bit much to cast him as a “bad-ass.” He plays the role like he knows his beer belly is getting in the way. Lou Gossett Jr is, well, he’s Lou Gossett Jr., what can I say? Ray Dawn Chong also stars as the hot teacher who almost gets raped by White Zack, the revengeful failure student. That’s right, White Zack. Luckily (don’t read further if you want to be inspired) Principal Badass races to her rescue on his….that’s right, his motorcycle! He zooms up the fucking stairs and down the hall to her room, just before Chong gets shlonged. I’m not saying the movie doesn’t have its good points, and as an educator, I give props to any movie that concerns itself with “tainted youth” and the struggle to reach them. It has heart, it’s just horribly 1987.

Fantastic "cleaning up the school" music montage:



The antagonist is Victor, played by Michael Wright who looks a lot like trip-hop artist Tricky. He is what the kids call a gangsta, with fantastic leadership abilities. Why Victor shows up for school in the first place, I do not know, but he’s a bad muh-fucker. The only reason I waited to see the end of the movie is to see whether Hollywood would cop out and give the cheesy educational ending, where Belushi gets through to Victor and eases his pain by giving him a book and he thanks him for saving his life, or the real-life way: beating the shit out of that little shit and sending him to jail where he belongs. I was not disappointed, except for the way they did the cheesy catch-the-about-to-punch-me-fist in the air thing. Oh, and this lovely interchange immediately prior to the riding away in the sunset on his motorcycle:

Kid: Hey, man. Who do you think you are, anyway?
Good kid: He’s the principal!
Belushi: I’m the principal. (cue electric guitar end-of-movie song)

Finally, Robocop 1. Just for the record, Peter Weller himself said he has never seen Robocop 3.

Somehow the 80's came and went and I never saw Robocop. I was 8 when it came out and I imagine my mom wouldn't let me see it. I'm sure she thought it was much too violent. What she didn't realize is how funny it is.

The trailer makes it look just a tad cooler than it really is:


Robocop drives a Ford Taurus. Think about that. Red Foreman plays the bad guy, Clarence Boddicker. There is just something strange about watching Red Foreman do nose candy and shoot people with military guns. I faded in and out of this one, it didn't really offer much other than your typical near-dead hero getting revenge on the bad guys who do a lot of blow, sexually assault hookers, and hang out at dance clubs when they're not doing blow off hookers. Kind of a gritty, Detroit-feeling movie. Juxtaposed between a policeman strike and corrupt corporations that operate out of high rise buildings, Robocop has a lot of work to do, but has a gooey center inside that hard, metallic shell. Blahdy blahdy blah, he throws the bad guy out of said high-rise building window, no one really reacts too much.

Some key Robocop quotes, in case someone brings it up at a party:
"I'd buy that for a dollar."

"Dead or alive, you're coming with me."

"Bitches, leave!" (That's Clarence Boddicker Red Foreman, to the hookers)

"First, don't fuck with me. I'm a desperate man! And second, I want some fresh coffee. And third, I want a recount! And no matter how it turns out, I want my old job back!"

and the walls became the world all around.

Tonight the prof of my cake class (i.e. Children's Lit, an undergrad survey course) discussed Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and it brought back memories of reading this book while teaching for the IRD last summer. One of the best moments of pure-joy teaching was when I had 20 first graders holding up their wild thing masks and "rumpusing," roaring their terrible roars and showing their terrible claws. Almost ten years ago, I remember a tiny little blond girl I waitressed with whose petite little back was covered with huge tattoos of the wild things.


280 undergraduates amuse themselves during Children's Lit

I worked on a paper while taking notes, my ears perking up when she mentioned WTWTA. She distinguished it as a prime example of good children's literature, that it met through the story and the illustrations the needs of children in an enjoyable way:

Needs:
- need for security
- need to love and be loved
- need to belong and be accepted
- need to achieve and be confident in what we do
- need to escape
- need for intelligence
- need for beauty and order

Clearly, these needs don't diminish upon exiting childhood.

Go ahead. Get a popsicle and watch:


Curious as to who Sendak was and what context he wrote this book in, I found this:

"With the publication of Where the Wild Things Are in 1963, Sendak felt that he had ended his apprenticeship. His childhood experiences, years of illustrations for other authors' books, and psychoanalysis came together in the fantasies of Max, the boy in the story who is sent to bed without his supper, and the monsters he encounters in the world of the wild things. The story is rooted in the very real fears that children have of being left alone or not cared for by their parents. Many critics and child psychologists, such as Bruno Bettelheim, felt that the book was too scary for sensitive children. Sendak was vindicated when the book won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. In his acceptance speech, he said, "… from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things."

Just as Sendak's life appeared to finally be on track, disaster struck. In 1967, he learned that his mother had developed cancer, he suffered a major coronary attack, and his beloved dog Jenny died. In spite of his troubles, he completed In the Night Kitchen in 1972. This book generated more controversy because he showed a boy in full frontal nudity. Librarians drew diapers over the child. "It's as if my book contains secret information that kids would be better off not knowing. This whole idea, of course, is ridiculous." Sendak moved to Ridgefields, Connecticut, in 1972. There he worked ten-hour days on other authors' books as well as his own. Outside Over There, which he considers one of his more significant books, was written during this period."

Then I was thinking, didn't I hear something about Spike Jonze making a movie out of this? More searching:

My doubts are balanced by the fact that Paul Dano is in it. We'll see.

Seeing with Sylvia

You could say I had a soul sandwich today. I woke up early this morning and half-asleepedly accepted a subbing job at the middle school I used to teach at, pre-graduate school. Then I tried to cancel, realize this would mean I couldn’t sleep and goof off all day, but it was too late. Bah. I need the money anyway, I told myself as I drank my orange juice. Gladys Knight sang Midnight Train to Georgia and Stevie Wonder sang As on Sirius 53--Soultown on the way to school. That seemed to be a good sign.

The morning was uneventful. Benchmark testing. Make kids sit for 4 hours and not talk while they do math. Fucking torture. At lunch I went home, slapped together a sandwich, and sat down to watch Montel. He had Sylvia Brown as a guest today, a gravelly-voiced, psychic toad with bleach blond hair, who looked either bored out of her mind or stoned out of her gourd. I don’t say that in a mean way. Just how she looked. If you don’t know, Sylvia Brown is an internationally known psychic and fraud. I began keeping a tally of her responses to questions from one wavering, wondering, teary guest after another about their recently departed friends and family members.










To add that special Montel spice, there was even a voicemail from beyond the grave and a photograph featuring a translucent figure for old Sylvia to decipher. Other inquiries included “who should I marry?” uttered by a normal-enough-looking young woman. I waited for Sylvia to tell her, “No one, if you go asking questions like that to psychics on lame daytime TV shows,” but instead she paused ever so slightly, then said, “Anthony.” Although it was clear she didn’t know any Anthonys, the lady sat down, satisfied. The frustration of keeping silence for the last four hours slipping away, I marveled at how she lobbed vague, ambiguous answers up to the serious and neurotic questions being asked. Was that my dead husband who left that voicemail? Yes. Are my dead parents disappointed in me? No. What should I do with my life? Medicine. What college should I go do? It doesn’t really matter, you’ll do well wherever. Am I going to have any more children? A boy. Is my dead mother-in-law watching over my child? Yes. Sylvia was on a goddamn roll, nonchalantly discussing the why’s and how’s of the afterlife, the difference between ghosts and spirits, and the difficulty of crossing over. It was like she had, floating somewhere above her head and whispering in her ear, every dead person related to an audience member, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. There wasn’t even an interested hum when a Mexican lady stood up and said her son had been killed 2 weeks ago and she didn’t know who murdered him. Sylvia said he had been out of his mind when it happened and for Mom to not worry about it. They lapped up each answer, nodding and wiping away tears as if some real answers had been given. Even when Sylvia interrupted a grieving widow to ask abruptly, “Who’s Reba?” (McIntyre? I thought), who stared blankly in response, no one questioned that she was on the up-and-up. Insecurity must be stronger than common sense, I guess—the need to know must be satisfied, even if it’s with trite, pithy pronouncements that could apply to anybody.

The devil you say? See you yourself:


I’m not saying I don’t believe in “that stuff,” I think it’s sort of fascinating—the unanswered questions about life and death, the questions that are unanswerable in the here and now. I read my horoscope on occasion. I don’t know how people know the things they know sometimes. One weekend, I asked David what time we were leaving for the beach, although he hadn’t said anything yet about the plan for some friends to go to the coast. I swear sometimes I feel it when my phone is about to ring, it feels like a little whoosh of energy about two seconds before someone calls. I don’t know what that means.

They call people like Sylvia “seers,” and I don’t mean to disrespect them—seers were common in many cultures and eras and only recently have had to compete with science and the age of reason. I’m sure some of them aren’t even frauds. But here’s what threw me for a loop: returning to school, the benchmark testing was over and I was to read The Lightning Thief with the class (who weren’t exactly calm after hours of testing). See for yourself:

(from Chapter 19)
Imagine the largest concert crowd you’ve ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.

Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beachball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has just happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.

Annabeth, Grover, and I tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghosts. I couldn’t help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can’t understand them, they frown and move away.

The dead aren’t scary. They’re just sad.

We crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:

JUDGEMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!

"you can hurt a ho with a belt...they like that shit."

I am hungover. No real mental or aesthetic gems in this post. Just an ode to Austin. I'll most likely be leaving within the year, and these experiences make me wonder why.

Mark decided spur of the moment-like to come visit. He told me (drunk) on Friday night to set my alarm for 5:30am, so I could call him and wake him up and he could get on the road and be here earlyish. I too have made plans like that, and just like mine, they got delayed. Excited, I called at the requested time. No answer. I called later, around 7, and sleepy boy mumbled, "Ijesneedalilmoresleep." The ETA changed from noonish to four thirty.

We ate at Hoover's, his favorite place, feasted on catfish, mashed potatos, jerk chicken, cream spinach, macaroni and cheese...damn. Then we met up with another Marc and a few friends at Lala's, the land of perpetual Christmas on Burnet. There I learned that in addition to never shooting tequila again (the one New Year's resolution I maintain year after year), I may have to swear off whiskey. Stories were shared, jokes were told, Al Green was played on the juke box, and we racked up an impressive tab. After that, we got the idea to rent a movie, so we stumbled into Blockbuster, where I sorta yelled, "YA'LL GOT POOTIE TANG?" Happily, they did.



(I'm leaving out the X-rated part of the evening, but I will say that everything has fallen off my bathroom shelf.)

This morning we suffered through headaches screaming for Excedrin and tried to pretend Mark didn't have to go back to Lubbock so soon. We drove for about a half hour, trying to decide where to eat lunch while I choked back upchuck. Mark didn't help, making fake puke noises, which made me laugh, hit his arm and weakly cry "stop it!" unconvincingly. My dehydrated body was fragile--it wasn't long til I was cry-laughing, a state Mark and I often put each other into. I love that.

He left a few hours ago, and I went back to sleep. My sheets still smell like him. Unfortunately, so does my bathroom.

That is all. For now.